Medically there are policies in various countries that differ on the term 'dead' or 'clinically dead'. Various places have different standards of dead.
This has a huge effect on organ donation rates. For my medical emergency thank god I live in the US or my organs would have been donated already.
some places may have a policy for either 'respiratory arrest or cardiac arrest after x period' to be considered clinically dead. If I had been in one of those countries my organs would be in many different people's bodies.
someone tried to kill me for exposing them raping my girlfriend and the doctors used experimental oxygenated blood to save my life. I got really drunk the night i was assaulted because of a related incident. During the incident with my gf, her ex and i were trying to locate her after a party (we were in another dorm and she called us on a cell, not hers) and she recollected she didn't know where she was, she was naked, and that some males were holding her close not letting her go. They would only give her clothes after a sexual act was performed. We tried locating her but we were too late. Afterword, I and the girlfriends ex tried pulling the call 'metadata' but it was deleted or i was not allowed to access it.
I have a higher likelihood of suffering a stroke in my 30s due to the fake blood injections.
My roommate was paid to keep watch while the offender tried to suffocate me. While transported to the hospital i lost consciousness for a long time. The hospital pretended like they had consent to inject me with the fake blood. The hospital covered up the rohypnol in my system. The nurse there assumed i tried to slip a gril a roofied drink and failed. The college buried the report, blaming it all on me. My parents were shamed. My girlfriend ended up dating the offender for 2 years due to violent threats on family. The offender got away with sexual assault against me (buck breaking). The offender stuck his dick up my ass so I wouldn't tell anyone of the event (i am male and it almost worked). The only reason I survived is that I pretended to die (thanks burn notice) only for the offender to realize he didn't want to kill anyone. I had a brown-out of the events for about 1.5 weeks after. This will be my greatest shame for the rest of my life not trying harder to prosecute the incident.
It's worse because the offender was politically connected and there was nothing I could do about the situation at the time i regained recollection. The offender also had large resources to pay ex spooks to keep the situation normal (for him), and digging up dirt on me and my family.
feathers need to be looked after. Neither is it true that the offcodes are algae,
but they are kept half-
gassed, but they are too muddy, and they are scarce.
Can't use my Nest lock to let guests into my house. I'm pretty sure their infrastructure is hosted in Google Cloud. So yeah... definitely some stuff lost.
You have my honest sympathy because of the difficulties you now suffer through, but it bears emphasizing: this is what you get when you replace what should be a physical product under your control with Internet-connected service running on third-party servers. IoT as seen on the consumer market is a Bad Idea.
I am pretty sure there are smart locks that don't rely on an active connection to the cloud. The lock downloads keys when it has a connection and a smartphone can download keys. This means they work even if no active internet connection at the time the person tries to open. If the connection was dead the entire time between creating the new key and the person trying to use the lock it still wouldn't work.
If there are not locks that work this way it sure seems like there should be. Using cloud services to enable cool features is great. But if those services are not designed from the beginning with fallback for when the internet/cloud isn't live that is something that is a weakness that often is unwise to leave in place imo.
FWIW - The Nest lock in question doesn't rely on an active internet connection to work. If it can't connect, it can still be unlocked using the sets of PINs you can setup for individual users (including setting start/end times and time of day that the codes are active). There's even a set of 9V battery terminals at the bottom in case you forget to change the batteries that power the lock.
This does mean you need to setup a code in advance of people showing up, but it's an under 30 second setup that I've found simpler than unlocking once someone shows up. The cameras dropping offline are a hot mess though, since those have no local storage option.
It may not be worth the complexity to give users the choice. If I were to issue keys to guests this way I would want my revocations to be immediately effective no matter what. Guest keys requiring a working network is a fine trade-off.
You can have this without user intervention - have the lock download an expiration time with the list of allowed guest keys, or have the guest keys public-key signed with metadata like expiration time.
If the cloud is down, revocations aren't going to happen instantly anyway. (Although you might be able to hack up a local WiFi or Bluetooth fallback.)
It's a fake trade-off, because you're choosing between lo-tech solution and bad engineering. IoT would work better if you made the "I" part stand for "Intranet", and kept the whole thing a product instead of a service. Alas, this wouldn't support user exploitation.
Yeah, my dream device would be some standard app architecture that could run on consumer routers. You buy the router and it's your family file and print server, and also is the public portal to manage your IoT devices like cameras, locks, thermostats, and lights.
I don't use the features, but I know my Qnap keeps touting IoT so they might be worth checking out as well.
It's also my Plex media server, file server, VPN, I run some containers on there. I used to use it as a print server but my new printer is wireless so I never bothered
Don't be ridiculous. Real alternatives would include P2P between your smart lock and your phone app or a locally hosted hub device which controls all home automation/IoT, instead of a cloud. If the Internet can still route a "unlock" message from your phone to your lock, why do you require a cloud for it to work?
Or use one of the boxes with combination lock that you can screw onto your wall for holding a physical key. Some are even recommended by insurance companies.
Any key commands they have already set up will still work. Nest is pretty good at having network failures fail to a working state.
They might not be able to actively open the lock over the network is the only change.
Sure you can, but you'll need to give them your code or the master code. Unless you've enabled Privacy Mode, in which case... I don't know if even the master code would work.
Everyone talking about security and not replacing locks with smart locks seems to forget that you can just kick the fucking door down or jimmy a window open.
"Cloud Automotive Collision Avoidance and Cloud Automotive Braking services are currently unavailable. Cloud Automotive Acceleration is currently accepting unauthenticated PUT requests. We apologise for any inconvenience caused."
Our algorithms have detected unusual patterns and we have terminated your account as per clause 404 in Terms And Conditions. The vehicle will now stop and you are requested to exit.
I keep trying to explain to people that our customers don’t care that there is someone to blame they just want their shit to work. There are advantages to having autonomy when things break.
There’s a fine line or at least some subtlety here though. This leads to some interesting conversations when people notice how hard I push back against NIH. You don’t have to be the author to understand and be able to fiddle with tool internals. In a pinch you can tinker with things you run yourself.
> I keep trying to explain to people that our customers don’t care that there is someone to blame they just want their shit to work. There are advantages to having autonomy when things break.
There are also advantages to being part of the herd.
When you are hosted at some non-cloud data center, and they have a problem that takes them offline, your customers notice.
When you are hosted at a giant cloud provider, and they have a problem that takes them offline, your customers might not even notice because your business is just one of dozens of businesses and services they use that aren't working for them.
Of course customers don't care about the root cause. The point of the cloud isn't to have a convenient scapegoat to punt blame to when your business is affected. It's a calculated risk that uptime will be superior compared to running and maintaining your own infrastructure, thus allowing your business to offer an overall better customer experience. Even when big outages like this one are taken into account, it's often a pretty good bet to take.
The small bare metal hosting company I use for some projects hardly goes down, and when there is an issue, I can actually get a human being on the phone in 2 minutes. Plus, a bare metal server with tons of RAM costs less than a small VM on the big cloud providers.
Hetzner is an example. Been using them for years and it's been a solid experience so far. OVH should be able to match them, and there's others, I'm sure.
Cloud costs roughly 4x than bare metal for sustained usage (of my workload). Even with the heavy discounts we get for being a large customer it’s still much more expensive. But I guess op-ex > cap-ex
Lots of responses, and I appreciate them, but I'm specifically looking for a bare metal server with "tons of RAM", that is at the same or lower price point as a google/microsoft/amazon "small" node.
I've never seen any of the providers listed offer "tons of ram" (unless we consider hundreds / low thousands of megabytes to be "tons") at that price point.
I've had pretty good luck with Green House Data's Colo Service and their Cloud offerings. A couple of RU's in the data center can host 1000's of VM's in multi-regions with great connectivity between them.
I've a question that always stopped me going that route, what happens when a disk or other hardware fails on these servers? beyond data loss I mean, like physically what happens who carries out the repair how long does it takes
For Hetzner you have to monitor your disks and run RAID-1. As soon as you get the first SMART-Failures you can file a ticket and either replace ASAP or shedule a time. This happened to me a few times in the past years it always has been just 15-30m delay after filing the ticket and at most 5 minutes downtime. You have to get your Linux stuff right through i.e. booting with a new disk.
If you don't like that you can order a KVM-VM with dedicated cores at similiar prices and the problem is not yours anymore.
Most bare metal providers nowadays contact you just like AWS and say "hey your hardware is failing get a new box.". Unless it's something exotic it's usually not long for setup time, and in some cases just like a VM it's online in a minute or two.
Thanks a million. Those prices look similar to what I've used in the past, it's just been a long time since I've gone shopping for small scale dedicated hosting.
You weren't kidding, 1:10 ratio to what we pay for similar VPS. And guaranteed worldwide lowest price on one of them. Except we get free bandwidth with ours.
There are some whole argue that the resiliency of cloud providers beats on prem or self hosted, and yet they’re down just as much or more (GCP, Azure, and AWS all the same). Don’t take my word for it; search HN for “$provider is down” and observe the frequency of occurrences.
You want velocity for your dev team? You get that. You want better uptime? Your expectations are gonna have a bad time. No need for rapid dev or bursty workloads? You’re lighting money on fire.
Disclaimer: I get paid to move clients to or from the cloud, everyone’s money is green. Opinion above is my own.
Solutions based on third-party butts have essentially two modes: the usual, where everything is smooth, and the bad one, where nothing works and you're shit out of luck - you can't get to your data anymore, because it's in my butt, accessible only through that butt, and arguably not even your data.
With on-prem solutions, you can at least access the physical servers and get your data out to carry on with your day while the infrastructure gets fixed.
Any solution would be based on third parties, the robust solution is either to run your own country with fuel sources for electricity and army to defend the datacenters or rely on multiple independent infrastructures. I think the latter is less complex.
This is a ridiculous statement. Surely you realise that there is a sliding scale.
You can run your own hardware and pull in multiple power lines without establishing your own country.
I’ve ran my own hardware, maybe people have genuinely forgotten what it’s like, and granted, it takes preparation and planning and it’s harder than clicking “go” in a dashboard. But it’s not the same as establishing a country and source your own fuel and feed an army. This is absurd.
Correct. Most CFO's I've run into as of late would rather spend $100 on a cloud vm than deal with capex, depreciation, and management of the infrastructure. Even though doing it yourself with the right people can go alot further.
The GP's statement is about relying on third parties, multiple power lines with generators you don't own on the other side falls under it.
Fun related fact: My first employee's main office was in former electonics factory in Moscow's downtown powered by 2 thermal power stations (and no other alternatives), which have exact same maintenance schedule.
Assuming you have data that is tiny enough to fit anywhere other than the cluster you were using.
Assuming you can afford to have a second instance with enough compute just sitting around.
Assuming it's not the HDDs, RAID controller, SAN, etc which is causing the outage.
Assuming it's not a fire/flood/earthquake in your datacenter causing the outage.
Ah, yes, I will never forget running a site in New Orleans, and the disaster preparedness plan included "When a named storm enters or appears in the Gulf of Mexico, transfer all services to offsite hosting outside the Gulf Coast". We weren't allowed to use Heroku in steady state, but we could in an emergency. But then we figured out they were in St. Louis, so we had to have a separate plan for flooding in the Mississippi River Valley.
Oh that’s weird, because it totally worked for me with “butts” as a euphemism for “people”, as in “butt-in-seat time” — relying on a third-party service is essentially relying on third party butts (i.e. people), and your data is only accessible through those people, whom you don’t control.
And then “your data is in my butt” was just a play on that.
I keep forgetting that I have it on, my brain treats the two words as identical at this point. The translator has this property, which I also tend to forget about, that it will substitute words in your HN comment if you edit it.
But yeah, it's still a thing, and the message behind it isn't any less current.
I made IoT using cheap (arduino, nrf24l01+, sensors/actuators) for local device telemetry, MQTT, node-red, and Tor for connecting clouds of endpoints that aren't local.
Long story short, its an IoT that is secure, consisting of a cloud of devices only you own.
Not really. Tariffs have hit e.g. Norway as well. Most of the countries affected are too small to complain - but they are quietly diversifying as a response.
I am currently wondering what the US reaction will be to the UK, should we refuse to fold to their current demands regarding not only Huawei, but also the demands to change our laws in order to create a more US friendly regulatory environment.
As British subjects, we are of course only allowed to divine such knowledge by the correct interpretation of which particular flowers have been chosen to adorn Lizzie's hat and the precise selection of jewelery she is wearing.
You might be right, but after the pomp and ceremony is over and syrupy vomit of 'special relationship' and some-such has been expelled, hopefully some real business will get done?
I feel like we are so close to wirelessly monitoring all brain waves (next 50 years) we will probably be able to, in real time, recognize and diagnose abnormal brain patterns. I think it would be promising if we get this sensor tech up and then perhaps deploy nanotech to interfere with maladaptive brain patterns. The ethics of such a device is considerably sticky.
paraphrased: "wireless non-contact mind reading tech may be cheap and mass producible within the next 50 years."
the only rate limiting step with his method of decoding thoughts is that it takes time under a high energy device to pair associations in the brain.
Think of how much screen time we currently use. If we could pair a wireless 'headset' like headphones while looking at pictures on a screen it would be possible to build a brain bank of children->tenenagers. Currently we just need a lot of processing power and reserved bandwidth on the internet to do some cool stuff.
In my honest opinion as a neuroscientist, we are not that close. We have only an obtuse understanding of how the brain works. Most 'mind reading' demonstrations, though cool, occur within highly constrained circumstances and training and test data, and even then perform just a bit over chance. For context, we barely achieve good accuracy classifying ASD vs typical development, ADHD vs typical development using neuroimaging, much less the much harder problem of classifying and decoding the contents of our thoughts. Slightly more impressive results have been achieved in studies collecting data from actual brain implants found in epilepsy patients, but even then, I do not see this as something that can be a reliable technology in a long long time.
I appreciate someone in the field taking the time to respond. I think we have the ability to scale our knowledge with machine learning and mass monitoring. Again i recognize that 50 years is extremely optimistic. Ethics, money, and politics never agree.
The poster before you is presumably talking about physical limitations of the current measurement methods which leads to very high noise. I doubt machine learning can overcome that.
1. Our understanding of the brain is poor, and I think that will be necessary to have good machine decoding. In principal, a machine learning algorithm does not need to know how the brain works to make an accurate decoding prediction, but I suspect understanding will be needed to help construct and constrain machine learning models learn to deal with the myriad of mental states, intentions, emotions, etc that can occur. While we can train classifiers better than chance to identify whether one or another item is observed, remembered, etc, these training are quite constrained to a type of information or class. I imagine those classifiers are hopeless when you start performing another activity or mental state, and the machine would need to recognize the new state and apply different decoders.
Second, yes there is too much noise in most available methods (EG, fMRI, MEG) and the information is not dense enough (spatial, temporal resolution) and not specific enough to the type of activity (excitation, inhibition, chemical diffusion, etc). Electrodes have done cool things, but I suspect that even millions of wires would not provide enough information and types of information to provide a full fledged brain interface.
Exactly. If the public justification for a behavior doesn't actually make sense and the behavior continues then there's probably another private motivation which is being satisfied.
This has a huge effect on organ donation rates. For my medical emergency thank god I live in the US or my organs would have been donated already.
some places may have a policy for either 'respiratory arrest or cardiac arrest after x period' to be considered clinically dead. If I had been in one of those countries my organs would be in many different people's bodies.
I thank god every day that I was born in the US.