coward123

Their people pop up in every hiring thread on HN, it isn't just warent and it isn't the first time.

My experience was the same as tedvim above - it was utterly dehumanizing and there's no way I want that either for myself or for the people I hire. The interviewers were smug little shits who didn't take feedback to ask questions relevant to the position.

Further - you guys lurk all over HN commenting like this every time there's an interview thread. It's submarining and it's gross.

Karat embodies everything wrong with the tech industry, and Triplebyte wasn't much better. I've interviewed - and hired - hundreds of people in my career. This robotic approach with a focus on either standardized test type material and/or the leetcode interviews where how we interview doesn't match the work itself - it's just all so broken. I don't know the fix, but I know this isn't it.

Lemme share still another perspective that hasn't gotten any media time... my accountant at the time recommended we apply for EIDL instead of PPP, for various reasons. So here we sit now several years later with PPP as free money, having to start paying on our EIDL loans, all because we legit needed the money but chose the wrong option. So yeah - very, very frustrating to see the ways that so many people who clearly didn't need the money got a free government handout while those that did need the money just ended up with debt.

I'm a white dude, and had an incident a number of years ago in which a group of Indian contractors basically didn't want to work with me because I was a white dude. Used a number of slang racist terms in my direction. I didn't make a stink about it because I was a consultant just there on a short-term project, but it was memorable. As another commenter suggested, even the whole "white people" branding that happens in social media is comical, given centuries of one white group looking down on another white group. I'm glad to see this kind of social dialog about racism / classism in all of its forms and think it is very worthwhile to realize that it isn't just about the stereotype of white (males) hating on everyone else as is generally portrayed.

Hobby beekeeper here... I kinda disagree with her final summary... I get her point, but there are benefits to encouraging more people to keep them:

-- Additional pollinators.

-- Awareness. I've witnessed for myself in my own backyard the effects of our unusual weather this spring (ahem: climate change) through observing how my bees are interacting with my garden and trees.

-- Overall benefit: Personally, tending them makes for great therapy and my neighbors love the honey.

-- Advocacy. When you are in-tune with the impact of climate change, pesticides, herbicides, and overall aware of the ecology around you, you are more likely to make political and consumer choices based on those learned / observed experiences.

Perhaps its a coincidence, but I noticed more native bees in my garden now too. I don't think I've done anything net-new in terms of flowers or trees since I started keeping honey bees, but maybe I'm just more aware of the native bees now? Disappointed I've not been able to attract Mason bees, but I've got at least three other varieties buzzing around regularly and I've identified the hive of at least one of those types.

There are many that would say Heller was an activist court making up law and completely overlooked precedent in Miller, in the same way the current court is overturning decades of precedent in another issue.

um... why do you think these conservative judges were named to the court? They know exactly what they are doing and have every intention of ending contraception, sending women's rights back to the dark ages, and screwing over anyone not straight, Christian, and white. That's the job they were nominated to do.

Consider this a bit of code switching. Many of us absolutely are concerned about what this means for women, but we also know that this forum skews male and a particular kind of male. So we are making the argument here that resonates with this forum.

You are right though that more people overall - even those who skew conservative and pro-individual rights, should realize that if you take away rights from women, and then homosexuals, and then people who want to be married to someone of a different race... where does it end in terms of stripping away individual rights? I'd argue that if you view women's health care as a matter of individual freedom and rights, then is that not the same argument being made in interpreting the 2nd amendment as not about militias (IE: a standing army) but the rights of the individual? If I can tell women they can't have a set of health care services, what's stopping the government from telling men that they can't have a different set of health care services?

Oh for Pete's sake go back to your mom's basement you troll. Have you looked through your comments on this thread and others? You aren't adding to the dialog here, you are just being a jerk. No, I don't find the opinions of these writers challenging rather I get tired of having to go find sources that show just how munch bunk gets published. My beef is that I expect better from what are supposed to be journalistic leaders.

Am I the only person who has never even heard of half these products, let alone used them? If Apple can do something better than they can or their products weren't compelling enough for Apple (or similar) to buy them up, well... that's how the world spins.

My point is log analysis is noise to the signal. A poor way to discern what went wrong or to proactively monitor to avoid an incident in the first place. There are loads of tools out there, some of which have been mentioned in this thread, that monitor from network to user to app layer and are superior for triage. If someone is down in the bowels of logs, it's gonna be a bad time. I spent a decade triaging high-profile incidents around the world and teaching organizations how to do this stuff.

FWIW: In my career doing this kind of work, I found logs to be archeologically interesting, but seldom of value. Products that claimed to do things with logs gave me skepticism, because they were often like trying to do brain surgery through your foot - better to just go straight to the head. That is to say, if you could replicate the problem, better to watch it via full-stack monitoring tools in real-time than wading through gigabytes (terabytes?) of log data after the fact, often which had a randomness to their shape (IE: consisted of whatever garbage some developer thought was useful long ago and far away).

I give you credit for working in this space and trying to create a more automated approach... I spent many years in the app performance world both as a consultant and working on products, so again - good on you.

For what it's worth, my immediate reaction is that you might work on different terminology in how you present what your product does. I get that you are trying to create a contrived example in order to demo the product and show value, and that can be a very difficult thing to do. That said, in my line of thinking, an HTTP 500 isn't actually the root cause, it's a symptom of the cause. The password being set incorrectly isn't the root cause either. The real root cause is something in the deployment pipeline, the configuration control, the change management, the architecture, etc, etc. that got us to this point.

I guess I'm struggling here a bit too because I think of how many times I would have been the manual version of this, where I would show information like this to a client's technical team, and I had to absolutely spoon feed them on how to remedy. I remember a team that was supposed to be crack guys from a vendor, an app team, etc who had been working on a problem for months that I fixed in a matter of hours because they just didn't understand what the line in the log meant. So it isn't clear to me how your product is actually creating better visibility + interpretation of the problem toward a solution.

In the ten or so years I did that kind of work, what really stood out to me was that the seemingly obvious tech issues were not obvious because of a lack of education / experience /training on the part of the client personnel, but more often than not the real problems were much much larger architectural issues way beyond just the message in the log. Those are much harder to both identify and correct, but products like yours and the ones you integrate with are almost just a band-aid on the problem.

So, take that for what it's worth - again, good work trying to improve the state of the art in this area.

The WSJ deserves its own special place in hell. Once upon a time 20ish+ years ago, it was solid business and economic news. Then they decided to do a redesign to be more general news, and then Murdoch came along and turned them into the comics.

I don't give The Economist a pass either. I started reading it in high school decades ago. Over time, they've moved away from deep journalism towards more of a weekly recap. If I want to know what happened this week, frankly I can get that from Twitter or Apple News for free. What is lacking is the kind of forward, somewhat out there perspective. There are still little bits of this with The Economist, but its a shell of its former self. I'd also remark that they have an angle on the world that I find at time ethically questionable.

The editorial / opinion pages of both NYT and WaPo ruined them for me. Thinking people want to read provocative, thoughtful perspectives that may challenge them, but the people and the positions in those pages are by and large, utter trash. Notice I didn't say anything about politics of left or right - I think there's trash there of both sides. We're talking people who are not good writers, who add nothing to public discourse, and who I would say spread a lot of at best half-truths and ill-informed ideas. So, I can't see paying for either one even though at least some of the journalism outside those sections is at least ok. Frankly, I think they both ride their past reputations and the fact they have survived by being in major urban centers while their past competitors (IE: small town newspapers, etc) have died.

My son, also 13, just went through a program at school where they built a basic website from scratch, then did some python, then some java. They had some kind of teaching environment, a bit like a code.org or Swift Playground. When I would look over his shoulder to help, he was certainly coding an answer, but the way it was set up was so contrived that I can't really say he learned any of those languages. He learned a set of contrived functions nominally using those languages that he assembled in order to get the right answers.

I share this as preamble to why I recommend Swift Playground...it will get them going and be somewhat self directed. They will feel like they are actually achieving a goal rather than just typing text. And, if they take it to the next level they will be able to transfer their knowledge into "real" apps.

Second to this would be Python, because it's a great teaching language. That said, I think it's about the curriculum you put in front of them even more than the language.

In this thread there are a lot of people overlooking that even someone who is financially disciplined can lose it all very quickly. Their own health or the health of someone close to them can drain those dollars quickly. A marriage goes sideways and you'll be lucky if the lawyers don't take it all. A few bad stock bets... point is, sure compound interest might make you a "millionaire" but it's a long way from those first millions to actual financial security, and LUCK plays a huge role.

>I think blockchain is an interesting technology that does have some unique qualities.

The way I phrase it is, blockchain offers an interesting/useful requirements document, with a poor implementation.

I've been out of software for about two years...is this test really now a thing or is this a submarine article to promote its use?

Thank you for this - you put into words very well all of the problems I had with that book. In fact, I found myself very frustrated with the authors, wondering if they had any familiarity with all the rest of the decades of work that had been done in related fields outside Google.

From 2008-2018, I went all over the world handling incidents and attempting to teach companies how to do the kinds of things the author is talking about. It was multi-diciplinary and very demanding, both in terms of technical and organizational (political and communication) skills.

One of the core observations I made was that few companies were willing to actually get better. Rather than figure out what skills they lacked organizationally, or how to improve their processes, or how to align their goals and teams, or any of the lessons they could have learned, it was way easier and cheaper to just keep on status quo. SRE as a practice, a position, a skill - whatever it could have been, it instead failed to really exist apart from maybe a hero here and there who chose to care about it. SLOs (or whatever name might have been used) did not exist to actually measure or inform anything. They were a kind of placebo - come up with something that looks measurable, find a way to make sure we always score well, and make sure there is a wall between these metrics and anyone's compensation / job performance.

An example of this, at a very prominent health insurer. I identified issues that could have been solved for, let's say well under $10MM. Rather than do any of that work, the company threw about $50MM in new hardware at the problem. In another case, at a national name Pharma company, about every two years I went back out to do the same basic consulting engagement, because they lacked the leadership to develop the skills in house or to figure out how to align their teams with the work they actually did. Still another case (prominent bank), they had this serious problem that blocked their commercial lenders from doing their job... they finally called me in after about a year of fooling around, I got the problem fixed, rolled out a bunch of tooling and training, but I guarantee they never used any of it... again - problem outright blocked key bank personnel from doing their job and yet it took them a year to do anything about it.

So... I guess what I'm saying is that yes SRE work can be fun and rewarding, but it's just not something most companies have the maturity to really do. I read the Google SRE book way back when, but I didn't find it particularly insightful. Likewise, I'm not really sure what to take away from this blog - for me, it doesn't answer any questions about a clear path forward and leads me to believe not much has changed since I left that kind of work years ago.

That's a really interesting observation you make, and one where I'll have to think on it for a bit. One of my thought exercises on this is to think about Glen Gould vs. Simone Dinnerstein's interpretation of Bach's Goldberg Variations. There's something I like about the way Dinnerstein hits those keys that is different to my ear than Gould.

I think most people in this area have a pretty general idea where it is... While I am at best an amateur mycologist, where drdec below has me angry at his/her sarcasm is that as a human being, no, it isn't at all obvious why the world largest fungi would end up here rather than say in the WA / OR / BC cascades, or for example in the Olympics in Washington State. Those areas certainly have more of the mushrooms that we prize for human consumption, have longer seasons in which those fungi are available too (I'm hypothesizing due to moisture). Remoteness could be a factor (IE: less human contact), but those areas have plenty of very remote terrain as well. Further, I think it is a really interesting question as we contemplate the effects of climate change in these areas.

May I ask - did you have a previous background in music? When I think of my own experiences and those of not only my kids but other musicians I've observed, two years is really just a starting point (IE: you should not have expected to have any degree of proficiency unless you already have considerable musical background)

Can you expand on this? Would love more information about what makes it "difficult" relative to another instrument.

(Orchestra supporter and string player dad over here, so genuinely curious)

I wish I knew precisely where in the Blue Mountains the supposedly largest fungi resides... I live near that area, hunt for mushrooms there, and it has never been my observation that there is anything unique about the terrain or conditions that would be particularly beneficial for mass fungi growth.

Hello Matt - I deliberately didn't name any tools, as the ones I worked with are no long in the tooth and were $$$. What I wanted to do was bring to the OP some concepts that they might search for in order to identify the right tool for their purpose. To your point - yes, some of the tools I used made use of the kind of network port mirroring similar to what it appears you developed at Amazon. Others instrumented various virtual machines, others used various external monitors.

I spent a number of years as a traveling consultant fixing problems... I guess it was aligned with what the cool kids call Site Reliability Engineering these days. Some company would have a crisis and I'd go in and fix it. So basically I had a matter of a few hours to learn as much as I could about some huge system that had probably been built over many years by a whole lot of people.

To do this, I used a number of generally proprietary tools, where part of the project was getting the company to them buy these tools and fix their practices so that perhaps they would avoid the problem in the future.

Anyway, my point is there are open source and proprietary tools out there in the world that will instrument an application and generally based on usage patterns will build out various visualization of the application. While these are often sold or marketed as tools for operational triage, I always argued that the best practice was for developers to use these tools in order to both understand the performance characteristics of their work as well as look for unexpected interactions.

These tools will generally build out a topology of how various components interact and will often do other type of visualizations that will show class and method level chain of invocation. The good ones show end to end across distributed systems every bit of code that gets called from the time a user attempts some kind of action.

The benefit of this approach over a UML diagram or something similar is that it shows how the system was actually built and is working, rather than what a developer intended to be built. The larger the system and the more years / developers involved, the greater the delta.

In the 2001+ timeframe, I saw two paths work for people:

1) Go someplace that looks boring but solid like health care. Pay might not be as good, projects might not seem as outwardly sexy, but it will be a solid paycheck.

2) Go someplace like a Google or Microsoft, IE: big tech, where even if one team is having cutbacks another will be hiring.

In the 2008+ timeframe... maybe it was the niche I was in, but I really didn't see much of a tech slowdown. I was contracting for part of that, and in a down economy companies like contractors so that they are expendable.