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dajobe

410 karma · joined August 13, 2009

Free Software / open source hacker by night (librdf, redland, raptor, rasqal, flickcurl, turtle, triplr), Hadoop SRE at Twitter by day. Ex Rackspace, Digg, Yahoo. https://www.dajobe.org/ @dajobe on the Twitter
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dajobe··on Miller is like sed, awk, cut, join, and sort for name-indexed data such as CSV
There is also the (impossible to google) https://github.com/harelba/q that lets you SQL over CSV and is unix pipeline friendly.
dajobe··on 4Q: the final archive format
Things it doesn't support: symlinks, posix acls (xattrs). The first one makes it a certain failure for archival use. The hardcoded link to an external crypo service keybase makes it a failure for long term use.
dajobe··on Creative Scala: A New Introduction to Scala
Even better, it's from the future: Posted 25 Mar 2015
dajobe··on Why We Still Believe in Private Offices
I liked the comment: "I’m a big advocate of remote work culture even if nobody works remote."

That really works: respect people's time even if you are in the shared, no-cube, open office world.

dajobe··on JSON or XML: Just Decide
There's no way to point from one part of a JSON doc to another without inventing a terminology or convention for marking the start (anchor) and end of the arc (href). People use 'id' for one end but there's no way to say a json value is actually a reference (href) not just a string. XML has that built in (ID IDREF) and so does HTML, but I didn't say XML was better, I said JSON sucks at markup and graphs. JSON's handy for serializing trees of data with no loops.
dajobe··on JSON or XML: Just Decide
You have good taste, since I invented Turtle. To keep this on topic, I've been using JSON for data web APIs since that's what it's best at. It sucks at: markup and graphs of course.
dajobe··on Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?
How do I vote this polling crap down? Pointless and subjective and if this was stackoverflow, would be deleted.
dajobe··on Copyright Industry Calls For Broad Search Engine Censorship
I partially agree with a slight modification. I write a lot of free software / open source software. This relies on copyright of course, to enforce the freedoms. I don't want an onerous registration environment, but if it was "copyright terms to 4 years after last publication without registration" but registration with a fee after that. So if I continue to make the software, it gets the copyright and if I get bored, it turns into PD - and that's fine.
dajobe··on Unfortunate Python
This article / talk is a collection of relatively random python things of which only a few are unarguably good advice such as not using deprecated terms or checking for exact types. The rest is not a good basis for pythonic best practice that I would recommend.
dajobe··on Path(v2) fly out menu already recreated and open sourced.
It is not open sourced, at least not yet. Putting something on github generally means it can be openly distributed. The source code says "all rights reserved" and there is no license file.
dajobe··on AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure
What a pathetic rant. I was totally not surprised that day #1 of a total codebase rewrite would not have all the features of the old version. AVOS hinted enough at this too. At least they are innovating and responding to users. Having said that, I do hope 'networks' returns since that's the feature I miss, so far.
dajobe··on Google+ is the social backbone
I'm rather skeptical at this stage; the article could have been titled "Google+ could be the social backbone" but that isn't so provocative. When the APIs appear and we see how easy it is to get data in AND out via them, then it'll be clear.
dajobe··on Mailchimp Project Omnivore: Declassified
That's true, but it's still an interesting read, it hasn't really dated.
dajobe··on Mailchimp Project Omnivore: Declassified
I assumed the submission software would notice dupes of existing stories and point at them. The URLs seem the same.
dajobe··on Google Chrome Courgette differential compression algorithm
Looks like it is still ongoing: http://dockets.justia.com/docket/massachusetts/madce/1:2009c... reports news from Nov 2010. Can't decode the legal language.
dajobe··on Divide and Concur - testing code at etsy
I submitted the blog post, I am not the author of it.
dajobe··on How SmugMug survived the Amazonpocalypse
It also doesn't explain how if they don't trust EBS they are going to replace their MySQL on dedicated servers. Sounds like they are considering the Cassandra route. Which gained a query language last week.
dajobe··on How Digg is Built
True, and it isn't the full story of system dependencies. Data dependencies aren't really shown here and they are also tricky, although Cassandra is the the primary ("source of truth") for most things. So for example, if a user does something on the site such as Digg a story, you mainly write Cassandra (several times) but in some cases have to write Redis, as well as flush some caches. Meanwhile async jobs can be writing to HDFS and ultimately MySQL.
dajobe··on How Digg is Built
Boy, a lot of questions. I already mentioned that the different stores have different features. I wouldn't see Redis or Cassandra replacing each other for anything. HBase is a potential replacement for bigger MySQL-like things such as big joins across all user data, actions. M-R inputs are logs in HDFS, copied from scribe. RabbitMQ isn't involved in logging those.
dajobe··on How Digg is Built
You think this diagram is complex? You should see the one that describes the full details. Things I missed out include the tiny Java bit. No Ruby though.
dajobe··on How Digg is Built
I'll see if we can include some figures in tech posts that follow.
dajobe··on How Digg is Built
Thanks, we hope to go deeper in areas people are interested in. Let us know.
dajobe··on How Digg is Built
I'm the author of this article which was about the technology we use. Your comment doesn't seem to be about tech at all.