All links:
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The Cranberries' 'Linger' - A Wistful '90s Gem That's Pure Irish Poetry ★
That night, in a drizzling rain, a ragtag group of travelers walked from the farmhouse hostel down an old stone road into town. We entered a pub and bellied up to whiskeys and stouts. Everyone was enjoying the “Craic,” Gaelic for “What’s happening?” “What’s good?” Shortly after a band of older men—probably 50 and 60-somethings—stood near the rock fireplace and performed a cover of “Linger” on acoustic guitars, mandolin and violin. Another man stood in front, in his thick sweater and ragged newsboy cap, singing the verses. Then the whole bar joined him for the choruses, as the rain fell outside. “Do you have to let it linger / Do you have to / Do you have to let it linger?” That night on the walk back to the hostel, the clouds broke and the stars shone bright in the Irish mist. O’Riordan’s legacy will not just linger, but live on forever, like the spirit of a Irish patron saint.
I saw her last year in May in concert. The moment her voice joined together with thousands of other British people signing will remain forever in my mind.
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How is poverty changing for higher poverty lines? ★
The case of China is remarkable. As the chart below shows, there has been a dramatic decline in the number of people living in extreme poverty, while at the same time there has been an increase in the number of people living on incomes above $10 a day.
I never imagined that the improvements could be this dramatic in only 20 years.
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Internatul testamentar ★
Pe șesul unui sat din Moldova, o femeie doarme adânc dis-de-dimineață. E trântită cu fața în jos. O mână o ține sub frunte, iar cu cealaltă și-a cuprins copilul de un an și jumătate, lipit de ea. Micuțul privește petele albe de pe cerul azuriu de vară și bolmojește cuvinte răzlețite și înțelese doar de el. Câteva gâze roiesc prin jurul lor, seduse de mirosul de scutec neschimbat de 3 zile și de vodcă „Spicușor”.
Dacă jurnalismul în România ar avea un premiu Pulitzer, articolul ăsta l-ar câștiga de departe. 😞
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Lessons From Hurricane Harvey: Houston’s Struggle Is America’s Tale ★
“Three 500-year floods in three years means either we’re free and clear for the next 1,500 years,” as he put it, “or something has seriously changed.”
😂… 😢.
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Estonia, the Digital Republic ★
Kaevats told me it irked him that so many Westerners saw his country as a tech haven. He thought they were missing the point. “This enthusiasm and optimism around technology is like a value of its own,” he complained. “This gadgetry that I’ve been ranting about? This is not important.” He threw up his hands, scattering ash. “It’s about the mind-set. It’s about the culture. It’s about the human relations—what it enables us to do.”
This is what I loved the most. No cryptobullshit, no gadgets, no nothing. It’s about humans in the end.
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Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow ★
Musk grabs a coffee-table book published by The Onion and starts leafing through it, laughing hysterically. “In order to understand the essential truth of things,” he theorizes, “I think you can find it in The Onion and occasionally on Reddit.”
That was unexpected.
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In 2017, UK water companies still rely on “magic” ★
If you had to work out where to dig so that you didn’t cut off the water supply to an entire town, would you rely on a Ouija board for your answer? Probably not, but that is in effect what at least two UK water companies (now ten out of the twelve UK companies) openly admit to doing in 2017. Except instead of asking a Ouija board, they are asking divining (or dowsing) rods.
Have a new year full of magic!
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How Sicily Became Ungovernable ★
But Francantonio Genovese isn’t locked up in the Gazzi Prison in Messina, where he was confined before his trial. In fact, he is currently standing at the counter of the bar in the Italian parliament, where he has ordered tea, a croissant and a glass of orange juice, sustenance for another day as a representative of the people. Genovese has changed parties seven times and recently left Renzi’s Democratic Party to join the Berlusconi camp. He is permitted to occupy seat number 536 at the Palazzo Montecitorio, which houses the Italian chamber of deputies, participate in debates and collect his parliamentary salary until his appeal trial is over. By the time a final judgement is handed down in Italy, corruption offenses have almost always reached the statute of limitations.
This describes perfectly what Eastern Europe can also become in the future.
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Italy’s Soccer Apocalypse ★
Why this mad excess, this extraordinary investment of emotion and rhetoric in what is, after all, just a game that ended badly? This is a country where thirty-five per cent of young adults are unemployed, a country which, in the last decade, has lost a large part of its manufacturing base and building industry. It faces a dramatic ongoing immigration crisis that has African men, women, and children frequently dying in the sea around its coasts. Banks falter, political parties split and bicker, the elections set for the spring of 2018 seem destined to deliver a parliament with no clear majority and hence no coherent government. Yet the most dramatic headlines seem to be exclusively reserved for soccer. “A sadness that infects us all,” Il Messaggero lamented. “An indelible stain,” Corriere dello Sport moaned, offering a choice of metaphors: “Apocalypse, tragedy, catastrophe.”
The crowd psychology wiki page has a lot of details on what is happening in the mind of the fans. Poor Italy.
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Rising Waters Threaten China’s Rising Cities ★
“The cities we now have are partly based on what we saw in American movies — on the dream of big malls, airports, highways and tall buildings,” Mr. Zhou said. “I belong to the generation that witnessed the biggest change. We had been almost like North Korea, closed off. Suddenly we could see American movies.”
“This became our idea of progress,” he added. “Only we wanted to do everything bigger, because we thought that is what it meant to be modern. The actual needs of the real city are ignored.”
“In many ways, we are still living a dream,” he said.
Well, that’s why air purifiers are becoming best gift around there. But there’s still time to change.
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TIL Death Growl ★
A death growl (or simply a growl) is a vocal style (an extended vocal technique) usually employed by death metal singers but also used in other heavy metal styles, such as metalcore. Death growls are sometimes criticized for their “ugliness”. However, the harshness of death growls is in keeping with death metal’s abrasive music style and often dark and obscene subject matter. The progressively more forceful enunciation of metal vocals has been noted from heavy metal to thrash metal to death metal.
Was reading this during an Eluveitie concert. I did not know unclean vocals have a scientific definition.
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Envoy and Istio ★
Envoy/Istio are designed to move logic out of your apps and into the middleware.
For example, say your app A makes an HTTP request to app B and app B times out. Ordinarily app A has to build in retry logic (with expontential backoff to avoid dogpiling). Fine if you have a single app, but if you have a dozen microservices, that’s a lot of duplicated code.
The solution is to let a proxy handle it for you. Instead of A -> B, you get A -> Envoy -> B. Envoy can do things like retrying, name resolution (something more flexible than DNS that can, say, be used to do A/B tests where traffic to B actually gets routed to another instance of B that runs code from a different branch), load balancing, request/bandwidth throttling, circuit-breaking (failing requests when an overload “trips” the breaker), logging, profiling (measuring timings and making them available to, say, Prometheus), tracing (inserting HTTP headers to generate a path so if a request goes A -> B -> C, then C has a complete “stack trace” that can be used for logging), and so on.
Istio adds a layer of transparency, at least on Kubernetes. Instead of configuring app A to use a proxy, app A just talks to app B as though there’s no proxy at all. In reality, Istio has injected some local network magic in the container to route the traffic through the proxy.
It took me an evening to understand how these pieces fit together, and this Hacker News comment was the best explanation. I have playing with Kubernetes on my weekend to do list for a while.