StanAngeloff

Some years ago, likely around 2010, I had the priviledge to visit Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (it was called UKAEA Culham back then). During my visit, we were shown around various experiments and after a long evening, we had the opportunity to attend a Q&A with the staff. The question everyone wanted to know the answer to was When will it be ready? The scientists and everyone else involved honestly thought 10 years would be more than enough time for the technology to mature and find its way into everyday lives.

We are not quite there yet.

Nobody "wants" another recession. We all read these articles, though, and then go on to spread them amongst peers like wild fire. The echo chamber only gets louder as time goes on. At some point those predictions/analyses become irreversible and de facto a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I've started refraining from talking about negative financial news with friends and family.

Another day, another horror story and with that a further confirmation of how profoundly broken Google's support is. I shall think twice before buying into any Google products and so should you. Imagine having you entire company cloud account suspended with no one to talk to... Or getting blocked from your domain/Gmail and unable to communicate... Or getting kicked out of the Play store when this is your only means of earning a living. These are not hypothetical, these are stories from HN front page just this year. Frightening and infuriating at the same time.

I'm not sure what did it at the end — I literally called the guy a cyborg and asked for someone else to review the appeal. I also filled in all sorts of appeals/forms, even for unrelated things and some even multiple times. I still don't know what did it for us.

We were banned from the Play Store for violation of their Impersonation policy in mid July after publishing an update. We just got reinstated last week. During the course of the lengthy appeal I had an unshakable feeling I was up against The System™. I still believe I was communicating with a bot and not an actual human being — I refuse to accept a rational human being will behave the way Bob from Google did.

It's such a stark contrast to developing a web app which you can _freely_ publish. When did thing go so horribly wrong?

There are alternatives for those of us not obsessed with the Apple universe. Android supports Android Messages which can be read/responded to from the browser/an app. iCloud may be substituted with any number of offerings, some will keep files on the cloud and sync as needed to preserve space. If you are invested in the Apple ecosystem, you're out of luck.

  > When is this change happening?  
  >  
  > As of July 25, 2019, all Norwegian accounts will be
  > redirected to Whereby.com. *Due to a court mandate
  > Norwegian based users will no longer be able to visit
  > the appear.in in page as of August 25th.

So this sudden change wasn't your everyday marketing decision.

We tried and used Webflow extensively in our company for about 2 years. It was great for most tasks and we could get up and running fairly quickly. Sadly our UI dev team never fell in love with it and slowly but surely Webflow faded to the background. I noticed our subscription had run out a couple of months ago and nobody had since complained. Brilliant piece of software, however if you are someone who operates on the code level, never quite good enough.

I've tweaked this to allow for the comments/favourite/etc. to show after you stop moving your mouse for a while:

  tr.athing + tr { opacity: 0; }

  tr.athing:hover + tr,
  tr.athing + tr:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 2.3333s cubic-bezier(1.000, 0.005, 1.000, -0.500); }

After Asus giving up on the tablet market [1] and Samsung dropping the ball on quality recently, there's very little choice for consumers left. Apart from getting an iPad and investing in the Apple ecosystem, there's not much left out there. Lots of cheap Chinese knock offs, quantity over quality...

[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/asus-quits-zenpad-tablets/

...and make sure logging code is safe, e.g., no NullPointerExceptions, OutOfBoundsExceptions, etc. (Dynamic languages make this more of a challenge) I've seen too many systems where customers are affected because a logging routine had failed.

I was considering investigating Now/Zeit as a possible evolution over our current stack. Having seen this announcement I'm not so sure that is still a good idea. Now 2 is a completely different beast to Now 1. The very last thing we need is churn in our servers/infrastructure rivalling our frontend. Is Now 3 going to be [dramatically improving the reliability and scalability of -our- deployments] yet again?

This same change to Google Chrome forced me to go to Firefox, too. After about a week of pain, I'm now much more comfortable about my choice.

I do have a Firefox account which syncs up my passwords, history, etc. so in a sense I'm still logged into the browser.

I do trust Mozilla more than I do Google with my personal data, though.

This is so badly written that for a moment it did make me question getting involved. I thought I had all the information I needed to make an informed decision, yet this article brings so much information to the table, I'll need a full day to digest it all.

I do appreciate Mozilla's approach[1] which is to connect you to an MEP straight away.

  [1]: https://changecopyright.org/en-US/call-now

This is truly amazing and has so much baked in I find myself wanting to use it. However most apps my team and I work on require some form of persistence - uploads, log ins, API rate limits, etc. These scenarios don't fit well with the serverless world. It is technically possible to offset most of this to S3, a hosted NoSQL and perhaps even a service for dealing with a images/thumbnails. By that time your monthly bill is in the three digits, though. For a big web shop this is fine but your average freelancer with multiple smaller and finite-resource projects it's something to consider carefully.

I'll be keeping an eye, thanks for dropping in. There are more "conversations" on the homepage and for most the format and extra engagement from the community works great.

/rant Interesting story, however the format is horrible. It's my first time coming across posts like this and it was a struggle to read till the end (much like Twitter threads are a mess). The whole story will make for a great blog post.

The _Account and billing_ section is very refreshing, congratulations. It somehow answered every question I knew I'd eventually have. Pricing is predictable, Dropbox permissions are not invasive (no, I wouldn't want to share my family photos with just about any service out there) and the subscription renewals process is fair.

I'm not sure if this is actually how reCAPTCHA v2 works, but I've found moving my mouse and highlighting text immediately after ticking the box almost certainly passes the tests for human. I very rarely get asked to recognise images or pick X out of Y. When I don't do this, i.e., I don't move my mouse or highlight text on a page at random, I most certainly have to sit through a couple of screens of tests (I'm behind a shared IP with lots of users).

All this leads me to think mouse movements tracking is much more widespread.

As a EU resident who is a partner in several UK based businesses, the uncertainty over what's coming next is frightening. When I approached different colleagues, friends & family in the UK, they all had different views on what should happen. To an outsider, it looks like opinions have been polarised.

If you are managing a business that has ties to the UK there are very many unknowns right now. It's a lot easier to plan for the worst than it is to take risks IMHO. Brexit must ultimately hurt the UK economy in some way – jobs lost, money flowing out of the country, talented people leaving?

I wonder if axing public folders was partially done because of the, at the time, upcoming Dropbox Professional? If you could share an interactive HTML mockup as part of the free service, there is little incentive to pay extra for a professional service.

From my exposure to enterprise users, they are usually the sort of environment where hundreds, if not thousands, of employees work. Can you imagine how one "angry" of UI changes person in a team of a dozen scales set against that? With open-source users, it's more decentralised IMHO.

The images 1…4 are in chronological order, the URLs contain the version if interested. However, should you look at them in any order or sequence, it goes to show how different the UI has looked throughout the life of the product.

My thoughts exactly. We've used GitLab since version 6 [1] and things have always felt like they are in a state of flux ([2] [3] [4]). For an open source project this is tolerable. I do wonder what enterprise users make of this constant UI change? Now that the navigation is back on the left, we'll probably see it collapsible in 9.5 and then morphed into a horizontal bar by version 10, rinse and repeat.

[1]: https://about.gitlab.com/images/6_0/mr_on_fork.png [2]: https://about.gitlab.com/images/8_0/ci_dash.png [3]: https://about.gitlab.com/images/9_0/navigation.png [4]: https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/redesigning-gitla...

Ah, these demos were so popular back in the scene days. There was the fire from the bottom [1], the tunnel, the rotating 3D model, wind and particles effect [2], etc. I recall writing a few of these myself in asm. Great to see scene demos brought to modern tech.

  [1]: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=69954
  [2]: http://matthewdoucette.com/realtimegraphicsdos/

I used to bootstrap a lot of VMs in development using shell scripts [1]. At a certain point Bash scripts become unmanageable. Ansible, Chef, Puppet have stricter syntax, battle-tested modules, large communities, proper multi-OS support, etc. Investing time to learn any of those tools certainly pays off in the long run.

Bash is great for a quick setup or a one-off instance. However it requires discipline for anything more. You are also dealing with the underlying OS yourself (e.g., Nginx is packaged and configured differently in Ubuntu, Debian, Cent OS & Arch; networking is configured differently in Ubuntu depending on whether systemd is installed, etc.).

[1] https://github.com/StanAngeloff/vagrant-shell-scripts

We fell in this "trap" as well. Whilst working on a marketing automation system, we were integrating a Google Analytics/Piwik clone. Our guestimates indicated we were going to be storing around 100GB of events per month. We geared up and got working. The team built complex Hadoop jobs, Pig & Sqoop scripts, lots of high-level abstractions to make writing jobs easier, lots of infrastructure, etc. etc. After about 2 months we scrapped the "big data" idea and redid everything in two weeks using PostgreSQL. As most of the queries were by date, partitioning made a huge difference.

I recall one of the classes was named SimpleJobDescriptor. At the near end it was 500+ lines long. Not so simple after all.

It's not just Onedrive, it's the entire Office 365, e.g., https://office.live.com/start/Word.aspx crashes Chrome (renders it unresponsive, closing the tab then takes forever).

Tested Thu, 23 Mar 2017 12:11:09 +0000

This is good news for their users, incl. us given the frequency of DDoS attacks lately. There has been hardly a month go by without their status page flagging an incident report involving increased traffic to one of their datacentres as a result of a DDoS attack.