mprovost

31 ms·

301.
by mprovost 5y ago
NFS version 3 already has the READDIRPLUS operation which returns the directory contents and all of the stats together in one call to improve performance for this case. Sometimes the kernel client doesn't use READDIRPLUS and falls back
302.
by mprovost 5y ago
"I like an escalator because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. There would never be an escalator temporarily out of order sign, only an escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience." - Mitch Hedbe
303.
by mprovost 5y ago
I used to have a security badge to get in there back in 2003 or so. When I was shown around someone said they could cause a minor recession in 5 minutes with an axe. Also they had me grab a fibre that carried all of Japan’s internet traffic
304.
by mprovost 5y ago
So would you be comfortable hiring a 4.0 grad from Stanford/MIT without doing a coding interview? Just based on their transcript. Does anyone do this anymore?
305.
by mprovost 5y ago
This is a great point about CS grads. Maybe in the past, you could just take a degree at face value: "oh you graduated from Stanford with an A average, you must know how to code, here's a job". But nobody trusts any universit
306.
by mprovost 5y ago
My great uncle used to tell me stories about how he wasn't allowed to eat tomatoes growing up in Massachusetts during the Great Depression. Only Italian immigrants ate them and everyone else thought they were crazy and were slowly pois
307.
by mprovost 5y ago
I wonder how much this is going to change now that so many people have figured out that they can work from home at least part of the time. First it starts with snowstorms, then maybe we'll see less traffic on rainy days...
308.
by mprovost 5y ago
Yes that's right it's the previous command from history. That way you run ls and see if it's the expected output, then rm to delete.
309.
by mprovost 5y ago
The issue is that these declarative languages (SQL, Terraform, Cisco IOS...) abstract away the loop. Sure it's tedious to do the same operation to 1000 servers, but computers are good at loops. And computers can help write loops. At pr
310.
by mprovost 5y ago
One quick trick I use a lot in the shell is to run a known safe command with the argument first, and then run the dangerous command with the the !$ variable (the last argument of the previous command) so there's no possibility of a mis
311.
by mprovost 5y ago
Tom Christiansen's essay "Csh Programming Considered Harmful" was commonly passed around the early internet and lists all the reasons why scripting in csh is terrible. I always considered csh purely for interactive use (where
312.
by mprovost 5y ago
The Slowlaris name is much older than that, going back to when they made the switch from BSD to System V in 1991. You could install either the retroactively named Solaris 1.x versions or the new 2.x on the same hardware, and everyone notice
313.
by mprovost 5y ago
Apple switched to zsh because newer versions of bash are licensed under GPLv3.
314.
by mprovost 5y ago
Tom's Diner was picked by Karlheinz Brandenburg as the reference song to develop the MP3 format. The team developing the audio compression algorithms listened to it over and over until it sounded "good". http://www
315.
by mprovost 5y ago
That candidate probably tells a version of this story where they dodged a bullet by avoiding a job where they would spend all their time serialising XML.
316.
by mprovost 5y ago
During the Industrial Revolution the owners of the factories became richer and richer and the workers got poorer and poorer. I seem to remember some quote about the workers "seizing the means of production"... I wonder what that l
317.
by mprovost 5y ago
Ah yes the classic Dancing Guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ
318.
by mprovost 5y ago
The hard part is determining with 100% accuracy what is a "critical change". Many of these incidents start with someone making a change that "should be" safe. So you either have to make all your changes with a crash cart
319.
by mprovost 5y ago
The state of Delaware should start advertising itself as the easiest place in the US to hire remote workers. I don't know why you would want to live there but this is their chance to show off what they've got and attract new resid
320.
by mprovost 5y ago
My father started his programming career in the 1970s when you were expected to wear a shirt and tie to the office every day. Then there was an energy crisis, and they turned up the temperature on the air conditioners. They also let everyon
321.
by mprovost 5y ago
IPv6 adoption is slowing and may never converge with v4. It halved from 2019 to 2020. See "Counting IPv6 users": https://blog.apnic.net/2021/02/08/ipv6-in-2020/
322.
by mprovost 5y ago
Samoa also recently (2009) changed to driving on the left side of the road to align with NZ/Australia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Samoa#Change_from...
323.
by mprovost 5y ago
You're not encouraged to talk about salaries but instead try and guess how much people make from social clues like what kind of car they drive, what brand clothes they wear, where they go on holiday, how new their phone is...
324.
by mprovost 5y ago
I'm publishing a book doing exactly this, rewriting one Unix utility per chapter from the BSD C version into Rust. The first two chapters for true/false and yes are published, with head, wc, cat, cut, rev, and uniq coming soon as
325.
by mprovost 5y ago
The rules of American football were changed in response to the 1905 season when 19 college players died. Instead of banning the sport completely, they started allowing forward passes. Which completely changed the game and made it safer.
326.
by mprovost 5y ago
Thomas Dickey has been maintaining this code by himself for years (decades?). Along with the timezone database, the terminal info database is a huge SPOF. It's too bad that this effort is mostly unrecognised.
327.
by mprovost 5y ago
The original NonZeroDay post [0] on Reddit. There are many variations of this productivity theme (Seinfeld etc) but the way this post is worded really hit me. I try and make progress on the book I'm writing every day - even if I just c
328.
by mprovost 5y ago
Isn't that what WebAssembly is for? It's kind of the web version of C pretending that everything is a PDP-11.
329.
by mprovost 5y ago
If you haven't seen the work Nick Black is doing with notcurses [0] it's pretty amazing to see what it can do with bitmapped graphics in a modern terminal. Makes me wonder if we're ready for a resurgence of TUIs with full mot
330.
by mprovost 5y ago
The spice must flow...

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