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Aqua_Geekon The Unreasonable Math of Type 1 Diabetes

I had a pancreatic tumor a couple of years ago that messed with my insulin levels (made me hypoglycemic). That gave me a much deeper appreciation for the struggle those with diabetes face. I had a CGM and had to watch to make sure my blood-sugar didn’t plummet. The “solution” in those cases was to eat; I only really had to worry about it one-way, as my body was over-producing insulin.

Aqua_Geekon AresDB: Uber's GPU-Powered Open Source, Real-Time Analytics Engine

There was a pervasive problem of “not invented here” at the company for a long time. I used to laugh at all the “It doesn’t scale!” justifications that were thrown around.

On the other hand, having enough people or money to throw at something were never a problem, so…

Aqua_Geekon Hiring Without Whiteboards

Apple did this in one of the sessions last time I interviewed there. They handed me a project in Xcode that had a number of bugs with varying degrees of difficulty — some caused crashes, others were UI glitches, etc. The assignment was to identify the problems and fix them. If you have more than a couple years’ experience the issues were pretty straightforward.

I really enjoyed this session, but I can see how it could be stressful to others.

Aqua_Geekon Apple WWDC Keynote

I mean, this IS an ad.

Aqua_Geekon Slack Removed a Blog Post Showing How Police Use Its Tech

"Racism is not getting worse, it's getting filmed." — Will Smith

Aqua_Geekon Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

I don't follow. How does the "Accept" header factor in here?

Aqua_Geekon Submit k3s for inclusion to CNCF as a sandbox project

> We wanted an installation of Kubernetes that was half the size in terms of memory footprint. Kubernetes is a 10 letter word stylized as k8s. So something half as big as Kubernetes would be a 5 letter word stylized as k3s. There is no long form of k3s and no official pronunciation.

Am I the only one who is tired of all these shorthand names?

Aqua_Geekon Enigma: Erlang VM Implementation in Rust

His book, "Game Programming Patterns," is great as well: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com

Aqua_Geekon Enigma: Erlang VM Implementation in Rust

The "Crafting Interpreters" book by Bob Nystrom is probably a good way to dig in. It has a whole chunk on implementing a VM: http://craftinginterpreters.com/a-bytecode-virtual-machine.h...

Aqua_Geekon Apple's MacOS Server has a 1.5/5 rating on the Mac App Store

I think the team that was working on this has been disbanded.

Aqua_Geekon The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

Looks like the post got updated with some reasoning:

> Why can’t we put a read-only archive online currently? The Wiki, even in it’s read-only state, was presenting security risks, and it was deemed necessary to take it offline.

Aqua_Geekon Twitter for Mac is incapable of accepting certain letters in the password field

https://twitter.com/NolanOBrien/status/1189585020232462340

> Root cause is Catalina regression that fails keyboard inputs when a UIKeyCommand is registered for the same key. UIResponder chain regression most likely.

Aqua_Geekon Perfectly Cropped

It was: https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-13/features/ (under the "Text Editing" section)

Aqua_Geekon iPadOS

I still don't understand the already-existent gestures on iPad.

Aqua_Geekon Keeping master green at scale

I don’t doubt it. They also do more traffic through their VCS than most companies do through their main product.

Aqua_Geekon Keeping master green at scale

Google has the team + tooling to properly support it. The same cannot be said for many other orgs.

Aqua_Geekon Swift String’s ABI and UTF-8

It might be due to interop with Objective-C — Foundation's NSString uses UTF-16: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsstrin...

Aqua_Geekon Building DSLs in Swift

> The only reason to not use it, is because some of those Apps are built with third party multi-platform frameworks and not UIKit (React)

Anecdote: I’ve worked on a few large iOS teams at well-known companies. At all of them, we have moved toward building UI in code and specifically banning the use of XIBs and Storyboards (we still use all of Apple’s frameworks — e.g. UIKit). Part of the reason is merge conflicts — in much the same way that merging Xcode project files requires every engineer to understand and be able to parse the syntax when looking at a diff, merging changes in XIBs and Storyboards is fraught with danger (at best).

Aqua_Geekon Ask HN: Why is iOS 11 such a mess?

I _still_ don't understand how multiple apps and the associated gestures work on iPad. Is there a support doc or something to which somebody could point me?

Aqua_Geekon Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan

The most productive days I've ever had at my current employer -- by a significant margin --- were when most of the company was not present (off-site or holiday). Being able to come in those days and work in a distraction-free environment was amazing.

Open office floor plans are the worst.

Aqua_Geekon App sizes are out of control

> You can bet that those companies' infrastructure is optimized to hell and back.

You'd be surprised. (Source: I work at a unicorn.)

Aqua_Geekon Phoenix 1.3.0 Released

It was added in 3.1 (http://guides.rubyonrails.org/3_1_release_notes.html) and uses bcrypt under the hood.

Aqua_Geekon How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

> I think there is very much a need for a more modern library [...]

Building a solid standalone monitoring/metrics package is apparently next up on the "todo list" for Chris McCord (creator of Phoenix): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfFpIjFOL-I

Aqua_Geekon Tim Cook Says Apple Is Focusing on an Autonomous Car System

I don't need a new OS, but modernizing AppKit and other frameworks would be a godsend!

Aqua_Geekon Options vs. Cash

Personally, I would appreciate that level of candor (and that's how I view my options anyway). I've heard far too many pitches from desperate recruiters about how an options package is worth $$$$$$.

Aqua_Geekon Swift architecture at Uber

We ran into this issue in the rewrite as well. We ended up having to convert all of our models from structs to classes (similar to your case they were immutable, so it wasn't a huge difference).

Aqua_Geekon How much does employee turnover really cost?

> I've never worked anywhere in the bay area where engineers were thought of as easily replaceable.

They may not have been thought of that way, but I've very much seen them treated that way.

Aqua_Geekon Update on the Swift Project Lead

I went to the LLVM Developers' Meeting this year, and Chris seems still very much involved in LLVM (at least from a management perspective -- he serves on the board of the LLVM Foundation).

Aqua_Geekon Dongle dilemma provokes Apple price cut

> They're focusing so much on the […] Apple Watch

From the hardware side, maybe. The developer experience for it is a miserable one.

Aqua_Geekon Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

> Estimates are that Schiaparelli dropped from a height of between 2 and 4 kilometres, therefore impacting at a considerable speed, greater than 300 km/h.

Ouch. It will be interesting to read the results of the investigation as to why the landing thrusters turned off prematurely.