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admiunon GE freezes pension benefits for 20k employees

Regarding 2), you could just make healthcare insurance mandatory. We have that in The Netherlands.

admiunon Scotland’s floating wind farm is showing how powerful offshore wind can be

I think it's already part of proposal [1] to generate a healthy chunk of the power required for the six North Sea countries. The video [2] is pretty interesting.

[1] https://iabr.nl/en/projectatelier/Atelier2050

[2] https://vimeo.com/199825983

admiunon The man who wrote the book on password management regrets the error

The XKCD method of generating passwords [1] does not imply 'best case' entropy of crackers going after each individual character. Instead it clearly states 44 bits of entropy which is the 'worst case' entropy when the attacking knows your exact method and dictionary used when generating the password.

I'd argue that when targeting the same number of bits of entropy the XKCD method is still easier to remember than a bunch of fully random characters.

[1] https://xkcd.com/936/

admiunon IPv6 Adoption

I think the rough IPv6 equivalent of a single IPv4 ban would be to ban a /64 subnet. This bans all users in that subnet which is the same as banning an IPv4 subnet hiding behind a single NAT address.

admiunon To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

I agree. Nuclear fission power seems to be associated with a negative learning curve [1][2]. This means that as the newly installed capacity goes up, price per unit actually increases. As solar is already becoming competitive and is experiencing a positive learning curve (costs going down rapidly as production expands) it would be pretty silly to invest in nuclear at this point.

[1] https://thinkprogress.org/does-nuclear-power-have-a-negative...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

admiunon 30K Page Views for $0.21: A Serverless Story

Not really although you probably need to use quite a bit of traffic before it becomes a problem. Your example of personal use only seems fine.

There was a post here a while ago (that I cannot find anymore) about the devs of a package manager of sorts who were asked kindly by Github to do something about their excessive data usage. So it's probably not a good idea to build a company on it.

admiunon 30K Page Views for $0.21: A Serverless Story

They do, yes. Rounded up to the nearest 100ms, scaled for chosen RAM capacity: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/ Note that this doesn't measure actual RAM use, although they do display it after lambda runs.

Data traffic is already measured and priced accordingly in AWS so that's not something new for Lambda.

admiunon Network Performance Issues in Europe

I always wonder if there's easy way to know where current global internet interruptions are, anyone know? In this case it apparently was Telia [1] but how do you figure that out? Top Google results for 'global internet status' aren't really usable.

[1] http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/cloud/cloud-management/cloud...

admiunon AWS X1 instances – 1.9 TB of memory

I thought that too but I successfully raised our limit after they made it a soft limit, so give it a shot!

admiunon Go channels are bad

"APIs should be designed synchronously, and the callers should orchestrate concurrency if they choose"

Just to add to this, I found the blog post he mentions[1] towards the bottom that supports this conclusion a really good read.

[1] http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-y...

admiunon What Happened: Adobe Creative Cloud Update Bug

This just shows we really do need a step towards an 'appstore-like' permissions model for desktop operating systems. There is just no reason for all these software packages to have full write access to everything in your user account.

admiunon Mass incarceration: A new theory for why so many Americans are in prison

If you're interested in this, John Oliver did a piece on elected judges: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poL7l-Uk3I8

admiunon SSH Keys on GitHub

Like passwords, sharing API keys is usually a bad thing. For some sites it is overkill or simply not possible but for something like AWS there is no excuse not to make individual IAM users with their own passwords and keys.

admiunon The Limitations of the Ethernet CRC and TCP/IP Checksums for Error Detection

Interestingly IPv6 removed the checksum from its packet header [1], delegating this work to the higher protocols such as TCP and UDP.[2] So I guess that raises the chance of an invalid IP header getting through. Source and target address will probably result in dropped packets but I wonder what happens if one of the other fields is corrupted, say traffic class.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_packet#Fixed_header

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Simplified_processing_by_...

admiunon Three Dead Protocols

As someone who just set up IPv6 tunnels to both home and the office, I had no issues with 6in4 (proto-41) traffic with both ISPs I used. This is in The Netherlands.

admiunon Amazon API Gateway – Build and Run Scalable Application Backends

This removes infrastructure from the equation entirely. You already had AWS Lambda which could run small pieces of Java or Javascript code when certain events were fired from other services (all without running a server yourself). The missing piece was something that catches HTTP requests and passes them to a Lambda function. This service seems to fill that gap.

It means you do not need to think about x instances that serve your API anymore. You just upload your Lambda function, wire some API path to it and pay per request. For smaller APIs this will be probably be negligible. Could be a gamechanger!

admiunon David Simon on Baltimore’s Anguish

Good point, I found that quite interesting too. He mentions Martin O'Malley as the person responsible in some degree and then follows with this quote:

"And, hey, if he's the Democratic nominee, I’m going to end up voting for him."

So while in the primaries he might vote for someone else, in the general he will vote for the person responsible for a lot of the issues described in the article. which is quite saddening but understandable.

admiunon Chrome 42 Launches with Push Notifications

Chrome on Windows automatically leaves a process running even when you close the last window. I remember because I had to manually disable it some time ago.

admiunon AWS Data Transfer Price Reduction

This is an unfair comparison. Like others have mentioned in this thread they have subtle items in their terms and conditions that prevent you from actually using all that bandwidth 100% month by month. They can offer these prices by overselling their bandwidth.

You can move a lot of bandwidth for sure but as soon as you start using droplets or linodes for the sole intent of using its' included bandwidth (to self-build a CDN on it for example) you'll be shut down in no time.

admiunon PostgreSQL Outperforms MongoDB in New Round of Tests

You don't need big data for (3), we use mongo sharding primarily for spreading database write load. Not saying that it's the best way to do that but it's what we use it for and I doubt we're the only ones.

admiunon Why C++ for Unreal 4

There's actually an interesting demo of the blueprints feature in the toolset:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hwhH7upYFE#t=384

admiunon Human settlement of Mars in 2023

The people in the space station have the odd problem of being a couple of centimeters taller and outgrowing their chairs when they go home after a few months. Described by Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers here:

http://blogs.esa.int/andre-kuipers/2012/05/15/ik-pas-nog-in-...

admiunon New Medium Instance, 64-bit bit Ubiquity, SSH Client

It's also handy in case you want to switch instance types. When instances are stopped you can change their type if they are the same architecture. This means you can now switch an instance around to all instance types they offer.

admiunon Netherlands makes net neutrality a law

Net neutrality in this context means an ISP must offer unfiltered internet. Unfiltered as in they cannot decide on their own to block certain sites or services. A judge passing a ruling to take some site down that he/she believes is breaking the law is something else entirely.

admiunon DNA sequenced of woman who lived to 115

Just read this on a Dutch newspapers' site. Not sure why the BBC site says her identity is secret, she is mentioned by name and it even has a picture of her:

(dutch article) http://www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/2672/Wetenschap-Gezondheid/ar...