illumen

A very interesting humble brag thread. I'm not sure it's imposter syndrome if you think you're doing well when presented with evidence and then believe it. Not by definition anyway.

The performance reviews remind me of this little joke (actually a common real experience) -- "I got rated Above Average!" 'What was the average rating?' "Let me check... Oh. It's Exceptional".

I flagged the story because it's apparently BS, and because it's a pay wall.

Is there a better article floating around?

The employee retention is much higher than industry standard. Apparently the employees are happy.

The market seems to like their performance, since they are getting more business and making more profits.

If recruiting costs 10k, and training training 6 months + 20k. That's already 30k saved. Plus no opportunity cost loss because they had enough staff to do business could be easily more than the wage increase (according to the author). That's easily already over the 30k/year difference.

Assuming the company does not even grow, but just stays still... then this should be sustainable. Whilst they are growing, losing less staff than industry average will only increase their growth.

Note, that the company was slowed down because they had to hire more staff. Those slow downs would have been worse if they could not hire as quickly, or lost staff.

Is the employee retention solely because of increased wages? I'm not sure. But that alone could save the company a lot of money.

I agree. It's a legitimate concern though. People are bombarded with what is healthy or not. With fad diets and such. Who do you believe?

ED: oops... I should learn to read good. It says _avoid_ processed meats. I think it would be clearer to leave stuff off the plate which we are supposed to leave off our plate.

Coal is terrible, but it's not the only alternative. Nor is coal the cheapest alternative.

That link says 2 to 59 grams too. Apparently the range is very high depending on how the extraction works, and all sorts of factors. Cement and steel for example have very different behaviours for emitting co2. Maybe the steel was melted by wind farm electricity for example.

But anyway, even at the high end of the estimates, that is still way lower than coal.

Yes, PV solar is not so good with waste either. Yes, the costs of removing broken solar panels should go into the costs for a project too. But that has nothing to do with judging weather Nuclear plants are a terrible investment.

Last I read none of the closed plants in the USA had been completely decommissioned. Which is why I think the estimates for decommissioning are wrong. But perhaps there are cheaper ways to do it in the future... I don't know.

Yes, fuel cost isn't that much... apparently 0.52 ¢/kWh. But that could still impact the bottom line if costs were 3x as much. But with 70 years of uranium left, I'm not sure prices will stay at similar prices over the life time of a new reactor.

You can build small renewable systems with all sorts of different capital costs, and all sorts of power generation abilities. Price ranges from $100 to $9billion. Nuclear projects do not happen for less than $Xbillions (and about half bankrupt before completion).

Got data? Seems that most of the renewable energy is being used ok. Smarter energy management, and using salt/aluminium/steel aluminium molten lakes allows for storage/adjustment. In many places aluminium factories use up a LOT of power. They can be used as batteries of sorts. CSP solar can hold power for over 8 hours. Wind farms over provision to allow for baseload generation. Then there is storing energy in car batteries. Biomass solutions offer different power generation abilities too. All this is being done today, and systems are continually being enhanced.

The point I was making though, is that you can have power generation (including batteries) at a much smaller cost for it to be useful. For example, even installing solar on a factory roof and installing batteries can be done for way under $100,000.

Working nuclear plants have to close 38 days every 17 months for refuelling and maintenance. How good are they at generating baseload then?

You are correct. It is not carbon free. Nuclear power plants make about 90 - 140 g CO2 per kWh electricity.

Uranium extraction, waste management, construction, and decommissioning being the biggest offenders in the whole process.

I think it's an even worse investment than that.

I don't believe them that the cost of decommissioning is built in. Especially since the financiers who pay during construction aim to sell their equity. Also in the UK, recently had to pay 4 billion worth of tax payer funds to decommission. That puts the whole thing at a loss.

Also, wind, solar and other renewable are able to be produced with a much smaller capital cost, and are only getting cheaper. Many of the tech issues are being fixed. For example, critical steam is now possible with CSP and mass production is making the systems cheaper.

The production risks for nuclear are really high, because of the high capital costs. As demonstrated by this project stalling for over a decade.

Also, uranium costs are not fixed. Over the last 18 years have changed a number of times. The price difference has been 3x (not even adjusting for inflation).

Finally, many nuclear power plants have been closed down early to fix up (14% have been closed for more than a year). Including of course Fukushima, but also other ones around the world and in the USA. There was a report of 14 plants in the USA which will likely close early. That is around 14% of plants (so far) closing earlier than planned. (There are 99 plants in the USA).

If there is a problem because the high capital costs, it seems many of the plants get closed. 100 orders for plants in the USA were cancelled, bankrupting companies.

This is in the desert. The nuke is on what was once useful land.

Yeah, it's a great way to find smelly bits of code.

Indeed. Hearing about how things didn't work out is highly instructional too.

In the past LLVM has been almost completely unusable for dynamic languages. Not it seems there are dynamic two implementations using it (at least JavaScriptCore). So this is a pretty good result.

The other good result is that it shows with LLVM other architectures were supported than x86.

I know at least pypy and unladen swallow have tried to use it in the past (5+ years ago) with no success.

Read your writing out aloud. Carefully observing the meter of the verse.

You won't become Hemingway. But you will seem quite odd to nearby work mates.

tl;dr

Complex or simple, lead with point. Because reasons.

Intro, support, conclusion -- do it.

He should learn how to read better. Seriously. Hire lieutenants that can read really well, and trust them to filter.

That aside, sucking up to journalists is a really good way to get their attention. PR win!

It's interesting that VW cars have been taken off the road for unintended acceleration. Also that quickcheck was used to find many timing related bugs between software components that VW uses. It was used after the models were taken off the road. There are other models still not recalled using similar software from the same era.

With most email accounts being provided by gmail, outlook, and yahoo, I don't see auth via email domain ever happening.

Most of python code that takes time has C/asm extensions. It's part of the 'glue code' nature of python. Right tool for the job and all that.

Single-dispatch generic functions are easy in python too: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0443/

Both browsers take patches. If enterprises need them so much, get some of their vast mountains of money from them to fix the problems.

For investing.

See what was published just days before the VW scandal in Nature. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v525/n7569/full/nature1...

Most people, including the authors of systemd would be very surprised if there were no problems with systemd.

Here's a couple of fun problems from years past.

Docs say NoNewPrivileges as yes "prohibits UID changes of any kind", but that's not exactly true.

It's spammed so much debug info the system fails to boot.

"systemd, when updating file permissions, allows local users to change the permissions and SELinux security contexts for arbitrary files via a symlink attack on unspecified files."

"The rm_rf_children function in util.c in the systemd-logind login manager in systemd before 44, when logging out, allows local users to delete arbitrary files via a symlink attack on unspecified files, related to "particular records related with user session."

It's complex software running on many different kernels, and many different distributions, doing many different things with lots of code written in C. There were over 80 people mentioned as contributing to the last release. Of course there are going to be problems!

There's clear evidence that many cities throughout Europe have too high air pollution, and that it kills close to what smoking does. Cities have been ordered by the EU to clean up by the end of the year, or face harsh fines. Over 80,000 people die in the UK per year (smoking kills 100,000). Mostly from diesel engine pollution.

Now try to think how many people it kills in the rest of Europe, the USA and the world?

Cars (and buses) stink, are noisy, and worse -- they kill on a massive scale. There is alternative tech available for order now that doesn't kill as much, and provides better service.

Demand that the killing machines are replaced, and the makers, and the users are brought to justice if they don't!

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/15/nearly-95...

That's very good hint, thanks.

There's only been a couple of remote ssh exploits (that I'm aware of) and both of them were stopped by white listing. If you can figure out your address ranges, I think it still makes sense to white list. I guess also the bots will catch up with modern ciphers.

Get a range of ip addresses where you will log in from (your DSL address ranges from home for example), and block all other ip addresses on that port. You may want to add some other hosts you control to that whitelist as well as a backup in case your ISP changes addresses. If you are the only one that is supposed to access some ports, then block everyone else. (use last -a to see all the places you've logged in recently to start making your whitelist).

You can also rate limit new connections to ssh depending on your use cases. So even if your whitelist is beaten you limit the number of attempts.

Now add fail2ban, so that even at 10 new rate limited connections per minute they get banned after X failed attempts.

Change the default port of ssh, to make it harder to find.

Remove password authentication, and make sure you have good secure keys.

You can also disable sudo, and root logins perhaps. As well you could try 2 factor auth, and perhaps move your keys to a secure(encrypted) USB drive.

But really, whitelisting who can connect to ssh in the first place will stop 99% of the automated brute force attacks, with all the rest stopping the remaining 0.99%.

They implemented shareware.

In python it is quite commonly used too.

It's a nice development feature to see console.log() output very close to when it happens. But I'd probably be able to live with a 1.0 second delay. I've worked on servers with a bigger delay. It's not as nice as a 0.1 second delay though.

They're probably trying to optimise for making developers happy.