incision's comments

incision | 11 years ago | on: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

> I find it weird that guides like this still suggest seperate root, home, boot and swap partitions.

The classic reason is preventing space / inode exhaustion of / by user accounts and preventing time of check, time of use vulns. Tough the latter have since been addressed in other ways [1]. There's also a certain amount of convenience and cleanliness to separating system and data that way.

1: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Security#Preventing_lin...

incision | 11 years ago | on: Ten Years of World of Warcraft

Wow, it has probably been 15 years since I read something from Raph Koster. So long that I had to think for a bit to recall why that name didn't quite feel right - until Designer Dragon popped into my head.

I can't disagree with a single thing said here.

I tend to think of WoW as the Buy-N-Large generation ship of gaming.

It created an entire word that was in some sense a paradise, but at the exclusion of all the awesome, frustrating, exciting, tedious richness that came before it.

incision | 11 years ago | on: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

What are there, 1B Android users? I'm sure Google would like that to be 7B.

I'd wager the complaints of the sort of people who frequent lobste.rs or HN are not representative of the majority of current users and almost certainly not of the next 6B potential users.

Overall, it's everything Google said they would do with material [1].

It's fine to dislike these things, I don't necessarily like them myself, but claiming they're simply wrong or "for no reason" is somewhere between angry and lazy.

Just a glance at the new vs old keyboard or gmail shows a direction - moving / duplicating interactions toward the bottom right (logical as screens get bigger), breaking out punctuation into discrete keys (presumably logical given the way most people actually type).

The overall restyling is adding consistency between apps and particularly between mobile and the desktop.

Animations are really valuable anytime someone doesn't come to the table with a complete mental model of how something fits together already. Basically, they're not for you Mr. Programmer.

1: http://www.google.com/design/

incision | 11 years ago | on: Spooky Alignment of Quasars Across Billions of Light-years

>"The new VLT results indicate that the rotation axes of the quasars tend to be parallel to the large-scale structures in which they find themselves. So, if the quasars are in a long filament then the spins of the central black holes will point along the filament."

Though I have no real idea what I'm talking about...

This feels intuitive to my mental picture of the universe.

The description of this large scale structure and the expansion of the universe has always put me in mind of watching the patterns form and reform from drips in a soapy sink or an elastic fabric being pulled apart.

In both cases, you end up with these big expanses bordered by dense stringy areas. That the motion of the stuff that snaps / shears / collapses or whatever into these strings and knots would be aligned seems perfectly logical.

incision | 11 years ago | on: Primary Data Emerges from Stealth with Woz as Chief Scientist

As the article points out, Woz was Chief Scientist at Fusion-IO [1] as well. That company struggled [2] before being acquired by SanDisk for less than the IPO price.

It was a different story in 2011 when Woz went on CNBC and said that the company "has grown as fast as Apple so far" [3] pushing the stock to the highest point it would ever reach just a month before the share lock-up expiration [4].

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion-io

2: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/25/fusionio_flasher_fla...

3: http://m.cnbc.com/us_news/45074931

4: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/12/06/fusion-io-...

incision | 11 years ago | on: Intro to Docker and how we use it at WriteLaTeX

Yeah, those are layers in the image. That image [1] (727MB) is built on buildpack-deps [2] (695MB) which is itself built on the base jessie (154MB).

It would be pretty straightforward to adapt those Dockerfiles to create an image which includes only the dependencies for building node. It would end up looking a lot like 'node:slim' [3] (288MB).

Ideally, Docker will eventually have the functionality to more easily strip out transient requirements like build dependencies from the final images.

1: https://github.com/docker-library/node/blob/013858ac35afb9ca...

2: https://github.com/docker-library/buildpack-deps/blob/a201b1...

3: https://github.com/docker-library/node/blob/013858ac35afb9ca...

incision | 11 years ago | on: Is Docker ready for production?

>"They don't even do what they're advertised to do, ie give you a reliable way to reproduce a build, and they're inflexible for my idea of real-world work with Docker."

Not exactly, as the thread you link points out you can reference an image ID in FROM rather than the name:tag which has potential to change silently.

It's the equivalent of using a package manager against a repo you don't own without pinning - expect problems.

This can be mitigated by FROM'ing via ID or avoided entirely by running your registry where tags are reliable.

Admittedly, these things are not necessarily obvious, but I think it's a bit disingenuous to paint Dockerfiles as worthless or broken.

That said, ShutIt looks very cool and seems to address exactly some of my concerns / desires about working with Docker.

I just don't agree with framing it in opposition to and at the expense of what exists.

There's value in a container description that is fully self-contained, transferable and 'dumb' enough to be transparent.

incision | 11 years ago | on: Is Docker ready for production?

>"We don't need more complex provisioning tools. We have plenty of provisioning tools."

Absolutely.

Thankfully, the Docker team seems in agreement with this based statements about avoiding making Dockerfiles "too clever" and the response to various proposals.

As you point out, most of the "issues" here are really misconceptions.

I expect it's a tough balance for any new(er) project. Maximizing exposure and adoption, but avoiding negative perceptions from being applied in ways aren't optimal.

incision | 11 years ago | on: Singapore Airlines Billed Me $1200 for the Internet

While I certainly question a system that allows a person to run up such a steep tab in the first place, this story smells.

>"So what does it take to rack up $1200 of internet use? In my case, just 155 page views, mostly to my email."

Looking at SA per MB pricing [1] you'd need to pull down just shy of 1.2GB to be charged that much - 7.5MB per "page view". Personally, my Gmail and Outlook Inbox are a few hundred K each.

So maybe the author just doesn't know what he's talking about? according to his bio [2]...

>"Today, I design and code Trend Hunter until 4am because I like it."

It would seem likely that statement is an exaggeration, the one about the number of page views is disingenuous or both.

Either way, the author loses credibility.

In any case, the author is apparently the globe trotting, baja racing, "rule breaking", former banker son of a VC [2] - he can surely afford to pay for - at best - failing to pay attention to the terms.

1: http://www.singaporeair.com/jsp/cms/en_UK/flying_with_us/inf...

2: http://www.trendhunter.com/Jeremy

incision | 11 years ago | on: Barbie Fucks It Up Again

Disappointing book and disappointing voting that saw both submissions of this post buried so quickly - this one was on the front page #30 when I got up for a stretch and buried among weekend posts at #147 when I got back.

I expect this sort of thing is hard for lots of people - those without kids - to empathize with. I doubt I spent much time thinking about such things prior to having a child.

Now though, it has become really clear to me how common stereotypes about gender, race and the like are among things aimed at children.

It's not that this one book is going to ruin someone or that any of the silliness it presents is so awful or dangerous.

It's that those ideas are pervasive, that even if you're filtering what you provide directly to your kids they're still indirectly affected by it - an ever present cloud of nudges and judgments about everything from choice of colors, toys, aspirations and even now how to use computer.

It's ridiculous and wasteful.

incision | 11 years ago | on: IBM Verse

Pretty confusing.

My guess/hope...

This is aiming to be GMail + Google Now for the enterprise. Something that will parse your mail, schedule and contacts to generate suggestions or reminders and create an easily accessible "context" for each.

A workplace client that can generate 'cards', reminders and contextualize common bits of information (Think UPS tracking numbers in GMail - applied to support tickets, physical sites, projects, POs and budgets in an enterprise) with the creepy accuracy of Google Now would actually be interesting - yet another take on unified communications or a skin deep re-imagining of email would not.

incision | 11 years ago | on: Five-year-old passes Microsoft exam

>"...but she was deeply unhappy with her life and the path (and expectations!) her parent put on her."

I find myself thinking about this an awful lot as I raise my first child.

I've never encountered anything on the level of a 12 year in college physics, but I did spend some time with kids who had clearly been reared with such things in mind to much the same effect.

In general I'd caution parents to recognize that children are people, not personal projects or possessions.

incision | 11 years ago | on: The Big Data Brain Drain

>"A child learns to speak and recognize objects from much less data than contemporary machine learning/data mining/AI/whatever you call it needs."

You think?

When a kid starts talking at 1.5, 2, 3 years or whenever they're doing so after being exposed to many thousands of hours of input, much of it effectively guided.

Also, as far as I know, we don't have nearly enough understanding of the way the brain works to make a useful comparison between "records" fed to a model and all the analog input that goes into making a person.

incision | 11 years ago | on: AWS EC2 Container Service

I'm disappointed that this requires an invite, particularly so close after Container Engine which I was able to try out immediately while still watching Cloud Platform Live the other day.

Is this typical for new AWS offerings?

It makes me wonder if it's something that truly isn't ready for prime time, but is being rushed / forced by the mounting Docker hype and GKE announcement.

incision | 11 years ago | on: Philae has landed

>"Why should the comment-parent be flagkilled for expressing an unpopular opinion?"

A comment shouldn't be killed for expressing an unpopular opinion and I don't think this one was.

That comment is a perfect example of how not to state an opinion, unpopular or otherwise.

It states an opinion as absolute and demands proof otherwise while providing none of its own. This is recognized as awful, trollish behavior on any forum.

Further, the opinion stated is derisive and emotional. Finally, the it begs for downvotes repeatedly.

This is exactly the sort of thing that should be killed regardless of the view expressed.

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