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douglasfshearer

728 karma · joined January 13, 2011

Software engineer. CTO at Distrify Media. Co-host of Pincount Podcast.

github.com/dougal @douglasfshearer

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douglasfshearer··on GitHub CLI is now in beta
The main developer of this at Github wrote a blogpost about the design decisions behind CLI, and how it fits/replaces Hub. [0]

[0] https://mislav.net/2020/01/github-cli/

douglasfshearer··on Dyson has scrapped its electric car project
October 19, 2018 - Singapore and EU sign free-trade agreement. [0]

January 22, 2019 - Dyson announces move to Singapore. [1]

After such strong support for Brexit, it is not a good look.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/coun...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/22/dyson-to-...

douglasfshearer··on Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond
I had this same experience in regards to support interaction. Starting from scratch is a less than ideal process IMO, so much so I have not done it in the hope that a future update fixes this, and I don't have to jump through all the hoops.
douglasfshearer··on Pi-Hole 4.3.2
I use two Max OS "Locations" (Apple Menu -> Location), one which uses the router default DNS (which is a Pi-Hole at home), and another which is set to use the Cloudflare DNS servers.

This allows me to to switch location, and instantly reload a page without the Pi-Hole interfering. Of course this only works on my Mac.

douglasfshearer··on ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully
Criminal, the podcast, did an episode about the killing of Ken McElroy. [0]

An episode that stuck in my head.

https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-66-bully-5-5-2017/

douglasfshearer··on As Scotland's 'Trainspotting' Generation Ages, the Dead Pile Up
Haven't seen this data in the form of an interactive map before.

For anyone else wondering "Geographic Access" is based on public transport times to selected public services. This is outline in the methodology documentation [0].

[0] https://www2.gov.scot/simdpublictransport

douglasfshearer··on YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views
This functionality is broken in Safari for me. Works in Chrome.
douglasfshearer··on YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views
Try pressing the spacebar.
douglasfshearer··on Blender 2.80 release candidate
> left click select as the new default

This is a huge improvement for new users. Right click was very un-intuitive when coming from other applications.

Congrats to the Blender team on this release.

douglasfshearer··on Vulnerability in the Mac Zoom client allows malicious websites to enable camera
It appears that two of Zoom's competitors, Blue Jeans and Webex, also use web servers on localhost:

https://twitter.com/anthonypjshaw/status/1148470933901864960

douglasfshearer··on Google’s robots.txt parser is now open source
> This library has been around for 20 years and it contains pieces of code that were written in the 90's.

Whilst I am sure there are good reasons for the omission, it would have been interesting to see the entirety of the commit history for this library.

douglasfshearer··on Apple Recalls 15-Inch MacBook Pro Laptop Computers Due to Fire Hazard
Previous discussion:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20235259

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20240359

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20238181

douglasfshearer··on Ireland to ban new petrol and diesel vehicles from 2030
> "The weighted average trip distance is 9.4 miles. Vehicles owned by urban households averaged 8.5 miles and rural vehicles averaged 12.1 miles." [0]

In the U.S, a considerably larger country than Ireland, greater-than-EV-range journeys are outliers.

The same purchasing decisions that are applied to vehicle capacity will get applied to range. People don't own large vans for the once-in-a-decade they move house with all their furniture. Owning an EV that can do 200 miles might be the norm, but the regular journeys are <10% of that.

[0] http://www.solarjourneyusa.com/EVdistanceAnalysis7.php

douglasfshearer··on UK energy bills 'used to subsidise nuclear submarines'
CCGT - Combined Cycle Gas Turbine

FYI

douglasfshearer··on Next-Paradigm Programming Languages: What Will They Look Like?
Does Erlang not satisfy this?
douglasfshearer··on Slack S-1
Slack has a 5-year, $50M/year minimum commitment with AWS.

From the document:

> In April 2018, the Company executed an amendment to its existing agreement with Amazon Web Services (“AWS”). The amended agreement was effective as of May 1, 2018 and continues through July 31, 2023. The Company has minimum annual commitments of $50.0 million each year of the agreement term for a total minimum commitment of $250.0 million. As of January 31, 2019, the Company had a remaining minimum payment obligation of $212.5 million to AWS through July 31, 2023.

douglasfshearer··on UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit
One of the developers tweeted last night "...nowhere near crashing the site - you all need to try harder tomorrow"

https://twitter.com/pixeltrix/status/1108518184301268995

douglasfshearer··on EC2 Instances Powered by Arm-Based AWS Graviton Processors
Rick Branson ran a benchmark with Phoronix. a1 is ~2/3 of the cost/performance of a5. [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/rbranson/status/1067304265696202752

douglasfshearer··on How to implement a multi-CDN strategy
If video is being served via HLS (which it probably is in 2018), then the manifests support redundant streams, where multiple hosts can be specified for each stream. [0]

hls.js supports this, as do many other clients. IME it works nicely for providing some client-side switching in case one of your hosts/CDNs goes down.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ne...

douglasfshearer··on New Lower-Cost, AMD-Powered M5a and R5a EC2 Instances
Only in selected regions at the moment. I can see the m5a and r5a instances available in the console from the Ireland and Virginia regions.
douglasfshearer··on New Lower-Cost, AMD-Powered M5a and R5a EC2 Instances
Two sockets.
douglasfshearer··on New Lower-Cost, AMD-Powered M5a and R5a EC2 Instances
A vCPU is a logical core, not a physical core. So yes, based on HT.
douglasfshearer··on Apple finally announces an overhauled Mac mini
CPUs available are:

* Core i3-8100 [0]

* Core i5-8500 [1]

* Core i7-8700 [2]

All of these are listed as having embedded version available, which I would expect Apple to be using, since embedded versions of desktop SKUs in the iMac.

[0] http://ark.intel.com/products/126688

[1] http://ark.intel.com/products/129939

[2] http://ark.intel.com/products/126686

douglasfshearer··on Postmortem Analysis of Dead Sonoff TH16 Wireless Switch
What is the GDPR acceptance interface being used here? I am assuming it is a plugin or third-party service, since Macrumors have an identical one.
douglasfshearer··on Design and Evaluation of FPGA-Based Gigabit Ethernet Network Card (2004) [pdf]
First gen ENA (never publicly acknowledged AFAIK) was an FPGA, second gen is an ASIC.
douglasfshearer··on Cloud Memorystore: A fully managed in-memory data store service for Redis
It would be fairer to compare with an AWS ElastiCache Redis instance [0].

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/redis/

douglasfshearer··on Design and Evaluation of FPGA-Based Gigabit Ethernet Network Card (2004) [pdf]
Amazon also do similar with their ENA [0]. James Hamilton talked about it in 2016 [1].

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/06/introduci...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyOAjFNPAbA&t=1820

douglasfshearer··on MySQL 8.0 is now generally available
> MySQL 8.0 delivers SQL window functions.

Great to see these in a MySQL release. Something so worth having I once had a script which would automate MySQL -> Postgres for data analytics purposes.

douglasfshearer··on Plattsburgh, New York has imposed an 18-month moratorium on Bitcoin mining
Thanks.
douglasfshearer··on Plattsburgh, New York has imposed an 18-month moratorium on Bitcoin mining
If it's just Bitcoin named in the bylaw, what's to stop the mining enterprises from switching to mining another cryptocurrency?
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