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aratno

459 karma · joined July 7, 2015

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aratno··on Facebook's Little Red Book
Looks like this is slightly modified by the uploader: p94 says “Weaponize the cloud” with the Antimetal logo
aratno··on Fselect: Find files with SQL-like queries
Have you used osquery? Seems like a good chunk of what you’re looking for!

https://www.osquery.io/schema/4.7.0/

aratno··on The Case of the Extra 40ms
Immediately searched for “Nagle”, “TCP”, etc but was surprised to see this is something else! Not the typical TCP_NODELAY issue.
aratno··on Please – A cross-language build system
I don’t think this is a fair reason to write the tool off. They support Homebrew, and I’m sure will add other install methods in the future. Piping to bash is no worse than clicking “yes” on every step of an install wizard.
aratno··on TypeScript 4.1
Using something like io-ts gives you the benefits of static types and runtime types. JSON Schema typically just provides runtime guarantees but doesn't come with the same development experience. I've been very happy with io-ts so far.
aratno··on NoisePage – Self-Driving Database Management System
ML-assisted query optimization is super interesting to me (I've had to fight the uphill battle against anomalies in Postgres stats and estimations[1]), but I'd also love to see more optimization and auto-tuning across the "stack":

- Use column-oriented storage for columns that are frequently scanned in analytical queries

- Automated index management, based on user-provided boundaries for write throughput, disk footprint, query latency

- Calibrated optimism for heap updates. AFAIK, current DBs are either optimistic (assume transactions are more likely to commit than rollback) and update the heap in-place, and write the old value elsewhere in case of rollback, or pessimistically write all updates in new, versioned tuples and let MVCC (and garbage collection) handle the rest. Would be interesting to see the performance improvement that could come from modeling commit / rollback outcomes and optimizing accordingly.

- Using variable-sized pages to reduce overhead for older pages, as a sort of light cold storage

Anyone know of any DBs that automatically tune these aspects?

[1]: http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol9/p204-leis.pdf

aratno··on Waypoint: Build, deploy, and release applications across any platform
Terraform does let you destroy resources: https://www.terraform.io/docs/commands/destroy.html
aratno··on Amazon Timestream is generally available
I see some references to Presto, but does anyone know what this engine is based on? Seems vaguely similar to Druid but it's hard to tell.
aratno··on Machine Learning Research at Apple
Nope, they've been sharing their research more widely in the last few years. Here's an example from 2018, in a different area of research: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol11/p540-shraer.pdf
aratno··on Ceasefire – Where cooler heads prevail. App launched today
Needs some sort of a demo or screenshot before I would consider signing up. Even better, let people lurk (read without creating an account) before joining.
aratno··on “Today, I submitted my resignation to Facebook”
What changes do you hope to see? When?

What does it mean for employees to "help implement the changes"?

What will you do if change does not happen?

aratno··on Dashmap: Fast concurrent HashMap for Rust
If you’re interested in this, you might like this live-coding session implementing Java’s ConcurrentHashMap in Rust: https://youtu.be/yQFWmGaFBjk
aratno··on Memory-Efficient Search Trees for Database Management Systems [pdf]
Sounds like you would be interested in this paper on TabulaROSA: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.05308.pdf
aratno··on Ask HN: Architecture Diagrams for GitHub Readme.md?
Monodraw is one option: https://monodraw.helftone.com/

Whimsical is another: https://whimsical.co/

aratno··on Cli.fan
Love the design! This is the first light/dark theme switch I’ve actually liked. Great work!
aratno··on Ephemeral Environments for DevOps: Why, What and How? (2017)
Currently my team uses Heroku review apps for this, and the experience has been excellent. Opening a PR for our frontend automatically opens a review app, which gets designer sign-off before code review.
aratno··on Simdjson – Parsing Gigabytes of JSON per Second
From “Design Decisions”[1]:

> JSON. The protocol for front-end / back-end communication, as well as between the back-end and plug-ins, is based on simple JSON messages. I considered binary formats, but the actual improvement in performance would be completely in the noise. Using JSON considerably lowers friction for developing plug-ins, as it’s available out of the box for most modern languages, and there are plenty of the libraries available for the other ones.

1: https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor/blob/master/README.md...

aratno··on Why don't I take military funding? (2004)
I don’t think it’s ridiculous. I think it simply says that people with stringent ethics cannot serve others and cede control. They may bootstrap their own businesses, become their own bosses, or find another way to operate independently.

For some, control is relinquished to VCs. For others, it is the funders of their research, or their bosses.

Most people are not as picky about their ethics as they are about their diets.

aratno··on Why don't I take military funding? (2004)
But do you think that the total number of grad students is a measure of good? If so, it makes sense to get funding for them by any means necessary.

But if not, there is an amount of unethical, unacceptable funding which trumps the good of the grad students it provides for.

Couldn’t some other professor take the available funding, and support those additional students?

aratno··on Why don't I take military funding? (2004)
Many of the reasons he stated can also be applied to VC funding:

> One thing that makes the slope so slippery is that you have accumulated responsibility for a lab full of graduate students, and the consequences of a major drop in funding will be even more painful for them than it is for you.

aratno··on Nearly 40 Percent of Tech Workers Believe They're Depressed
Nearly 40% of Blind (teamblind.com) users are self-reporting depression. This is far from a representative sample of the tech industry. In my experience, people only join a service like Blind if they feel some level of dissatisfaction at work that they can’t bring up to their own leadership. It makes sense that this population is more likely to be depressed, and it is far from representative of the entire industry.
aratno··on Jack Dorsey on silent vipassana meditation
This is such a bizarre experience to share, given the current position and optics of Twitter. As others have mentioned, there’s some serious irony in his praise of silence and separation. What was he expecting to get out of it?
aratno··on The Periodic Table of Data Structures [pdf]
Is this the one you’re thinking of? https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/06/21/generalized-data-structu...
aratno··on 6.S974 Decentralized Applications, Fall 2018
I’d enroll in this class in an instant if I could.

Fun fact: the instructor, Robert Morris, co-founded YC and was one of the first people to be indicted for a computer crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris

aratno··on Diagrams: A diagram editor for the Mac
My favorite tool for flow charts is Whimsical. It offers just the right amount of control and the output charts look fantastic.

https://whimsical.co/flowcharts/

aratno··on Read and understand code faster with programming ligatures in Fira Code font
While these are cool for complete code snippets, they are distracting during coding. For example, the colon contextual alignment flickers as the context is typed, and that distraction alone outweighs any convenience of a merged symbol.
aratno··on MUJI Hut: A 9.1-sqm Minimalist Cabin
Well that's too bad. Wouldn't it be possible to Airbnb though?
aratno··on MUJI Hut: A 9.1-sqm Minimalist Cabin
Just made the depressing transition from looking at Craigslist housing in SF to seeing this. The concept looks great, but it's hard to tell who its for. I assume you need to own the land it's placed on, so how could it be used for vacationing?
aratno··on Alexander Grothendieck, a genius of mathematics (2015)
> He ignores the silent and flawless consensus that is part of the air we breathe – the consensus of all the people who are, or are reputed to be, reasonable.

Very well put, especially considering this is from a personal journal.

aratno··on Rethinking our default profile photo
I actually really liked the egg as an icon, and I'm sad to see it go. The colors should have been rethought though. Muted colors that are universal for all accounts (instead of each account getting its own bright color) would also encourage users to upload their own photos.

I don't see the point of using an "alternative" head shape, or including shoulders in the default image. No matter how the head is shaped, it'll represent some users more than others. Using an egg avoided this issue of approximating a human shape.

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