Quotations
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Redis streams aren’t exciting for their innovativeness, but rather than they bring building a unified log architecture within reach of a small and/or inexpensive app. Kafka is infamously difficult to configure and get running, and is expensive to operate once you do. [...] Redis on the other hand is probably already in your stack.
There's also a huge population of "admins," who as you might guess, administer an organization's salesforce account & data. These folks often start out as office managers or other clerical types, who are handed this responsibility because nobody else wants to do it. Here's where it gets interesting. Admin ➡️ WYSIWYG customizer ➡️ occasional coder ➡️ full time dev is a real pipeline into software development that folks often with just high school degrees are actually taking. This isn't just a narrative pushed by salesforce marketing; I'm meeting these people. They say things like "I love salesforce, it changed my life" with disarming sincerity.
In the official timeline, Peppa is appropriately reassured by a kindly dentist. In the version above, she is basically tortured, before turning into a series of Iron Man robots and performing the Learn Colours dance. A search for “peppa pig dentist” returns the above video on the front page, and it only gets worse from here.
The only thing that would have been nice is that after the project had been finished and the chip deployed, that someone from Intel would have told me, just as a courtesy, that MINIX 3 was now probably the most widely used operating system in the world on x86 computers. That certainly wasn't required in any way, but I think it would have been polite to give me a heads up, that's all.
Skip the title text! Nobody uses them – they don’t work on touch screens and on desktop they require that the user hovers for a while over an image, which nobody does. Also, adding a title-text makes some screen readers both read the title-text and the alt-text, which becomes redundant.
Apple reserves new emojis for point releases, instead of major upgrades, to incentivize people to keep updating. Very smart strategy.
I'm concerned that this character will open the floodgates for an open-ended set of PILE OF POO emoji with emotions, such as CRYING PILE OF POO, PILE OF POO WITH LOOK OF TRIUMPH, PILE OF POO SCREAMING IN FEAR, etc. Is there really any need to add a range of emotions to PILE OF POO? I personally think that changing PILE OF POO to a de facto SMILING PILE OF POO was wrong, but adding F|FROWNING PILE OF POO as a counterpart is even worse. If this is accepted then there will be no neutral, expressionless PILE OF POO, so at least a PILE OF POO WITH NO FACE would be required to be encoded to restore some balance.
The idea that our 5 committees would sanction further cute graphic characters based on this should embarrass absolutely everyone who votes yes on such an excrescence. Will we have a CRYING PILE OF POO next? PILE OF POO WITH TONGUE STICKING OUT? PILE OF POO WITH QUESTION MARKS FOR EYES? PILE OF POO WITH KARAOKE MIC? Will we have to encode a neutral FACELESS PILE OF POO?
In the Bay Area, we have a collection of fiefdoms. Villages are parading as cities, addressing problems myopically. For example, Brisbane (a city of 5,000 people between San Francisco and SFO) is currently blocking a large housing development for local reasons. It’s NIMBY-ism on a broad scale – a regional tragedy of the commons.
I’ve heard managers and teams mandating 100% code coverage for applications. That’s a really bad idea. The problem is that you get diminishing returns on our tests as the coverage increases much beyond 70% (I made that number up… no science there). Why is that? Well, when you strive for 100% all the time, you find yourself spending time testing things that really don’t need to be tested. Things that really have no logic in them at all (so any bugs could be caught by ESLint and Flow). Maintaining tests like this actually really slow you and your team down.
Early this year, the U.S. intelligence community named RT and Sputnik as implementing state-sponsored Russian efforts to interfere with and disrupt the 2016 Presidential election, which is not something we want on Twitter.
We made a sale for Appointment Reminder from someone whose only way of getting data into the system was to fax it to us. Guess the cheat. If you guess "CEO signs up for HelloFax, receives the fax, and types 600 patient names and phone numbers by hand" you have good instincts.
I am currently documenting a language called Seenku, spoken by fewer than 15,000 people in the rolling hills of southwestern Burkina Faso in West Africa. Like Chinese, it is a tonal language, meaning the pitch on which a word is pronounced can radically alter its meaning. For instance, tsu can mean “thatch” when pronounced with an extra low pitch, but “hippopotamus” when pronounced with falling pitch. In fact, pitch plays such a huge role in Seenku that it can be “spoken” through music alone, most notably on the traditional xylophone.
Goldberg’s machines are always described as useless and my machines are too. But they both made us enough money to live off, which is quite useful. Also making people laugh is useful, a lot more beneficial than many ‘serious’ advances in technology like yet another new computer operating system. My aunt Lis, who is very religious, describes my arcade as my ministry.
Serverless is a somewhat unhelpfully misleading term for "highly scalable stateless code". All the times I've seen serverless stuff work really well it was workloads that were usually zero but occasionally 30k/sec without warning. I've run a company with that kind of workload and serverless stuff would have saved us a ton of money. Publishing to the [npm] registry could be done as a serverless app but there's little benefit because we do not get huge spikes in publishing. We get huge spikes in downloads but serverless isn't useful there because it's a read-only case and very little processing is done. Serverless is a great solution to one type of problem. It's very seldom the case that you can convert all your problems into that shape.
By cutting out a hundred voices or fewer, things and people that everybody talks about became things and people that nobody talks about. The internet is a technology for creating small ponds for us to all be big fish in. But you change your perspective just slightly, move over just an inch, and suddenly you get a sense of just how few people know about you or could possibly care.
TL;DR on the KRACK WPA2 stuff - you can repeatedly resend the 3rd packet in a WPA2 handshake and it'll reset the key state, which leads to nonce reuse, which leads to trivial decryption with known plaintext. Can be easily leveraged to dump TCP SYN traffic and hijack connections.
Whatever weird thing you imagine might happen, something weirder probably did happen. Reporters tried to keep up, but it was too strange. As Max Read put it in New York Magazine, Facebook is “like a four-dimensional object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize.” No one can quite wrap their heads around what this thing has become, or all the things this thing has become.
I have come to the conclusion that the real heroes of ideas are not the people who have them – they are the people who buy them
C is a bit like Latin these days. We no longer write everything in it, but knowing it affords deeper knowledge of more-recent languages.
Learning a language behind bars is a good way to meet foreign nationals and hear interesting stories about their lives back home and how they ended up doing porridge. I learnt a bit of Spanish with a 70 year-old Columbian grandfather who’d hit hard times and tried to bring a suitcase full of cocaine through Heathrow. He didn’t speak a word of English before jail and had learnt it all from the Cockney geezers on the wing. As a result he didn’t understand basic outside world vocabulary such as ‘traffic cone’ or ‘coat hanger’, but he did talk about ‘avin a bubble with his china plates’
There is plenty of evidence in the ecosystem to support the hypothesis that, if given the tools to do so easily, object-oriented programmers are ready to embrace functional techniques (such as immutability) and work them into an object-oriented view of the world, and will write better, less error-prone code as a result. Simply put, we believe the best thing we can do for Java developers is to give them a gentle push towards a more functional style of programming.
We can deploy new versions of our software, make database schema changes, or even rotate our primary database server, all without failing to respond to a single request. We can accomplish this because we gave ourselves the ability suspend our traffic, which gives us a window of a few seconds to make some changes before letting the requests through. To make this happen, we built a custom HTTP server and application dispatching infrastructure around Python’s Tornado and Redis.
— Dan Manges, Braintree
One interesting quirk of Pinboard is a complete absence of unit tests. I used to be a die-hard believer in testing, but in Pinboard tried a different approach, as an experiment. Instead of writng tests I try to be extremely careful in coding, and keep the code size small so I continue to understand it. I've found my defect rate to be pretty comparable to earlier projects that included extensive test suites and fixtures, but I am much more productive on Pinboard.
URLs are supposed to represent resources. A web app can be a resource, and there are techniques for managing state within those. Hashbangs might be one of these. But when large web properties are converting all their links to articles and other bits of text (tweets/twits/whatever) into these monstrosities, it’s not innovation. It’s a huge mistake that ought to be regretted now and will certainly be regretted in the future.
Before events took this bad turn, the contract represented by a link was simple: “Here’s a string, send it off to a server and the server will figure out what it identifies and send you back a representation.” Now it’s along the lines of: “Here’s a string, save the hashbang, send the rest to the server, and rely on being able to run the code the server sends you to use the hashbang to generate the representation.” Do I need to explain why this is less robust and flexible? This is what we call “tight coupling” and I thought that anyone with a Computer Science degree ought to have been taught to avoid it.
— Tim Bray
National politics of snoopiness vs corporate ethic of not being evil aren’t directly compatible, and the solution here only works because (let’s face it) Tunisia is not a rising economic force. If you’re selling ads in China, you don’t get to pretend that the Great Firewall of China is a security issue.
The excess capacity story is a myth. It was never a matter of selling excess capacity, actually within 2 months after launch AWS would have already burned through the excess Amazon.com capacity. Amazon Web Services was always considered a business by itself, with the expectation that it could even grow as big as the Amazon.com retail operation.
All I can say, looking back, is that when history takes a look at the lives of Jerry Yang and David Filo, this is what it will probably say: “Two graduate students, intrigued by a growing wealth of material on the Internet, built a huge fucking lobster trap, absorbed as much of human history and creativity as they could, and destroyed all of it.”
I am, frankly, a mixture of disappointed and sad that after Yahoo! shut down Geocities, Briefcase, Content Match, Mash, RSS Advertising, Yahoo! Live, Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Pets, Yahoo Publisher, Yahoo! Podcasts, Yahoo! Music Store, Yahoo Photos, Yahoo! Design, Yahoo Auctions, Farechase, Yahoo Kickstart, MyWeb, WebJay, Yahoo! Directory France, Yahoo! Directory Spain, Yahoo! Directory Germany, Yahoo! Directory Italy, the enterprise business division, Inktomi, SpotM, Maven Networks, Direct Media Exchange, The All Seeing Eye, Yahoo! Tech, Paid Inclusion, Brickhouse, PayDirect, SearchMonkey, and Yahoo! Go!… there are still people out there going “Well, Yahoo certainly will never shut down Flickr, because _______________” where ______ is the sound of donkeys.