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akbar501

490 karma · joined August 2, 2013

Founder. Eminate.io (coming soon)
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akbar501··on Buying a Home Near Nvidia's Headquarters Is Nearly Impossible Right Now
Was about to say the exact same thing. Housing constraints are not limited to "near Nvidia HQ". It's the entire Bay Area.

For those not from the area, it's city after city after city in the Bay Area. 60 miles up the peninsula (from San Jose to San Francisco), and 60 miles up the East Bay, the vast majority of which has inventory and affordability challenges.

akbar501··on Blitz.js Now in Beta (Batteries Included Framework Built on Next.js)
TL;DR Give Blitz a try.

I've been developing my app with Blitz. It has been an extremely productive framework to work with.

The following are a few of the productivity boosts that I like:

1. It includes authentication plus there's a good library for authorization (blitz-guard) so auth is a breeze.

2. The generator is helpful when I started with Blitz, but use it less now.

3. The community is friendly and helpful. ex. Check out this post on skeleton loaders https://andreas.fyi/engineering/nextjs-auth-skeleton-loaders

4. The integration with Prisma is buttery smooth. In your UI code you call a function that has the database access. Blitz converts the function calls into API calls and runs your database code on the server. When Prisma is not enough you can drop to `db.$queryRaw` to write SQL directly.

5. Personally, I dislike fiddling with 800 libraries to get a project up and running. Blitz includes Jest, Prettier, and everything else you need so on so that you're productive from day 1.

akbar501··on Apply to YC on Your Schedule
One request I would have for SUS is to add the ability to add a weekly update in the past.

More than once I was working late Sunday and well into Monday morning. When this happens I can no longer provide an update for the prior week so it looks like I've done nothing for that week.

akbar501··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2018)
Tenable | SF / Bay Area | ONSITE or REMOTE | Sr. Software Engineer and Principal Engineer positions open

Tenable is a rapidly growing network security company. We’re expanding our engineering team to keep up with our rapid customer and revenue growth.

Tenable.io is the first comprehensive cyber exposure platform. You will be joining a team that is building our data management capabilities, streaming data pipelines using Kafka, ingest APIs, and various other parts of our data infrastructure. This is a great opportunity to have a significant impact.

In terms of skills, you should be able to develop, deploy and maintain a microservice written in Java/Kotlin or another JVM language, experience with databases (PG, C*, Elastic, etc), and expertise managing data at scale. If you already know Kafka that's a plus. AWS, GCP or Azure experience is needed.

I'm the Sr. Director of Engineering, Data Services. You can reach me at aahmed @ tenable.com. Please put "HN" in the subject line.

akbar501··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2018)
Tenable | SF / Bay Area | ONSITE or REMOTE Software Engineer, Principal Engineer

Tenable is a rapidly growing network security company. We’re expanding our engineering team to keep up with our rapid customer and revenue growth.

Tenable.io is the first comprehensive cyber exposure platform. You will be joining a team that is building a streaming data pipeline using Kafka and Java/Kotlin. We are also building connectors to 3rd party applications using a FaaS (aka serverless). This is a great opportunity to have a significant impact.

In terms of skills, you should be able to develop, deploy and maintain a microservice written in Java/Kotlin or another language that runs on the JVM, that exposes a REST API, calls other REST APIs, parses and produces JSON, reads/writes to/from a data store (PG/Aurora...). It's a plus if you understand how to instrument your code (telemetry, logs, etc.), and ideally understand retries with backoffs, ideally circuit breakers, etc. If you already know Kafka that's a plus. AWS, GCP or Azure experience is needed.

I'm the Sr. Director of Engineering, Data Services (Data Science and Data Engineering). You can reach me at aahmed @ tenable.com. Please put "HN" in the subject line.

akbar501··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2018)
Tenable | SF / Bay Area | ONSITE or REMOTE Software Engineer, Sr. Software Engineer, Principal Engineer, Engineering Manager

We're hiring at all skill levels.

Tenable is a rapidly growing network security company. We’re expanding our engineering team to keep up with our rapid customer and revenue growth.

Tenable.io is the first comprehensive cyber exposure platform. You will be joining a team that is building a streaming data pipeline using Kafka and Java/Kotlin. This is a great opportunity to have a significant impact.

In terms of skills, you should be able to develop, deploy and maintain a microservice written in Java/Kotlin or another language that runs on the JVM, that exposes a REST API, calls other REST APIs, parses and produces JSON, reads/writes to/from a data store (PG/Aurora, or whatever). If you're applying to one of the more senior roles, then you should also understand how to instrument your code (telemetry, logs, etc.), and ideally understand retries with backoffs, ideally circuit breakers, etc. If you already know Kafka that's a plus. AWS, GCP or Azure experience is needed.

Interview process

We interview quickly. Our goal is 5-10 business days for the entire process.

  - Cultural fit with Director Engineering (i.e. me)
  - Technical interview with 2 peers
  - Coding challenge (practical exercise similar to what you'll actually do)
  - Decision
I'm the Director of Engineering, Ingest and Pipelines. You can reach me at aahmed @ tenable.com. Please put "HN" in the subject line.
akbar501··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2018)
Tenable | SF / Bay Area | ONSITE or REMOTE Software Engineer, Sr. Software Engineer, Principal Engineer, Engineering Manager

We're hiring at all skill levels.

Tenable is a rapidly growing network security company. We’re expanding our engineering team to keep up with our rapid customer and revenue growth.

Tenable.io is the first comprehensive cyber exposure platform. You will be joining a team that is building a streaming data pipeline using Kafka and Java/Kotlin. This is a great opportunity to have a significant impact.

In terms of skills, you should be able to develop, deploy and maintain a microservice written in Java/Kotlin or another language that runs on the JVM, that exposes a REST API, calls other REST APIs, parses and produces JSON, reads/writes to/from a data store (PG/Aurora, or whatever). If you're applying to one of the more senior roles, then you should also understand how to instrument your code (telemetry, logs, etc.), and ideally understand retries with backoffs, ideally circuit breakers, etc. If you already know Kafka that's a plus. AWS, GCP or Azure experience is needed.

Interview process

We interview quickly. Our goal is 5-10 business days for the entire process. - Cultural fit with Director Engineering (i.e. me) - Technical interview with 2 peers - Coding challenge (practical exercise similar to what you'll actually do) - Decision

I'm the Director of Engineering, Ingest and Pipelines. You can reach me at aahmed @ tenable.com. Please put "HN" in the subject line.

akbar501··on Badger – A fast key-value store written natively in Go
Amazon is a huge threat for any infrastructure company using Apache 2.0. If you gain popularity, then Amazon will be a direct competitor once they host your project. Given that Amazon's services benefit from the IE effect, it's not irrational for an open source infrastructure company to eliminate such a threat via licensing.
akbar501··on Badger – A fast key-value store written natively in Go
It's comparable to LevelDB and RocksDB. However, Badger is not comparable to Cassandra, ScyllaDB or DynamoDB as they are distributed database management systems.

Cassandra, for example, has it's own storage engine that's responsible for writing bits to disk.

akbar501··on Badger – A fast key-value store written natively in Go
Redis is a database management system (DBMS). Badger is a storage engine.

An application developer would not choose Badger, but instead would pick a DBMS such as Redis.

A database engineer would use Badger to develop a DBMS that the application engineer could use. If the database engineer so chooses they could expose a Redis compatible API.

akbar501··on Badger – A fast key-value store written natively in Go
The terminology can be a bit confusing. Database Management System is what people often call a database. Unfortunately, the storage engine is also called a database.

Badger, RocksDB, LMDB, etc. are storage engines. A process uses these storage engines to write data to memory (note: the storage engine may support persistent, volatile, or both types of memory).

A database management system (DBMS) is a higher level concept that often has multiple processes either on a single server or distributed across multiple servers. Simply stated, each process within a DBMS uses the storage engine to read/write to/from memory (persistent or volatile).

It's important to note that storage engines are a specialized area and require different skills from writing a DBMS. It's a big deal when other people write high quality storage engines because it makes it a lot easier to write a DBMS.

akbar501··on Ask HN: How did you find that offshore dev team you work with?
In my experience, your points about communication and onsite visits are key. Also, communication should be centralized and managed on both sides so there is not only a communication channel, but also clear lines of responsibility. Of course, communication is not just phone and email, but also well defined specs.

However, getting involved in another company's hiring process is rarely a good idea. Most offshore projects are results oriented, so getting involved in hiring is too low level (i.e. micro-management). In other words, manage the output, not the process.

With the above said, involvement in hiring can be effective when 1.) you're using the offshore firm to acquire very specialized, high-end talent, and 2.) you're paying a substantial premium above local market to ensure hiring is a rare event.

akbar501··on India rupee ban: Snapdeal to deliver cash
Steve Forbes wrote about the lack of planning and impact on ordinary citizens: http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2016/12/22/what-indi...
akbar501··on A man who put up $1.5M to help 200 Syrian refugees
There is simply no factual basis for this comment.

Every American Muslim I have met believes in the 1st Amendment.

Perhaps more than many Americans, American Muslims are acutely aware of how our laws keep them safe. Reducing these laws would make them more of a target then they already are.

akbar501··on Ask HN: Why is Go lang so popular for cloud infrastructure
In case anyone who is not a Java dev wonders, "what is a fat jar"?

A fat jar is a single runnable binary. It makes deploying Java super simple and is roughly equivalent to Go's single binary.

akbar501··on Ask HN: Digital Ocean vs. AWS for client hosting
AWS becomes interesting when you want to automate your infrastructure (i.e. infrastructure as software). When you're not orchestrating your infrastructure, then its probably overkill.

DO, as you rightly mentioned, is a lot closer to a straight forward Linux or whatever instance (easier to use). And the prices are very attractive.

I use both and split based on the above. DO is great for hosting web apps / dynamic web sites at a reasonable price. AWS is great for orchestrated clusters / large scale production, or for very low cost static hosting via S3.

akbar501··on Amazon RDS now supports PostgreSQL 9.6.1
Compose.io is owned by IBM. I had a chance to meet both the Compose team and a few people from IBM at the DataLayer conference. They are passionate and smart.

Compose is in a sweet spot right now. They run with the speed of a startup, but have access to IBM's massive resources. Really the best of both worlds.

akbar501··on Show HN: SummitDB – In-Memory NoSQL DB
It's the full Redis API and protocol. See https://github.com/Netflix/dynomite/blob/dev/notes/redis.md for a list of all supported Redis features.

The benefit of Dynomite's support for the Redis API + protocol is a.) you can use any Redis client and b.) the same code can be used for standalone Redis on your laptop and on a distributed Dynomite cluster.

akbar501··on Show HN: SummitDB – In-Memory NoSQL DB
Yes, I was a speaker at DataLayer.

There are two answers to your first question.

1. Dynomite pairs well with Cassandra. At scale, Cassandra is not a speed deamon when it comes to reads. Dynomite helps to improve Cassandra's read performance.

2. The use case for Dynomite as the primary database is for workloads that require high throughput and low latency. In other words, Dynomite delivers consistently lower latency at any scale.

akbar501··on Show HN: SummitDB – In-Memory NoSQL DB
https://github.com/Netflix/dynomite

Dynomite for production proven, limitless scale for Redis.

Provides ability to Redis for both in-memory and on-disk workloads.

Dynamo-inspired linearly scalable, shared nothing multi-master architecture. Pairs well with Cassandra.

Supports pluggable backends (ex. RocksDB).

Been in production 2+ years. One of the larger clusters handles over 3.6 million sustained ops/sec in production, every day.

akbar501··on Company town
The monopsony, which is infrequent in today's markets, is what caused these types of cities/towns. Specifically, a labor market monopsony.
akbar501··on Prometheus reaches 1.0
What is the scale out process with Prometheus? Is sharding/replication a manual setup process or is it automated? What's involved in scaling out?
akbar501··on Show HN: Midas – Easy way to enrich your email lists
Interesting product. However, our problem is usually the inverse. We have a name + company + LinkedIn, but want the email address.
akbar501··on InfluxDB Clustering Beta and Data Explorer
There is a lot of discussion going on currently around OSS business models. The general consensus is that support contracts / professional services / support do not monetize well enough to grow a large business.

Hosted services is a viable business model. The risk here is to ensure that your product, if successful, cannot simply be deployed by Amazon. Dual licensing has been one response to the Amazon risk.

Admin tools alone are also thought to be difficult to monetize at sufficient value to grow a large business.

While DataStax has a nice UI, they have built a data platform with Cassandra the core, much like Cloudera has built a data platform with HDFS/HBase at the core. Personally, I view the data platforms as prepackaged and productized SI (which is very valuable..

akbar501··on Trump
Flip this around. Would you be okay with a presidential candidate saying that a white judge was unable to do his job b/c of his color? What if a ban of additional white immigrants was being proposed? Would you be okay with a female candidate stating that women are clearly superior to the inferior male?

I hope you would stand up and speak out against such actions, because I know I would.

akbar501··on California surpasses France as world's 6th largest economy
A wall all along the US/Mexico border is a fantasy. It's the grown up equivalent of promising to put soda in the drinking fountains when running for class president.
akbar501··on Show HN: Run your own OAuth2/OpenID Connect provider
For anyone interested the Go client library is: https://github.com/ory-am/fosite
akbar501··on Media's Obsession with Trump Not Supported by Data
If the media loves writing articles about Trump, they could at least put a modicum of thought into topics. There are so many easy topics.

Far from Trump taking over the GOP, the GOP has taken over Trump and now literally dictates his policy.

Bankers contributed money and bought Trump's support for financial deregulation.

Trump energy and coal policy are literally being written by GOP governors. The GOP now coordinates with Trump's speak writer to determine what is said.

Starting a trade war with China would have a direct negative impact on real estate prices in the US, which would affect Trump...and therefore will never happen.

A Trump presidency would basically be characterized by substantial benefits accruing to the wealthy while his middle class and lower class supporters will be further subjugated. In other words, just write about the effects of his policy suggestions...which does not take much effort.

And perhaps the biggest one, instead of writing articles that Trump will somehow magically take over every American institution, the reality much more mundane. US institutions are strong and his ability to get anything done will be mired in the same red tape that every President faces. Thus, campaign promises to build walls, undo numerous trade deals, ban Muslims, deport Hispanics etc. are empty promises that simply will not occur.

akbar501··on Peter Thiel on the Global Economy, Technology, Artificial Intelligence [video]
Serious question. Is immigration subsidized? If so, how?
akbar501··on Redis Loadable Modules System
@antirez, is Redis 4.0 going to be part of the more rapid release schedule (will we see it in 3, 6 months) or are major upgrades still annual releases (we'll see 4.0 in 12 months)?
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