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opsunit

88 karma · joined September 9, 2013

I do SRE.
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opsunit··on Estimating square roots in your head
I've often wondered how others get the multiplication tables to stick. When I was in school and tasked with learning and being tested on them I remembered them - just about - for long enough to be tested (primarily from a quick reminder on the way to school) and then they were gone.

My overall experience was that they were a very boring song with terrible lyrics. I can't ever say that any meaning clicked especially. The teacher called out the first part of the verse and I "sang" it internally and hopefully got it right. Having gotten through that it was gone by lunchtime in time for a different set of words to the same song next week.

I tried again about 30 years later as a adult and had much the same experience. You might as well have been asking me to remember items on a tray.

To me it's like this:

chicken x tree = rock

brick x kangaroo = Susan

boat x walnut = dinosaur

Now imagine you have to remember 288 of those (because you might be asked to produce either side of the equals sign) and somebody asking you to recall one arbitrarily.

How do you get your students to get them to stick?

opsunit··on Estimating square roots in your head
I do the dots thing too. I've never heard anybody else describe it and, to be honest, it's quite comforting to hear I'm not the only one. In fact I don't just imagine dots, I imagine die faces. This obviously gets problematic after six. I too feel limited by my working memory: it makes mental arithmetic of numbers with two digits very very hard without an external store like fingers.
opsunit··on Estimating square roots in your head
> We start by finding a number that forms a perfect square that is close to 33. Here, let’s pick g=6, since 6^2=36.

As somebody who is numerically essentially blind I'm not only incredibly jealous and in awe of most of the comments in this thread but also utterly perplexed by the above. How does that even come to mind that 6 is a good starting value? Do you people just intuit this stuff or do you rapidly run through the options? If you're asking me to come up with something that when multiplied by itself is something near 33 then you're in for a long wait.

There's another comment in this thread:

>Everyone generally knows the perfect squares up to at least 12, and then for bigger values, you can use even powers of 2, which I assume people also know.

Do they? Jeez.

opsunit··on The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’
They bought and then shuttered Slicehost in an attempt to occupy that market segment.
opsunit··on Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS
Estonia beg to differ: https://e-estonia.com
opsunit··on Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?
https://runson.cloud and the associated Chrome extension
opsunit··on Is that ship still stuck?
On the same topic, this is an excellent read: https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-seacowboys/
opsunit··on Google Cloud Networking reporting issues
If you are unsure of the tenancy of any given site https://runson.cloud may be of some help.
opsunit··on Why COBOL Isn't the Problem
Having worked on the PL/1 and Assembler that formed the core accounting systems of a bank: yes.

Not only did I have source control I had flow diagrams of the entire system for all points in the chain. My code reviews had me doing line-by-line justifications. I wrote tests.

Just because the technology and practitioners are old it doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing.

Generally they invented whatever "you" are reinventing the first time around.

opsunit··on Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building
An availability zone (AZ) in AWS eu-west-2 was flooded by a fire protection system going off within the last year. It absolutely did affect workloads in that AZ. That shouldn't have had a large impact on their customers since AWS promote and make as trivial as is viable multi-AZ architectures.

Put another way: one is guided towards making operational good choices rather than being left to discover them yourself. This is a value proposition of public clouds since it commoditises that specialist knowledge.

opsunit··on Google admits Kubernetes container tech is too complex
render.com
opsunit··on Kubernetes Failure Stories
I did a lot of the work to get sub-second timestamps working within the fluentd+ElasticSearch ecosystem and the thing is a tire fire.
opsunit··on Vantage has acquired ec2instances.info
I built https://runson.cloud to help you identify which Cloud or CDN a site runs on in the first place.
opsunit··on Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog
Wavefront brings a number of things to the table that aren't core competencies we wish to maintain in-house.

I know it can scale to massive volumes without interaction from us.

I know it'll be available when our infrastructure isn't. By being a third party we can be confident that any action on our part (such as rolling an SCP out to an AWS org, despite unit tests) won't impact the observability we rely on to tell us we've screwed that up.

I can plug 100s of AWS accounts and 10s of payers into it and I don't have to think about that in terms of making self-hosted infrastructure available via PrivateLinks or some other such complication.

I pay mid six-figure sums annually for these things to "just work". If you folks believe I can achieve this functionality on a per-seat basis I'd be interested in saving those six figures.

opsunit··on Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog
Why should I run this instead of renewing my Wavefront contract?
opsunit··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
A query interface to the public IP address manifests published by the larger Cloud providers and CDNs

https://runson.cloud/

opsunit··on Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana
It is interesting to note that elastic.co is hosted on Google Cloud: https://runson.cloud/search/elastic.co
opsunit··on Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPv4 addresses
I have a tool that makes parsing that file easier for some query types: https://github.com/sampointer/digaws
opsunit··on A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM
Mobile game development is heavily biased around Mono across Android. It is perhaps the biggest existing proving ground of the architecture independence of C#.
opsunit··on A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM
I've worked on zSeries machines running S/360 binaries from the early 70s. It is one of the primary reasons banking and related sectors that are heavily regulated stick with such platforms for core accounting.

The single whole-bank migration I was involved with was zSeries to zSeries.

This is where the challenger banks really have an advantage. They're not saddled with the baggage of an overnight batch run of JCL decks and Data Sets to arrive at what their regulators consider the reconciled position of the bank.

opsunit··on How the Golden State Killer was found: A covert operation and private DNA
As a counterpoint, the suspected murderer of Abigail Williams and Liberty German in Delphi ("The Delphi Murders") was captured on video by his victims[1] and remains at large three years later.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0snT740jhtw

opsunit··on A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
This isn't in any way a criticism, but I found it really amusing that your post contained almost exactly the error you were describing ("hat") before correction.
opsunit··on Cockney Rhyming Slang History
Britney Spears = Beers. Brad Pitt = Shit.

"Get the Britneys in, I'll be back in a minute - I'm off for quick Brad".

opsunit··on I used the internet to painlessly relearn a foreign language
I had both experiences and found neither valuable. I am in awe of anybody who can learn a foreign language full-stop.

My French teacher fully explained the grammar most of which passed me by since, certainly in my case, one doesn't really rationalise their own language in terms of technicalities.

My German teacher just pitched up on day one and spoke nothing but German. Two years later I was absolutely none the wiser. I could quite honestly have been listening to white noise.

That anybody "picks up" a language is something I am amazed by.

opsunit··on I used the internet to painlessly relearn a foreign language
Same experience, same outcome.

"They" attempted to teach me both French and German and in both cases I quite literally had no idea what was going on. A* pupil in English and English Literature.

I am sure it is different today but certainly in the '80s and into the '90s you could arrive in senior school with perfect English and no idea why.

The shocker for me was that I'd spent my whole short life up until that point just correctly intuiting all of the weird grammar modifications and then suddenly I couldn't. Any attempt to explain went right over my head as the framework to explain them was just missing.

opsunit··on Common mistakes using Kubernetes
2x the line item cost but generally much cheaper in terms of Total Cost of Ownership.
opsunit··on The human body’s remarkable ability to adapt to the cold
Or goalposts.
opsunit··on Robinhood reports outage as markets rebound
If that is true and they're not on the ball they have another hard deadline fast approaching: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/amazon-rds-customers-u...

(yes: the URI says February 5th whilst the article says March 5th!)

opsunit··on M3DB, a distributed timeseries database
Wavefront: https://www.wavefront.com/
opsunit··on Boeing 777X: World’s largest twin-engine jet completes first flight
I've a Defender, a '66 VW Beetle, a Fiat 500 and a Volvo XC40 with adaptive and predictive everything and I'll only take my kids out in the latter. Heritage vehicles have their place but they're harmful to the occupants and harmful to the other party in an accident. I wouldn't use one as a daily for that reason.

One interesting thing about the Beetle is that despite retaining the same basic shape and construction over the entire run a lot changed to significantly improve relative safety: collapsible steering columns, the change to Macpherson strut suspension, door handles with the opening mechanism shielded in a roll-over and so-on.

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