News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

killertypo

Re:Apple open-sources FoundationDB on Thursday April 19, 2018 @05:49PM (#16880487)
And FoundationDB has held our data durable through all of this.
Re:Apple open-sources FoundationDB on Thursday April 19, 2018 @01:11PM (#16877716)
There is not

The speed and durability has gone unmatched. We can write millions of transactions per second w/ millions of reads w/o issue. We have never lost data or found data to be inconsistent.

Re:Apple open-sources FoundationDB on Thursday April 19, 2018 @01:10PM (#16877700)
this is amazing and this is huge for us - FoundationDB is one of the fastest most scalable distributed KV stores.
I've been in environments without any sense of monitoring; pingdom and esx health checks that provide only a tiny frame of reference to the real health of an application.

Being able to know the true health of a service is an absolute godsend.

So many times a service had been dead or gone for hours before anyone noticed (well our customers noticed, but it has to funnel up the pipeline from customer, to support, to engineering) before we were made aware of a real issue.

Nothing says good PR like not knowing you've been dead in the water for half a day and have no idea.

    TraffickCam enables you to help combat sex trafficking by uploading photos of the hotel rooms you stay in when you travel.

    Traffickers regularly post photographs of their victims posed in hotel rooms for online advertisements. These photographs are evidence that can be used to find and prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes. In order to use these photos, however, investigators must be able to determine where the photos were taken.

    The purpose of TraffickCam is to create a database of hotel room images that an investigator can efficiently search, in order to find other images that were taken in the same location as an image that is part of an investigation.

    TraffickCam was created in 2015 by the Exchange Initiative. The Exchange Initiative is committed to combating commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC). Their mission is to provide resources, information and networking solutions to combat sex trafficking in the United States.

    The Exchange Initiative was created by Nix Conference & Meeting Management to empower individuals and organizations with real resources to help end sex trafficking. Nix Conference & Meeting Management is one of just 13 U.S. companies and 43 worldwide honored as a 2014 Top Member by the internationally recognized Tourism Child-Protection Code of Conduct (TheCode.org) for their exceptional work to integrate child protection practices into their business.
figured it would be good to link exactly how this system works and the purpose since I was a little confused when I got to the home page
Re:Show HN: Spot the Drowning Child on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @03:12PM (#9963840)
this is pretty true, having nearly drowned once I freaked out and grabbed all over my savior. Thankfully he was at least 5-6 years older than me and had no problem containing me as he dragged me to the side of the pool.

There is a reason life guards grab from behind and disable the arms.

Re:Show HN: Spot the Drowning Child on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @03:05PM (#9963798)
Scary video, reminds me of camping as a child. My mom was a life guard growing up and she taught us all to swim and was pretty good at spotting other kids in the pool. Had a friend of mines little brother responding just like the kid in the video. His parents? Watching and laughing because they thought he was swimming funny. Thankfully my mom dove in and pulled him out of the lake, she knew exactly what was happening and made sure everyone knew what to look for after that.

edit:

Rules of the pool:

1) Don't run around a pool

2) NEVER push someone into a pool

3) Don't dive into a pool unless it's meant for diving (I recently dove into a pool and ate the plaster on the other side, if it hadn't been for her voice parroting in my head to stay calm I may have freaked out and drowned...in the shallow end, in front of my family

4) Absolutely no flotation devices in the pool that were big and round, especially innertubes (tell me how fun they are until you jump onto one and have it flip back and whack your head against the concrete side of the pool).

Re:Personal names around the world on Monday April 27, 2015 @08:41PM (#9449981)
This is always a difficult task to tackle, especially when dealing with data sources like Active Directory that want a surname and given name, which may not always be the case for everyone.

Admittedly the best answer is to get a "Family Name" and a "Nick Name" (not to be confused with a user name). The big problem is convincing the management they don't need to collect first name, last name, greeting...etc

Re:A Million Lines of Bad Code on Friday April 17, 2015 @05:29PM (#9397297)
one of my first projects as a consultant fresh out of college was HORRIBLY coded by my standards today. Sometimes I still fire it up and it still works (which fills me with pride); however, perusing the code hurts my eyes and I often wonder what was going through my mind.
> I'm curious how having the capability to either take a picture of me or possibly have a video conference improves the end user experience? First of all - doing the latter would involve me being forced to stop a moving car to engage in such an interaction. I have a rental car because my intent is to drive somewhere, not interact with someone I do not know through means of video. "Personablity" does not play into this conversation at all unfortunately - unless a random Hertz employee complimenting me on my attire or hair style at a given moment is a contributing factor to my car rental experience.

Please do not confuse my speaking to what the article states as being entirely in support of it. In fact the article claims that it may be for "live agent connectivity". What use is that? Who knows, but they're obviously cooking up something, that is my point.

> Regarding "it is very easy to get riled up about security". Yes, it is - as it very well should be. What happens if I hand a credit card over to a passenger and the "NeverLost" snaps an image of the digits? Highly unlikely but plausible - is Hertz going to guarantee PCI compliance of the footage? What if a group of individuals working for a defense contractor rent a car and are all discussing a secret, or top secret, program they are all cleared for? What are the implications of controlling that data?

You're goddamn right it's easy to get riled up about that and people should. I don't mean it negatively, more people should care about security.

Again you pose exactly the kind of question that should be asked and for which there is no answer, and likely why they (hertz) are being so damn vague at the moment.

> I fully understand there is a gray middle-ground - however people have an expectation of privacy in a vehicle today. There are just as many counter-point scenarios to the "dog pissing" one presented (which is rather weak in my opinion).

Anecdotal evidence is the best evidence and there are a lot of claims on both sides. Unfortunately that's the problem with picking sides, any given side has tons of evidence to back up their side. I would err on the side of "I would rather not have a camera in face."

> If anything these devices should be opt-in, meaning they can be removed by any customer prior to taking the rental vehicle. Customers will make choices based on privacy, if that seems minimal it may be today. But overall awareness exists and is garnering more consideration over time.

I agree 100%, i prefer the opt-in approach, if anything I would take a front/rear facing cam on the car to protect myself and my rental from liability during operations vs. a camera to talk to an agent.

the verbiage is crappy and vague, but I can see a use if you need support or help and they want to give you a personable experience. That said, this issue is two-fold...it is very easy to get riled up about security (especially as it seems we lose more and more freedoms each day to "securing" our nation). On the other hand, this offers them the ability to improve the customer experience. They just could not have picked a worse way to introduce the device, especially since they are not ready to publicly talk about its use-cases.

A definite gray middle-area, but technically you do not own the car and it is their property. If you want to rent the car then they definitely can record its use to ensure that damages were not from a dog pissing on the seat vs. "i spilled some juice"

the sad part of this is that of the team of developers I work with (when i was on the M$ side) NONE wrote commit messages, save for one guy. So this would be an impossible game, and quite a sad one as well.

I would like a game along the lines of "who wrote that and what were they thinking"

something like this is just too important to not donate money to.
Re:YouTube now defaults to HTML5 video on Tuesday January 27, 2015 @04:54PM (#8956260)
yeah but a lot of them are more mobile friendly which means they're not using flash as heavily anymore.

I know this only for research purposes of course...

Re:What taking my daughter to a comic book store taught me on Saturday January 17, 2015 @03:05AM (#8903827)
http://moviepilot.com/posts/2015/01/16/9-incredible-examples...

here is a great example of how to make interesting and compelling art without drawing your females as hyper sexualized pieces of meat.

Sans the DBZ one, which is -okayish- but still debatable.

Re:What Doesn't Seem Like Work? on Friday January 16, 2015 @06:29PM (#8902475)
> Personally, I experienced this with programming. When I learned to program in high school, it never struck me as a chore; it was always just interesting and I enjoyed it.

that was me when I picked up my first K&R book in elementary school. It was interesting and fun.

Re:What taking my daughter to a comic book store taught me on Friday January 16, 2015 @06:20PM (#8902440)
the portrayal of men is just as dumb and unrealistic. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy comics quite a bit (Infinity Guantlet anyone? Planet Hulk? World War Hulk???)

I think hyper sexualization of any gender is stupid and serves more as softcore porn than anything.

It is just slightly more offensive to women who spent a long time in our history being told "Well maybe you shouldn't have worn that dress and he wouldn't have hit on you the way he did."

BUT HEY before this gets out of hand, it is equally as degrading as putting down a man for "Well if your wife hits you and you just take it, your a little b()."

There has to be some give and take on this issue, it is not so clearly black and white.

I'm a big enough adult to recognize it's just stupid to think I can change comics and how they are drawn. Maybe if there were a bit more selection for my daughter so she could ease her way into it though? That would be pretty cool.

We're talking about creating a business out of an existing business.

Not getting rid of what we have, at some point you have to accept the reality of the world we live in. I don't want to strike down comic books, but it would be cool if they had a bigger selection for my kids (who would love to enjoy what daddy is reading, but they can wait until they're more mentally/emotionally/physically developed before being exposed).

Re:What taking my daughter to a comic book store taught me on Friday January 16, 2015 @03:10PM (#8901349)
> Meanwhile, in our more "enlightened" mainstream American culture, people write angry blog posts filled with stupid impact font image macros about how they literally judged an entire medium by its cover, because the female body is offensive or something.

It is absolutely offensive when it is posed in an unreal and unnatural way with impossible proportions and impossible looks.

I get that they are comics, but a story about super girl where she has a perfect 36-24-36 with Tripple F boobs that are molded and sculpted and pointed so far north you could almost navigate by them...it...it is a bit ridiculous.

Fun to look at, yes, but they don't offer much other than a fantasy.

Re:Full-fledged FPS in WebGL on Friday January 16, 2015 @03:00PM (#8901290)
yeah but that's conflating simple with optimized, which i doubt this is. A lot can probably be done to make this run much faster. This is not a AAA title.
Re:Full-fledged FPS in WebGL on Wednesday January 14, 2015 @07:52PM (#8890246)
I noticed this as well, but I use a trackball mouse and I can flick the ball and get good responsiveness.
Re:Mathematician's anger over his unread 500-page proof on Friday January 09, 2015 @03:14PM (#8864231)
did you look at the source, that was written by a mathematician, he took careful care to calculate out every pixel of padding and space. Probably for his specific monitor :)
Re:Wikipedia on HHVM on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @07:51PM (#8848193)
TIL, thank you for that.
Re:Wikipedia on HHVM on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @07:31PM (#8848115)
how does HHVM compare to PHP 7 in terms of speed savings? PHP 7 is supposed to be pretty damn fast from what I have seen. I guess benchmarks are hard to read because they're dependent upon a lot of factors. It would be interesting to see two sites at similar scales running competing engines for PHP (hhvm vs. PHP 7).
not always, but most certainly is true very often.
the disrespect and downright abuse of women in technology is both disturbing and downright disgusting. When will it end? What will it take for people to back off gender for a moment and listen to what people have to offer. Who cares what is between your legs when your contribution is a gift from the heart and mind.
Re:Half a decade with Go on Tuesday November 11, 2014 @11:47AM (#8590752)
hahah well I am very comfortable with C and other languages, but I love python for it's versatility and ease of use! It has some very expressive one liners that are surprisingly coherent for being one liners.
Re:Essential Math for Games Programmers on Tuesday November 11, 2014 @02:20AM (#8588710)
this is absolutely wonderful, as someone who dabbles in gamedev on the side this is immensely useful (just like gameprogrammingpatterns.com).

I love math, it is my favorite subject (numbers are beautiful) but sometimes I don't know the concepts for the math I am trying to apply, this definitely helps fill in some gaps.

Re:Half a decade with Go on Tuesday November 11, 2014 @01:15AM (#8588569)
I NEED to work Go into one of my projects, but dammit I love Python so much. it is a warm and safe and comfortable cocoon. :)
Re:If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It on Monday November 10, 2014 @04:32PM (#8586620)
and still IS depending on the distribution. Squeak and Pharo are great from what I understand, but are lacking some of the enterprise features present in Cincoms distribution. Though for 99.999% squeak and pharo are going to be more than enough.

Older »