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Seven or eight years ago, I led a project for a large media company to consolidate publishing workflows across multiple products, moving everything from several content management systems to Drupal.

After evaluating the landscape, my take was that the project was a waste of time and wouldn’t benefit the company. But a large consultancy was involved, so we had to pick a CMS. We picked Drupal. The result was exactly what management wanted: a single CMS, well-defined taxonomies, and all the content in one place.

Unsurprisingly, the writers hated it. They’d been forced to give up specialized tools for something half-baked that mostly did the same things.

The development experience was atrocious. Scaling was difficult, rolling upgrades and deployments without downtime were nearly impossible, and we constantly ran into bugs and limitations in the existing plugins. We had to bring in Drupal consultants at $300 an hour to get the project over the finish line, but we eventually did. All we ended up using was the admin interface and a GraphQL API, which the company’s products then had to be rebuilt around.

Management wanted everything hosted by Acquia, so we ended up paying $100,000 a year for a few servers that would have cost, at worst, a few hundred bucks a year on Hetzner.

By the original requirements, the project was a success. We managed to move all the traffic over without any downtime. Shortly afterward, I left the company because of how miserable the project had made me.

A few days ago, out of curiosity, I checked whether they were still using Drupal. It turns out management hadn’t learned from its past mistakes: they’d migrated to yet another CMS, even though it was obvious non-management the problem was the business model not the CMS. What of waste of time and money.

I'm helping my wife build https://quantral.com - initially we put it together to track stock sentiment/crowd wisdom on social networks for our own investments. This is something I was previously doing manually every morning while having breakfast. I couldn't find a similar project to satisfy my needs for discovering hot stocks and the track records of people who mentioned those stocks on finx and /r/wsb. We are now planning to add congressional trading as another data source.

I managed to get down to 13% body from more than 25% with a single set of adjustable dumbbells that cost me $60. For the first time in my life I had visible abs. What pushed me was a single week of counting calories - I never realized how many extra calories I was consuming.

I’m running a cheap VPS on hetzner. Wanted to bump up my plan but they are out of capacity for some of their plans. Demand is brutal.

Fair point. We are working on releasing this in the App Store where there won’t be a need to enter credit card details - billing will go through Apple and cancelling subscriptions is easier. Happy to provide a promo code for a one month free trial without a card if you email us at [email protected].

Helping my wife ship https://quantral.com - a platform to monitor X and Reddit for financial chatter and score companies and authors. We discovered lots of stocks early in this AI cycle from X. There’s lots of noise, so we built a platform to more easily monitor the social sentiment for our investment purposes, but now we are trying to spin out a fully fledged consumer product.

Reminds me of https://github.com/jtolio/gls which implement a "thread local storage" in golang

This brings so many memories. I remember how badly I wanted an GeForce 6800 Sadly, I was never able to justify spending this much money on a GPU. Still holds true, even today.

A Roman sarcophagus was found on a beach in Bulgaria last year [1]. It was used as a bar and had holes drilled for LED lighting.

[1] https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/08/12/beach-bar-sarc...

Until very recently, at the company I work for, we were running one of the largest (if not the largest) replica set cluster in terms of number of documents stored (~20B) and data size ~11TB. The database held up nicely in the past 10 years since the very first inception of the product. We had to do some optimizations over the years, but those are expected with any database. Since Mongo Atlas has a hard limit on the maximum disk size of 14TB we explored multiple migration options - sharding Mongo or moving to Postgres/TimescaleDB or another time series database. During the evaluation of alternative database we couldn't find one which supported our use case, that's highly available, could scale horizontally and that's easily maintainable (e.g. upgrades on Mongo Atlas require no manual intervention and there's no downtime even when going to the next major version). We had to work around numerous bugs that we encountered during sharding that were specific to our workloads, but the migration was seamless and required ~1h of downtime (mainly required to fine-tune database parameters). We've had very few issues with it over the years. I think Mongo is a mature technology and it makes sense depending on the type of data you're storing. I know at least few other healthcare companies that are using it for storing life-critical data even at a larger scale.

You should take everything he says with a grain of salt. He’s defunding research on transgenic mice, not transgender.

Correctly ingesting and visualizing data that's captured by different devices while also accounting for travel across timezones, is a real challenge. [1] is our guide how we do this for diabetes data generated by CGMs and insulin pumps.

[1] https://tidepool.stoplight.io/docs/tidepool-api/branches/mas...

Yes, zinc helped a lot in when the skin was severely inflamed and oozing. After that period passed, I discontinued it as well, because the drier the skin is, the easier it cracks.

iPhones record videos with variable frame rate, which makes them unsuitable for syncing the video with a separate recorded audio track (e.g. when recording guitars). The video and audio would ever so slightly go our of sync. I wish there was a way to use fixed frame rate when recording.

I have a severe form of allergic dermatitis that I've been trying to get under control for close to 10 years now. At one point to it so bad I couldn't take a shower without being in excruciating pain, I couldn't sleep, I could barely go through the day. The problem with all of the existing treatments, including the latest generation of monoclonal antibodies and JAK inhibitors is that they downregulate your immune system and they make you more sensitive to allergens if you discontinue the treatment. The only thing that made me better over time was stopping all drugs (including topical ones). It got worse for close to a year, but in 2-3 years my skin "healed". I'm still allergic and do get rashes occasionally, but I'm way less sensitive now.

Scala has type inference [1]

[1] https://docs.scala-lang.org/tour/type-inference.html

Wavelets are used for pattern recognition in many iris recognition systems. First, the position of the iris in the input image is determined, then any eyelash and eyelid occlusions are removed and the iris is extracted by converting it to a polar coordinated image. The resulting image signal is convolved with wavelets of different shapes and sizes. The resulting signal is encoded using phase demodulation to produce an IrisCode. Two iris codes can be checked for a match by computing their hamming distance. [1] is the paper which describes the original system invented by Daugman. [2] is an open source implementation of that method.

[1] https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~az/lectures/est/iris.pdf [2] http://iris.giannaros.org/

Rego, the language used in Open Policy Agent, is based on and extends Datalog. It's gaining a lot of traction in the past couple of years for evaluating authorization policies.

I wouldn't call it healthier due to the risk of avalanches and in my experience it's not negligible. It requires some complex skills of being able to both judge the terrain and act fast if something happens. And even then, accidents happen. How many people die annually on the slopes of ski resorts and how many die in avalanches while skiing?

Every time I open vim by accident, I have to restart my computer.

Bitwarden

My best code is the one that I didn’t write

My best code is the one that I didn’t write.

I had the exact same feeling when we started having daily standups about 4 years ago for a green field project. Now that most of the original developers are no longer in the company I feel glad that I actually paid attention. It turns out that I have a very good knowledge about how and what every micro-service in our stack does. What's discussed in those standups might not be relevant for day-to-day work, but on a higher level it can help developers understand the architecture of a complex system better.

Recently I switched to Ardour for recording guitars on Linux - it has great VST support, allows syncing music with videos, and has automation built-in. Even Amplitube works through LinVst.

I was also blown away by their pricing - you can pay as little as $1 for the full version, which is what I did, but after seeing how well it works, I did a donation to match the recommended price of $45.