foxylad

We have two email servers for redundancy (like when Gmail is rate-limiting), not load. We send about 10,000 messages a day total, or about seven per minute, spread fairly evenly across the day. No mass email.

I suppose it would be an interesting exercise to slowly increase servers/IP addresses until rate limiting stops, but servers cost time and money.

If you are OK with a 180mm build space, grab a Prusa Mini. Very quiet, fits in a cupboard, just works.

For me, ventilation isn't required for PLA. The smell is minimal and not unpleasant, and I often print (in a cupboard) while working two metres away.

Very happy early Prusa Mini owner. I do remember some difficulty when assembling it, which lead to non-square axes. After an hour or so I eventually got right, so you might want to try redoing the tower assembly.

I don't have a filament sensor (I also print mainly small parts, so rare to hit the end of a spool), and haven't had any problems with heating elements, z steppers or nozzle crashes. I did experience the extruder clicking due to shrinking PTFE in the hot end, but I've ordered the E3D Revo mini hot end which will prevent that problem ever happening again.

THIS.

Spam is a solved problem, thanks to SPF and DKIM. But despite doing all the right things, Microsoft and Google continuously block and rate-limit delivery.

Case in point: we deliver 20,000 booking confirmation emails every day, all requested by users and not spam. We have perfect Postmaster Tools metrics: absolutely zero reported spam, 100% IP reputation, high domain reputation, zero feedback loop spam, 100% encryption. But Gmail still rate-limits us daily, so their customers get their booking confirmations several hours late.

It's getting to the point where running an independent mail server is impossible. Yet another part of the open internet bites the dust.

My parents-in-law found LG to be much easier to control than Panasonic.

That's like saying "Postfix isn't scalable like Gmail", comparing two completely different things. and in fact the fediverse is far more scalable than any single service like Twitter can be.

The fediverse is based on a protocol called ActivityPub, just like email is a based on SMTP. ActivityPub is designed from the ground up to allow any number of federated servers to share posts. Email servers can run Postfix or Exim (or others), and the fediverse servers can run Mastodon or Pleroma (or others).

One of the joys of the fediverse is that it's possible (and easy) to move your account (posts, followers etc) to another server. So when a particular server gets too busy, people simply migrate to another server, or even set one up themselves. Universities are already setting up their own fediverse servers for their staff and students, and I think we'll see companies following suit soon - again echoing the growth of email.

So that's the theory - what about real world? Thanks to Elon's unique management style, Mastodon active users (a good proxy for load) have gone from 370K to 2,500K in two months. I use it daily, and it's no slower with all those extra users.

It's on Mastodon: @elonjet@mastodon.social

Imagine twenty ethernet cables plugged into a switch, and you need to remove one. You unplug it, pull it slightly to see which it is below the bundle, grab it there and pull.

You will then discover that an uncovered clip magically catches on EVERY SINGLE other cable on the way through. It will also catch on the rack, any other devices within reach, and somehow the power switch for the entire installation.

In fact if you ever lose your car keys down a drain, simply poke an ethernet cable with an uncovered RJ45 plug through the grate. Your keys will be firmly attached to the tab, along with five other sets of lost keys, several rodents and the grate itself.

You need a Prusa.

I started with an Anet A8 which taught me a lot about 3D printers (and even more about how they fail!). My Prusa Mini just works, and it's rare I need to reprint anything.

After a close family member went down the conspiracy slide, I've realised believing conspiracy theories is an excellent indicator of mental health issues.

Your MiL is a case in point, and sounds like she needs serious help. Fifty years ago the men in white coats would intervene, but now mental health is basically ignored by society. If you care enough about her, you/your wife need to do act.

He's not stupid in the domains he understands. I think his problem is impulse control, and he's impulsively bought into a business that he knows little about.

I do think hard times are coming for Musk. As well as burning billions on Twitter, Tesla is no longer the vangard of the EV market, Boring seems to be a dead end, and I haven't heard anything about the solar enterprise for years. Space X seems to be still innovating, and I hope Musk isn't completely cleaned out so his Mars aspirations still bear fruit.

Depends where you're coming from. Our (small, but international) company's accounting system is built on Google Sheets, with python scripts to import bank data.

We started with Xero, but it couldn't handle our international books. For instance the NZ IRD mandates particular exchange rates, and weird tax regimes (looking at you, Canada!) were way beyond it.

Sheets means a server can securely update data remotely, and we can instantly share data with our accountants. It's a five minute job to build a sheet that mimics tax reporting forms, and you can do financial what-ifs without having to dump data to Excel.

I'm sure Excel power users will hate Sheets, but Sheets power users will hate Excel just as much. Oh, and let's revisit this after your SSD dies just after you'd perfected the ultimate data analysis formula.

The annoying thing is that this is obviously a setting within Gmail, because our other server is sending the same volume of messages without any issues. Right now it's getting slowly better so I'm not keen to set up extra servers for what I hope is a transient problem.

Other suggestions have been to send all Gmail messages via our working server, but that would cause a spike in it's traffic and I'm worried we'd get the exact same issue there.

Both Microsoft and Yahoo have responsive processes to solve this problem, it's frustrating that Google is so opaque.

I've used \u001F and \u001E for years. Don't need to check for and un/escape separator characters, very compact, and python's split() and join() makes implementation trivial.

Hope this article makes them more popular.

> That shows the search algorithms ... are good enough and Google can be eventually disrupted

I doubt this. I'm guessing that 90% of Google Search's development effort is concentrated on defeating SEO, and as soon as a new competitor succeeds well enough to attract SEO attention, their results will suddenly turn to custard.

The competitor then has to combat the extremely sophisticated SEO practises developed against Google over the years. This is likely to be an even bigger barrier to disruption than building market share against Google.

You just moved from a family to an organisation.

I was part of a small company that grew agressively. When you're small, you're a family - you know everyone else, you know each other's strengths and weaknesses, you help each other out, and things get done fast.

At a certain level, this breaks down - someone drops the ball and management decides that they need documented processes and systems for everything. Then you need more managers to make sure everyone is following the the processes and systems, and then you need meetings with those managers. Productivity drops by half, the number of forms you need to fill in multiplies by ten, and you get really frustrated.

I'm with you - I hate the inefficiency of larger organisations. Leave for another small startup, or even better, start your own.

Can someone elucidate how astronomers know this galaxy has no dark matter?

Completely off topic, but there ARE fanatical collectors of scout badges, at least here in NZ. They attend scout jamborees, and we had to warn kids that they are brutal negotiators.

Yeah, only snapping on release would prevent random snaps when dragging, which happened to me a couple of times.

> When i pay in the current financial system I am giving you every bit of information to rob me blind and hoping you don't take it all.

I don't understand this. You're saying if I send you $0.01 via internet banking, you can somehow take everything in the account?

It doesn't work this way in NZ, where it is common to put your bank account details on invoices so people can pay you directly.

No. Gmail spam filtering seems to work almost perfectly for me, with maybe one false negative a month. I just went into my spam folder to look for false positives, and couldn't find one.

It will be fascinating, and I agree the vaccine rollout has not been the speediest. However, one thing on our side is that we have experienced the benefits of elimination, so our lockdown compliance is extraordinary.

When Auckland is locked down, Queenstown is a ghost town, but otherwise (50 out of last 52 weeks?) we've been pretty busy actually.

So much so that the tourism spokespeople who railed against the first lockdown are saying "Lets lock down hard so we can open up again faster" this time.

Your higher death rate comes with these exciting free add-ons!

- significant loss in productivity due to varying levels of incapacitation from Covid19

- additional loss in productivity due to cautious people isolating anyway

- new strains due to more mutations of the virus

Also delta seems to be killing young people better, so we're not talking about "disposable" old people any more. And I won't be suprised if we have an epidemic of early-onset Alzheimers in ten years time.

> resources are indeed infinite, because the human ingenuity is infinite

Human ingenuity is impressive, but not infinite. I recommend Collapse by Jared Diamond. It's a long read, but every single society he examines thought they were doing great but ended up eating each other (literally) within a couple of generations once some vital resource dried up. Human ingenuity failed all of them.

I'll give you peak oil: our ingenuity is already finding viable alternative energy solutions. But climate change is going to destabilise so much more - food, water, land, security - that I'm pessimistic that our civilisation will last more than a few generations.

So far we've only discovered more positive feedback (e.g. methane from melting Siberia), when we desperately need strong negative feedback. A bit like Covid, where everyone assumed the ingenious new vaccines would get us back to normal in a couple of months, but mutations, politics and social dynamics mean we're still very much on the back foot.

But hey, I'm 60 and still a lefty so obviously no brain and just a bullshit doomer :) But do grab a copy of Collapse, there are a lot of "whoa!" insights and it's a fascinating read.

How do you control attitude with just two contra-rotating rotors? I've Googled, but can't find an answer.

Extra points for why NASA chose this mode, and terrestrial drones don't?

Add one more: Anyone publicly attacking Signal's privacy in the future is painting a very large target on their forehead.

Can HN please add a filter for these increasingly lame "Google cancels all the stuff" posts?

Yes, Google has cancelled services, but they've all been free things that they had every right to decide would never increase revenue. Why should Google have to keep everything they ever built running for ever?

If you pay for services from Google, then it's a completely different story. We've used Appengine for 12 years now, and every time they've decided to deprecate services, there's always plenty of notice, a superior replacement, and usually lower costs.

If you have to consume functions called call_some_function(), you've got way bigger problems than untyped parameters.

A well designed function/class will have a descriptive name and descriptive parameters, which should give you good hints about their usage. And if it that isn't enough, a quick scan of the code will show you exactly how the function works - a good idea (even in typed languages) if you have any doubts about what you're calling.

The fact that people can program effectively without types is demonstrated by the enormous volume of code in non-typed languages.

We've used Google Appengine for over ten years now. It was the first service to abstract infrastructure, so developers could simply deploy code without worrying about scaling and redundancy.

Google's edge (for us) is reliability. Over our ten-year tenure (heh), there have been a handful of incidents when our service was down, most early on before the NDB datastore. I seriously can't remember how many years it's been since our service was down.

And when Appengine does break, they do a brutally honest report about exactly what happened, and how they are going to make sure it never happens again. If you've got the interest and time, it's worth searching for articles/videos about Google's SREs. They are fanatics.

I know this is anecdotal, but AWS and Azure seem to have multiple outages a year. Every time I'm immensely relieved to be on Appengine.