erik_seaberg

True, I'm assuming commodity hardware. I've never had the privilege of working on really high end systems, but my impression is that you buy or lease a cluster in a box that is simulating one reliable computer.

Three machines get you availability that one machine can't.

It’s kind of terrifying to have and give out admin powers with no oversight (except maybe forensics if we’re lucky). I’m interested in what alternatives could look like. Maybe provisioning requests take multiple signatures, like turning missile keys?

To finish validating a request and then start executing it creates a race condition. That's why execution always needed to fail in a recoverable way.

Spark offers a fluent DSL with infix operators for data transforms, but after a company-imposed auto formatter got done mangling it I was only allowed to check in a wall of method chaining that none of my teammates would write.

    things
      .where($"key" === lit(key))
      .select("value")
      .as[String]
      .repartition(N1, $"value")
      .flatMap(new ThingIterator(_))
      .repartition(N2)
      .write
      .parquet(
        s"s3a://bucket/things/key=$key")

As for naming, I see stuff like “every method must take one arg whose name ends with Request” even when envelope or notification would make more sense.

Naming and layout are part of how experts communicate intent with each other. Auto formatters are literally blind so they mostly make poorly motivated naming and layout decisions.

I went through a phase of this because it made sense and I didn’t realize that it wasn’t standard English.

I don’t think they should be considered potential buyers until their streets are lined with chargers.

You can create a simulated directory, and write a bunch of files in it, but you can't atomically rename it--behind the scenes each file needs to be copied from old name to new.

Not sure I see a difference between thunks and futures.

> Public chargers are sorely lacking and prone to malfunctions[...] But price matters most of all

Either you own a garage or you don't. How could price matter more than that?

What worries me about WIP commits is that dropping them via rebase -i might not be trivial if quality commits later depend on them.

Triplebyte tried to do this, but apparently companies were only skipping phone screens for those candidates, not interview rounds.

This was basically my experience on the Google bus. Probably it’s only feasible when you have well-behaved riders (even the toilet was clean) and you don’t cheap out on capacity.

When code is as concise as possible, everything still there is there for a clear reason. Repetitive, verbose code is where our ape brains get bored or confused and miss bugs.

I don’t want to pollute a real branch with crap. I know how to rewrite history getting rid of it all, but I’d rather not. I prefer a bright line between tested, quality work with messages ready for review, and whatever I happened to be in the middle of (that I may or may not decide to abandon later).

It’s an abstraction that can’t exert any physical force to preserve its own existence without our cooperation.

I once worked on a legal case management database. One of the clients was getting sued over breast implants, and they used the database to catch scammers who sued fifty times (once in each state) over implants they never actually had.

That cognitive load around ownership and sharing already existed in C and even assembly, we were just managing it very poorly without tooling.

Anything reusable must be generic; that’s a cost of static typing.

Recording is visibly opt-in and retention is limited by default for the same reasons as chat and email—the US legal discovery process is a big burden even for the innocent. The only time I see it happen is a planned presentation to a group where future reuse makes sense. Some of our all-hands org meetings even take anonymous questions.

Retirement shouldn’t be the grand prize. If you execute well on a good idea, it’s important that you have an opportunity to scale it into a real business.

There used to be hardware that supported pointers to individual bits or complete words, rather than the eight-bit bytes we see today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_addressing

There's also org-journal, where a global keybind (I use the recommended C-c C-j) adds an empty timestamped item to a dated file.

Reused for food? Is it dishwasher safe?

This is because workers aren’t pooling their own money and agreeing to accept a full share of any losses. (Historically a few have done this; sometimes it works.)

A company shouldn’t blow all its revenue on labor for the same reason I don’t blow all my wages on pizza. I have many other needs, including the building I live in.

My favorite corporate laptop and desktop ran Goobuntu. macOS is dissimilar to production hosts in datacenters.

I use my True Name™ to remind myself this could be subject to legal discovery (through no fault of mine). But I like the marketplace of ideas not caring about the pedigree of a good idea.

Competing dictatorships of experts seem pretty efficient when workers are free to move.

I think a domain-specific dialect is the best way to unlock the potential of a team of handpicked experts, but a lot of companies seem to hire an army of devs they don’t trust enough.