samhw

65 ms·

691.
by samhw 5y ago
And also, I strongly suspect, because any description of the events is likely to be considered tendentious by some of the upset parties. Much easier to avoid the issues that come with having to write a balanced history of it.
692.
by samhw 5y ago
What if that person is Hitler? What if you work at Dignitas? What if you're Linus Torvalds, working at Dignitas, and the person is Hitler, and Hitler wants to merge a particularly bad pull request to add an NPM leftpad dependency t
693.
by samhw 5y ago
That commenter is agreeing with you . (I would say this underscores the need for everyone to speak clearly, but IMO they at least were speaking fairly clearly already.)
694.
by samhw 5y ago
Generally, it's considered news when things change in important ways
695.
by samhw 5y ago
Has there been any update on the Great Klabazon Schism of a month or so ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28513130 )? It felt like that was the start of a protracted 'leaking against' campaign, but then not
696.
by samhw 5y ago
> Arguably these tables could be on Scylla/Cassandra with eventual consistency even In a past company we managed to run a bank on Cassandra with eventual consistency. It was ... well, it was good CV experience for the DevOps guys. (
697.
by samhw 5y ago
There's some remarkable sleight of hand in "for every person working on [it]". That's a lot of people required to build a browser. Are you suggesting each of those 5000 users pays $5 multiplied by $NUM_OF_DEVELOPERS, or
698.
by samhw 5y ago
He's trying to explain the knock-on effect on other websites. I don't see how this is at all condescending.
699.
by samhw 5y ago
A friend of mine had this idea but with opioids. He invented an opioid painkiller which was, IIRC, a positive allosteric modulator of the mu opioid receptor - I'm not an expert, but I believe the gist was that it enhanced your endogeno
700.
by samhw 5y ago
Sorry, I should have been clearer - the dongles controlled access to that bank account. It was a bank account for banks to hold funds in. (Not our real capital reserves, but sort of like a current account / checking account for banks.)
701.
by samhw 5y ago
The issue is that this view always relies on stuff like "make people triple check everything". - How does that relate to making a config change? - How do you practically implement a system where someone has to triple check everyth
702.
by samhw 5y ago
Yeah, totally agree. That factored into my answer too: "their secrets would require so much capital to apply as to be impracticable for most" was my explanation for why they probably wouldn't mind explaining it if they did
703.
by samhw 5y ago
Ah, I getchu. In that case you're probably not wrong. It must be an absolutely redoubtable volume of traffic.
704.
by samhw 5y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by that. The 170,000 does have a precise unit - it's dollars lost in cash, as stated in the comment you were replying to. The amount of time taken for Facebook to fold in minutes is represented by $TOTAL
705.
by samhw 5y ago
This is very true. I tell everyone who'll listen that every competent engineer should be well versed in the nuances of feedback in complex systems ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback ). The most successful syst
706.
by samhw 5y ago
Even if we accept that's true, it still makes no difference to the fact that this outage has harmed those people.
707.
by samhw 5y ago
I'm not sure it's possible to speculate in a way which is generic over all possible infrastructures. You'll also hit the inevitable tradeoff of security (which tends towards minimal privilege, aka single points of failure) vs
708.
by samhw 5y ago
Yeah, I've heard this view a hundred times on Twitter, and I wish it were true. But sadly, there is no company which doesn't rely, at least at one point or another, on a human being typing an arbitrary command or value into a box.
709.
by samhw 5y ago
That someone will win the lottery is also incredibly likely. That a given person will win the lottery is, on the other hand, vanishingly unlikely. That a given config change will go wrong in a given way is ... eh, you see where I'm g
710.
by samhw 5y ago
You're very, very right - and insightful - about the consequences of sharing this information. I agree with you on that. I don't think you're right that firing people is the best approach. Irrespective of the question of ho
711.
by samhw 5y ago
Yup, it's terrifying how much is ultimately, ultimately dependent on dongles and trust. I used to work at a company with a billion or so in a bank account (obviously a rather special type of account), which was ultimately authorised
712.
by samhw 5y ago
Their market cap doesn't have anything to do with how much cash they have.
713.
by samhw 5y ago
Equivalent how? In volume? In intention?
714.
by samhw 5y ago
I'm happy to have a discussion if you're willing to accept that kratom is addictive. Suggesting that the 25k kratom addicts on that subreddit all took fentanyl-laced kratom, and kratom itself is absolutely non-addictive, is delusi
715.
by samhw 5y ago
The other problem is that there's no reason to assume $SUCCESSFUL_PERSON even knows what made them successful. I was once hanging out with a friend of a friend who was pretty successful in finance, and he said he could no more explai
716.
by samhw 5y ago
My point isn't that it "isn't fun or felt strange". My point is that it's dangerous and addictive. It's not honest to equate it to the minor hepatotoxicity of over-the-counter NSAID painkillers. Ibuprofen does
717.
by samhw 5y ago
Yup, you're entirely correct. I'm disappointed to see your point downvoted. I thought HN was above believing in arguments just because of their elegance, even if that elegance is accomplished by distorting the facts.
718.
by samhw 5y ago
> takes away from the original overarching argument: nature is primitive and cruel but humans in general at least try to alleviate that kind of cruelty seen in non-human nature And if that were the only claim they made, that would be fin
719.
by samhw 5y ago
> Now try “barbaric”. Definition two: “primitive; unsophisticated” Yes, definition two . I reiterate what I said before: you're searching for fringe meanings to back up your argument. Your original comment argued that the meaning o
720.
by samhw 5y ago
Indeed, you're referring to the doctrine of double effect (which the linked Wikipedia article on R v Adams mentions). That said, I don't think "[only] doses that are virtually certain to cause death lead to liability for th

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