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colmmacc

3,860 karmajoined 16 лет назад
Colm MacCárthaigh : member of the Apache HTTPd development team , VP/Distinguished Engineer working on Amazon Web Services; s2n (TLS/SSL), IAM, EC2, Nitro Enclaves, ELB, S3, Route 53, CloudFront and anti-DDOS. Also: musician. All comments represent my own private opinion only.

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colmmacc
·5 дней назад·discuss
You're right but in my experience in Washington state - Park rangers, forest fire marshals, and reservation police will all rigorously enforce the bans in places that are prone to wild fires. The local community won't have much sympathy either. People get how dumb that is. You also see bans enforced in very well off communities that basically have their own police force too. It's fascinating how these micro-cultures all self-regulate.
colmmacc
·9 дней назад·discuss
32-bits are great for recording too because they do an incredible job of capturing the dynamic range without having to be precise on the preamp settings. It removes an entire job from the recording workflow.

192 for mixing and mastering can be useful especially if you're doing a lot of effects, especially anything that pitch shifts. But I've seen low quality phone-microphone recordings make it to the master; if you capture lightning in a bottle, it hardly matters what the settings were, what the microphone was, or anything else.
colmmacc
·в прошлом месяце·discuss
Unless it is very specific to a proprietary product, craftspeople take their jigs with them from job to job, building up a personal library over a career. As a software developer I've always had a well-tuned IDE and shell config in a safe place.

Something I think about a lot is what is the equivalent for the software builders of today using AI tools? how do make these harnesses exportable and portable? You might think employers would be against this; make it more costly to leave. But I actually think most will favor this because it makes people more productive more quickly. But we have to find ways to normalize it and show that there are no security leaks in the process (like might make it in to a set of personal steering prompts).
colmmacc
·2 месяца назад·discuss
Reed-Solomon is an Erasure code, and I definitely wouldn't look to that for Secret Splitting. Those leakage models are gnarly. But if you want something else that is more general - there are Monotone Span Programs. Seriously underused.
colmmacc
·2 месяца назад·discuss
Related: https://observer.com/2026/03/the-catholic-priest-who-helped-...

Chris Olah, one of Anthropic’s co-founders, got in touch. What followed was, by McGuire’s own description, mind-blowing. “They basically were asking for direct help from the Vatican to convene and help the industry, because the industry was going so fast down this road,” he recalled.
colmmacc
·3 месяца назад·discuss
If GitHub flipped a switch and enabled IPv6 it would instantly break many of their customers who have configured IP based access controls [1]. If the customer's network supports IPv6, the traffic would switch, and if they haven't added their IPv6 addresses to the policy ... boom everything breaks.

This is a tricky problem; providers don't have an easy way to correlate addresses or update policies pro-actively. And customers hate it when things suddenly break no matter how well you go about it.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/organizat...
colmmacc
·4 месяца назад·discuss
The four essential freedoms of the Free Software movement are ...

1. The freedom to run the program as you wish 2. The freedom to study how it works and modify it (which requires access to source code) 3. The freedom to redistribute copies to help others 4. The freedom to distribute modified versions, so the whole community benefits from your improvements

To my mind ... GenAI coding make all of these far more realizable, especially for "normal people", than CopyLeft ever has. Let's go through them ...

Want to run a program as you wish? Great! It's easier than ever to build a replacement. Proprietary or non-free software is just as vulnerable to reimplementation as Copyleft is.

Want to study a how a program works and to modify it? This is now much more achievable.

Want the freedom to redistribute copies to help others? Build your own version! It may not even be copyrightable if it's 100% generated (IANAL).

Want to distribute modified versions? yes! see previous.

I dunno; seems like generative coding can be as much a liberator as any kind of problem.
colmmacc
·4 месяца назад·discuss
EC only works if parents are the sole carers, and every success story I've heard had one main parent doing 90% of the care-taking. No daycare would do it, and if you can find a nanny, au-pair, grand-parent or other carer who is up for it ... small kids still just behave differently around different people. If they have a different level of comfort, anxiety, or reluctance with a person it breaks down.
colmmacc
·4 месяца назад·discuss
Our two year old is potty training right now, and this was definitely a factor for us. We had to wait until it could be explained. Another factor is that diapers are now so absorbent that the kid feels no real discomfort from a pee or a poop. His main motivation is peer pressure and to be a bigger kid; concepts he's only recently caught.
colmmacc
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
That's almost certainly right. I couldn't see that as anything other than "Teal" but Éalú makes perfect sense especially thematically.
colmmacc
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
That does make more sense.
colmmacc
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
Native Irish Speaker and Sci-Fi fan here. What an unexpected delight. For those who might not pick it up , the author name "Máiréad Ní Ghráda" is that of an unmarried (that's the "Ní") woman ("Máiréad" which is like a variation of Mary).

Here's my Translations of the Chapter titles. I'm pretty sure many of these have old-Irish style séimhiú (a dot above a consonant denotes what would now be a h after the consonant) in the originals that have not been translated by the OCR, so there are several missing h letters. If I weren't on a plane over Afghanistan, I'd download the PDF to check. Will update the repo when I can!

   Pláinéid na feaca Súil Duine riamh = A planet no person's eyes have ever seen
   An Radarc, tríd an gCiandracán = the view throughout the [Ciandracan] (this is a compound proper noun, "Cian" is "head" or "brain" and "racán" could be visor or rocket)
   An Turas go Manannán = the Trip to Manannán
   Manannán = Manannán (it's a noun, which is very similar to the Irish term for the Manx and the Isle of Mann). 
   Muintear Manannáin = the people of Manannán
   na 'Cráidmí' = the Craidmi (I think it's just a plural noun)
   An tÁrd-Máigistir = the high Magistrate, or possibly the supreme magistry
   An Priorún = the Priory
   Oidce sa Coill = The class/lesson/teaching in the woods/forest
   An tinneall = the fire
   Oidce tar Oidceanta = Lesson upon lesson
   Lug Lám-fada = the long-armed lug
   An Tróid leis na 'Cráidmí' = The war with the Craidmi
   Diogaltas = Revenge
   An téalod = not sure about this one
colmmacc
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
Grafton St buskers at their best are really really good, but there are also some very average buskers there every day too. New Orleans is a stand-out in the US where you can find world-class jazz bands playing on the streets.

Nashville has plenty in the evenings, and then you can find hot spots in some cities. I've seen regular buskers in Boston, Seattle, Sarasota, and Boulder - usually in pedestrianized touristy quarters.
colmmacc
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
Lesser known but possibly more relevant to most HN readers are Feynman's lectures on computation - https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/Gentoomen%20Library/Extra/Richard... . There's some really great explanations in there of computability, information theory, entropy, thermodynamics, and more. Very little of it is now out-dated.
colmmacc
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
I don't support this kind of detention, but the case reads like he overstayed his original conditions of entry.

According to the court order, he entered the US on the Visa Waiver Program in 2009. He may have a work permit now because anyone can file for an Employment Authorization Document (EAD) through an I-765 while they are applying for a green card through marriage, but there's no indication that he had work permits before that. I've encountered Irish people throughout the US in similar situations.
colmmacc
·6 месяцев назад·discuss
I am very petty about this one bug and have a very old axe to grind that this reminded me of! Way back in 2011 CloudFlare launched an incredibly poorly researched feature to just return CNAME records at a domain apex ... RFCs be damned.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/zone-apex-naked-domain-root-doma... , and I quote directly ... "Never one to let a RFC stand in the way of a solution to a real problem, we're happy to announce that CloudFlare allows you to set your zone apex to a CNAME."

The problem? CNAMEs are name level aliases, not record level, so this "feature" would break the caching of NS, MX, and SOA records that exist at domain apexes. Many of us warned them at the time that this would result in a non-deterministic issue. At EC2 and Route 53 we weren't supporting this just to be mean! If a user's DNS resolver got an MX query before an A query, things might work ... but the other way around, they might not. An absolute nightmare to deal with. But move fast and break things, so hey :)

In earnest though ... it's great to see how now CloudFare are handling CNAME chains and A record ordering issues in this kind of detail. I never would have thought of this implicit contract they've discovered, and it makes sense!
colmmacc
·6 месяцев назад·discuss
I've always considered that Tim Jennison quote to be a reference to C.P. Snow's "The Two Cultures" lecture. Steve Jobs' ambition for Apple to be "where the Liberal Arts and Technology meet" also seemed similarly influenced. If you haven't read Snow's lecture, it's well worth the quick read.
colmmacc
·7 месяцев назад·discuss
There is a great meditation in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about the differences between riding and driving. Being open to the elements, in and a part of nature, is visceral. Bubbled in a car, our surroundings are observed more than experienced. That's always resonated for me.
colmmacc
·7 месяцев назад·discuss
The transition to 7200 VXRs as core routers really hit a tipping point around 2000. They could handle millions of entries in the FiBs and really led to a relief in pressure. Subsequent devices had to match that.

On the IPv6 side; by 2002, nobody was really experimenting with A6 records any more, and EUI64 was needless. Both were parts of IPv6 designed to facilitate "easy" renumbering, so that single prefixes could be replaced with larger ones. But the ISPs weren't complaining any more about table size.
colmmacc
·7 месяцев назад·discuss
The Oscars, The Golden Globes, the Emmys, just a few!