skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some of their DCs don't look particularly fireproof either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM
I use 1TB SanDisk (Raspberry 2) and 4GB Panasonic SLC (Raspberry 4) in my distributed database cluster: http://github.com/tinspin/rupy

In my experience industrial versions of mainstream cards are less reliable!

I agree, you have to measure latency and longevity on these edge (maximum longevity or space) SD cards as bandwidth is limited by SPI (4 is not really that much faster than 2).

USB3 is not stable enough for 99.9999 uptime.

If you use the cards above and mostly write once on the 1TB and replicate all that data on 3 cards in 2 geographical locations in realtime (6x in total minimum = you have redundancy even if one node fails on local and global level) you should be fine.

After having 8GB Odroid MMC fail on me twice after 5 years, I invested in Intel Atom servers with X25-E (65nm SLC 100.000 writes per bit) drives as backup plan if the SD card solution fails/has problems.

Power goes from 2W to 25W (50W with 10x SATA SSDs) with that change so you cannot afford more than 1-2 Atoms per location as lead-acid backup will be too expensive/large otherwise.

Remember, if you do not power flash memory for a long time the data is corrupted/lost. You need your disks to be powerable on solar/wind, in practice this means Raspberry 2 when the mains go.

As electricity prices rise the supply quality will degrade. Power outages will increase exponentially until the powergrid fails without replacement parts/transport.

Peak energy is not a speculation, it's the only sure thing.
What are the top things you hate about Product Managers?
> Can a support engineer for customers in one region access the systems/databases relied upon by customers in other regions?

My (admittedly outdated) experience is that this is always the case, regardless of any assurance vendors might have provided to the customer. In the end, people have to get stuff done, and offshore bodies are just too cheap to pass on. Things might have changed a bit since GDPR but, in practice, I expect there will always be "channels" for people to reach out cross-region.
Convenience kills.

The Art of Memory by F.A. Yates is still a nice read.

In the article, the engineers admired by the author were intel ops who
were stuck in an airgap and had to use their minds. That's a principle
I try to use in life - to some extent deliberately making things hard
for myself. As with all exercise, what was impossibly hard becomes
commonplace.

Part of this discipline is knowing what not to do (yes, attic
theory). I never create new accounts on anything or unless I've a
clear cost-benefit rationale that makes memorising a new 32 character
passphrase worthwhile. That excludes a huge heal of crap that wants
you to "sign up" for it.
Stevey's Tech Talk E41: Emacs Part 2 – Emergency Emacs [video]
I always feel like I'm missing something about literate programming because every example is "godawful". Transitioning between text and context-less code fragments littered with markup is incredibly jarring, and instead of something "written for humans", you now have something that is neither text _or_ code that you have to piece together and hold in your head as you go.
Torrent (allegedly) here: https://sizeof.cat/post/okta-customers-leak/
Unlike Tesla, you can rely on it in those circumstances.

In Tesla you have to have hands on wheel all the time.
oh yes classic western solution to outsource environmental problems to other countries
Overprovisioning and HVDC. Those two together can make a real dent into required installed baseline power.
https://www.magicalquote.com/seriesquotes/our-power-comes-fr...

Perfect fit.
> Kill All Humans mode

I think they discovered that it was the pilots who were accidentally leaning on the that switch when getting up for a coffee break.

Terrible decision to put it right next to an armrest...
Fair enough, and thanks for the insight!
> Deep link to explanation: https://youtu.be/If61baWF4GE

This video is fascinating and explains a lot. Many thanks for this!!
Love KeePassXC - it's a beautiful and speedy program which simply just works without ever causing any problems. The original KeePass always struck me as a tad heavy due to its somewhat archaic aesthetic and dependency on Mono, whereas KeePassXC looks modern and requires minimal resources and dependencies.

I combine it with KeePassium on iOS and Resilio Sync for synchronising across my main and mobile devices. (Syncthing doesn't offer an iOS client, sadly, hence the choice of using Resilio)
This setup is so far off standard practice it's shocking.

Freeflowing does not excuse not having proper auto-closing dampers, triggered by the fire alarms or suppression system.

Automatic power disconnects based on fire suppression system triggering are pretty standard. Most of the systems are fail-safe, meaning if the fire suppression panel loses power or is disconnected from the breakers feeding the room, the breakers trip off.

That there were no automatic shutoffs or easily accessible breakers to disable the generators is shocking. Most NOCs I've visited, there are remote genset controls on one of the walls, often remote transfer switch controls as well. At the very least, on the way out the door someone in the NOC should have pushed the right buttons.

I've never even heard of a commercial datacenter that didn't have fire suppression. Some companies go for preaction systems to reduce the chances of a "everything gets completely fucked by water" systems (gaseous systems are the gold standard, hugely expensive to install compared to water.)

They had wood ceilings!?

In my career in the US, I've been around numerous situations where it was pretty obvious the fire inspector was being paid off or at the very least had an extremely cordial relationship with the building management. My guess is that something similar was happening here.

I don't understand how they managed to have insurance, or get the ISO certifications they claimed they had.
Long-time R user here. Yes, many of these points are valid but I still think R is unbeaten when it comes to speed in (tabular) data exploration. In the article you mention that you missed using data.table - a significant portion of the problems you named would be solved or at least weakened by using data.table. Started working with it many years ago and never looked back. It's easy, powerful and efficient to use. I also find its Python pendant, pandas, much less intuitive to use (.loc() anyone?) although they compare performance wise.
What needs to be added is that before R the reproducibility problem in science was compounded by the fact that analyses were done with proprietary software limiting communication and replication of those analyses. This was and continues to be a major problem, particular in some fields, but at least now there is a common widely used language that can be used to overcome this. I wouldn't focus on idiosyncrasies but rather on the major problem it addresses. Any large system will grow over time and have some inconsistencies but after a while you learn the workarounds so they are less important than the big picture.
Are you under the assumption that the GDPR requires consent for all processing of personal data?

Because it doesn't.

There are six legal bases for processing personal data in in Article 6 of the GDPR.

Consent is the first one, but the second one listed (paragraph (b)) is that the "processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data subject is party or in order to take steps at the request of the data subject prior to entering into a contract".

That covers your payment case.
This even goes for Amazon. Multiple DCs in the same AZ can fail together.
JavaScript is the most popular language. We have not made rational choices at all.
> At this price point it should be perfectly fine if a datacenter burns down occasionally. At least their network is otherwise very reliable.

That depends on what you're looking for. If you're looking for sustainable options, this probably doesn't include companies that burn down datacenters.
Refactoring for Intent (2012)
Are you seriously adopting the position that "third world" is a common moniker for Finland and Sweden?
> Don't fight the tools: libraries, language, platform, etc.

That means you'll always be stuck doing things using existing paradigms. Which is fine if you're only developing an application, but not fine if you want to effect more fundamental change.

> Never start coding (making a solution) unless you fully understand the problem

Sometimes, I cannot understand the problem until I've started coding.

> Tech debt is like fast food.

Yes, in the sense that where I work, many people have it every day :-(

> go for this priority: Security > Reliability > Usability etc.

I don't buy that gradation.

> Don’t use dependencies

Contradicts a bunch of other points IMHO.

> Any function that’s not pure should be a class.

No. Verbs are not nouns. But - if he means functions with static variables, then maybe.

> Software is more fun when it’s made together. Build a sustainable community.

Very difficult in my experience. In a commercial setting, the company controls your software, and it's a totalitarian 'community', if at all. With your pet projects, it's often difficult to attract users to participate more actively.
Oh, is this why I was kicked out of my OneProvider server hosted by Scaleway/Online in Paris?
I recently researched password managers, settled on keypassxc. Happy I did. I use keypassxc on windows + keypassxc chrome plugin, strongbox on iOS and google drive for syncing. All works seamlessly.
> Drive Pilot can only engage at speeds under 40 mph (60 km/h in Germany) on limited-access divided highways

Don't all highways in Germany have minimum speed of 70 km/h? So basically there's no road where Drive Pilot can be used?
I have passed this on to our marketing team. Sorry you are having difficulty unsubscribing. In the meantime, feel free to email me (jgc@) from the email that needs to be removed and I will make sure it happens.
Intentional communities in digital spaces: What side of TikTok are you on?
People comfortable with numbers are also not average in their soft skills.
Time to consider becoming a lion tamer [1].

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LqQlCOmXuHM
If any of the hackers are here, could you run this on the Windows repo please?

git reset --hard windows2000-sp4

/s
I very much agree with this. I use python for (different types of) data analysis too, and in python in particular it feels like the "boilerplate" to "science" ratio is rather high in the direction of "boilerplate". R manages to abstract this away very effectively, as the article highlights.

The beauty of R is that you can write one line of code and use some hot-off-the-PhD-thesis cutting-edge-just-published-in-J.-Stat.-Soft-chunk of statistical analysis in your totally different, completely whacky problem, and it's fast, and (by and large) works.

Of course, that's its biggest problem as well. Scientifically, it will quite happily give you a 150 mm howitzer to aim at your foot, assuming you know best.
> Does Strasbourg not have any fire regulations that require fireman accessible power cut-outs, automatic extinguishers etc?

I think it's a safe bet it doesn't, because that building passed fire safety review and was approved as such.
Why go through all of that when you can just create a filter to mark everything as spam?
My own understanding of the 3d world idea evolved enormously as I grew older.

Started as 3d world=poor.

Then I found out there was a 1st and 2nd world, and 3th was basically everything else.

Then there came an additional, cynical connotation of not worth the bother for USA or Russia to turn that country into a vazal state. Maybe they fight some proxy wars or send some 'help'.

But now? Russia's influence is a shadow of it's past. But the USA influence is also shrinking. Look at the whole Ukraine thing. The 3rd world is not condemning Russia very loud, and even in the 1st world a lot of people look at China as a relevant player.

The fact that Russia is military having trouble in Ukraine, and the USA did not follow trough on Afganistan suggest a new world order: The whole 1/2/3th world thing is becoming a historical cold war relic, and 3d world might just become a group of neutral players in the big power struggles of the world.
A proper datacenter can be both efficient and safe. Add solid blidners to close the chimneys, and an oxygen suppressant system (NOVEC, etc.), and add motorized switch-fuses. They can all be orchestrated by a PLC, and a fire alarm/control system.

Close blinds, release NOVEC, disable power rails to computers. That's all. It might not stop everything, but it can help a lot.
I don't understand your sentiment.

The design choices created substantial risk to the life of firefighters.
The gallery in the article links to this drone footage I hadn't seen before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrGsCD2nVrk
It's funny, I think your Ordinary People vs Raging Bull comment excellently underscores the original article.

Raging Bull is a cinematic masterpiece. As "art as art" it is sublime. It is a love letter to film.

Ordinary People is an emotional masterpiece. As "art as therapy" it is sublime. It is a love letter to humanity.

When people "steal" from Raging Bull it's fairly obvious and usually surface level.

Plenty of people stole from Ordinary People, too, it's just harder to spot because what they stole is more psychological and subtextual.

Just as a simple example, the most iconic televison show of the last 30 years (The Simpsons) cribbed way more from Ordinary People than Raging Bull.

If you look, it's easy to spot the influence throughout the series' run. But there's no single iconic shot like their Raging Bull slo-mo homage in "The Homer They Fall."

What does it even mean, to remember, to steal, art...?
Fire suppression systems have risks all their own:

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/11/06/work...

That was still under construction.
The common trope with R is that statisticians and love it and developers hate it.

The the main reason that statisticians love it is that the libraries useful to them are much better in R than elsewhere (though Python keeps encroaching in that turf, and "real developers" dislike Python a lot less than they do R).

The main reasons that developers hate it is that it is very unlike almost all other languages that they're used to. This is very valid since outside the narrow domain of statistics, there's probably nothing that R does better than other languages. So for a dev who occasionally dabbles with R by necessity, the otherness serves nothing but frustration.

Still, I wonder how much criticism there is against R as a programming language, that is not some variation on this works very differently from other languages. IMHO the sub-setting syntax, and countless x-apply variations are big warts. I'm not a big fan of Tidyverse, and even less of the schism between base- and Tidy-R. I read some seemingly fundamental criticism about R's deficient scoping rules, but I'm not nearly knowledgeable enough to judge their merits.

I guess it doesn't help that almost nobody learned R as their first computer (as opposed to statistics) language. Personally, I learned C, Matlab, Python/numpy, SQL, R in that order. R does seem to be quirkier than all the others, except maybe SQL. But I don't dislike working in R any more than working in any other language.
We will soon test charging a transaction fee on the items, which will be fulfilled by the stores.
Self-flagellation isn't boring. If you can do it on a unicycle, even better!
I think #1 is:

Rule #1: Software is a social service. If you're not writing for the user, but rather for the sake of writing code, you're not a good programmer. Write for the user, whether that user is Joe Sixpack or Jane Hotdev, or even if you are the user - assume the role of servicing the end user. Software is a social service.
In particular the automotive industry has been sued often enough to be careful what they say. I fully expect Tesla to be found at fault for some situation where they officially say the driver is in charge, but the courts decide marketing messages mislead the driver.
Never take crap like this, just "Report spam" if there is no option to directly unsubscribe with a single click.
Agree and not only Redis, the way Salvatore Sanfilippo (Redis creator) program is very readable and instructive. A glance into its repos worth the time.
>For example, setting a cookie called "hello" with the value "world" on the browser of every user does not require consent, as long as this is not used to identify specific user, of course.

No, that needs consent because that cookie is not strictly necessary for the provision of the service.

(But the reason that requires consent is not the GDPR, it's the ePrivacy Directive)
> Subconsciously, when you learn a piece by heart, its message penetrates deep inside you. It lies at your fingertips, ready for you to make use of it. Many cultures have long understood this. In Islam, people who memorize the entire Koran are given the special title of hafiz, or guardian. In a secular equivalent, I know people who have memorized Rudyard Kipling's poem If— to give them a moral helping hand at times of crisis.

What poems you all think serve as good reminders of truths of how to work well in teams and build good software?
What's your definition of the lead? To me, this is huge. Tesla has never been willing to take responsibility for any crashes, instead blamining the driver.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMAL
I switched from KeePass to KeePassXC some years ago when I realized the XC browser extension was better than what KeePass offered. Sync via my own Nextcloud, KeePass2Android on mobile, works great :)
They will try to avoid taking responsibility anyway. The courts will decide if they do or not.
According to the article it seems to be:

1. NHTSA has reiterated that its data came from Tesla, and has not been verified by an independent party (as it noted in a footnote in the report).

2. Second, it says its investigators did not consider whether the driver was using Autopilot at the time of each crash. (Reminder: Drivers are only supposed to use Autopilot in very specific contexts.)

3. And third, airbag deployments are an inexact proxy for crashes.

... which all sound like really flimsy reasons to conclude "doesn't stack up." A more honest summary based on those would be something like "hasn't been verified by a 3rd party yet."

It's incredible how openly the media makes things up about Tesla, likely just to generate page impressions.
Consent popups are not a requirement.

Not needlessly processing personal data is a requirement.
And:

- even if I learned it, nobody in my social circle would care
In general marketing teams try to be “smart” like this. I have many many examples of this.

It’s the exact same bs as using someone’s contact list to spam them with farmville.

Marketers have no respect for their audience whatsoever.
Been using keepassxc with self hosted seafile for sync for a few years now. Keepassdx on android. Super happy with this combo.
I had some Matlab experience about 3 decades ago. What's you take in Matlab vs R as programming languages?
Tolkien's Paintings
I’m so glad that you made this post. It sums up so many pain points of working with tech, and how sometimes we’re able to self-help. Loved the ending.
If a company makes it hard for me to unsubscribe, I mark it as spam. Because at that point, that's exactly what it is.
> R has two types of empty string: character(0) and "".

I understand it's frustrating trying to use a language you don't understand. And instead of reading the language manual you go on rambling.

"" is an empty string (almost) as you know it from other languages.

character(0) is an empty vector of type character (i.e. a vector with no elements). This vector doesn't even contain an empty string.

R is a vectorized language. You almost always deal with vectors. "" actually is a character(1), a character vector of length 1. Once you understand this, there is a chance for you to enjoy R.
> Don't all highways in Germany have minimum speed of 70 km/h?

No. The only legal limit is that the vehicle has to be type-licensed for going more than 60 km/h, which an S-class clearly is. Actual minimum speed requirements are rare.

Nevertheless this is for now clearly primarily useful as an assistant for being stuck in bad traffic, and you can get ticketed for going slow enough to hinder traffic flow without a good reason, and if you can argue a good reason depends. An upgrade to 80 so you can stick it behind a truck in the right lane would make it a lot more practical.
> Software diversity is good

Software diversity also means attack surface multiplication, so it's a delicate tradeoff.
> I have no knowledge, firsthand or otherwise

Sus !
Agreed but I'm totally cool with renting a self-driving car on demand. I don't want to own and maintain a car at all, if I can avoid it.

It sounds like a good self-driving car is going to be really expensive, too, using technologies companies like Tesla are afraid to implement (e.g. LIDAR). Renting by the minute probably makes a lot more sense financially, too.
How many other companies do you know of where the CTO himself jumps in to help on an issue like this (and in 20 minutes, no less!)

Cloudflare is awesome.
What about that documentary starring Ben Affleck?
And it would even be open-source copyleft [0] because the "AI" can't claim it's copyright either! Check mate patent trolls

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-off...
What makes a good error message? The only thing worse than an error
"Pick the right tool for the job" --- exit
Any citation to back these claims?

I'd like to think this is mainly determined by platform, if you want Windows, you use DX, iOS/Mac - Metal, Android - OpenGL/Vulkan.

You can use Vulkan on Windows or proton or moltenvk, but those are minorities.
We built this precisely because we believed users didn't care much about which shop the item came from. We see the context of viewing items through the stores as a marketing tool that leverages established brands. We hope that being able to see much of an entire store's inventories for lesser prices feels like a superpower.
These days "report spam" doesn't seem to do anything. I've gotten as many as five identical e-mails from the same sender and hit "report spam" on each one with no effect before eventually creating a custom filter rule to stop it.
I’ve been in a lot of major data centres in the UK and OVH is definitely a complete joke compared to the worst of them.

Apart from Host Europe in Nottingham who no longer exist there AFAIK. That was worse than OVH.
No, but I might prefer a plumber from a company that pays their plumbers to train and work on the latest 'tech' in their down time. I might even be willing to pay a 15% premium, especially if I'm looking for a 'cutting edge' solution for my bathroom.
This is all true, but it's not what the legal system of the richest countries think. If a little Greek director were to sway a little too close to, say, The Wrestler or Black Swan, you could bet he'd be sued into nothingness by Fox Searchlight.

The power imbalance in creative copyright is real.
Windows source code is fairly widely available, as in government agencies, universities and others already have access. I'm sure this means anyone motivated enough could get it if they really wanted to. Of course even looking at it is problematic if you want to work on open source operating systems later, so I'm not sure why you'd voluntarily choose to do this.
Good data protection makes for good business
No need to attribute malice. Why would that be intentional? Its just ambiguous drafting.
Two understandable deficiencies in Common Lisp