Hacker News: M_bara

New comment by M_bara in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

M_bara — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:46:47 +0000

That is why i insist on 1. Streaming replication whether from RDS or my own DB 2. Db dumps shipped to s3 using write only creds or something like rsync.

Streaming gets you PIT recovery while DB dumps give me daily snapshots stored daily for 14 days.

An aside: 15 or so years ago, a work colleague made a mistake and dropped the entire business critical DB - at a critical internet related company - think of continent wide ip issues. I had just joined as a dba and the first thing I’d done was MySQL bin logging. That thing saved our bacon - the drop db statement had been replicated to slaves so we ended up restoring our nightly backup and replaying the binlogs using sed and awk to extract DML queries. Epic 30 minute save. Moral of the story, have a backup of your backup so you can recover when the recovery fails;)

New comment by M_bara in "GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation"

M_bara — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 18:42:15 +0000

And that is why I’d rather work with a smallish and responsible registrar like porkbun - this is after I lost a domain from a “cheap name” registrar.

Personal experience, no relationship to either registrar listed above

New comment by M_bara in "Iran demands Bitcoin fees for ships passing Hormuz during ceasefire"

M_bara — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:31:33 +0000

Honestly, it’s a good counter to get both sides of the coin. At the moment you’ll find BBC, CNN, NYT et al on one end and Al Jazeera on the other. I also look at DW for a more balanced approach. Don’t consume from one camp!

New comment by M_bara in "The Most Accurately Predicted Genocide in History"

M_bara — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 05:38:48 +0000

It’s all about the resources - the gold, the minerals and the farmland. Different groups want to control it from East African proxies for the Middle East. It’s really sad and has the potential to destabilise the region.

New comment by M_bara in "OpenSCAD is kinda neat"

M_bara — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 19:05:24 +0000

Or perhaps take a look at cadquery? It’s also pretty neat - http://cadquery.readthedocs.io/

New comment by M_bara in "I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me"

M_bara — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 18:52:25 +0000

Sashay…

New comment by M_bara in "How can traditional British TV survive the US streaming giants"

M_bara — Sat, 17 May 2025 17:32:37 +0000

I’d pay more for bbc content than i do for Netflix or prime. It’s typically very good content that is strongly geo locked behind iplayer and you have to play whack a mole to get it…

New comment by M_bara in "First Ammonia-Fueled Ship Hits a Snag"

M_bara — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 12:56:49 +0000

If you think this is bad, then the chemicals used in rocketry - read the book ignition [1] - will have you whimpering in a corner. As with any system, risks can be identified and controlled and operationalised - Gasoline has its risks, so does Chlorine trifluoride [2]. Yet both are wildly different and are used in day to day operations.

1. https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride

New comment by M_bara in "First Ammonia-Fueled Ship Hits a Snag"

M_bara — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 12:51:51 +0000

I thought it smells like piss. Rotten eggs - hydrogen sulphide.

New comment by M_bara in "Demand for Starlink in Zimbabwe is overwhelming capacity"

M_bara — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 20:18:32 +0000

Precisely,Safaricom also alleged that they would allow for illegal connections… perhaps they meant connections that we can’t easily wiretap on behalf of the government. Interestingly, during the protests a few months ago, the government severely throttled all external connections by putting a few interfaces down at the fibre sea landing points. Only Starlink users were getting good connectivity. A lot of folks migrated at that point.

New comment by M_bara in "Demand for Starlink in Zimbabwe is overwhelming capacity"

M_bara — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 20:15:15 +0000

Yep, blame my phone’s auto correct…

New comment by M_bara in "Demand for Starlink in Zimbabwe is overwhelming capacity"

M_bara — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 17:42:11 +0000

Same thing in Kenya. A 150km radius around Nairobi is maxed out. I have a fishy kit that can’t join due to capacity issues. In fact, the advent of Starlink - which had acquired 0.5% of the entire market - has rattled the existing players so much that, 1. They’ve doubled available bandwidth for residential plans without increasing cost. Safaricom went way overboard and 5x-ed plans. So if you were on 40mbit for $40 USD, you’d get 200mbit for the same cost. 2. They are all writing letters to the fcc equivalent crying about GSM spectrum interference (duh…) and predatory pricing [1]. I’m all for more competition! I’m only considering moving to Starlink due to frequent fibre cuts.

1. https://www.businessdailyafrica.com/bd/corporate/technology/...

New comment by M_bara in "Highest-resolution images ever captured of the sun’s surface"

M_bara — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 13:25:18 +0000

Stephen Baxter’s Flux has something in that vein

New comment by M_bara in "Two galaxies aligned in a way where their gravity acts as a compound lens"

M_bara — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 21:00:59 +0000

Should work the other way too. Physics and symmetry:)

New comment by M_bara in "HPV vaccination: How the world can eliminate cervical cancer"

M_bara — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 08:51:57 +0000

Take a vacation to somewhere in Africa, see the Mara and get the vaccine there. It does cost about $40 per dose…

New comment by M_bara in "The unnecessary decline of U.S. numerical weather prediction"

M_bara — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 18:13:44 +0000

Missed a chance to reword that epic as a failure to an epic failure

New comment by M_bara in "Love being interrupted when my monitor asks me to accept user agreements"

M_bara — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 20:54:11 +0000

I think the hdmi standard allows for Ethernet over hdmi. That’s a sneaky way in for your tv

New comment by M_bara in "How NASA brought the F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life (2013)"

M_bara — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 18:08:18 +0000

There goes the god Apollo…

New comment by M_bara in "Show HN: Xcapture-BPF – like Linux top, but with Xray vision"

M_bara — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 17:28:05 +0000

We had something similar about 10 years ago where I worked. Customer instances were backed via loopback devices to local disks. We didn’t think of this - face palm - on the loop back devices. What we ended up doing was writing a small daemon to posix fadvise the kernel to skip the page cache… your solution is way simpler and more elegant… hats off to you

New comment by M_bara in "First 'tooth regrowth medicine' to be tested in Japan from Sept. 2024"

M_bara — Sun, 05 May 2024 16:37:21 +0000

This is something life changing for some of us. I grew up in an area where water has a lot of fluoride and we didn’t get to know until I was 16.. side effect is I have very brittle teeth.. I’ve shattered a couple due to bad rice (had a small stone in it), lentils, sliver of bone … Now, the kicker is Colgate et al have been marketing fluoride toothpaste to the same region to people facing fluorosis knowingly - profits above all else. so if this treatment comes through, I’ll be lining up!