dkhenry

Vitess is pretty close to magic for a lot of use cases. The downside of its rebalancer is that the re-sharding process requires a full expansion of the shards that are being re-balanced, which is to say if you have two shards [-80] and [80-], and you want to split out part of the first shard you need to provision two new shards [-40] and [40-80], let the data copy into them, and then you can mark them as active and delete the old [-80] shard. In this brave new cloud world, that not as much of an issue as it would have been in the old data of your own datacenter.

The big problem everyone I have talked to about sharding runs into is managing the shards as you expand. In this case it looks like notion over sharded so they can spin out up to 480 physical nodes, but when they need the 481 it is going to be a nightmare, thats what Vitess gets you for free, expand to any number of shards and just never worry about it again

They meet once a week for a full day to discuss the course material with a paid tutor. That gives a good time to have those discussions and ask questions.

You are completely correct about how hard independent study can be, in the group our younger kids go to, a few of the older siblings have opted to go back to a classroom settings, not all of them, but every kid is different and with a strong academic basis they can thrive in whatever setting you put them in. More importantly if the students choose to go to college that will almost definitely be a traditional college experience so at some point they will need to be acclimated to traditional school. I hope my children can thrive in the independent program, but if not they will have the skills needed to learn in any environment.

Third Grade, First Grade, and Pre-Kindergarden. I really shared your concerns about academic performance as the course material gets harder, but what we have settled on is a co-op program that teaches the fundamentals of learning in the early years ( K - 6 ) and then progressively pushes the students towards independent study in the more advanced years, with a very extensive curriculum.

Honestly the foundational work is just as vital to the parents as it is to the kids as we will be simply guiding them through a high school curriculum that is much more advanced that anything we ever experienced. This is the program we are using, but we have two more years before we begin.

https://www.classicalconversations.com/challenge/

I have lived in some of the best school districts in the country and sent my kids to the public school in them.

1. Garnet Valley in PA ( this one was the best of all we tried ) https://www.greatschools.org/pennsylvania/glen-mills/garnet-...

2. Fairfax Country in VA ( this one was the worst ) https://www.greatschools.org/virginia/falls-church/fairfax-c...

3. Los Gatos/Saratoga in CA https://www.greatschools.org/california/saratoga/schools/

In California we sent our kids to a private school before pulling them out for home schooling. Essentially I don't think its the school districts fault, I think its a suboptimal model and if you are really well funded with really engaged parents you can kinda make it work. Although the number of Kuman and Russian Math tutoring facilities near me makes me double guess myself on that.

I am part of this increase, and after a full year homeschooling we will not be sending our kids back to traditional school. What we noticed is that our kids weren't actually learning, they were being pushed through a program so they could pass a test with very little concern about where that would leave them in the future. This was most apparent in math, where foundational concepts were being rushed just to cover the full syllabus and in future years the foundations of computation were not really well covered and when we started to put them though our math program of choice ( Saxon math ) it was really clear they didn't understand the concepts ( for instance, given a word problem there was no real ability to write down the equation, even though they had been taught that material in the past ). It wasn't just math, it was every topic, and it was really apparent as we started to actually evaluate what they knew. As time goes by I am really struggling to see any benefit of the traditional model except for keeping kids busy so their parents can work. Giving kids the individual attention and tailoring the schoolwork for them its just so much better and able to actually instruct the children.

I would much rather live a simpler life in a place with a low cost of living, than require a two income household and offload the education of my children to a system that doesn't particularly care about them being educated.

Thankfully you are not the only person to realize this and a multi-billion dollar industry sprung up to help independent retailers compete. A Shopify website has a customer experience similar to Amazon. The real issue is Amazon has so much market capture that most people don't even look for independent retailers. In fact even suggesting that you can go other places online gets a bunch of push back from people insisting that nothing can compete, and that somehow it's moral to ignore all externalities in the name of pure market efficiency.

I believe thats exactly how we stop that, by choosing not to shop at Amazon. The government is ( theoretically ) an expression of the will of the people, if the will of the people is to exploit others for their own benefit, the government will reflect that. Until we individually decide that our neighbors are important enough to us that we are willing to suffer a little inconvenience nothing will change, but if we are willing to individually suffer a little inconvenience we absolutely can effect any company even one as big as Amazon.

They should, but they weren't auto fuses, and Ace Hardware didn't sell them either. They were really small and specific to small electronics ( in this case a Honeywell desk fan that had a fuse in the plug ) Fry's would have had them, but Fry's is no more, and there isn't any other store like that anymore.

It's not the mega conglomerates they are putting out of business. It's the bike stores, the hobby shops, the clothing boutiques. In the US with the purchase of Whole Foods, they are also moving more into groceries and everything else. After experiencing not being able at all to go to a high street and buy things and forcing everything to be online, I realized just how bad the experience is, and decided if I had to choose between the two I would choose the physical experience.

Once you do that you start to realize just how much of the consumer goods world Amazon has already put out of business. I live in silicon valley and there is no where I can go for electronics any more. My last amazon purchase was getting some 2.5A fuses because every store that would sell them locally has closed ( either before the pandemic, or because of it ). I tried to buy a video card, and the local computer equipment retailer literally couldn't get allocated any stock from the manufacturers, somehow Amazon managed to get first dibs on supply. I don't like that world, and I don't want to live in it.

And I believe its exploitive of everyone in the supply chain, from manufacturers to delivery drivers, and has led to the vast centralization of an overwhelmingly large portion of our economy into the hands of corporation with no accountability.

Furthermore I am very convinced it makes the lives of everyone, except the tiny minority that are actively exploiting everyone else, much worse. Good jobs are lost, supply chains are made fragile, and monopolistic tendencies are encouraged. I would rather the inconvenience of shopping around than encourage a world with a private entity as the sole source of all consumer goods.

I am happy the parts company is ditching Amazon, but its so much more important for us consumers to ditch amazon. I have cut my amazon purchases down to only 16 total items this year so far ( down from ~50 in 2020 ) and I am now only ordering from Amazon as a last option when I cant find what I want anywhere else. That brief glimpse of the Amazon future where all stores are shut down, and we can only ever buy things online, and everyone is an amazon serf was such a wakeup call as to what we were heading towards. I just hope enough people can jump ship to keep a functioning non amazon centric supply chain.

Why only one bedroom apartments? You can't build a community that you think will stand for any amount of time and be this hostile to families.

If that specific bill was the only debt we were printing to subsidize car dependence it would be bad enough, however the majority of spending is done by municipalities which sits currently at 4T and its estimated we need to add 6T to that over the next 10 years to keep up with repairs. After we have spent that 10T we will then have to repair all the roads built in the past 20 years which is growing at about 500,000 miles of roads per decade.

If you want more walkable cities you have to stop subsidizing the suburban sprawl that has been paid for with debt spending. The infrastructure that is falling apart around us is happening because its unsustainable, and if we just print 1T dollars every few years to kick the can down the road all you do is create a bigger problem to be solved in 20 years.

A few things I am really excited about in this release are the new protbuf compiler ( https://vitess.io/blog/2021-06-03-a-new-protobuf-generator-f... ) and the improvement on end to end speed ( https://benchmark.vitess.io/macrobench?ltag=10.0.0&rtag=11.0... )

Vitess was already one of the most performant distributed databases, this is really pushing the limits even further.

I have a very simple rule that I adopted when I first became a manager, and it has served me well. I won't ever fire someone for performance unless I have explicitly said to them. `If you don't do the following things in the given time frame you will be fired` I require myself to explicitly state they will loose their job, and I require to have an explicit list of exactly what needs to be done and a fixed time frame for it to be done. I feel if I as a manager can't do that, then the real issue is a failure in management not a failure in the employee.

While I have still had to fire plenty of people for performance even with this rule. I can also say that I have had multiple people actually improve their performance and get off the PiP which as I understand from talking to other managers is not a common occurrence.

Yeah, if you are doing global replication you are much more likely to fall behind so you should have aggressive monitoring on the replica to remove it if replica lag gets to high, that will prevent the primary from retaining WAL files for too long.

It also means you will need to be able to resync the replica from a backup once write volume calms down.

That is good and should prevent against bringing down the primary. There is still the issue with being able to get that region back online once replication is severed, which isn't always possible even with co-located systems.

Of the many things that can go wrong, the one I would be most worried about would be replication lag causing the disk on the primary to fill with WAL logs bringing down the primary, or if you have limited the WAL logs, the replica not being able to keep up and detaching from the primary causing stale reads.

Also long distances will make replication latency increase so unless _all_ requests are sent to the primary region you will likely have a read after write state data situation unless you go out of your way to ensure consistency

This is very true, its hard to tell if the company you are going to join is well run, or awful. Stories people tell about startup's don't help since it can normalize bad behavior and make it seem like that is the industry norm ( i.e. 14 hour days being standard, very low pay, toxic management ).

When I joined my first startup I had already worked in a large engineering firm for 5 years, and due to the nature of the work ( small team with responsibility to do everything from funding projects to delivering them ) I knew what kind of questions to ask to figure out how well run the company was. I think advice about how to spot well run startup's would be much better for junior engineers then telling them to just join a large public company.

This is awful advice. I have worked for startup's and large companies, and I would hands down say you will learn more and become a better engineer working at a well run startup then you will ever become by joining a hyperscaler as a line engineer and trying to play the corporate politics.

The author is correct that by the numbers it is far more likely that you will make more money if you just sell your soul to a FAANG, and if all you want is to make a quick buck and spend it all on overpriced real estate they are entirely correct. Every single one of their other points is just indicative that they have worked for awful startups. Large companies can be just as bad, but the difference is in a large company most of the problematic points will break down lower in the organization. If you think every team at all the FAANGS is great at mentoring or doesn't put in long days or has anything approaching a reasonable hiring and review systems you are ignorant of just how much variation there is on different teams.

Up until the table is so large that the copy takes longer then your WAL retention so you can't ever catch up. Like all things in Postgres, it works great up to a point, and then you are stuck. You also have to Logically replicate the entire schema because postgres won't logically replicate from table to table

This is one of the areas where Postgres is so far behind MySQL is embarrassing. Zero downtime migrations in MySQL have been a common method for over 10 years. This solution is far from ideal due to the use of Triggers which can greatly increase the load on the database and slow down transactions. If you don't have a lot of load on your DB thats fine, but if you are pushing your DB this will bring it down.

In MySQL they started with triggers with PT-OSC, but now there is GH-OST which does it with Replication. You can do something like this with Postgres by using Logical replication, but its still requires hand holding, and to my knowledge there is no way to "throttle" the migration like you can with GH-OST. Where I work now we are building all this out so we can have first class online migrations, but the chasm is still pretty big.

The biggest thing is Saxon is a physical book, and it comes along with all the worksheets and tests and problem sets that we can copy and have them work on multiple times if needed. Specifically things like math facts and computations require a lot of practice, and they have these worksheets you do multiple times, timing yourself each time to show progress. Its really good to have that be able to be done physically with a pencil as the physical interaction really helps with retention. Also I greatly prefer the sequencing of Saxon, they do a lot of introduction work with coins and clocks, two things that are easy to get your hands on and that kids relate with well. Explaining fractions with a Quarter being a quarter of a dollar, and being 25 cents gives you a lot of discussion you can have. Then clocks are so useful for fractions ( half past the hour, quarter till ), especially since they are base 60 and not base 10. Also things like place value ( 1 vs 10's vs 100's ) and even angles are all related to real world physical objects the kids can touch.

If it came down to it I think Kahn would give them a wonderful education and everything I have seen is well executed and wraps in a lot of the sequencing that I have seen work with my kids, but I do like Saxon enough to pay for it and use it as the primary source.

The other piece is this thing called Institute for Excellence in Writing (https://iew.com/) it is honestly amazing. My kids know more about writing, and have a better grasp of the english language then I do thanks to that program.

There is a fairly robust set of benchmarks that are run to test out performance improvements[1] and macro benchmarks are the ultimate test of holistic improvement. CPU isn't a great proxy, but one of the biggest problems in real world performance on this specific system ( databases in general ) is latency. CPU time is a really good proxy for latency so by taking a look at CPU time we can get an idea of how the system will respond under "normal" conditions.

1.https://benchmark.vitess.io/macrobench

Everyone in the homeschooling group my family attends generally pays for material, and then supplements with things that are free(ish). For example math for us is Saxon (paid), and then we will sometimes use Kahn (free) if the kids need extra practice, or if they need the material presented a different way.

As a parent who has all three children fully home schooled now I can confidently say it is just the better way to educate children. The article slightly alludes to this, but homeschooling today is not the kids sitting at home independently going through workbooks, with limited interaction. The big revelation to me when we started this journey was that homeschooling can be done in groups, not on a day by day basis, but by aligning curriculum with other families and working independently you get this amazing interaction where the kids can relate to others doing the same work, they can have meetup's and group sessions on some regular basis, and they can still have a generally fully customized experience to meet the child learning exactly where they are.

The most poignant example of the overwhelming benefit of homeschooling was when we found out that our son was really struggling with math. He was able to answer most problems, but was consistently getting basic things wrong. He never actually internalized the math he had learned and now in 5th grade he was struggling with not knowing things like math facts or order of operations, or anything of how to deal with fractions. In a traditional school he would likely be tracked into remedial math, and would spend the rest of his school time there. However by just spending more time on math each day he was able to quickly address his issues and start better understanding his new coursework.

Same thing with reading for my daughter, she was a prolific reader, and quickly advanced to books she saw her older brother reading, but when we had her do school work she couldn't complete basic comprehension work for the age level books we were assigning. Well it turns out it wasn't that she didn't comprehend them, it was that she never learned how to communicate details, we spent six months having her read and explain very simple books, and quickly she was back up to speed and excelling in both reading and comprehension tasks.

We wouldn't have been able to do either of these without dedicated and time consuming intervention. The exact kind of intervention you would never get in even the most dedicated public schools. The only place you can get that kind of prolonged dedicated attention is with parents at home. Add into this that we have been able to _vastly_ expand the scope and sequence of what our kids are learning because we can just firehose them as much new material as they can take and you quickly see that a child who is excited about learning, who is able to explore and discover, and isn't bound to an artificial school day, or school year, or school curriculum will learn so much more then their traditionally schooled counterparts.

After this last year we are 100% sold on never sending our kids back to traditional school, it would be unloving and would be doing them a disservice. We decided that if it came down to it, we would rather move away from the extremely high cost of living world we live in today so we could be a one income household and give our kids the attention they deserve rather then let someone else try and raise them for us.

Philly has lots of good tech jobs, but they don't have a very large software based startup ecosystem. They do have some venture funds floating around ( https://technical.ly/philly/2020/02/19/pact-report-philadelp... ) but almost all of that is not in tech companies ( https://philadelphiapact.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/2019... )

The biggest problem in Philadelphia is that its a really cost effective city to live in, so you aren't going to get the sky high paying tech jobs that you find in other cities, because there is a big pool of workers from the larger employers that are always around for modest wage increases. That depresses wages, and makes really talented engineers look at moving towards NYC or DC where they can get a _much_ better paying job. Specifically NYC where you can still live in the suburbs and make NYC level wages by only moving a half hour north of Philadelphia.

I have been watching Ubiquiti slowly go downhill over the past five years. I finally jumped ship to Mikrotik for a recent addition to my network and they seem like a good replacement for power users. Nothing they sell is quite as user friendly as the Ubiquiti gear, but I would rather have to spend a few minutes at a console then loose control over my network because a SaaS went offline

Parents are responsible for the education of their children. Public school is a failure because it promises parents they don't have to be active participants in the education of their kids. Building your society around the idea that both parents work outside the house and they outsource the nurture and development of their kids to a professional class of child development experts for their whole life will never work. It effects those with limited resources the most.

I can't blame a parent who has bought into a system that was doomed to failure from the very beginning.