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jarcoal

962 karma · joined July 14, 2011

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jarcoal··on John C. Dvorak has died
Damn, this one hit hard. Grew up watching him on ZDTV/TechTV. RIP.
jarcoal··on Ask HN: How do you teach your kids about AI?
I set my son (8) up with a ChatGPT account and he loves it. He uses it to generate scripts for Roblox Studio, recipes to cook, etc.

I used the "Instructions" field to indicate he is only a child and to interact with him appropriately, and overall it does a decent job keeping the language somewhat simple when chatting with him.

jarcoal··on Hotline for modern Apple systems
Wow this triggered some neural pathways I forgot I had.

I remember using both of those clients.

jarcoal··on Daniel Kahneman has died
Damn, I’m reading Thinking Fast and Slow right now. RIP.
jarcoal··on Airbus Shatters Record for Jet Orders as Demand Soars
Air France 447 is a famous one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

jarcoal··on ChatGPT for Teams
I'm confused -- wasn't ChatGPT upgraded to 128k tokens at their last release? Or was that just the API?
jarcoal··on What Reddit Got Wrong
What went wrong is that after being divested from Condé Nast, reddit went and raised a huge round that ensured they would have to go down the route of synthetic growth tactics.

This whole operation could be wildly profitable with a team of 50-100 people and no major investors to appease.

Instead they read the room wrong, or just didn't care, and now we're here.

jarcoal··on Epic’s new motion-capture animation tech
1. Wow a thing, people seem to be excited about it.

2. Are people excited about my thing? Am I excited about it?

3. Have I made the wrong life choices?

4. This makes me feel uncomfortable.

5. If I can defend my life choices I can feel good again.

6. I will downplay this thing, that will resolve my uncomfortable feelings.

jarcoal··on Heroku April 2022 Incident Review
It's a little hard to parse parts of that paragraph, but it sounds like the repo (presumably hosted on GitHub) had access tokens granted to third party integrations (similar to Heroku being granted access to GitHub on behalf of their mutual users).

Assuming that's true, it should be trivial for GitHub to tell them which third party integration the token was associated with.

jarcoal··on Heroku resetting passwords for “a portion” of their users immediately
I just received an email back from an Incident Handler at Salesforce. I wrote:

> A statement that confirms whether or not config variables and secrets were accessed, or that you're not sure, needs to be sent out.

To which they replied:

> We currently have no evidence that Heroku customers’ secrets stored in config Var were accessed. If we find any evidence of unauthorized access to customer secrets, we will notify affected customers without undue delay.

Take that as you will, but it doesn't fill me with confidence.

jarcoal··on Heroku resetting passwords for “a portion” of their users immediately
Very confusing! To clarify for others, what they mean is that if there was a secret embedded in the log drain URL, rotate it. This is often the case for HTTPS log drains.

Example: https://datadog.com/logs?api_key=abc123

jarcoal··on Heroku resetting passwords for “a portion” of their users immediately
This is turning into a complete train wreck and a case study on how not to communicate with your customers.

For those of you that haven't been following, Heroku has been adding non-update updates to this security thread over the last couple of weeks, which began with the announcement that some (or maybe all) of their GitHub granted access tokens had been compromised: https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2413

Now, weeks later, we're hearing that all account passwords are being reset, and for some reason if you have been using an HTTPS-style log drain that you should reset any secrets related to it as well.

Heroku needs to come out and clearly state what they know about this situation, and more importantly what they don't know -- which is starting to sound like the answer is "a lot". It's not even clear they know how this all happened -- whatever door was left open might still be open. So if you've gone and rotated all of your application secrets (which you probably should do), be prepared to rotate them again when this is all over.

jarcoal··on Apple unveils the best photos from the Shot on iPhone Macro Challenge
It’s not really about being justified, it’s about being gentler with people. We don’t have to jump all over each other, there is another way.
jarcoal··on Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees
Yep, I’ve been referring to this as “work locally”, and I also feel this is an ideal balance, although it does limit your access to talent.
jarcoal··on Advice to new managers: don't joke about firing people
I once jokingly said it to an employee and immediately felt bad about it. Did a quick all-hands (we're a small company), apologized and said it wouldn't happen again.
jarcoal··on Snowmobiler finds family of five stuck in frozen wilderness
Indeed. I remember watching him on Fresh Gear, which aired on ZDTV (later became TechTV).
jarcoal··on Lime shuts in 12 markets, lays off around 100
I recently visited San Diego and was absolutely blown away by how many scooter companies were operating there, and how many unused scooters I saw lying around.
jarcoal··on Ask HN: Are books worth it?
I just started reading books again in the last couple of years and I think it’s definitely worth it.

My recommendation is that you start with a physical book and not an ebook or audio book. It might test your attention span at first, but it’s the best way to get your focus back and you’ll find that your reading speed and comprehension will start to improve. Also, it’s nice not having to charge them ;)

jarcoal··on Django 2.2
Been building Django apps for almost 10 years and after seeing the amount of wasted time going into organizing things into apps, I settled on this technique.

It doesn’t really swim against the current as long as you import models into the __init__.py file in their package.

jarcoal··on Django 2.2
I don't use multiple apps anymore and instead treat the project as the app, so my directory structure looks something like this ('project' can change to something specific to what you're working on):

* manage.py

* project/settings.py

* project/urls.py

* project/models/ (each model gets it's own file here)

* project/views/ (same for views)

...and so on. And in `INSTALLED_APPS` I just add 'project'.

Makes it so I don't waste a bunch of time trying to figure out which app to put a model in, etc.

jarcoal··on Company Update
> For a while, there will be a lot of fuss and noise in the media. Just ignore them.

Please take your own advice Elon.

Sincerely, Someone who wants you to succeed

jarcoal··on Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok
Technically, but it doesn’t tell you much about what you’re doing. Having the action be more descriptive allows users to act more quickly.
jarcoal··on Giraffes Added to the Endangered Species List (2016)
Compassion and foresight are in short supply these days.
jarcoal··on Former Equifax Executive Charged with Insider Trading
> Ying avoided more than $117,000 in losses.

Seems like a pretty high risk for such low reward.

jarcoal··on Google Calendar should prevent spam by default
This isn't an issue that's exclusive to Google Calendar; Office 365 also does this, as well as numerous other mail+calendar apps.

I believe it's related to the iCalendar spec. https://icalendar.org/

jarcoal··on Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes
Discord also seems to be growing rapidly.
jarcoal··on Plastics Pile Up as China Refuses to Take the West’s Recycling
It’s embarrassing and we should all be ashamed of ourselves for allowing such incredible waste to become an acceptable part of our lives.
jarcoal··on Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype
You’re not missing anything, this is definitely possible to do.

That said, encrypting every message with everyone’s public key doesn’t scale, so instead you’d likely want to generate a symmetric key for the group and as new users are invited the inviter would encrypt the group key with the invitee’s public key. That makes it trivial for new users to view history, and as new chats are posted they only need to be encrypted with one key.

jarcoal··on To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet
My ISP is a local mom-and-pop shop that is using fixed point wireless, which seems like a great solution because it doesn’t require digging up pavement, massively reducing startup costs.
jarcoal··on Millennials to Small Cities: Ready or Not, Here We Come
Unfortunately as long as there are better parents there will always be better schools.
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