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digikata

2,482 karma · joined September 19, 2010

Fractional CTO-level advisement and software development w/ Uplink Labs (alan uplinklabs.com)

Reach me on Fedi/Mastodon @digikata@fosstodon.org

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digikata··on Hurl 4.0.0
I have been using it for API testing manual and in CI of one of our services and it's been very nice. You can basically put a series of http exchanges for a workflow per hurl file and get a nice test suite that also checks directly into git.
digikata··on Instant Brands, maker of Instant Pot and Pyrex cookware, files for bankruptcy
Or you recognize that the product area it's in, and size the business to market and make it efficient for a long term run (probably growing shrinking according some metric of market adoption gap, demographics, household growth...). But that's crazy talk.
digikata··on House vote advances bill to set SEC test to become accredited investor
Under the bill, the Equal Opportunity for All Investors Act, individuals would become certified as accredited investors after successfully completing an examination designed by the Securities and Exchange Commission and administered by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc.
digikata··on Why does MPEG Transport Stream still exist?
This takes me back to when I was working on real-time digital video streaming for drones and one of the engineers I was working with had a prized mpeg-ts poster breaking out the protocol on a packet field level. We would frequently be found around that poster reviewing the interpretation of one of the packets making sure we were handling things correctly. Good times!
digikata··on WebAssembly is eating the database?
Fluvio is an open source data pipeline project [1] w/ plugin wasm modules for data transformations as "SmartModules"[2]. In our case we can run wasm plugins on frontend or backend (none of which require a browser). Feel free to come by our Discord if you have any questions. Disclosure: I work as a engineer for Infinyon backing the project.

[1] https://github.com/infinyon/fluvio

[2] https://www.fluvio.io/smartmodules/

digikata··on Dell goes back on WFH pledge, forces employees to come back to the office
I hadn't come across this before. I'll have to check it out. Thanks!
digikata··on Dell goes back on WFH pledge, forces employees to come back to the office
Some references I recognize and some interesting new ones. Thanks!
digikata··on Dell goes back on WFH pledge, forces employees to come back to the office
Look at the term Theory of Constraints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints. There is a "business fiction" book called "The Goal" by Eli Goldratt that is pretty approachable. He actually wrote a number of books at different levels of detail. Initially the concepts were addressed for manufacturing ops, but there are some fundamental similarities for scaling software teams, focusing where you produce value, and where you can create waste and misfocus if you try to keep everything/everyone busy at 100%.
digikata··on Health Insurance Claim Denied? See What Insurers Said Behind the Scenes
10 drugs out of probably tens of thousands.
digikata··on Ask HN: Best way to run Linux VMs on M1 Mac with fileSharing/shared networking?
I'm using it thru colima and there was very little config needed. Although occasional M1 users seem to run into some form of networking issues, I haven't.
digikata··on Ask HN: Best way to run Linux VMs on M1 Mac with fileSharing/shared networking?
Have you tried lima? https://lima-vm.io/ https://github.com/lima-vm/lima
digikata··on How RocksDB Works
Write Apache arrow parquet files directly? A lot of other dbs can ingest those directly anyway.
digikata··on Show HN: An open-source library for telemetry streaming started at Formula 1
Would qx be difficult to adapt to a different message broker with a python client?
digikata··on Rust on Espressif chips – 2023 Roadmap
It's been a while, but tbf not using the Nordic proprietary BT stack on their microcontrollers was a pain in C too.
digikata··on Simulation Intelligence: Towards a New Generation of Scientific Methods (2022)
As I recall, Karl Popper is generally thought to be a major contributor to the approach of modern scientific methods. Having worked in simulation and simulation validation before, simulation is a method that is powerful, but adds complexity in that you're basically running a meta verification loop on top of direct experimentation loop, and people can get lost in that complexity if you aren't careful with how you keep your simulation in touch with reality.
digikata··on Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
Maybe? Skimming the protocol there aspects of the spec I may not be understanding that superficially seem at odds with a storage container with fairly simple interfaces. Though the security aspects seem at about at the complexity they have to be. I'm probably missing the full aims of the protocol though.
digikata··on Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
These are fair suggestions for the low level detail of my comment. I think the core functionality is providing a web friendly storage access api providing for user control and syncing between multiple nodes. It's been done before but not recently with more recent and lighter protocols. Apps like the classic sample todo or note taking apps frequently shown on HN should really just be able to connect to a user owned storage - get authorized for a stoage allocation either fronting local storage or easy to spin up a node on a cloud hosted vm.

It's sort of a shame that so much of the new web3 storage work intrinsically links storage to a blockchain, instead providing a blockchain integration as one of many authentication/provisioning models.

digikata··on Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
For a while now I think we have been lacking an enabling shareable storage and auth abstraction to build cloud apps on. From this standpoint email is a little bit of shared storage: owner read, public write (with email specific secure acceptance algos), group chat: account read, account write; note app: owner read, write.
digikata··on TSMC to customers: It's time to stop using older nodes and move to 28nm
A $300 tablet drops support in 90days to a year. A $300 tablet equivalent in a car has a trailing maintenance requirement for service and parts for years (5-10?)
digikata··on Writing better by answering why, what, how
One thing I've found is that outside the formal design cycle its often nice to write short technical memos to document some small portion of what you're working on. It could be a feature, it could be why the CI is setup the way it is. If anyone asks a question about some technical subject you have written about, give them a short answer, but point them to your written document and invite more questions if anything is unclear. If you get repeated questions on something that isn't written up, it's a good clue it might be useful.

Also nice if your org has some internally searchable wiki or doc repository. Having a commonly designated "Tech Memo" area can be helpful too, though often the best place for it is near the code it describes or that you've set out to build.

digikata··on Coffee drinking linked to lower mortality risk, new study finds
Perhaps I'm reading the summary of numbers wrong, but it looks like at 1.5-2.5 cups a day, the hazard ratio was 0.69 for sweetened coffee drinkers vs 0.71 for unsweetened coffee at 2.5-4.5 cups a day.

With confidence intervals on those, about the same even if the number of cups is different, but odd that 1.5-2.5 cups per day unsweetened comes out worse than sweetened.

digikata··on Coffee drinking linked to lower mortality risk, new study finds
The sweet spot would seem to be for you to drink two cups a day.
digikata··on Ask HN: How do you sync your computer’s development configurations/environment?
I use git to sync a local bin folder between machines. One branch per type environment though sometimes that's just a branch for a particular machine.

common files between many environments are just in a common subdirectory. This could be a submodule, but that's overkill, I just sync it via a git path checkout from time to time.

Dotfiles are in there too and symlinked to wherever they're used. Similar with other configs. If they're picky about being symlinked, I'll write a quick copy script to pull them into a subfolder to bring it into git.

digikata··on Ask HN: What’s is the most practical, non toy, programmable robot for under 10k?
A farm bot? https://farm.bot

Around $1.5-6k

digikata··on Google’s finally straightening out its legacy free G Suite mess
I changed over the bus started edition in the morning, and the announcement came out in the afternoon. The help docs had some buttons to request getting on the non-commercial family support. I received a couple of service case support emails in response that said the account would be switched over - but the account still shows as a business starter as of this comment. So we'll see I suppose.
digikata··on The Lost Art of C Structure Packing (2014)
Is what the article says re: the pahole utility still correct (that it's not maintained)? Looks like it might be maintained now w/ kernel git under the dwarves area.

Pahole is a decent utility to look at what the packing of a structure actually ended up after everything has had its last effect in the compile chain.

digikata··on Rethinking submarine fibre cable projects in the South Pacific
At a party we could now be having a nice conversation about Stephenson and maybe Gibson et al.
digikata··on Rethinking submarine fibre cable projects in the South Pacific
Reference to a plot element in Neal Stephensen's book, Cryptonomicon which included a startup for pinoy-grams enabled by a new submarine fiber-optic cable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon

digikata··on I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app
Increase of passenger engagement metrics on app delivered video services?
digikata··on I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app
They spend a lot of money trying to offer competitive features on their flights - like maybe watching streaming videos on the plane enabled by the app. To the extent that passengers can't finish a 439MB download of the app just before they board, the app size wastes investments in services of the airline.
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