Here's 12 Sysadmin/DevOps (they're synonyms now!) challenges, straight from the day job:
1. Get a user to stop logging in as root.
2. Get all users to stop sharing the same login and password for all servers.
3. Get a user to upgrade their app's dependencies to versions newer than 2010.
4. Get a user to use configuration management rather than scp'ing config files from their laptop to the server.
5. Get a user to bake immutable images w/configuration rather than using configuration management.
6. Get a user to switch from Jenkins to GitHub Actions.
7. Get a user to stop keeping one file with all production secrets in S3, and use a secrets vault instead.
8. Convince a user (and management) you need to buy new servers, because although "we haven't had one go down in years", every one has faulty power supply, hard drive, network card, RAM, etc, and the hardware's so old you can't find spare parts.
9. Get management to give you the authority to force users to rotate their AWS access keys which are 8 years old.
10. Get a user to stop using the aws root account's access keys for their application.
11. Get a user to build their application in a container.
12. Get a user to deploy their application without you.
After you complete each one, you get a glass of scotch. Happy Holidays!
There's a line in one of my kids' Bluey books that says "Do you want to win, or do you want the game to continue? Because sometimes you can't have both."
I feel like that's sorta where we are in America. In the glory days of the 50s-70s, people wanted the game to continue - they were willing to sacrifice a little bit of winning for the sake of keeping the system intact. Then starting in the 80s, people gradually started sacrificing the game for the win, doing things that they knew would eventually lead to the collapse of everything so that they could come out on top. This is corrosive. Once it starts becoming apparent, everybody will start sacrificing the system as a whole for their own personal gain, because the system is dead anyway.
I think we're right on the brink of everyone realizing that the system is now dead, and bad things will likely come of it.
Once a Chinese grad student explained to me a difference he noted between Chinese and American citizens. He said in China no really reads or watches 24/7 major news outlets in China. They are fully aware that all of it is propaganda and just go about their life. He said Americans seem to get really emotional over content in the press and seem to really struggle with the idea of propaganda / journalism in the news.
I tend to agree with student, NYT and major news outlets are clearly used for propaganda and if you sit back and look at it from perhaps another angle it makes sense , why wouldn’t a world super power with a massive government apparatus use media to influence and control citizen behavior?
So yes the anonymous experts, the anonymous intelligence experts, the experts on CNN panels .. etc etc. It’s the government pushing a narrative for a purpose. My two cents live your life and spend your precious emotional energy for the people you care about around you. Do things in your local community and help when and where you can.
Not sure what you are talking about? In WAL mode (which is what you should be using) writes don't block reads and reads don't block writes. If you are connections pooling (which you should) the cache will stay hot.
Sqlite (properly configured) will outperform "proper databases" often by an order of magnitude in the context of a single box. You want a single writer for high performance as it lets you batch.
> 256 hardware threads...
Have you tried? I have. Others have too. [1]
> Additionally, SQLite lacks a bunch of integrity checks, like data types and various kinds of constraints. And things like materialised views, etc.
Sqlite has blobs so you can use your own custom encoding which is what you want in a high performance context.
Here's sqlite on a 5$ shared VPS that can handle 10000+ checks per second over a billion checkboxes [2]. You're gonna be fine.
Hello! I made this website. Thank you for sharing.
I appreciate all the feedback, and have implemented a few changes. A few points worth accentuating to avoid any misunderstandings. It is correct that the current proposal indeed is at the Council level, introduced as a high-priority item by the Danish Presidency. It is not yet with the Parliament. This is important as both need to be in agreement for any legislation to be adopted into European law. The first two sections of the website thus summarises the level of support at Council level. The source of this data strictly follows leaked documents from a July 11th 2025 meeting of the Council's Law Enforcement Working Party (LEWP) [0], originally reported by [1] and subsequently summarised by [2]. The next meeting for LEWP is scheduled for September 12th [3], shortly after most MEPs return from vacation.
As noted in another comment, the Council level requires at least 15/27 member states to support it. Should this happen, it would then reach the Parliament, pending approval. However, as support at the Council level seems greater than in previous renditions (supported further by Denmark's insistence and confidence on an expedited vote scheduled for October 14 [4]), it seems prudent to target beyond merely the Council-level. This is the intended goal of the third section of the website.
I see a few comments here suggesting that it would be better to label MEPs yet to respond as "Unknown". I initially decided to have MEPs inherit the position of their government, in part because I (a) wanted to encourage MEPs making a statement and clarifying their stance (while some have in the past, circumstances have changed with this version of the legislation); and (b) wanted to encourage a firm opposition at the Parliament level, ideally before the Council vote. However, I recognise how this can be perceived as being misleading. As such, I have updated the appearance such that pending a response, the label reads "Unknown" while the border indicates the presumed stance of the MEP to be that of their government.
I appreciate the interest and feedback: thank you. Ultimately, the goal with this website really is to raise awareness that the proposed legislation, once again, has been resurrected and is making progress. The attention this thread has garnered is greatly appreciated. As all MEPs have been contacted to confirm their stance, I expect responses to arrive in the coming days and weeks, allowing the overview to soon accurately reflect the personal opinions of each MEP.
In the meantime, I would still encourage you to contact your MEPs such that they are aware of your concerns.
Examples are everywhere. In fact, almost every human interaction is an example. Here are a few off the top of my head:
Quality control rejected one program because it was indented 4 spaces instead of the standard 5, but accepted another, even though it had enough memory leaks to crash the server under certain conditions. The first was a detail; the second was an issue. It took me 2 days to get Q.C. to understand the difference.
A friend recently arrived for a dinner party an hour late and then complained to me that another spoke with her mouth full. As far as I was concerned, the first was an issue and the second was a detail. My friend thought otherwise about both.
Accounting recently spent 3 days implementing a new key policy for the private rest rooms (presumably to prevent theft) and then wrote off $50,000 of inventory because no one could find the proper paperwork. IMO, the former was a detail upon which much time was wasted and the latter was an issue that never actually got dealt with.
We spent the first hour of a recent meeting trying to determine naming conventions, but ran out of time before we decided if the customer's credit limit should be split between 2 divisions. Again, wasting time on details and not dealing with real issues. (This is a great example. One of the best ways to lose your shirt is to not deal with credit/collection/accounts receivable issues.)
My favorite on-line example: A few years ago here on hn, I posted examples of how I found some of my customers. I expected some interesting discussion, but the thread was hijacked because of the presence of 2 concepts in my original post "Bible" and "pawn shop". Lots of issues that could have provided value for people were never explored because the gang preferred to beat a detail to death. Unfortunately this sort of thing happens quite a bit on-line.
Funny how I still remember that thread. Here it is:
I have a simple guideline for real life interactions with others that carries over quite well on-line, "Deal with issues; ignore details."
It's amazing how well this works in person, especially when trying to get something done. My number one question to another is probably, "Is that an issue or a detail?" We can almost always decide together which it is. Then, if it's an issue, we deal with it, and if it's a detail, we move on to the next issue.
This has also saved me countless hours and aggravation on-line. If I post something and someone disagrees, I quickly decide whether or not it's really an issue and only engage the other if it is. I realize that this is just a judgment call, but I'd estimate about 90% of on-line disagreements are just details. In these cases, I think it's best to simply move on.
I've used various commercial databases over the years. Some popular commercial databases relevant to HN readers include Web of Science, Scopus, and Engineering Village. When I worked at the USPTO, I used the less popular database Dialog, which I preferred. To my knowledge, none of these are available direct to consumers. I've only been able to get access from places with subscriptions. Some university libraries allow visitors where you can use these databases for free on-site.
I would call these databases complementary, not "entirely superior". There are two main advantages. One is that these databases will contain many things that you can't find on Google. The second advantage of these databases is that they are designed for advanced searchers and have more powerful query languages. Google on the other hand is dumbed down and will try to guess what you want, often doing a poor job. You can get very specific on these databases in ways that you can't with Google.
Related: I'm somewhat fascinated by more specialized bibliographic databases because they often contain things that can't be found on Google or the major commercial databases I listed above. I started keeping a list of them. https://github.com/btrettel/specialized-bibs
A few years ago I got testicular cancer. The information about the disease came in pieces: first all I knew was that there was a lump; then came the ultrasound, the CT scan, then biopsy of the testicle, then a second surgery to sample lymph nodes to which the cancer might have spread. At every step I would obsessively query my doctors for conditional probabilities: given what we'd just found out, what were the chances of dying? Of relapse? Of chemo? Of sterility? I was always incredibly frustrated at how vague their responses would be - they'd say, e.g. "we don't like to give probabilities because you just never know what will happen!". And I would think, "That's exactly the point of a probability! Please just tell me a number!"
One doctor eventually showed me a paper on outcomes for the lymph node surgery I had, with a relapse rate curve going out five years so. I found this incredibly helpful for managing my emotions because it let me track my progress in a very precise way: every monthly checkup that would go by uneventfully, I knew exactly what my chance of relapse had dropped to. The goal was to get to zero. More importantly, having actual numbers gave me something on which I could focus my optimism. It's so much worse to hear "you might become sterile" than "there's a 5% chance of becoming sterile". With the 5% number in mind, I'd do things like imagine myself in a room full of 20 people and think "wow, it would be incredibly unlikely to be randomly chosen from this group". Having spent a lot of time in a cancer hospital now -- around people who were much worse off than I was -- I believe that almost everyone has incredible reserves of optimism. I think it's better when the hopeful possibility is concretely defined - it makes it easier to imagine a path forward while you're stuck waiting for more information.
Mine is obviously a completely different situation from the terminal cancer described by the author, where the question isn't, "when will I be free of this cancer", but rather "when will I die from it". Testicular cancer is very treatable, and I never faced a significant chance of death. I'm sure I would have been in a much different psychological state if I had.
Also, PSA: testicular cancer is REALLY common for young males (if you're male you have a 1 in 500 chance of getting it between 20 and 34). Given HN user demographics, there are almost certainly some of you reading this who've gotten it already, or who will. You can save yourself a ton of trouble if you do a self-examination every once in a while. That's actually how I found out, and is a big reason that I avoided chemotherapy.
> You can create the impression of getting a lot of work done. Or the impression of a well-written cover letter. Or of a genre novel, techno track, whatever.
Yeah, one of their most "effective" uses is to counterfeit signals that we have relied on--wisely or not--to estimate deeper practical truths. Stuff like "did this person invest some time into this" or "does this person have knowledge of a field" or "can they even think straight."
Oh, sure, qualitatively speaking it's not new, people could have used form-letters, hired a ghostwriter, or simply sank time and effort into a good lie... but the quantitative change of "Bot, write something that appears heartfelt and clever" is huge.
In some cases that's devastating--like trying to avert botting/sockpuppet operations online--and in others we might have to cope by saying stuff like: "Fuck it, personal essays and cover letters are meaningless now, just put down the raw bullet-points."
It's widely known among EEs. It's used for lots of interesting things, such as temperature control, motor control and positioning, and LED lighting. You can do it in hardware old-style with a 555 timer or hex inverter, but most modern systems I've worked with do it with a microcontroller.
An addendum to this that you may find interesting -- I've experimented with turning the LED on for a few microseconds at higher than rated current, then off for tens of milliseconds. The average current stays far below the specifications. This results in very high apparent brightness per unit of power consumption.
Using the IV curve of the LED, this also let me eliminate the typical current-limiting resistor. The power savings are more than the power cost of the MCU that controls it (modern low-power microcontrollers are awesome).
Anyway, the end result is a little LED + CR2032 cell + magnet that you stick to furniture, and it runs for about 3 years. I made it so that elderly people I know who wake up at night to go to the bathroom don't bump into furniture (especially in an unfamiliar place, like while traveling). Without creating a thing they have to think about often. If you're curious, I posted the code here: https://github.com/seanboyce/tinylight
An additional one you might like: I did PWM for LED dimming in the tens of Mhz for some 1 Watt red LEDs. This is for my wife -- when she has a migraine she prefers very dim red light to complete darkness. In the Mhz range, there's no visible flicker by a longshot (although it costs a little more power). Most PWM systems I've seen that flicker, use lower-frequency signals.
It must have been cool to play with LEDs in the 70s. We sort of take them for granted now, but they are so awesome. Truly we live in an age of wonders.
I agree. The very fact that they added a Terms of Service is weird. I don't want Firefox to be a service in any way. It's a tool.
When I drill a hole in my wall, DeWalt don't tell anyone who I am, how large a hole it is, what material I drilled into or even the fact that I actually drilled anything. They don't know any of that, and neither should Mozilla know when my local copy of the browser makes a DNS, HTTP or any other request.
The problem with the Unix lowest-common-denominator model is that it pushes complexity out of the stack and into view, because of stuff other designs _thought_ about and worked to integrate.
It is very important never to forget the technological context of UNIX: a text-only OS for a tiny, already obsolete and desperately resource-constrained, standalone minicomputer. It was written for a machine that was already obsolete, and it shows.
No graphics. No networking. No sound. Dumb text terminals, which is why the obsession with text files being piped to other text files and filtered through things that only handle text files.
While at the same time as UNIX evolved, other bigger OSes for bigger minicomputers were being designed and built to directly integrate things like networking, clustering, notations for accessing other machines over the network, accessing filesystems mounted remotely over the network, file versioning and so on.
People brought up on Unix look at that and see needless complexity, but it isn't.
VMS' complex pathnames are the visible sign of an OS which natively understands that it's one node on a network, that currently-mounted disks can be mounted on more than one network nodes even if those nodes are running different OS versions on different CPU architectures. It's an OS that understands that a node name is a flexible concept that can apply to one machine, or to a cluster of them, and every command from (the equivalent of) `ping` to (the equivalent of) `ssh` can be addressed to a cluster and the nearest available machine will respond and the other end need never know it's not talking to one particular box.
50 years later and Unix still can't do stuff like that. It needs tons of extra work with load-balancers and multi-homed network adaptors and SANs to simulate what VMS did out of the box in the 1970s in 1 megabyte of RAM.
The Unix was only looks simple because the implementors didn't do the hard stuff. They ripped it out in order to fit the OS into 32 kB of RAM or something.
The whole point of Unix was to be minimal, small, and simple.
Only it isn't any more, because now we need clustering and network filesystems and virtual machines and all this baroque stuff piled on top.
The result is that an OS which was hand-coded in assembler and was tiny and fast and efficient on non-networked text-only minicomputers now contains tens of millions of lines of unsafe code in unsafe languages and no human actually comprehends how the whole thing works.
Which is why we've build a multi-billion-dollar industry constantly trying to patch all the holes and stop the magic haunted sand leaking out and the whole sandcastle collapsing.
It's not a wonderful inspiring achievement. It's a vast, epic, global-scale waste of human intelligence and effort.
Because we build a planetary network out of the software equivalent of wet sand.
The point is that it was 1885 and the design was able to support buildings 10× as big without fundamental change.
The Chicago Home Insurance building wasn't very impressive, but its design was. Its design scaled.
When I look at classic OSes of the past, like in this post, I see miracles of design which did big complex hard tasks, built by tiny teams of a few people, and which still works today.
When I look at massive FOSS OSes, mostly, I see ant-hills. It's impressive but it's so much work to build anything big with sand that the impressive part is that it works at all... and that to build something so big, you need millions of workers, and constant maintenance.
If we stopped using sand, and abandoned our current plans, and started over afresh, we could build software skyscrapers instead of ant hills.
But everyone is too focussed on keeping our sand software working on our sand hill OSes that they're too busy to learn something else and start over.
The sort of language policing taking place in TFA is a club: a blunt-force social weapon that (predominantly white) leftists use to keep each other down, by emphasizing the recipient's lack of ideological purity, manifested in this context by being insufficiently sensitive to the possibility of hurting someone's feelings. It's also a great way to make oneself look like one supports causes like anti-racism or decolonialism without having to actually do anything that would require effort or material change to one's lifestyle.
For example: "spook" was allegedly used at some point as a slur against black people, so if you have ever used the term "spooky" in a Hallowe'en context you have committed the immortal sin of doing a structural racism.
To the underemployed university administrative staff who have never experienced real hardships, this sort of thing is a Big Deal(tm), except we can't call it that because it's insensitive to short people. Correction: people experiencing heightlessness.
I wish there was a tailscale-like equivalent without connectivity encryption, for devices which encrypt at the application layer (like almost the entire internet does). We don't always need the lower layers to be encrypted, this is especially computationally expensive for low power devices (think IoT stuff running a tailscale like tunnel).
GRE tunnels exist and I actually use them extensively, but UDP hole punching is not handled so hub-and-spoke architecture is needed for them, no peer to peer meshes with GRE (ip fou).
Are there equivalent libraries out there which do UDP hole punching and unencrypted GRE tunnels following an encrypted handshake to confirm identity?
Largely agree, 19 years here. Good managers and bad managers alike have weaknesses that are largely in-built personality traits. Telling them won't change how they've spent decades behaving.
The two worst managers I had clearly had anger management issues and some sort of inferiority complex, theres no feedback to fix that.
Try to stick with good managers as long as you can, especially if their weaknesses that don't bother you too much, understand where it's coming from, and try not to take it personally.
The 3 examples at the top of the article - unclear guidance, unable to set priorities, and not training new hires .. these are good benign issues that I've seen repeatedly from good managers.
You can remind them in a friendly tone why things are happening -(as they raise yet another low importance high urgency task) "if we keep switching to these urgent but less important tasks, the long-term important things (give examples) you are unhappy with the pace of will continue to be slow". The best outcome tends to be a 20% reduction in the undesired behavior, over many months. It doesn't go away or get unlearned.
Do you mean in the sense that they'll make a token attempt that only stops the laziest among us, or do you mean they'll actually manage to stop it?
Because I don't think their attempts to stop people from recording stuff on their TV's has worked out well. HDMI strippers are cheap and plentiful, though many of them aren't meant to be HDMI strippers and are just out of spec devices because it's cheaper to not implement.
Doesn't Netflix's stuff still end up on pirating sites hours after it releases?
I don't think it's fundamentally possible to prevent people from recording stuff off their output cables using current technology; or at least not long term (until the keys leak). It might happen if those theoretical quantum connection systems work out where you can tell whether the data has already been read or not by checking if the waveform is collapsed (or so I understand, not a physicist).
Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences.
I wonder if this isn't a GDPR violation of a pretty large magnitude? Especially because the way to get removed is this:
> If you want a record removed from the database, please include the BSSID (MAC Address) of the network in question!
There have already been a few wifi tracking cases within the EU where the perpetrators lost. A lot of this was used to track people in things like shopping malls though, so it's not exactly the same, but what came out of them was basically that people have to opt-in rather than opt-out if you want to do any sort of tracking.
Google didn't change it, it embodied it. The problem isn't AI, it's the pervasive culture of PR and advertising which appeared in the 50s and eventually consumed its host.
Western industrial culture was based on substance - getting real shit done. There was always a lot of scammery around it, but the bedrock goal was to make physical things happen - build things, invent things, deliver things, innovate.
PR and ad culture was there to support that. The goal was to change values and behaviours to get people to Buy More Stuff. OK.
Then around the time the Internet arrived, industry was off-shored, and the culture started to become one of appearance and performance, not of substance and action.
SEO, adtech, social media, web framework soup, management fads - they're all about impression management and popularity games, not about underlying fundamentals.
This is very obvious on social media in the arts. The qualification for a creative career used to be substantial talent and ability. Now there are thousands of people making careers out of performing the lifestyle of being a creative person. Their ability to do the basics - draw, write, compose - is very limited. Worse, they lack the ability to imagine anything fresh or original - which is where the real substance is in art.
Worse than that, they don't know what they don't know, because they've been trained to be superficial in a superficial culture.
It's just as bad in engineering, where it has become more important to create the illusion of work being done, than to do the work. (Looking at you, Boeing. And also Agile...)
You literally make more money doing this. A lot more.
So AI isn't really a tool for creating substance. It's a tool for automating impression management. You can create the impression of getting a lot of work done. Or the impression of a well-written cover letter. Or of a genre novel, techno track, whatever.
AI might one day be a tool for creating substance. But at the moment it's reflecting and enabling a Potemkin busy-culture of recycled facades and appearances that has almost nothing real behind it.
Unfortunately it's quite good at that.
But the problem is the culture, not the technology. And it's been a problem for a long time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo (The Tragedy of systemd) is an interesting talk on this topic from the view of someone (Benno Rice) in BSD land. Highly recommended.
EDIT: this is mentioned in the article, thanks koalacola
This is one of the more influential ideas I've ever come across. Not that the actual behaviour of people living on isolated islands briefly visited in wartime matters so much, but it's a good story. If your take away the concept of
"In trying to emulate success by copying without understanding, you may make the error of copying the visible things, rather than the relevant ones."
then it's a pattern than can be seen in all walks of life, rather than just science (where the difference may be particularly stark). I find that many people will now recognise an accusation of "cargoculting" (although I have heard this interpreted as meaning the worship of a British prince).
This event is predicted in Sydney Dekker’s book “Drift into Failure”, which basically postulates that in order to prevent local failure we setup failure prevention systems that increase the complexity beyond our ability to handle, and introduce systemic failures that are global. It’s a sobering book to read if you ever thought we could make systems fault tolerant.
Surprised no one has mentioned another great and similar resource called Rustlings [0] (yes very punny name). You are given some files with todo statements which you'll need to fix and make the code compile and pass all the tests. It's an interactive way to learn which is what got me through learning Rust a few years ago.
FWIW, the book The Identity Trap by Yasha Mounk attributes the popularisation of what it calls the Identity Synthesis to social media such as Tumblr, then later Reddit, Twitter, Instagram; and web sites such as Thought Catalog, later Jezebel, xoJane, Rookie Mag, and the Daily Dot, then everydayfeminism.com, Salon, Vox.
I think it's conceivable that, while these ideas on the left and right later entered all social media and even mainstream media, they originated on Tumblr and 4chan, respectively. I wonder whether one could quantify/measure it somehow.
