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A_Beer_Clinked

106 karma · joined February 4, 2014

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A_Beer_Clinked··on Mountain-climbing addresses for code lines
In some ways git blame accomplishes this, at least conceptually.

It chains back through the diffs to find out who edited the line.

So to address the OP problem you could have a hash that was based on : Original Line number , diff id , diff id etc

A_Beer_Clinked··on GitHub's Metal Cloud
Can anybody with experience of using Openstack Ironic[1] in this space comment on advantages of rolling your own liek GitHub?

[1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Ironic

A_Beer_Clinked··on DEC's No Output Division Memo (1982) [pdf]
Nice find. Relatedly I found this brief history of DEC: From: http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Digital_Equipment_Corp.asp...

>There was virtually no organizational structure during Digital’s early years because Olsen was committed to creating an environment much like the research labs at MIT. A temporary position as liaison between MIT and IBM in 1959 convinced Olsen that the hierarchy at companies like IBM did not allow for creativity and the flow of ideas.

Sound familiar to anyone here?

A_Beer_Clinked··on A Back Door to Encryption Won't Stop Terrorists
>The ability to create privacy should be a point of pride as not everyone has that luxury. It should be a human right.

I agree; so does the UN in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 12. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 18. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

A_Beer_Clinked··on Ask HN: How to form deep friendships later in life?
Speaking of Dojo. Why not mentor at your local Coder Dojo? (Or start one) I've found it a great way to meet people and have made some good friends with other mentors and the parents of the ninjas (kids).

https://coderdojo.com/

A_Beer_Clinked··on Big data in genomics: The $1k genome has arrived
I found this link: https://medium.com/precision-medicine/how-big-is-the-human-g... In summary: > 1. In a perfect world (just your 3 billion letters): ~700 megabytes > 2. In the real world, right off the genome sequencer: ~200 gigabytes > 3. As a variant file, with just the list of mutations: ~125 megabytes
A_Beer_Clinked··on Nellie Bly
I first heard about Nellie Bly via the early West Wing episode. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0745595/quotes?item=qt0297998

I hadn't realised that she had also done a Jules Verne around the world.

A_Beer_Clinked··on Kill the laws that keep car dealers in business
I've done a lot of data work for several other brands in a few markets and can confirm the used car part of this is true.

A properly run organisation can sell and re-sell the same car several times, also selling parts and services to each owner in between sales.

Rental and other fleets are particularly battled after for this reason as they can "inject" far more life time value in the the network than just the initial sale.

A_Beer_Clinked··on ‘99.99 percent air’: Boeing releases video of revolutionary lightweight metal
Why not remove everything and go for vacuum spheres... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Lana_de_Terzi#Airshi...
A_Beer_Clinked··on Mistakes Were Made: A guide to avoiding premature burial (1889)
You don't want a body lying around for a few days spreading whatever they died off. Apparently plague victims were often buried in haste.
A_Beer_Clinked··on [dead]
good idea! Let's also change the airport code for Brownsville. Better change the ones for Manchester and Guymon too.

Something does need to be done to address the gender balance in software world; this isn't it.

At the coderdojo where I mentor getting girls to engage and stay engaged is an ongoing challenge. Today we had about 25% girls which is about norm for other dojos.

Some background on initiatives. https://coderdojo.com/news/2015/03/11/girls-who-code-coderdo...

A_Beer_Clinked··on Europe's highest court has rejected the 'safe harbor' agreement
The full ruling is available here: http://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/schrems-ju...

These bit jumped out at me: >Furthermore, national security, public interest and law enforcement requirements of the United States prevail over the safe harbour scheme, so that United States undertakings are bound to disregard, without limitation, the protective rules laid down by that scheme where they conflict with such requirements. The United States safe harbour scheme thus enables interference, by United States public authorities, with the fundamental rights of persons, and the Commission decision does not refer either to the existence, in the United States, of rules intended to limit any such interference or to the existence of effective legal protection against the interference.

>This judgment has the consequence that the Irish supervisory authority is required to examine Mr Schrems’ complaint with all due diligence and, at the conclusion of its investigation, is to decide whether, pursuant to the directive, transfer of the data of Facebook’s European subscribers to the United States should be suspended on the ground that that country does not afford an adequate level of protection of personal data.

My reading (not a legal expert) is that data residency is the important bit here. Which in my view is a small step but not sufficient.

A_Beer_Clinked··on Satellite Internet gets a fresh look, cash infusion
They have sold 100k Porsches on to an information superhighway that has only room for 1000 at a time so they only let each one use it for a relatively short amount of time each month. i.e the do contention management over a month.

Most providers sell consumer broadband access based on headline speed because that's what the fixed line providers do.

When buying "professional" satellite broadband; users can buy un-contented at much lower speeds. A Ford Transit with a dedicated lane perhaps...

A_Beer_Clinked··on Volkswagen and Cheating Software
I could imagine a scenario where this started out as something less evil. Seems to me that cars will perform differently in a lab than on the road; off the top of my head: - Stationary cars have different air-intake characteristics - The temperature of the fuel and air is likely different - The humidity of the air might be different - The fuel in the tank is stationary not sloshing around

There may well be valid reasons for the software to vary engine parameters test mode; maybe to compensate for the above.

Then sometime later someone said "This NOx Reduction module is killing fuel efficiency on the open road, how about we turn it off"

The net result is the same but motives and intentions of the individuals are important.

A_Beer_Clinked··on Data Centers Waste Vast Amounts of Energy, Belying Industry Image (2012)
Well they could be.. Demand Side Response is a mechanism where utility companies pay energy consumers to stop using grid power at peak times. Effectively a company is treated as a power generator but instead of selling power to the grid they just consume less either by turning stuff off or relying on on-site power generation for a while.

It's popular in lots of industries but there seems to be relatively little (publicised) adoption in the data center business yet.

A_Beer_Clinked··on Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
I was curious about this; Ethnologue, which seems to be the base reference on this says:

The exact number of unwritten languages is hard to determine. Ethnologue (17th edition) has data to indicate that of the currently listed 7,105 living languages, 3,570 have a developed writing system. We don't always know, however, if the existing writing systems are widely used. That is, while an alphabet may exist there may not be very many people who are literate and actually using the alphabet. We have data to indicate that 696 languages are unwritten. And for the remaining 2,839 languages we have no data. Source: https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages...

Also of intrest on the same site is this page: http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size which shows the distribution of first-languages by number of speakers. The top 90 languages account for 80% of the world. The bottom 1% of languages ~5765 have a cumulative ~70M speakers.

A_Beer_Clinked··on CryptDB – A database system that can process SQL queries over encrypted data
The papers I mentioned above) indicate that it can be used against postgres. You can annotate your scheme to configure how you want the tables to be handled.
A_Beer_Clinked··on CryptDB – A database system that can process SQL queries over encrypted data
This is a fantastic project from the MIT CSAIL team that builds brings together many cryptographic components into a integrated system. The academic papers on this are available from here https://css.csail.mit.edu/cryptdb/

Conceptually it's a sql proxy that decides how to maximally encrypt data based on the operations that are required. It can then weaken and re-encrypt portions of the data on the fly so that more powerful operations can be performed.

You can chain the encryption to the users login to to prevent cross user leakage.

This model allows you to have a database that is protected from adversary who have access to the database.

The encryption techniques include a partially Homomorphic scheme and other non-homomorphic schemes.

I believe that the team behind it seem to have moved on to a startup using similar technology. The code is not being actively maintained anymore. I was able to build it successfully on Ubuntu 12.04 with Bison 2.x(The code requires a mysql build which chokes on BISON 3).

They claim only a ~15%-25% performance hit although I've not yet be able to replicate that myself yet.

A_Beer_Clinked··on Python Enhancement Proposal 495: Local Time Disambiguation
Another great resource is the tz database [0]. It includes some great vignettes as well as the time zone rules:

From Larry M. Smith (2006-04-26) re Wisconsin: http://www.legis.state.wi.us/statutes/Stat0175.pdf ... is currently enforced at the 01:00 time of change. Because the local "bar time" in the state corresponds to 02:00, a number of citations are issued for the "sale of class 'B' alcohol after prohibited hours" within the deviated hour of this change every year....

From Winston Churchill (1934-04-28): It is one of the paradoxes of history that we should owe the boon of summer time, which gives every year to the people of this country between 160 and 170 hours more daylight leisure, to a war which plunged Europe into darkness for four years, and shook the foundations of civilization throughout the world.

[0] http://www.iana.org/time-zones

A_Beer_Clinked··on NASA Astronauts Eat Space-Grown Food
In the Ben Bova Mars series they have strategically positioned piles of patches that get sucked up and stuck in the holes. Maybe you could accomplish something similar with a middle layer that was oversized and stuffed in between the outer edges...
A_Beer_Clinked··on Change Data Capture: The Magic Wand We Forgot
Lots of databases are configured to do both. The tables store what we normally think of as "the data" and the log stores the changes. Tables are like the HEAD in git etc and the transaction log is like the chain of commits.

In principle you could just query the transaction log for every change to your data and compute the final state every time. Obviously this would be onerous so in normal operation we just use the latest state.

When things go wrong the transaction log is useful for understanding why and also rewinding/replaying the database to the correct state.

Some databases ship these transaction logs around between replicas to keep them all in sync.

The work presented here is an interesting application of the same basic mechanism to keep different flavours of datastores in sync.

Recently we very briefly explored the idea of using this mechanism to implement partial replication for partitioned reporting data stores. Unfortunately our current platform SQL Azure doesn't grant access to the transaction log directly. (Which on balance this is a good thing because it's handling all the replications etc)

A_Beer_Clinked··on Secret TPP Talks Continue as the Deal Grows More Controversial
Is the fact that the talks are in a "Luxury Hotel" pertinent? The article doesn't explain how.

Would the EFF be happier if the the "Secret TPP Talks Continue at a Reasonably Priced Motel as the Deal Grows More Controversial"

Clearly the EFF doesn't like the process; but this phrasing is a cheap shot that distracts from the very important message.

It's also one they've used a few times. https://www.eff.org/search/site/luxury%20hotel%20

A_Beer_Clinked··on Some analysis of the 1M most popular sites on the web
I did a little searching to expand on your numbers. What follows is not scientific.

According to https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/cdn/ CloudFront, Akamai, MaxCDN, CloudFlare, EdgeCast and CDNEtworks account for ~75% of CDN usage by the Alexa top 1M (with 28 others listed)

Data from http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/jQuery suggests that the 1.4.2, 1.7.1, 1.7.2, 1.8.3 versions of JQuery are cover 53% of the 23M the have version data for (with 23 others listed)

That puts a lower bound of 690 on the number CDN-Version pairs in the wild.

If we make the (totally unsupported!) assumption that the distribution of versions is the same across all CDNs than 20 of these CDN-Version account for ~25% of the versions.

This could suggest that there is a cache advantage towards using Jquery 1.4.2 (21%) served by Akamai(37.5%)

Seems like jacquesm should now have the data to test this and give us a actual answer.

A_Beer_Clinked··on Failed Startup code graveyard
I've been through this a few times as both the vendor and the client. There are normally a bunch of conditions that can trigger a release of the the source code to the client. These _could_ include business failure but also non-performance or acquisition.

I've never come across one where escrow agent will release source to the Public Domain but I guess it could happen.

Companies like Iron Mountain have escrow services for clients of SaaS providers. I think in these cases data escrow is significantly more important than source code escrow.

A_Beer_Clinked··on Do we need browsers?
as a remedy I have one of my monitors rotated 90° into portrait orientation. I can just drag the offending tab across and have a screen width of 1200px. There are a (very) few sites though that seem to cache the original screen width and need a hard refresh.
A_Beer_Clinked··on Execute SQL against structured text like CSV or TSV
An alternative approach is Microsoft Log Parser. While it is old in internet time (2005), it works brilliantly on very large files. I've successfully used it on 10+ GigaByte files. The documentation is a little sparse but once you get the hang of it it's pretty simple. Clearly it only works on windows boxen.

Example: #Find all unique from col1 logparser -i:csv -o:csv -stats:off -dtlines:2000 -headers:off "select distinct col1 from input.csv" >out.csv