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flamingcow

86 karma · joined April 11, 2013

Apple

flamingcow.at.hn

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flamingcow··on Time and Frequency (2009)
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flamingcow··on Show HN: Fast, Easy System Diagrams
Bug fixed early today -- you may have a cached copy. Try shift-reload.
flamingcow··on Show HN: Fast, Easy System Diagrams
Thanks for the suggestion. I'd previously added the tutorial linked below, but that clearly wasn't cutting it, so I've now added an example diagram for first-time visitors. If you already visited, click on the top object (probably the help text), press shift-D to delete all items, then refresh the page.
flamingcow··on Show HN: Fast, Easy System Diagrams
I spend lots of my time at a whiteboard diagramming current or proposed systems. The whiteboard experience is less than ideal: my handwriting isn't great, folks on the other side of a VC can't see, etc. Most diagramming software is designed for careful human placement to get precise results. I built Architype to let me take notes and play with system designs in real time during a conversation, in a way that can be easily projected. It's designed to be entirely client-side and fast, but still powerful enough to produce useful diagrams for most purposes.
flamingcow··on Show HN: Fast, Easy System Diagrams
Thanks for this and filing the github issue as well. I put together a tutorial to walk through usage in more detail: https://github.com/firestuff/architype/blob/master/TUTORIAL....
flamingcow··on Google Cloud Is Down
[I am the Cloud SQL tech lead]

This is a networking issue, and your data is safe. Cloud SQL stores instance metadata regionally, so it shares a failure domain with the data it describes. When the region is down or inaccessible, instances are missing from the list results, but that doesn't say anything about the instance availability from within region.

flamingcow··on Google Cloud Is Down
[I am the Cloud SQL tech lead]

This is a networking issue, and your data is safe. Cloud SQL stores instance metadata regionally, so it shares a failure domain with the data it describes. When the region is down or inaccessible, instances are missing from the list results, but that doesn't say anything about the instance availability from within region.

flamingcow··on Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL now generally available
[I'm the Cloud SQL TL] Confirmed. We know it's a problem that we need to fix. HA reduces downtime in unexpected failure cases (live migration for your primary only helps in planned shutdown cases, not if the physical machine fails), but doesn't currently help with maintenance-related downtime.
flamingcow··on Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL now generally available
[I'm the Cloud SQL TL] We do recommend connection pooling whenever possible. You save server resources, but you also save connection latency.
flamingcow··on Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL now generally available
[I'm the Cloud SQL TL] I can't comment on timelines, but we're aware that customers are interested in more features around maintenance window scheduling, deferral, and notification, as well as shorter downtime for updates and smarter scheduling within a group of replicas.
flamingcow··on Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL now generally available
[I'm the Cloud SQL TL] What features would've kept you on Cloud SQL?
flamingcow··on Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL now generally available
[I'm the Cloud SQL TL] Note that we currently only support PostgreSQL 9.6. Obviously supporting major versions across both MySQL and PostgreSQL is a priority for us.
flamingcow··on Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL now generally available
[I'm the Cloud SQL TL] No, it isn't. We agree with you that it's an important feature for managed databases, and we're working to get it right. We decoupled it from this launch to get PostgreSQL to GA faster.
flamingcow··on How not to run a CA
Does it really? Even if the code author hadn't learned to escape/sanitize close to use so it's visible (or to avoid cases where you need to escape/sanitize entirely, like using something that bypasses the shell and takes array arguments), let's look at the manpages.

PHP's system() manpage: http://php.net/manual/en/function.system.php

  [red box]
  Warning
  When allowing user-supplied data to be passed to this function, use escapeshellarg() or escapeshellcmd() to ensure that users cannot trick the system into executing arbitrary commands.
system(3): http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/system.3.html

  Any user input that is employed as part of command should be carefully sanitized, to ensure that unexpected shell commands or command options are not executed.  Such risks are especially grave when using system() from a privileged program.
This is a canonical mistake that's used as a mistake example in textbooks.
flamingcow··on A blog post leads to doubts about Cornell’s food laboratory
A researcher with hundreds of publications hadn't heard of p-hacking or the reproducibility crisis until a month ago? Lay people who occasionally read science news have been hearing about those for years now. This is the "I'm too stupid to be a fraud" defense, apparently.