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crashoverdrive

213 karma · joined July 22, 2012

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crashoverdrive··on Ask HN: I'm writing a book about white-collar drug use, including tech sector
> "people with real adhd can't get high from stims", but i suspect that some of this is just that people want to distance their legitimate use from those tweakers over there.

I don't know if "High" is the right word. I've accidentally taken too much, and it makes me super impatient, which makes me kind of an asshole. I've also taken WAY too much on accident, and it just made me paranoid and think my heart was beating out of my chest.

I will say, being on a normal amount is kind of the best kind of high. Living with ADHD is like drowning, like you have these short moments of coming up for air and being productive, but quickly become distracted for everything else.

Being on the right amount, is like someone finally shut all the extra TVs off in the back of my brain. Like there's no challenge in determining the priority of what needs to be done. I feel human, not anxious, not depressed by my inability to remember where I put my keys 30 seconds ago. and thus, more productive.

Now I don't claim that my experience with ADHD is like another's, but this is my experience.

crashoverdrive··on Google is buying Chelsea Market building for over $2B
I’m sorry you did this. Someday, you’ll be sorry you did this. Historically speaking, there is a correction every year. Corrections last on average no more than 54 days. After a correction, the stock market will go back to rising. Timing the market is near impossible, but leaving the market is just asking to lose money. With some reading and some fear management, you could be extremely successful in the stock market. But you have to learn to buy and hold.
crashoverdrive··on MonolithFirst
Okay then. Let's play the "hard nosed technical justification" for this new architectural mold. Specifically pointed at your issues.

> The serialization/deserialization layer adds potential for bugs.

Adding an agreed upon layer that aligns with clean architecture[0) will actually produce less bugs both upstream and downstream. (This is why contract apis are important) and are actually more valuable than monolithic systems where there is a sincere lack of data and state guarantees. (clean understanding vs black box mentality)

> The massively increased number of services all need constant monitoring.

It's the same amount of monitoring. It's just horizontally scaled and is actually easier to pinpoint issues. This also allows you the ability to change or create circuit breakers to fail over when issues targeting specific are found. (see slides 134-150 of Sam Newman's principles of microservices [1])

> The massively multiplied error conditions (what happens when service 37 talks to 39 and 39 times out?) need to be accounted for and those edge cases must be ironed out.

They should have been "ironed out" well before this point to begin with. If the application fails due to infrastructure issues, it is actually an application design failure that should have been identified and resolved previously via TDD and failure state testing. Graceful failure is always desirable, and having a legacy monolithic application does not prevent infrastructure/connectivity failures. (for reference, check out Martin Fowler's "The 12 Factor App" [2])

> You get fuck all except migraines caused by the brittleness of your app.

What it sounds like you're saying is:

"Building a monolithic app allows you to crutch bad behavior and poor design without having to understand the realities of software. You can ignore scalability, clean architecture, concurrency, data modeling and graceful failures."

I can understand how moving to a microservice could seem very painful and have a brittle result without the depth of understanding these realities. This is specifically why I noted it is a required paradigm shift for many developers.

For more inspired reading, you may want to checkout Gilt's discussions on moving to microservices.[3]

[0] http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2012/08/13/the-clean-arch...

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/spnewman/principles-of-microservic...

[2] http://12factor.net/

[3] http://tech.gilt.com/post/102628539834/making-architecture-w...

crashoverdrive··on MonolithFirst
I feel like if you're building them brittle, you're building them wrong.

I had the pleasure of watching Sam Newman's tutorial on microservices. He's uploaded the slides here: http://t.co/2nhDBJK1oB

Building microservices requires a few changes in culture. If you are moving from a monolith to microservices, your entire culture must change how you look at problems must change and if you fail to do those things, of course your transition will change. It is not a silver bullet. It is a paradigm shift.

crashoverdrive··on “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”
Ack! No. I was mobile and it pinged me to login after generating the comment, then brought me to a blank screen. I'd thought I lost my comment.

That's a good idea though..If only I had the time

crashoverdrive··on “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”
What I find most strange about all of the photos of office design for "big companies"

Where does the actual work get done? Why are those pictures never included?

crashoverdrive··on “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”
The funniest thing about all of these "office design" photos that I see of big companies.

"Where does the actual work get done?" Why are those photos never included.

crashoverdrive··on Apple Acquires FoundationDB
You can no longer download from their website. So, I'd assume yes, we all wasted our time.
crashoverdrive··on Triton: Docker and the “best of all worlds”
I feel like perhaps I'm the only one concerned about this: (Somehow, “SmartOS + LX-branded zones + SmartDataCenter + sdc-portolan + sdc-docker” was a bit of a mouthful.)

Not only is it a mouthful, it means there is a much wider space for things to go wrong.

crashoverdrive··on Machine learning for fraud detection
Don't be confused. Paypal's Igor wasn't automatically detecting and taking action. See my comment. Max Levchin's original design failed.
crashoverdrive··on Machine learning for fraud detection
The reality is, computers are good at some things, humans are good at others (Remember how much effort it took google to identify cats in youtube thumbnails? Something any four year old can do?). Computers are good at sifting through large amounts of data. Great. Humans are good at detecting fraud. Combining them is best.

Peter Thiel writes about how fatal machine learning for fraud detection in his book, "Zero to One".

At Paypal, Max Levchin assembled an elite team of mathematicians to study the fraudulent transfers in detail. Then we took what we learned and wrote software to automatically identify and cancel bogus transactions in real time. But it quickly became clear that this approach wouldn't would either. After an hour or two, the thieves would catch on and change their tactics. We were dealing with an adaptive enemy and our software couldn't adapt in response.

The fraudsters adaptive evasions fooled our automatic detection algorithms, but we found that they didn't fool our human analysts as easily. So max and his engineers rewrote the software to take a hybrid approach: the computer would flag the most suspicious transactions on a well designed user interface, and human operators would make the final judgment as to their legitimacy.

crashoverdrive··on Stop Leaning In. Put Down Your IPhone. And HELP ME.
Thank you, this helps.
crashoverdrive··on Stop Leaning In. Put Down Your IPhone. And HELP ME.
"FREE KITTENS!"
crashoverdrive··on Stop Leaning In. Put Down Your IPhone. And HELP ME.
I don't know why you're being down voted either. In the moment I couldn't get past her wanting all of my things, and I couldn't get past having to do my presentation and letting all of my peers and company down. I froze and in the future that won't happen again, but you were right, I should have thrown my phone and hobbled away.
crashoverdrive··on Stop Leaning In. Put Down Your IPhone. And HELP ME.
Because you're human! What do you think got your ancestors this far! Do those values no longer apply because we beat certain environmental elements?

Are we to suggest that community support is as vestigial as the tailbone?

crashoverdrive··on Stop Leaning In. Put Down Your IPhone. And HELP ME.
You are correct, in hindsight, I would have handed it over, halfway through fighting it over, while bleeding I contemplated handing it over? What stopped me from doing so in the beginning?

I had the largest presentation of my life that night for a public audience of 200 people and letting my company and CTO down. I couldn't imagine losing all of my things and not being able to do so. Yes it was a very selfish driver at the time, but my brain couldn't move beyond that thought.

crashoverdrive··on Stop Leaning In. Put Down Your IPhone. And HELP ME.
I want to be clear, because I understand that in my post it isn't clear. For the total of the entire event, she only had the knife out for maybe two minutes of it tops. The rest she was just following me around. And when she would get close enough, press into me, pushing me/threaten me.

I, being in an orthopedic boot, was unable to move at anything more than a quick hobble.

crashoverdrive··on Heroku down for production and staging apps
Sorry, what I meant was that I wasn't suggesting it was their fault, I was merely reminded of my own curiosity of wanting to build a better product but not wanting to break what a ton of customers are using and paying a lot of money for
crashoverdrive··on Heroku down for production and staging apps
I'd be curious to see the numbers of how often Heroku pushes code to production, and also how often those pushes break the build.
crashoverdrive··on How is Docker.io different from a normal virtual machine?
Truthfully then by your own moral high bar, Shykes plugging of Docker should make you really uncomfortable. If you however allow yourself to take a step back and realize these threads are directed at real people trying to help each other with real problems, (Though arguably some do it for money) Then you can allow yourself to see it as helpfulness.

Because in reality, What is personal gain of plugging an open source free product that helps people?

crashoverdrive··on Docker: Git for deployment
I just saw that book on a coworker's desk of mine, now I've GOT to check it out, thanks!
crashoverdrive··on Docker: Git for deployment
Oh, Thanks! I'll check it out!
crashoverdrive··on Why am I being endorsed for skills and expertise I do not claim on my profile?
The truth is, Does it really matter. People look at your skills or skills people think you're good at, and it allows you more breadth and job opportunities.
crashoverdrive··on How one man turns annoying cold calls into cash
I feel this is a microcosm for our society today. Particularly in America. "Let's find a way to manipulate people into giving me money for doing nothing"

As a hardcore coder, a workaholic, and someone who came from rags to riches, I find this kind of behavior deplorable

crashoverdrive··on Docker: Git for deployment
One thing I keep seeing and feeling uncomfortable about, is this throwing layers ontop of layers ontop of layers until you are so far removed from what is actually happening, if one piece breaks down it's impossible to fix, and you have a ton of overhead. I want fast, simple, easy to hack, and something that just goes.

Isn't there a way to do this super slimmed down and light weight?

crashoverdrive··on Swarm casts humans as ants in the first Google Glass MMO game
I'm torn between oculus and glass games on who's going to win the war with gamers. Opinions?
crashoverdrive··on Docker 0.5.2 Released - Security Update
is this chroot or root, because, in my experience, don't you NOT want apps running as root? I suppose with containers having sub-level access it would be a difficult decision to choose which was more secure, giving docker full access to everything, or it not having control. It's a shame that its such a difficult place to change it, or that you can't select it at install.
crashoverdrive··on Getting to Docker 1.0
I looked at it but it seems overly complicated, I got ShipBuilder up and running in a flash
crashoverdrive··on ShipBuilder - Open Source PaaS written in Go
Calling it by the wrong name certainly sounds like the first stone to me.
crashoverdrive··on ShipBuilder: Go make your deployments smooth sailing
I dub thee, Heroku-Killer.
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