batbomb (u/batbomb) - Readit News

batbomb commented on Experimental USAF space plane breaks record for orbital spaceflight techcrunch.com/2019/08/26... · Posted by u/lil-scamp

nwallin · 7 years ago

There are two groups of people who take pictures of satellites:

1. Amateur astronomers like this guy.

2. Nation states who take clandestine photos of other nation's spy satellites. These pictures are better, but you haven't seen them.

For everything else, there's some guy working in the lab who's like, "oh, you want a picture of our satellite? Of course, there's like 40 of them on our press site. Do you need more? I can ask around and see if anyone's taken selfies from interesting angles." So there's no open institutional force behind it. So the only reasonable outcome of natural market forces is that amateur astronomers create the best pictures of satellites in orbit.

Amateur astronomer isn't a slur either, if that was your point. Take a look at the galleries on cloudnights, a lot of it wouldn't look out of place on NASA/ESA homepages.

batbomb · 7 years ago

(3) Astronomers - usually not on purpose

batbomb commented on How Uber Got Lost nytimes.com/2019/08/23/bu... · Posted by u/braythwayt

jfoster · 7 years ago

If it's so easy to compete, why aren't there more competitors with a larger market share? I don't know of any ride share market with more than two major players.

US: Uber / Lyft

South East Asia: Grab / GoJek

Australia: Mainly just Uber (lots of smaller players but none with very significant market share)

batbomb · 7 years ago

Uber is worldwide - I’ve used it on 4 continents. I actually signed up for it when in South Africa.

Considering they sold their business to Grab, I think you could safely say Uber+Grab are as close to a global service as you can get, and probably represents a significant fraction (though maybe not 50%+) of the global market

batbomb commented on Bill Hader Channels Tom Cruise – DeepFake [video] youtube.com/watch?v=VWrhR... · Posted by u/sinak

batbomb · 7 years ago

I've been thinking a lot about this one, and it gets a ton of help in the fact that Bill Hader is actually good at facial impressions, and that's what really sells it.

batbomb commented on Python Is Eating the World zdnet.com/article/python-... · Posted by u/gilad

CydeWeys · 7 years ago

It's not my project; I'm just a collaborator. My experience has been that a very tiny minority of Python code out there is written in this style, so unless you're only starting projects from scratch, you can't benefit from it.

batbomb · 7 years ago

you can gradually type (probably don't use --strict in that case). It might not be a ton of benefit if you aren't actually writing new code though.

There's a good document on this:

https://mypy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/existing_code.html

batbomb commented on Python Is Eating the World zdnet.com/article/python-... · Posted by u/gilad

CydeWeys · 7 years ago

Here's some rational "hate" for Python then.

I just returned to Python for the first time in a little while to collaborate on a side project and ran into a few tricky-to-debug errors that caused a fair bit of lost time. Know what the errors were?

In one case, I was iterating over the contents of what was supposed to be a list, but in some rare circumstances could instead be a string. Instead of throwing a type error, Python happily went along with it, and iterated over each character in the string individually. This threw a wrench into the works because the list being iterated over was patterns, and when you apply a single character as a pattern you of course match much more than you're expecting.

And another one, I typoed a variable name as groups_keys instead of group_keys (or vice-versa, I don't remember). Instead of just throwing an error, Python happily went along with it, used an uninitialized value, and then all the logic broke.

There's entire classes of errors you can cause yourself in Python that aren't possible in stronger, statically-typed languages. For a large project, I'd pick the old and boring Java over Python every time.

batbomb · 7 years ago

okay, so use type annotations and mypy --strict

batbomb commented on US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers theverge.com/2019/8/11/20... · Posted by u/Grazester

wincy · 7 years ago

There’s a part of me that misses T9 texting on my cell phones. There was a time that I was very good at T9, and because it was deterministic (with auto complete off) you could text without looking and it’d text exactly what you meant. Definitely can’t do that now, and voice controls aren’t as good.

batbomb · 7 years ago

I can text without looking on iPhone 5/SE, but that went away with the 8

batbomb commented on US Visa Forms DS-160, 260 Has Social Media Questions Now – Samples redbus2us.com/us-visa-for... · Posted by u/elliekelly

Someone1234 · 7 years ago

I literally could not fill this out without perjuring myself. They say you need to list even unknown/closed/deleted accounts for the last five years. I don't know them all.

This either feels like an out of touch attempt by an older generation who doesn't understand social media (only uses Facebook, etc), or a huge honey trap tricking people into inadvertently "lying" to the USG. They can then use these mistakes to then revoke anyone's status after the fact at a whim (inc. for political reasons).

It reminds me of the pre-ACA health insurance forms, they were designed as huge "gotchas" so they could revoke as needed ("undisclosed pre-existing conditions"). This has that exact same feeling.

Also I wonder if a low/no social media presence will be held against you? I'm assuming it will.

batbomb · 7 years ago

For my fiancée, she deleted her facebook a long time ago, and she never paid attention to the username. We just made a best attempt at guessing the “user name”

batbomb commented on Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi potatofrom.space/post/via... · Posted by u/Pneumaticat

batbomb · 7 years ago

It’s always easier to just wireshark for an IP address that has access (in hotels too) and then clone the MAC adddress.

batbomb commented on How Uber, Facebook and Netflix Do SSH gravitational.com/blog/ho... · Posted by u/yankcrime

batbomb · 7 years ago

I'd like to see an MFA-version of Kerberos/kinit, and a PAM module that checks for ticket revocation on login.

That's not so different from BeyondCorp and Uber's model.

Alternatively, some kind of OpenID Connect init (oidcinit) to get a JWT and then a PAM module like the kerberos one (which also checks the JWT's Key Id for revocation on authentication)

batbomb commented on Anyone made the jump from MySQL to PostreSQL? It is worth it? old.reddit.com/r/PHP/comm... · Posted by u/hu3

IMTDb · 7 years ago

If your project is already on MySQL and you have no issue => Don't change anything

If your project is already on MySQL and you have issues => understand the issues you are facing and make sure that moving to Postgres would fix them (99% chance it won't)

If you have a new project and have very precise informations about the constraint you will face (pretty rare) => Do your research and choose what's best for your use case

If you have a new project and have only got a vague idea of what you are going to need/face 5 years down the road => Postgres is a slightly better choice than MySQL due to the feature set. Unless you have some other reason to go for MySQL (expertise, ...)

batbomb · 7 years ago

There's some caveats there.

If you are just running a web app, then this is the correct answer. If your business is in your database, you employ data analysts and want to gleam some additional insights from your database, then it might be worth a look, though most people who chose MySQL did so because they were building a web applications and don't employ analysts.