dougb's comments | WingNews

dougb | 1 year ago | on: AWS S3 SDK breaks its compatible services

I got bit by this a month ago. You can disable the new behavior by setting 2 environment variables

  export AWS_REQUEST_CHECKSUM_CALCULATION=when_required
  export AWS_RESPONSE_CHECKSUM_CALCULATION=when_required

or adding the following 2 lines to a profile in ~/.aws/config

  request_checksum_calculation=when_required
  response_checksum_validation=when_required

Or just pin your AWS SDK to version before the following.

<https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go-v2/blob/release-2025-01-15...>

<https://github.com/boto/boto3/issues/4392>

<https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/blob/1.37.0/CHANGELOG.rst#L19>

<https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/blob/2.23.0/CHANGELOG.rst#223...>

<https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-java-v2/releases/tag/2.30.0>

<https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-net/releases/tag/3.7.963.0>

<https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-php/releases/tag/3.337.0>

and wait for your S3 Compatible Object store to add a fix to support this.

dougb | 3 years ago | on: How Southwest Airlines melted down

A Friend of a friend is a technical recruiter for SWA. They told me that SWA pays their Software Engineers below market salaries. They complained that because of that, its hard to recruit people, and they end up with mediocre developers.

dougb | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

I was able to copy a c64 cartridge by inserting it crooked and then dumping the memory to floppy disk. Then you could load it and run `sys 32768` to get it to run.

dougb | 3 years ago | on: New open source project: Common Lisp 3D graphics system

I looked, but I couldn't find a .tar.gz or anything. I emailed Joel and asked him to put it up on his github page, https://github.com/jswelling He has something called DrawP3D, but I think its just a library that you can call from C or Fortran that uses the P3D rendering backend. I could be wrong it was a long time ago.

dougb | 3 years ago | on: New open source project: Common Lisp 3D graphics system

Back in the 90s, Joel Welling and Chris Nuuja at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center at CMU developed a similar system called P3D. It was really cool, and they had a bunch of backends to render on different high end graphic workstations. We even had a Pixar Renderman hooked up to a laser disk recorder. You could script a 3D scene with different light sources and cameras and over the course of a week, render some high quality NTSC video.

P3D: a Lisp-based format for representing general 3D models https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/110382.110608

P3D DESCRIPTION AND DEFINITIONS http://netghost.narod.ru/gff/vendspec/p3d/p3d_desc.txt

dougb | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Anyone have stock option horror stories?

I started at Akamai in July 2002 and I received an option grant as part of my offer. Since I had options before, I thought they were all priced at the closing price on the day they were approved by the board. But Akamai had a provision in their option agreement that priced the options at 4 different prices. The price of the first quarter of my stock was the closing price the day the grant was approved by the board. The 2nd quarter was priced 90 days later, the 3rd 90 days after that, and the final price as 270 days after the initial grant. No one mentioned this odd pricing during the interview process, and I never thought to ask about it in the interview process, I just assumed they priced them all at once like my previous options.

I was told after I complained to HR, that they did this for MY benefit! Because their stock went straight to $300/share at the IPO and then started a slow decline. This was a good policy for people that started after the stock hit $300 and before I started because each quarter of their stock was priced lower than the previous quarter. But for those of us that started close to the bottom $2/share, it sucked!

One guy who started after me quit when he found out about the 4 different prices.

dougb | 4 years ago | on: A Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code (2018)

His company is http://www.ave4.com/ I meet him a few times, interviewed to work there (didn't get the job.) I mostly talked to a lawyer who was very nice, but reminded me of Kobayashi from the Usual Suspects. The offices are a bit extravagant with some amazing original artwork on the walls, https://www.jendoco.com/portfolio/fourth-avenue-analytics/

Pre covid he hosted meetups with Pittsburgh's R Users Group, https://www.meetup.com/Pittsburgh-useR-Group/events/26070166...

He is also mentioned in http://www.fortunesformula.com/ which I really enjoyed.

dougb | 6 years ago | on: Covid-19 Open Research Dataset

This is would be the perfect time for IBM to apply all Watson technologies and resources to develop new insight into Covid-19.

dougb | 7 years ago | on: SPARCbook 3000ST

I used a SPARCbook back in 1996 for a business trip to Germany to install our search engine at t-online.de. The CFO of the company wanted to know who had this machine at all times because it was so expensive, around $20k USD. It didn't have any usable battery life, if you tried to do any type of development, it would last about 20 minutes before it shutdown. The many disk partitions made us get creative to fill the 1.2GB disk with data. We had to put files all over the place, and use softlinks get our software to work. This odd setup lead a sysadmin to "clean things up" one afternoon. He delete most of the OS in the process. He was really mad because he had to stay up all night to do a reinstall.

Wow, I forgot about that machine until this post.

dougb | 7 years ago | on: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine

I'd like to see the source code for Altavista released to the Computer History Museum. I think it is of historical significance. If anyone knows who currently has that code, please post a comment. I think there is a lot to learn from examining old computer code.

dougb | 7 years ago | on: Demystifying Radix Trees: How Radix trees made blocking IPs 5000 times faster

Radix Trees are used extensively at Akamai. They are very useful in dealing with blocks of network addresses. When I was there, they had 2 libraries which shared the on disk format. One was mutable and had all sorts of operations you could do on them. The other was immutable and optimized for very fast lookups.

dougb | 7 years ago | on: Toyota Lifts the Veil on Its Guardian Driver-Assist System

I'm reminded of this report from CMU on Toyota's Unintended Acceleration and Software Saftey from a few years ago. https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_... If you haven't seen it before, its an interesting set of slides.

dougb | 7 years ago | on: How to implement a multi-CDN strategy

Doesn't work for streaming Live Events (pay per view), which is the main use case for multi-CDN

dougb | 7 years ago | on: How to implement a multi-CDN strategy

This sounds similar to https://www.conviva.com/precision/

Unfortunately you need to know a lot more and the devil is in the details. Supporting the various streaming devices/browsers is a huge pain in the ass.

Full Disclosure: I worked for both Conviva, and Akamai.

dougb | 7 years ago | on: Google spinoff Dandelion uses ground energy to heat and cool homes

They don't depend on geothermal activity. They depend on the relatively constant temp of the ground below the freeze line. In most places if you go down a few feet the earth is 40-50 degrees F. Its basically a heat pump that uses water instead of air.

My sister outside of Pittsburgh, PA has had a https://www.waterfurnace.com for 17 years. Her system has paid for itself a few times over. She has 1500 ft of plastic tubing burried in her front yard.

dougb | 8 years ago | on: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

The 'ERA' in 'Speedera' was from the first letter of first name of each of the founders, Eric Swildens, Rich Day, and Ajit Gupta.

dougb | 8 years ago | on: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

Makes me wonder if Travis has a connection to Eric through Akamai. Eric's company, Speedera, was also acquired by Akamai in 2005. Travis's company, RedSwoosh, was acquired by Akamai in 2007.

dougb | 9 years ago | on: Cornell wants to drill 2-4mi underground for enhanced geothermal heating

My sister has a http://www.waterfurnace.com with a about 1500 feet of plastic tubing buried in her yard. Works really well.

dougb | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: Moving Out of Silicon Valley because of housing? Where to?

I second Pittsburgh. I moved from Cambridge to Pittsburgh 10 years ago after my first child was born. I have had no trouble finding interesting projects to work on at decent pay. I live in a great neighborhood (Point Breeze) and my 3 kids go to a good school.

Cambridge was great when I was single, but after I got married and had a kid, it didn't look that great. Once I started looking for a place to raise a family, the only affordable options had killer commutes. Pittsburgh is great for families. I highly recommend it.

dougb | 10 years ago | on: Stark images of Shackleton's struggle

I love the ad he placed in the paper, it was perfect. "Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of succes"