bobnamob

Correlated or inversely correlated?

Seems like a very limited subset of software development to be basing a benchmark on

Where’s the kernel dev? Where’s the embedded dev? Where’s the throwaway python script?

* for some values of FAANG

C++ has been dead and effectively banned at amzn for years. Only very specific (robotics and ML generally) projects get exemptions. Rust is big and only getting bigger

s3 open bucket syndrome is basically cured at this point. (Aside from legacy buckets, which should all be exploited by now)

The "yes I really want to do this" confirmations you need to go through when opening up a bucket these days are about 4 deep...

Authn/z issues are real though, they'll never be fixed

Generally meta features like macros are _far_ more useful to library authors that need to do some sort of "reflection" on your application code.

Serialization libraries are frequently the largest beneficiary.

In my ideal world I don't need to write macros or use language meta/reflection features while (only) writing code to solve business problems, but to get to that ideal often the libs you use do need reflection capabilities

I'd argue that it's entirely reasonable for the average application/service developer to not appreciate the usefulness of macros. Not everyone needs to be a foundational library author, honestly we probably need fewer (looking at you npm/cargo micropackages)

That works till management n layers up starts tracking office entry badge taps or wifi access

Designing Data Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann is required reading if you're in this space.

I can't recommend it highly enough.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Data-Intensive-Applications...

Chesterton's Fence

As far as I'm aware, jank isn't at the point where libraries exist. It's still under initial development and doesn't implement all of Clojure just yet.

Idk if it's RUB or Yuval, he was credited on spectre and meltdown as well (if I recall correctly), but he was at data61 or Uni adelaide at the time

That’s effectively how datomic works. Datoms are the fundamental unit, with attributes being analogous to a column name and views being the 4 indexes that datomic keeps

My impression of the two demographics this targets (ie people that use TikTok and people that want to use decentralised social media) is that the set intersection of the two won’t be anywhere near the critical mass necessary to get a TikTok like algorithm working

Should they?

You could do the maths on conversion rate increase if that latency disappeared vs the cost of spinning up a dc & running it (including the mess that is localised dbs)

I’m not sure the economics works out for most businesses (I say this as an Australian)

Broadly (hah) giving me Broadway/Flow [1] vibes, which isn’t surprising given Rich’s references to Elixir/erlang in his Language of the System talk

[1] https://github.com/dashbitco/flow

> 200ms for round-trip and DB queries is complete bonkers

Never lived in Australia I see

If my in-laws are any indication, yes.

15 years and I’ve only ever had “Dear bobnamob, <pre printed seasonal or birthday pleasantry> Love, <in-law x> & <in-law y>”

^ CTO of Cloudflare for reference

Who said it was an infrastructure failure?

There's innumerable causes of this kind of failure that aren't rooted cloud service provider shenanigans

(Admittedly the duration of the outage does "feel" like an infra outage)

I’m still sad there’s such an aversion to parens

Edn is a lovely config language that checks most of the authors boxes, while still being “composable”

If Jonny startup has been building release prioritised systems all his life/career, there's a decent chance he doesn't even know what more goes into systems with higher release & maintenance standards.

Conversely, if Terrence has only ever worked in high rigour environments, he's unlikely to understand Jonny's perspective when Jonny says that code generation tools are doing amazing "reliable" things.

Again, this isn't meant to be a value judgement against either Jonny or Terrence, more that they don't have shared context & understanding on what and how the other is building, and therefore are going to struggle to have a productive conversation about a magic blackbox that one thinks will take their job in 6 months.

Is apparently (re)trademarked...

https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-network-is-the-computer/

I think this article is indicative of the "vibe" I've been getting when reading any discussion around genAI programming.

The range of (areas of) competence is just so damn vast in our industry that any discussion about the quality of generated code (or code reviews in this case) is doomed. There just isn't a stable, shared baseline for what quality looks like.

I mean really - how on earth can Jonny Startup, who spends his days slinging JS/TS to get his business launched in < a month[1], and Terrence PhD the database engineer, who writes simulation tested C++ for FoundationDB, possibly have a grounded discussion about code quality? Rarely do I see people declaring their priors.

Furthermore, the article is so bereft of detail and gushes so profusely about the success and virtues of their newly minted "senior level" AI that I can't help but wonder if they're selling something...

/rant

[1] Please don't read this as slight against Jonny Startup, his priorities are different

Yeah, I’ll admit there’s some paranoia about losing access after a botched upgrade.

I’m considering investing in a https://tinypilotkvm.com/, but that can wait till I’ve lost ssh at least once. I’m not hosting aws on the thing so I can afford to play it fast and loose :)

As another aussie expat abroad, leaving a box behind at my parents place for an Australian residential IP has got to be one of the most unexpectedly great things I've done.

Wireguard/Tailscale and my parents having access to cheap renewable power are the real enablers ofc.

To anyone moving abroad in the near future - leave a box behind with your parents/close friends, it's well worth the trouble if they're ok with you occasionally mooching some bandwidth. You absolutely won't regret it

I can back up your anecdote.

For <business reasons> we have in the order of 10^6 SNS topics in one account+region pair. In that account, while in that region, the SNS console is entirely frozen. I suspect they're doing some looped pagination polling in the background and fall over on our degenerate use case.

Edit: I can also back up the other parent comment - tagging still works fine (and I know for a fact the stability and scalability of the tag system is taken more seriously than most things within AWS)

“sunshine” along with the “rising sun” diagram make me wonder if this entire blog is some engineer’s subtle attempt at satire

The fun thing about control theory in CS is that (in my experience) it's far easier to build accurate simulations or even run scaled down experiments than it would be in a physical setting.

See articles like [1] or any of Marc Brooker's [2] blog for inspiration

[1] https://medium.com/yandex/good-retry-bad-retry-an-incident-s...

[2] https://brooker.co.za/blog/2022/04/11/simulation.html

Hacker: love it, rig up a rpi and a pair of light sensors, score on a sliding 0-5 scale

Ball fan: Borderline impossible to officiate at non-professional level.

Keeping the “casual” game relatively similar to the professional game is important for talent feed

You can't just mention an obscure optimisation problem without naming it on HN, surely that breaks some site guideline somewhere

Echoing this experience.

I moved AUS->UK for family reasons, didn’t start applying till we landed and settled. Had a remote contract signed within two months at “big tech” for 97th percentile income locally.

20ish apps total, only 5ish got past resume screening, bombed one, turned down two, one couldn’t afford me, one accepted, no referrals, only applying for Sr IC roles, ~30yo, ~10yoe, no dei, admittedly have a degree unlike op

All up I was left doubting the jobs downturn, anecdote ofc :shrug: