ramblings about spam, scalability, software development, the web

LambCI — a serverless build system

Run CI builds on Lambda:

LambCI is a tool I began building over a year ago to run tests on our pull requests and branches at Uniqlo Mobile. Inspired at the inaugural ServerlessConf a few weeks ago, I recently put some work into hammering it into shape for public consumption. It was borne of a dissatisfaction with the two current choices for automated testing on private projects. You can either pay for it as a service (Travis, CircleCI, etc)?—?where 3 developers needing their own build containers might set you back a few hundred dollars a month. Or you can setup a system like Jenkins, Strider, etc and configure and manage a database, a web server and a cluster of build servers . In both cases you’ll be under- or overutilized, waiting for servers to free up or paying for server power you’re not using. And this, for me, is where the advantage of a serverless architecture really comes to light: 100% utilization, coupled with instant invocations.

(tags: lambci ci builds jenkins testing coding)

We’re more likely to get cancer than to get married. This is a wake-up call | Ranjana Srivastava | Opinion | The Guardian

Later, in clinic, I see patients ranging from a stoical university student to a devastated father to the frail octogenarian who can’t remember the day, let alone that he has cancer – each patient an illustration of a recent Macmillan Cancer Support UK finding that it is more common for an individual to be diagnosed with cancer than to get married or have a first child. One in two people will encounter a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime, which is why the report says that, alongside marriage, parenthood, retirement and the death of a parent, cancer is now “a common life milestone”.

(tags: cancer life milestones death uk health medicine)

Airtable

looks like a nice web-based database, FileMaker Pro-style

(tags: filemaker collaboration database tools web sharing teams)

Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices–a national cross sectional questionnaire survey. – PubMed – NCBI

occupants in open-plan offices (>6 persons) had 62% more days of sickness absence (RR 1.62, 95% CI 1.30-2.02).

(tags: health office workplace data sickness open-plan work offices)

Legendary aquarium “piscamel” thread from the GotMead forums

I thought I had detected a studied disinterest for my March 28 questions about raising fish and making mead in the same aquarium — now I realize that you mazers probably thought I was drunk. My hypothesis was that fish manures would provide valuable fertilizer to the yeast, the aquarium bubbler would keep O2 levels high, and the fish would get a nice honey drink. The result, instead, was 3 “piscamels” flavored by rotting fish.

(tags: via:johnlooney biohazard mead fish aquarium gotmead forums brewing disgusting)

Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js | Engineering Blog | Facebook Code

This decision comes after several weeks of disappointment and uncertainty for our community. Although we still believe our BSD + Patents license provides some benefits to users of our projects, we acknowledge that we failed to decisively convince this community.

(tags: facebook opensource react patents swpats bsd licensing)

‘Monitoring Cloudflare’s planet-scale edge network with Prometheus’ (preso)

from SRECon EMEA 2017; how Cloudflare are replacing Nagios with Prometheus and grafana

(tags: metrics monitoring alerting prometheus grafana nagios)

European Commission study finds no link between piracy and lower sales of digital content

According to the report, an average of 51% of adults and 72% of minors in the EU have pirated digital content, with Poland and Spain averaging the highest rates of all countries surveyed. Nevertheless, displacement rates (the impact of piracy on legitimate sales) were found to be negligible or non-existent for music, books and games, while rates for films and TV were in line with previous digital piracy studies. Most interesting is the fact that the study found that illegal game downloads actually lead to an increase in legal purchases. The report concludes that tactics like video game microtransactions are proving effective in converting illegal users to paying users. The full report goes in-depth regarding potential factors influencing piracy and the challenges of accurately tracking its impact on legitimate sales, but the researchers ultimately conclude that there is no robust statistical evidence that illegal downloads reduce legal sales. That’s big news, which makes it all the more troubling that the EU effectively buried it for two years.

(tags: piracy eu studies downloads ec games movies books content)

Understanding Uber: It’s Not About The App

the next time you see a link to a petition or someone raging about this decision being ‘anti-innovation’, remember Greyball. Remember the Metropolitan Police letter [regarding several sexual assaults which Uber didn’t report to police]. Remember that this is about holding ULL, as a company, to the same set of standards to which every other mini-cab operator in London already complies. Most of all though remember: it is not about the app.

(tags: uber ull safety crime london assault greyball taxis cabs apps)

‘Hey #gamedev, tell me about some brilliant mechanics in games that are hidden from the player to get across a certain feeling.’

This is an amazing Twitter thread. Lots of fantastic game-improvement “cheats” out there. Polygon article: https://www.polygon.com/2017/9/2/16247112/video-game-developer-secrets

(tags: games gaming cheats tweaks game-mechanics til twitter)

Turning Off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in iOS 11’s Control Center Doesn’t Actually Turn Off Wi-Fi or Bluetooth – Motherboard

“in iOS 11 and later, when you toggle the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth buttons in Control Center, your device will immediately disconnect from Wi-Fi and Bluetooth accessories. Both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth will continue to be available.” That is because Apple wants the iPhone to be able to continue using AirDrop, AirPlay, Apple Pencil, Apple Watch, Location Services, and other features, according to the documentation.

(tags: wifi bluetooth iphone ios security fail off-means-off)

Wiggle | Panaracer RibMo Folding City Tyre | City Tyres

Recommended for city commuting by a couple of ppl on ITS

(tags: tyres tires ribmo panaracer cycling bike to-get)

Gas Pump Skimmers – learn.sparkfun.com

For those who don’t want to read through the gritty details here’s the summary: These skimmers are cheap and are becoming more common and more of a nuisance across north america. The skimmer broadcasts over bluetooth as HC-05 with a password of 1234. If you happen to be at a gas pump and happen to scan for bluetooth devices and happen to see an HC-05 listed as an available connection then you probably don’t want to use that pump. The bluetooth module used on these skimmers is extremely common and used on all sorts of legitimate products end educational kits. If you detect one in the field you can confirm that it is a skimmer (and not some other device) by sending the character ‘P’ to the module over a terminal. If you get a ’M’ in response then you have likely found a skimmer and you should contact your local authorities.

(tags: crime hardware bluetooth security electronics skimmers gas-stations usa petrol-stations hc-05)

Locking, Little’s Law, and the USL

Excellent explanatory mailing list post by Martin Thompson to the mechanical-sympathy group, discussing Little’s Law vs the USL:

Little’s law can be used to describe a system in steady state from a queuing perspective, i.e. arrival and leaving rates are balanced. In this case it is a crude way of modelling a system with a contention percentage of 100% under Amdahl’s law, in that throughput is one over latency. However this is an inaccurate way to model a system with locks. Amdahl’s law does not account for coherence costs. For example, if you wrote a microbenchmark with a single thread to measure the lock cost then it is much lower than in a multi-threaded environment where cache coherence, other OS costs such as scheduling, and lock implementations need to be considered. Universal Scalability Law (USL) accounts for both the contention and the coherence costs. http://www.perfdynamics.com/Manifesto/USLscalability.html When modelling locks it is necessary to consider how contention and coherence costs vary given how they can be implemented. Consider in Java how we have biased locking, thin locks, fat locks, inflation, and revoking biases which can cause safe points that bring all threads in the JVM to a stop with a significant coherence component.

(tags: usl scaling scalability performance locking locks java jvm amdahls-law littles-law system-dynamics modelling systems caching threads schedulers contention)

“HTML email, was that your fault?”

jwz may indeed have invented this feature way back in Netscape Mail. FWIW I think he’s right — Netscape Mail was the first usage of HTML email I recall

(tags: netscape history html email smtp mime mozilla jwz)

Undercover operation ‘Close Pass’ reduced cyclist injuries by 20% in a year

An initiative to protect cyclists from dangerous overtaking has been praised, after reducing the amount of cyclists killed or seriously injured on the roads by 20% over the last year. Operation ‘Close Pass’ was devised by West Midlands Police as a low cost way of preventing accidents caused by motorists who are driving too close for comfort.

(tags: cycling via:fanf safety overtaking roads bikes)

Normietivity: A Review of Angela Nagle’s Kill all Normies

Due to a persistent vagueness in targets and refusal to respond to the best arguments presented by those she loosely groups together, Nagle does not provide the thoroughgoing and immanent treatment of the left which would be required to achieve the profound intervention she clearly intended. Nor does she grapple with the difficult implications figures like Greer (with her transphobic campaign against a vulnerable colleague) and Milo (with his direct advocacy for the nativist and carceral state) present for free speech absolutists. And indeed, the blurring their specifically shared transphobia causes for distinguishing between left and right wing social analysis. In genre terms, Nagle’s writing is best described as travel writing for internet culture. Kill All Normies provides a string of curios and oddities (from neo-nazi cults, to inscrutably gendered teenagers) to an audience expected to find them unfamiliar, and titillating. Nagle attempts to cast herself as an aloof and wry explorer, but at various points her commitments become all too clear. Nagle implicitly casts her reader as the eponymous normies, overlooking those of us who live through lives with transgenders, in the wake of colonialism, despite invisible disabilities (including depression), and all the rest. This is both a shame and a missed opportunity, because the deadly violence the Alt-Right has proven itself capable of is in urgent need of evaluation, but so too are the very real dysfunctions which afflict the left (both online and IRL). After this book patient, discerning, explanatory, and immanent readings of internet culture remain sorely needed. The best that can be said for Kill All Normies is, as the old meme goes, “An attempt was made.”

(tags: angela-nagle normies books reading transphobia germaine-greer milo alt-right politics internet 4chan)

Native Memory Tracking

Java 8 HotSpot feature to monitor and diagnose native memory leaks

(tags: java jvm memory native-memory malloc debugging coding nmt java-8 jcmd)

This Heroic Captain Defied His Orders and Stopped America From Starting World War III

Captain William Bassett, a USAF officer stationed at Okinawa on October 28, 1962, can now be added alongside Stanislav Petrov to the list of people who have saved the world from WWIII:

By [John] Bordne’s account, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Air Force crews on Okinawa were ordered to launch 32 missiles, each carrying a large nuclear warhead. […] The Captain told Missile Operations Center over the phone that he either needed to hear that the threat level had been raised to DEFCON 1 and that he should fire the nukes, or that he should stand down. We don’t know exactly what the Missile Operations Center told Captain Bassett, but they finally received confirmation that they should not launch their nukes. After the crisis had passed Bassett reportedly told his men: “None of us will discuss anything that happened here tonight, and I mean anything. No discussions at the barracks, in a bar, or even here at the launch site. You do not even write home about this. Am I making myself perfectly clear on this subject?”

(tags: wwiii history nukes cuban-missile-crisis 1960s usaf okinawa missiles william-bassett)

malware piggybacking on CCleaner

On September 13, 2017 while conducting customer beta testing of our new exploit detection technology, Cisco Talos identified a specific executable which was triggering our advanced malware protection systems. Upon closer inspection, the executable in question was the installer for CCleaner v5.33, which was being delivered to endpoints by the legitimate CCleaner download servers. Talos began initial analysis to determine what was causing this technology to flag CCleaner. We identified that even though the downloaded installation executable was signed using a valid digital signature issued to Piriform, CCleaner was not the only application that came with the download. During the installation of CCleaner 5.33, the 32-bit CCleaner binary that was included also contained a malicious payload that featured a Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) as well as hardcoded Command and Control (C2) functionality. We confirmed that this malicious version of CCleaner was being hosted directly on CCleaner’s download server as recently as September 11, 2017.

(tags: ccleaner malware avast piriform windows security)

Malicious typosquatting packages in PyPI

skcsirt-sa-20170909-pypi vulnerability announcement from SK-CSIRT:

SK-CSIRT identified malicious software libraries in the official Python package repository, PyPI, posing as well known libraries. A prominent example is a fake package urllib-1.21.1.tar.gz, based upon a well known package urllib3-1.21.1.tar.gz. Such packages may have been downloaded by unwitting developer or administrator by various means, including the popular “pip” utility (pip install urllib). There is evidence that the fake packages have indeed been downloaded and incorporated into software multiple times between June 2017 and September 2017.

(tags: pypi python typos urllib security malware)

London police’s use of AFR facial recognition falls flat on its face

A “top-of-the-line” automated facial recognition (AFR) system trialled for the second year in a row at London’s Notting Hill Carnival couldn’t even tell the difference between a young woman and a balding man, according to a rights group worker invited to view it in action. Because yes, of course they did it again: London’s Met police used controversial, inaccurate, largely unregulated automated facial recognition (AFR) technology to spot troublemakers. And once again, it did more harm than good. Last year, it proved useless. This year, it proved worse than useless: it blew up in their faces, with 35 false matches and one wrongful arrest of somebody erroneously tagged as being wanted on a warrant for a rioting offense. […] During a recent, scathing US House oversight committee hearing on the FBI’s use of the technology, it emerged that 80% of the people in the FBI database don’t have any sort of arrest record. Yet the system’s recognition algorithm inaccurately identifies them during criminal searches 15% of the time, with black women most often being misidentified.

(tags: face-recognition afr london notting-hill-carnival police liberty met-police privacy data-privacy algorithms)

Universal adversarial perturbations

in today’s paper Moosavi-Dezfooli et al., show us how to create a _single_ perturbation that causes the vast majority of input images to be misclassified.

(tags: adversarial-classification spam image-recognition ml machine-learning dnns neural-networks images classification perturbation papers)

“Use trees. Not too deep. Mostly ensembles.”

snarky summary of ‘Data-driven Advice for Applying Machine Learning to Bioinformatics Problems’, a recent analysis paper of ML algorithms

(tags: algorithms machine-learning bioinformatics funny advice classification)

“You Can’t Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech”

In 2015, Reddit closed several subreddits—foremost among them r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown—due to violations of Reddit’s anti-harassment policy. However, the effectiveness of banning as a moderation approach remains unclear: banning might diminish hateful behavior, or it may relocate such behavior to different parts of the site. We study the ban of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown in terms of its effect on both participating users and affected subreddits. Working from over 100M Reddit posts and comments, we generate hate speech lexicons to examine variations in hate speech usage via causal inference methods. We find that the ban worked for Reddit. More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreased their hate speech usage—by at least 80%. Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown “migrants,” those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage. In other words, other subreddits did not inherit the problem. We conclude by reflecting on the apparent success of the ban, discussing implications for online moderation, Reddit and internet communities more broadly.

(tags: abuse reddit research hate-speech community moderation racism internet)

The Immortal Myths About Online Abuse – Humane Tech – Medium

After building online communities for two decades, we’ve learned how to fight abuse. It’s a solvable problem. We just have to stop repeating the same myths as excuses not to fix things.

(tags: abuse comments community harassment racism reddit anil-dash free-speech)

‘Let’s all survive the GDPR’

Simon McGarr and John Looney’s slides from their SRECon ’17 presentation

(tags: simon-mcgarr data-privacy privacy data-protection gdpr slides presentations)

The React license for founders and CTOs – James Ide – Medium

Decent explanation of _why_ Facebook came up with the BSD+Patents license: “Facebook’s patent grant is about sharing its code while preserving its ability to defend itself against patent lawsuits.”

The difficulty of open sourcing code at Facebook, including React in 2013, was one of the reasons the company’s open-source contributions used to be a fraction of what they are today. It didn’t use to have a strong reputation as an open-source contributor to front-end technologies. Facebook wanted to open source code, though; when it grew communities for projects like React, core contributors emerged to help out and interview candidates often cited React and other Facebook open source as one of the reasons they were interested in applying. People at Facebook wanted to make it easier to open source code and not worry as much about patents. Facebook’s solution was the Facebook BSD+Patents license.

(tags: facebook bsd licenses licensing asf patents swpats react license software-patents open-source rocksdb)

HN thread on the new Network Load Balancer AWS product

looks like @colmmacc works on it. Lots and lots of good details here

(tags: nlb aws load-balancing ops architecture lbs tcp ip)

Java Flame Graphs Introduction: Fire For Everyone!

lots of good detail on flame graph usage in Java, and the Honest Profiler (honest because it’s safepoint-free)

(tags: profiling java safepoints jvm flame-graphs perf measurement benchmarking testing)

Teaching Students to Code – What Works

Lynn Langit describing her work as part of Microsoft Digigirlz and TKP to teach thousands of kids worldwide to code. Describes a curriculum from “K” (4-6-year olds) learning computational thinking with a block-based programming environment like Scratch, up to University level, solving problems with public clouds like AWS’ free tier.

(tags: education learning coding teaching tkp lynn-langit scratch kids)

So much for that Voynich manuscript “solution”

boo.

The idea that the book is a medical treatise on women’s health, however, might turn out to be correct. But that wasn’t Gibbs’ discovery. Many scholars and amateur sleuths had already reached that conclusion, using the same evidence that Gibbs did. Essentially, Gibbs rolled together a bunch of already-existing scholarship and did a highly speculative translation, without even consulting the librarians at the institute where the book resides. Gibbs said in the TLS article that he did his research for an unnamed “television network.” Given that Gibbs’ main claim to fame before this article was a series of books about how to write and sell television screenplays, it seems that his goal in this research was probably to sell a television screenplay of his own. In 2015, Gibbs did an interview where he said that in five years, “I would like to think I could have a returnable series up and running.” Considering the dubious accuracy of many History Channel “documentaries,” he might just get his wish.

(tags: crypto history voynich-manuscript historians tls)

How to Optimize Garbage Collection in Go

In this post, we’ll share a few powerful optimizations that mitigate many of the performance problems common to Go’s garbage collection (we will cover “fun with deadlocks” in a follow-up). In particular, we’ll share how embedding structs, using sync.Pool, and reusing backing arrays can minimize memory allocations and reduce garbage collection overhead.

(tags: garbage performance gc golang go coding)

Firms involved in biometric database in India contracted by Irish government

Two tech firms – one owned by businessman Dermot Desmond – involved in the creation of a controversial biometric database in India, are providing services for the Government’s public services card and passports. Known as the Aadhaar project, the Indian scheme is the world’s largest ever biometric database involving 1.2 billion citizens. Initially voluntary, it became mandatory for obtaining state services, for paying taxes and for opening a bank account. […] Dermot Casey, a former chief technology officer of Storyful, said that if the Daon system was used to store the data and carry out the facial matching then the Government “appears to have purchased a biometric database system which can be extended to include voice, fingerprint and iris identification at a moment’s notice”. Katherine O’Keefe, a data protection consultant with Castlebridge, said if the departments were using images of people’s faces to single out or identify an individual, they were “by legal definition processing biometric data”.

(tags: biometrics databases aadhar id-cards ireland psc daon morpho)

Even Racists Got the Blues

racist tries to make a “Blue Lives Matter” tee shirt as gaeilge, accidentally writes “Black Lives Matter” instead. perfect

(tags: racists duh stupid translation fail daoine-gorme irish blm cops funny)

New Network Load Balancer – Effortless Scaling to Millions of Requests per Second | AWS Blog

Looks like the EC2 Networking team got their way and got to rewrite LBs in AWS

(tags: load-balancing aws elb alb nlb networking ec2 ops architecture)

The solution to the Voynich manuscript

To those who have studied medieval medicine, and possess a good knowledge of its origins, the classical physicians Galen (AD 129–210), Hippocrates (460–370 BC) and Soranus (AD 98–138) among them, the Voynich manuscript’s incorporation of an illustrated herbarium (collection of plant remedies), Zodiac charts, instructions on thermae (baths) and a diagram showing the influence of the Pleiades side by side will not be surprising. They are all in tune with contemporary medical treatises, part and parcel of the medieval world of health and healing. Bathing as a remedy is a time-honoured tradition: practised by the Greeks and the Romans, advocated by the classical physicians, and sustained during the Middle Ages. The central theme of the Voynich manuscript is just such an activity, and one of its chief characteristics is the presence of naked female figures immersed in some concoction or other. Classical and medieval medicine had separate divisions devoted to the complaints and diseases of women, mostly but not exclusively in the area of gynaecology, and covered other topics such as hygiene, food, purgatives, blood­letting, fumigations, tonics, tinctures and even cosmetics and perfumes: all involved “taking the waters”, by bathing or ingesting.

(tags: history voynich-manuscript codes medieval-medicine thermae herbaria)

Download 67,000 Historic Maps (in High Resolution) from the Wonderful David Rumsey Map Collection | Open Culture

You do not need to be a Stanford student or faculty or staff member to access the vast treasures of the Rumsey Map collection, nor do you need to visit the university or its new Center. Since 1996, the Rumsey collection’s online database has been open to all, currently offering anyone with an internet connection access to 67,000 maps from all over the globe, spanning five centuries of cartography.

(tags: via:oisin maps art graphics open-access mapping history david-rumsey collections)

Comment: ‘Mandatory but not compulsory’ – what exactly is the justification for the Public Services Card? – Independent.ie

TJ McIntyre nails the problem here:

‘Mandatory but not compulsory”. This ill-judged hair-splitting seems likely to stick to Social Protection Minister Regina Doherty in the same way that “an Irish solution to an Irish problem” and “on mature recollection” did to politicians before her. The minister used that phrase to defend against the criticism that the public services card (PSC) is being rolled out as a national ID card by stealth, without any clear legal basis or public debate. She went on to say that the PSC is not compulsory as “nobody will drag you kicking and screaming to have a card”. This is correct, but irrelevant. The Government’s strategy is one of making the PSC effectively rather than legally compulsory – by cutting off benefits such as pensions and refusing driving licences and passports unless a person registers. Whether or not the PSC is required by law is immaterial if you cannot function in society without it.

(tags: psc id-cards ireland social-welfare id privacy data-protection)

The data for the Irish theory driving test is stored in the US

Prometric is the company which adminsters the test and they appear to store it on US-based servers

(tags: prometric data privacy data-protection driving-test ireland theory-test)

bet365 to save Riak

‘It is our intention to open source all of Basho’s products and all of the source code that they have been working on. We’ll do this as quickly as we are able to organise it, and we would appreciate some input from the community on how you would like this done.’

(tags: oss riak basho storage open-source bet365)

Britta Blvd – The Marauders’ Map

lovely bit of papercraft

(tags: harry-potter papercraft origami kids)

How to Easily Unsubscribe from Bulk Emails in Gmail – Unroll.me Alternative

nice Google Script which runs in the background and scrapes out unsubscribe links. I’m drowning in single-opt-in mainsleaze newsletters at this stage so this is very welcome

(tags: mainsleaze unsubscribe spam gmail google email one-bite-of-the-apple)

AdoptOpenJDK/jitwatch

Log analyser and visualiser for the HotSpot JIT compiler. Inspect inlining decisions, hot methods, bytecode, and assembly. View results in the JavaFX user interface.

(tags: analysis java jvm performance tools debugging optimization jit)

GitHub – hillbrad/U2FReviews

‘Reviews of U2F [Universal Second Factor] devices’ — ie. Yubico keys et al.

(tags: u2f totp oath otp one-time-passwords authentication devices gadgets security 2fa)

48 Hours In Dublin

good set of tourist tips for a foodie Dublin weekender

(tags: dublin tourism food eating dining restaurants tips weekend)

Linux Load Averages: Solving the Mystery

Nice bit of OS archaeology by Brendan Gregg.

In 1993, a Linux engineer found a nonintuitive case with load averages, and with a three-line patch changed them forever from “CPU load averages” to what one might call “system load averages.” His change included tasks in the uninterruptible state, so that load averages reflected demand for disk resources and not just CPUs. These system load averages count the number of threads working and waiting to work, and are summarized as a triplet of exponentially-damped moving sum averages that use 1, 5, and 15 minutes as constants in an equation. This triplet of numbers lets you see if load is increasing or decreasing, and their greatest value may be for relative comparisons with themselves.

(tags: load monitoring linux unix performance ops brendan-gregg history cpu)

Distilled Identity

Gabriel recently bought a distillery in Barbados, where he says the majority of his team is of African descent. “The sugar industry is a painful past for them, but my understanding, from my team, is that they do see it as the past,” Gabriel explained. “There was great suffering, but their take is like, ‘We built this island.’ They are reclaiming it, and we are seeing that in efforts to preserve farming land and not let it all go to tourism.” I rather liked this narrative, or at least the potential of it. Slavery was appalling across the board, but countries and cultures throughout the African Diaspora have managed their paths forward in ways that don’t mimic the American aftermath. A plurality of narratives was possible here, which was thrilling to me. I am often disappointed by the mainstream perception of one-note blackness. One could easily argue the root of colonization is far from removed in the Caribbean. But if I understood Gabriel, and if he accurately captured the sentiments of his Barbadian colleagues, plantation sugarcane offered career opportunities to some, and was perhaps not solely a distressing connection to a shared global history. We chewed on this thought, together, in silence.

(tags: history distilling rum barbados african-diaspora slavery american-history booze language etymology)

cristim/autospotting

‘Easy to use tool that automatically replaces some or even all on-demand AutoScaling group members with similar or larger identically configured spot instances in order to generate significant cost savings on AWS EC2, behaving much like an AutoScaling-backed spot fleet.’

(tags: asg autoscaling ec2 aws spot-fleet spot-instances cost-saving scaling)

Going Multi-Cloud with AWS and GCP: Lessons Learned at Scale

Metamarkets splits across AWS and GCP, going into heavy detail here

(tags: aws gcp google ops hosting multi-cloud)

Cycling to work: major new study suggests health benefits are staggering

We found that cycling to work was associated with a 41% lower risk of dying overall compared to commuting by car or public transport. Cycle commuters had a 52% lower risk of dying from heart disease and a 40% lower risk of dying from cancer. They also had 46% lower risk of developing heart disease and a 45% lower risk of developing cancer at all.

(tags: cycling transport health medicine science commuting life statistics)

NASA’s Sound Suppression Water System

If you’ve ever watched a rocket launch, you’ve probably noticed the billowing clouds around the launch pad during lift-off. What you’re seeing is not actually the rocket’s exhaust but the result of a launch pad and vehicle protection system known in NASA parlance as the Sound Suppression Water System. Exhaust gases from a rocket typically exit at a pressure higher than the ambient atmosphere, which generates shock waves and lots of turbulent mixing between the exhaust and the air. Put differently, launch ignition is incredibly loud, loud enough to cause structural damage to the launchpad and, via reflection, the vehicle and its contents. To mitigate this problem, launch operators use a massive water injection system that pours about 3.5 times as much water as rocket propellant per second. This significantly reduces the noise levels on the launchpad and vehicle and also helps protect the infrastructure from heat damage.

(tags: water rockets launch nasa space sound-suppression sound science)

The White Lies of Craft Culture – Eater

Besides field laborers, [Southern US] planter and urban communities both depended on proficient carpenters, blacksmiths, gardeners, stable hands, seamstresses, and cooks; the America of the 1700s and 1800s was literally crafted by people of color. Part of this hidden history includes the revelation that six slaves were critical to the operation of George Washington’s distillery, and that the eponymous Jack Daniel learned to make whiskey from an enslaved black man named Nathan “Nearest” Green. As Clay Risen reported for the New York Times last year, contrary to the predominant narrative that views whiskey as an ever “lily-white affair,” black men were the minds and hands behind American whiskey production. “In the same way that white cookbook authors often appropriated recipes from their black cooks, white distillery owners took credit for the whiskey,” he writes. Described as “the best whiskey maker that I know of” by his master, Dan Call, Green taught young Jack Daniel how to run a whiskey still. When Daniel later opened his own distillery, he hired two of Green’s sons. The popular image of moonshine is a product of the white cultural monopoly on all things ‘country’ Over time, that legacy was forgotten, creating a gap in knowledge about American distilling traditions — while English, German, Scottish, and Irish influences exist, that combination alone cannot explain the entirely of American distilling. As bourbon historian Michael Veach suggests, slave culture pieces together an otherwise puzzling intellectual history.

(tags: history craft-beer craft-culture food drink whiskey distilling black-history jack-daniels nathan-nearest-green)

Meet the Espresso Tonic, Iced Coffee’s Bubbly New Cousin

Bit late on this one but YUM

To make the drink, Box Kite baristas simply load a glass with ice, fill it about three quarters of the way with chilled tonic, and then top it off with an espresso shot — typically from roasters like Madcap (MI) and Ritual (SF). Often, baristas pull the espresso shot directly on top of the tonic and ice mixture, forgoing the process of first pulling it into a cup and then pouring the espresso from cup to glass.

(tags: tonic-water recipes espresso coffee drinks cocktails)

Fsq.io

Foursquare’s open source repo, where they extract reusable components for open sourcing — I like the approach of using a separate top level module path for OSS bits

(tags: open-source oss foursquare libraries maintainance coding git monorepos)

GTK+ switches build from Autotools to Meson

‘The main change is that now GTK+ takes about ? of the time to build compared to the Autotools build, with likely bigger wins on older/less powerful hardware; the Visual Studio support on Windows should be at least a couple of orders of magnitude easier (shout out to Fan Chun-wei for having spent so, so many hours ensuring that we could even build on Windows with Visual Studio and MSVC); and maintaining the build system should be equally easier for everyone on any platform we currently support.’ Looking at http://mesonbuild.com/ it appears to be Python-based and AL2-licensed open source. On the downside, though, the Meson file is basically a Python script, which is something I’m really not fond of :( more details at http://taint.org/2011/02/18/001527a.html .

(tags: meson build coding dev autotools gtk+ python)

Matt Haughey ???????? on Twitter: “high quality LED light tape for bikes and wheels is ridiculously cheap these days”

good thread on fitting out a bike with crazy LED light tape; see also EL string. Apparently it’ll run off a 4.5V (3xAAA) battery pack nowadays which makes it pretty viable!

(tags: bikes cycling safety led-lights el-tape led-tape hacks via:mathowie)

M00N

a beautifully-glitched photo of the moon by Giacomo Carmagnola; more on his art at http://www.bleaq.com/2015/giacomo-carmagnola . (Via Archillect)

(tags: via:archillect art giacomo-carmagnola glitch-art moon glitch images)

How to shop on AliExpress

From the aptly-named Aliholic.com. Thanks, Elliot — the last thing I needed was something to feed my addiction to cheap tat from China!

(tags: china aliexpress dealextreme gearbest gadgets buying tat aliholic stuff)

TIL you shouldn’t use conditioner if you get nuked

If you shower carefully with soap and shampoo, Karam says [Andrew Karam, radiation expert], the radioactive dust should wash right out. But hair conditioner has particular compounds called cationic surfactants and polymers. If radioactive particles have drifted underneath damaged scales of hair protein, these compounds can pull those scales down to create a smooth strand of hair. “That can trap particles of contamination inside of the scale,” Karam says. These conditioner compounds are also oily and have a positive charge on one end that will make them stick to negatively charged sections of a strand of hair, says Perry Romanowski, a cosmetics chemist who has developed personal hygiene formulas and now hosts “The Beauty Brains” podcast on cosmetics chemistry. “Unlike shampoo, conditioners are meant to stay behind on your hair,” Romanowski says. If the conditioner comes into contact with radioactive material, these sticky, oily compounds can gum radioactive dust into your hair, he says.

(tags: factoids conditioner surfactants nuclear-bombs fallout hair bizarre til via:boingboing)

Allen curve – Wikipedia

During the late 1970s, [Professor Thomas J.] Allen undertook a project to determine how the distance between engineers’ offices affects the frequency of technical communication between them. The result of that research, produced what is now known as the Allen Curve, revealed that there is a strong negative correlation between physical distance and the frequency of communication between work stations. The finding also revealed the critical distance of 50 meters for weekly technical communication. With the fast advancement of internet and sharp drop of telecommunication cost, some wonder the observation of Allen Curve in today’s corporate environment. In his recently co-authored book, Allen examined this question and the same still holds true. He says[2] “For example, rather than finding that the probability of telephone communication increases with distance, as face-to-face probability decays, our data show a decay in the use of all communication media with distance (following a “near-field” rise).” [p. 58]

(tags: jeff-dean google history allen-curve work communication distance offices workplace teleworking remote-work)

Arq Backs Up To B2!

Arq backup for OSX now supports B2 (as well as S3) as a storage backend. “it’s a super-cheap option ($.005/GB per month) for storing your backups.” (that is less than half the price of $0.0125/GB for S3’s Infrequent Access class)

(tags: s3 storage b2 backblaze backups arq macosx ops)

After Charlottesville, I Asked My Dad About Selma

Dad told me that he didn’t think I was going to have to go through what he went through, but now he can see that he was wrong. “This fight is a never-ending fight,” he said. “There’s no end to it. I think after the ‘60s, the whole black revolution, Martin Luther King, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael and all the rest of the people, after that happened, people went to sleep,” he said. “They thought, ‘this is over.’”

(tags: selma charlottesville racism nazis america race history civil-rights 1960s)

Computer says no: Irish vet fails oral English test needed to stay in Australia

An Irish veterinarian with degrees in history and politics has been unable to convince a machine she can speak English well enough to stay in Australia. Louise Kennedy is a native English speaker, has excellent grammar and a broad vocabulary. She holds two university degrees – both obtained in English – and has been working in Australia as an equine vet on a skilled worker visa for the past two years. But she is now scrambling for other visa options after a computer-based English test – scored by a machine – essentially handed her a fail in terms of convincing immigration officers she can fluently speak her own language.

(tags: via:etienneshrdlu kafkaesque bureaucracy computer-says-no voice-recognition australia immigration english voice testing)

Godwin repeals Godwin’s Law

‘By All Means, Compare These Shitheads to the Nazis’

(tags: mike-godwin nazis shitheads funny godwins-law internet)

Sattolo’s algorithm

produces a randomized permutation of a list, with exactly one cycle (which guarantees that we will reach every element of the list even though we’re traversing it in random order)

(tags: algorithms lists permutation random randomization cycles)

Working with multiple AWS accounts at Ticketea

AWS STS/multiple account best practice described

(tags: sts aws authz ops ticketea dev)

A general purpose counting filter

This paper introduces a new AMQ data structure, a Counting Quotient Filter, which addresses all of these shortcomings and performs extremely well in both time and space: CQF performs in-memory inserts and queries up to an order of magnitude faster than the original quotient filter structure from which it takes its inspiration, several times faster than a Bloom filter, and similarly to a cuckoo filter. The CQF structure is comparable or more space efficient than all of them too. Moreover, CQF does all of this while supporting counting, outperforming all of the other forms in both dimensions even though they do not. In short, CQF is a big deal!

(tags: cqf counting-quotient-filters data-structures via:acolyer coding approximate bloom-filters)

consistent hashing with bounded loads

‘an algorithm that combined consistent hashing with an upper limit on any one server’s load, relative to the average load of the whole pool.’ Lovely blog post from Vimeo’s eng blog on a new variation on consistent hashing — incorporating a concept of overload-avoidance — and adding it to HAProxy and using it in production in Vimeo. All sounds pretty nifty! (via Toby DiPasquale)

(tags: via:codeslinger algorithms networking performance haproxy consistent-hashing load-balancing lbs vimeo overload load)

AWS Lambda Deployment using Terraform – Build ACL – Medium

Fairly persuasive that production usage of Lambda is much easier if you go full Terraform to manage and deploy.

A complete picture of what it takes to deploy your Lambda function to production with the same diligence you apply to any other codebase using Terraform. […] There are many cases where frameworks such as SAM or Serverless are not enough. You need more than that for a highly integrated Lambda function. In such cases, it’s easier to simply use Terraform.

(tags: infrastructure aws lambda serverless ops terraform sam)

GitHub – jorgebastida/awslogs: AWS CloudWatch logs for Humans™

This feature alone is a bit of a killer app:

$ awslogs get /var/log/syslog ip-10-1.* –start=’2h ago’ | grep ERROR

(tags: cli logging aws cloudwatch logs awslogs ec2)

Hyperscan

a high-performance multiple regex matching library. It follows the regular expression syntax of the commonly-used libpcre library, yet functions as a standalone library with its own API written in C. Hyperscan uses hybrid automata techniques to allow simultaneous matching of large numbers (up to tens of thousands) of regular expressions, as well as matching of regular expressions across streams of data. Hyperscan is typically used in a DPI library stack. Hyperscan began in 2008, and evolved from a commercial closed-source product 2009-2015. First developed at Sensory Networks Incorporated, and later acquired and released as open source software by Intel in October 2015.  Hyperscan is under a 3-clause BSD license. We welcome outside contributors.

(tags: via:fanf regexps regular-expressions text matching pattern-matching intel open-source bsd c dpi scanning sensory-networks)

What do scientists think about the biological claims made in the anti-diversity document written by a Google employee in August 2017? – Quora

Cut out and keep for future use.

(tags: sexism misogyny bias discrimination google biology women gender sex via:klyda)

Beard vs Taleb: Scientism and the Nature of Historical Inquiry

The most interesting aspect of this Twitter war is that it is representative of a malaise that has stricken a good chunk of academics (mostly scientists, with a peppering of philosophers) and an increasing portion of the general public: scientism. I have co-edited an entire book, due out soon, on the topic, which features authors who are pro, con, and somewhere in the middle. Scientism is defined as the belief that the assumptions, methods of research, etc., of the natural sciences are the only ways to gather valuable knowledge or to answer meaningful questions. Everything else, to paraphrase Taleb, is bullshit. Does Taleb engage in scientism? Indubitably. I have already mentioned above his generalization from what one particular historian (Beard) said to “historians” tout court. But there is more, from his Twitter feed: “there is this absence of intellectual rigor in humanities.” “Are historians idiots? Let’s be polite and say that they are in the majority no rocket scientists and operate under a structural bias. It looks like an empirically rigorous view of historiography is missing.”

(tags: history science scientism nassim-taleb argument debate proof romans britain mary-beard)

Google’s Response to Employee’s Anti-Diversity Manifesto Ignores Workplace Discrimination Law – Medium

A workplace-discrimination lawyer writes:

Stray remarks are not enough. But a widespread workplace discussion of whether women engineers are biologically capable of performing at the same level as their male counterparts could suffice to create a hostile work environment. As another example, envision the racial hostility of a workplace where employees, as Google put it, “feel safe” to espouse their “alternative view” that their African-American colleagues are not well-represented in management positions because they are not genetically predisposed for leadership roles. In short, a workplace where people “feel safe sharing opinions” based on gender (or racial, ethnic or religious) stereotypes may become so offensive that it legally amounts to actionable discrimination.

(tags: employment sexism workplace discrimination racism misogyny women beliefs)

a list of all the nuclear war scenarios stored in the W.O.P.R. computer

For fans of the movie WARGAMES: a list of all the nuclear war scenarios stored in the W.O.P.R. computer. (self.movies)

(tags: via:burritojustice wargames movies wopr global-thermonuclear-war wwiii)

Nextflow – A DSL for parallel and scalable computational pipelines

Data-driven computational pipelines Nextflow enables scalable and reproducible scientific workflows using software containers. It allows the adaptation of pipelines written in the most common scripting languages. Its fluent DSL simplifies the implementation and the deployment of complex parallel and reactive workflows on clouds and clusters.

(tags: computation workflows pipelines batch docker ops open-source)

BinaryAlert: Serverless, Real-time & Retroactive Malware Detection

This is a serverless stack built on AWS, deployed with Terraform. Not sure what to think about this — it still makes me shudder a little

(tags: aws serverless lambda airbnb malware yara binaryalert architecture)

Malicious packages in npm

The node.js packaging system is being exploited by bad guys to steal auth tokens at build time. This is the best advice they can come up with:

Always check the name of packages you’re installing. You can look at the downloads number: if a package is popular but the downloads number is low, something is wrong.

(tags: javascript security npm node packaging packages fail)

Air Canada near-miss: Air traffic controllers make split-second decisions in a culture of “psychological safety” — Quartz

“’Just culture’ as a term emerged from air traffic control in the late 1990s, as concern was mounting that air traffic controllers were unfairly cited or prosecuted for incidents that happened to them while they were on the job,” Sidney Dekker, a professor, writer, and director of the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Australia, explains to Quartz in an email. Eurocontrol, the intergovernmental organization that focuses on the safety of airspace across Europe, has “adopted a harmonized ‘just culture’ that it encourages all member countries and others to apply to their air traffic control organizations.” […] One tragic example of what can happen when companies don’t create a culture where employees feel empowered to raise questions or admit mistakes came to light in 2014, when an investigation into a faulty ignition switch that caused more than 100 deaths at GM Motors revealed a toxic culture of denying errors and deflecting blame within the firm. The problem was later attributed to one engineer who had not disclosed an obvious issue with the flawed switch, but many employees spoke of extreme pressure to put costs and delivery times before all other considerations, and to hide large and small concerns.

(tags: just-culture atc air-traffic-control management post-mortems outages reliability air-canada disasters accidents learning psychological-safety work)

Dark forces, Brexit and Irexit

The EU have made it clear, as they have to, that there will be no frictionless borders between the union and the UK. Brexit will be dislocative.  As smaller irish companies start to go to the wall post Brexit expect the calls for “something to be done” to start to include Irexit [an Irish exit from the EU a la Brexit]. But this way madness lies. […] we export more in education services than in beverages ; we exportthree times or more manufactured goods than food; we export six times more in chemicals and related; value added by industry or by distribution and transport is more than 10 times that of agriculture. Seeking Irexit on the basis that it would be good for agribusiness is seeking to amputate a hand for a broken finger.

(tags: agribusiness ireland irexit brexit economics eu politics)

APOLLO 13 EARTH ORBITAL CHART | Artsy

Some nice catalogue details around this Apollo 13 AEO:

Apollo Earth Orbit Chart (AEO), Apollo Mission 13 for April 1970 Launch Date. March 3, 1970. Color Earth map, first edition. 13 by 42 inches. From the Catalogue: SIGNED and INSCRIBED: “JAMES LOVELL, Apollo 13 CDR and FRED HAISE, Apollo 13 LMP.” Additionally INSCRIBED by HAISE with mission events: “Launch at 2:13 pm EST, April 11, 1970” and “Splash – April 17, 1970.” He has marked the splashdown area with an “X.” Circular plots in black represent the ground station communication coverage areas with the red circle being the tracking ship Vanguard in the Atlantic Ocean. Orbital paths show the full launch range azimuths of 72 to 108 degrees. The first orbit is plotted in light blue with the second orbit in dark blue. The planned TLI (TransLunar Injection) burn occurred on time during the mission and is plotted with a red dashed line. The point above the Earth as Apollo 13 headed toward the Moon is shown with a brown line and continues for 24 hours of mission elapsed time. This line moves over the Pacific Ocean and into the continental United States. Then it moves backwards (relative to the Earth’s rotation) over the Pacific Ocean and ends near the west coast of Africa. The Service Module explosion occurred some 32 hours after end point of the TLI brown line tracking plot.

(tags: aeo apollo history spaceflight collectibles antiques james-lovell fred-haise 1970 apollo-13 charts)

Pipeline Development Tools

“pipelint.sh” — command line Jenkins pipeline linting

(tags: pipelines jenkins ci coding dev)

Rule that patients must finish antibiotics course is wrong, study says

Patients have traditionally been told that they must complete courses of antibiotics, the theory being that taking too few tablets will allow the bacteria causing their disease to mutate and become resistant to the drug. But Martin Llewelyn, a professor in infectious diseases at Brighton and Sussex medical school, and colleagues claim that this is not the case. In an analysis in the British Medical Journal, the experts say “the idea that stopping antibiotic treatment early encourages antibiotic resistance is not supported by evidence, while taking antibiotics for longer than necessary increases the risk of resistance”.

(tags: health medicine antibiotics bmj bacteria)

Repair a Road or Footpath – Dublin City Council

how to report a pothole or other problem with a road or cycle path online. Keeping for future use

(tags: dcc potholes reporting dublin roads paths cycling)

How the coffee-machine took down a factories control room : talesfromtechsupport

A coffee machine was plugged into both a secure network and also connected to the main wifi network, and became a vector for malware to take down the factory’s control room. Security is hard

(tags: coffee-machines fail security networking wifi)

Ireland’s staggering hypocrisy on climate change | Environment | The Guardian

The national climate policy is a greenwash – the country is certain to miss its 2020 emissions target and still handing out drilling licences

(tags: guardian green greenwashing ireland politics energy future climate-change nmp oil fossil-fuels)

EBS gp2 I/O BurstBalance exhaustion

when EBS volumes in EC2 exhaust their “burst” allocation, things go awry very quickly

(tags: performance aws ebs ec2 burst-balance ops debugging)

Breaking open the MtGox case, part 1

Earlier today news broke of an arrest in Greece of a Russian national suspected of running a large-scale money laundering operation focused on Bitcoin. The man has since been publicly identified as Alexander Vinnik, 38, and over $4 billion USD is said to have been trafficked through the operation since 2011. We won’t beat around the bush with it: Vinnik is [WizSec’s] chief suspect for involvement in the MtGox theft (or the laundering of the proceeds thereof).

(tags: mtgox theft bitcoin fraud)

The 38 Essential Dublin Restaurants

Irish Times resto reviewer @catherineeats with her 38 top recommendations for Dublin. a solid list

(tags: dublin restaurants eating food lists tourism)

Kubernetes Best Practices // Speaker Deck

A lot of these are general Docker/containerisation best practices, too. (via Devops Weekly)

(tags: k8s kubernetes devops ops containers docker best-practices tips packaging)

terrible review for Solidity as a programming environment in HN

“Solidity/EVM is by far the worst programming environment I have ever encountered. It would be impossible to write even toy programs correctly in this language, yet it is literally called “Solidity” and used to program a financial system that manages hundreds of millions of dollars.”

(tags: blockchain ethereum programming coding via:fanf funny fail floating-point money json languages bugs reliability)

“This War of Mine” review by survivor of the siege of Sarajevo

‘Big Kudos to designers of this game. I can’t imagine how much research it was for them to make this. It is as if they were in Sarajevo during whole Siege of Sarajevo, and they weren’t doing anything else but taking notes. Will you like this game? Well, I do not know. If you want to know how a siege works, then YES. If you want to play great game with theme that is a bit dark, YES. If you want to play amazingly heavy solo or coop game, YES. But, also, I can see why someone would never play this game. My board game collection, before This war of mine, was just “The wall of fun”, and now, amongst other boxes, there is this one that is also fun, but different than any other. This is one really unique game.’

(tags: reviews siege sarajevo history war boardgames this-war-of-mine heavy)

Decoding the Enigma with Recurrent Neural Networks

I am blown away by this — given that Recurrent Neural Networks are Turing-complete, they can actually automate cryptanalysis given sufficient resources, at least to the degree of simulating the internal workings of the Enigma algorithm given plaintext, ciphertext and key:

The model needed to be very large to capture all the Enigma’s transformations. I had success with a single-celled LSTM model with 3000 hidden units. Training involved about a million steps of batched gradient descent: after a few days on a k40 GPU, I was getting 96-97% accuracy!

(tags: machine-learning deep-learning rnns enigma crypto cryptanalysis turing history gpus gradient-descent)

awslabs/aws-ec2rescue-linux

Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Rescue for Linux is a python-based tool that allows for the automatic diagnosis of common problems found on EC2 Linux instances.

(tags: ec2 aws kernel linux ec2rl ops)

SECURITY ALERT – Critical bug in Parity’s MultiSig-Wallet

‘Together, we were able to determine that malicious actors had exploited a flaw in the Parity Multisig code, which allowed a known party to steal over 153,000 ETH from several projects including Edgeless Casino, Aeternity, and Swarm City.’ by leaving “internal” (a visibility restricting keyword) off of the wallet contract, it was possible for attackers to steal millions from a “secure” multi-sig wallet in Ethereum: https://press.swarm.city/parity-multisig-wallet-exploit-hits-swarm-city-funds-statement-by-the-swarm-city-core-team-d1f3929b4e4e https://twitter.com/ncweaver/status/887821804038873088 : ‘Time from “OMFG there is a bug” to “geez, someone steal $16M”? 2 hours. Gotta love JavaScript FunBukx, err Ethereum’

(tags: ethereum fail security exploits javascript parity)

timeX.google.com provide non standard time · Issue #437 · systemd/systemd

Google ask systemd not to use timeX.google.com due to nonstandard ticking behaviour; systemd dev tells them to FO. lovely

(tags: systemd systemdsucks fail google ntp time)

systemd systemdsucks logs fail bugs journald logging)

Wifi AP Placement

‘AP Placement – A Job For the Work Experience Kid? | Scott Stapleton | WLPC EU Budapest 2016’

(tags: ap wifi placement layout ops wireless home presos)

Xiaomi Mi robot vacuum cleaner

sounds like a decent enough vac at a low price point, word of mouth is good

(tags: robots cleaning vacuum-cleaners xiaomi gadgets home)

Amazon Global Product Price Check

price compare across global Amazon sites, by ASIN. there are some major differences

(tags: prices amazon via:its price-check comparison shopping eu uk asin)

[LEGAL-303] ASF, RocksDB, and Facebook’s BSD+patent grant licensing

Facebook’s licensing includes a “nuclear option” if a user acts in a way interpreted by Facebook as competing with them; the ASF has marked the license as “Category-X”, and may not be included in Apache projects as a result. Looks like RocksDB are going to relicense as dual GPLv2/ASL2 to clear this up, but React.js has not shown any plans to do so yet

(tags: react rocksdb licensing asl2 apache asf facebook open-source patents)

Will the last person at Basho please turn out the lights? • The Register

Basho, once a rising star of the NoSQL database world, has faded away to almost nothing […] According to sources, the company, which developed the Riak distributed database, has been shedding engineers for months, and is now operating as a shadow of its former self, as at least one buy-out has fallen through.

(tags: basho riak nosql databases storage startups funding)

Developer Experience Lessons Operating a Serverless-like Platform at Netflix

Very interesting writeup on how Netflix are finding operating a serverless scripting system; they offer scriptability in their backend and it’s used heavily by devs to provide features. Lots of having to reinvent the wheel on packaging, deployment, versioning, and test/staging infrastructure

(tags: serverless dependencies packaging deployment versioning devex netflix developer-experience dev testing staging scripting)

OVH suffer 24-hour outage (The Register)

Choice quotes: ‘At 6:48pm, Thursday, June 29, in Room 3 of the P19 datacenter, due to a crack on a soft plastic pipe in our water-cooling system, a coolant leak causes fluid to enter the system’; ‘This process had been tested in principle but not at a 50,000-website scale’

(tags: postmortems ovh outages liquid-cooling datacenters dr disaster-recovery ops)

Hyrum’s Law

“With a sufficient number of users of an API, it doesn’t matter what you promised in the contract, all observable behaviours of your interface will be depended upon by somebody.”

(tags: laws funny apis reliability hyrum-wright hyrums-law compatibilty interfaces)