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AdamN

4,134karma·1,342submissions·August 27, 2009
about
AWS/Amazon Q - Berlin

Formerly Seattle, Nairobi, NYC:

* AWS Reliability Services (Fault Injection Service) - Region Isolation, AZ Power Outage and other tools for Chaos Engineering * AWS Developer Tools - building software teams to build software for other developers to build software * CTO at Factr - a geo/temporal research aggregation tool for international organizations and media * Founder of Kili.io - a public OpenStack for African markets based in Nairobi. * CTO at Yipit - Built the team and was initial dev (Python, Django, Ubuntu, AWS) * Way back when, I was the CTO of Forsalebyowner.com (acquired by Tribune Interactive).

Get in touch (adam@varud.com) if you have any interest in African technology, governance, Amazon, or anything in between.

recent activity (1,342 total)
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There are other constraints like Five Eyes and bright lines around things like how the US would (usually) ask the German intel agencies to spy on Germans if possible. This is unlike the Chinese who p…
2y ago·view thread
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Europe and US are allies so there is less (but certainly not zero) risk from US controlling European cranes than China controlling them. Also, US has more controls that would prevent them from abusin…
2y ago·view thread
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A large portion of those 200 bips goes back to the customer via points/cash refunds so it's not actually an amount that the interchange captures.
2y ago·view thread
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Three letter agencies are part of politics. For anything this big it's usually all three: 1/ an industry that can benefit from the policy (US-based crane builders), 2/ the government i…
2y ago·view thread
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There are many conditions that confer a narrow fitness advantage and have significant disadvantages too: sickle cell anemia (malaria resistance), diabetes (cold tolerance) are two I can think of off t…
2y ago·view thread
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I doubt it's an ethical choice. Some junior dev in the early days probably just put it in there and now the bureacratic lift required to undo it (and pay for a similar set of analytics instead o…
2y ago·view thread
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Interesting feedback. As you rightly point out, in major tech projects most of these advantages to software don't hold up (determinism, rapid feedback loops, etc...). So I guess everybody is sq…
2y ago·view thread
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We had a small chain in Seattle that was an oldschool holistic health store but also had a modern pharmacy attached. The one location nearest our home unfortunately did not have the pharmacy because …
2y ago·view thread
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Plastic bags are far cheaper and even if they are not really recyclable, they have less of an upstream impact on the environment (a few grams of oil from underground vs a percentage of a tree farm tha…
2y ago·view thread
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Environmentalists can also focus on environmental beauty - which is the primary rationale for reducing single-use plastic bags so they don't end up in trees and on the street. This is more of a …
2y ago·view thread
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Don't want to judge but that's concerning. You can really mess up your internal organs with that much volume (even spread over a year with a family of four).
2y ago·view thread
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In the US, a drug store is a DM with a pharmacy in the back. There are way fewer independent pharmacies in the US nowadays as 'drug stores' have taken over.
2y ago·view thread
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Thanks for article - possibly it's 'retcon nonsense' but the explanation of 'pod' preceding 'iPod' was told to me in the very early days of iPods so if it was made u…
2y ago·view thread
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I got progressives a few months ago - going back to reading glasses
2y ago·view thread
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'pod' comes from Play on Demand and pre-dates the iPod (iPod being an apple branded Play on Demand device).
2y ago·view thread
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Any recommendations on a mind melter?!?!? Something that is logically consistent is my only criterion (not much of a mind melter if it's incosistent within its own world) ... and the writing not…
2y ago·view thread
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Yes. My understanding is that the original album was released as an album but was originally intended to be the soundtrack for the movie - the movie itself was not meant to have any human dialog, jus…
2y ago·view thread
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It is cool and I've seen it (it's what I was referencing above). The original concept though was to purely have the album match the movie with no transmissions at all (the version I'd …
2y ago·view thread
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The movie I'd like to see is For All Mankind without the spoken audio recordings from Apollo but with the album that was originally meant to be the soundtrack.
2y ago·view thread
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It doesn't seem like a 'problem'. For new tech, the emphasis should always be on pro users first (even if they don't initially adopt it because of the long lead times for those ind…
2y ago·view thread
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You can buy different fertilizer for rhododendron to change the color.
2y ago·view thread
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I had 'swamp carrots' for lack of a better word a few months ago at an amazing restaurant in Berlin. Fundamentally different than a regular carrot - super smooth but crisp flesh, almost cre…
2y ago·view thread
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syn ... ack ... synack
2y ago·view thread
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There was an IBM article a while back advocating for '5 Hows' as a replacement for '5 Whys' with this logic. How was it possible for this to happen and that should be the root que…
2y ago·view thread
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Rail/Road doesn't compare to ships in terms of throughput by weight so the land route to China from Russia, even if the freight train system were robust, would not handle the same amounts th…
2y ago·view thread
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The problem was that it was more like a bank. Person gives you $9k cash, you add that to their account but it doesn't work so you push the button again. Now the computer thinks you should have …
2y ago·view thread
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Any car can have a governor installed and some parents do it. I believe many modern cars have this integrated and can do things like notify the owner even if a limit is exceeded.
2y ago·view thread
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An electronic governor wouldn't care about that. The important engineering issue for an ICE car would be the gear ratios of the upper gears but that's already pretty well handled. Fundament…
2y ago·view thread