g9yuayon

Many comments below focus on failures with a single startup. I think it misses the point. Working for startups is risky, but the key is to build a system that increases your accumulated probability of success -- this is exactly why it's important to live in the bay area and work for some startups there, at least before the Covid-19. You get to see a large number of people who didn't fund any company, but still became financially independent by choosing to join the right companies at the right time. You get to see how those people make their choices. You get to see how those people decide to jump ship. You get to build a social circle where you learn lots of first-hand information about startups. There are a few simple steps that worked well for many people (again, no guarantee of success, but they do increase accumulated probability of finding the right company).

- You bet on product you love. Airbnb/Pinterest/Uber before 2013, Netflix before 2010, FB before 2009, Google before 2003, Databriks before 2017, Tesla before 2017.

- You bet on sectors. SDN, gig economy, search, big data, and etc.

- You bet on company's productivity - the customers/engineer grows exponentially without Uber-style marketing cost - Instagram/WhatsApp; the company releases features faster than they hire - Google; people deliver without working like a dog - Netflix

- You bet on people you know or you admire

- You bet on the leaders in each sector

Startup is not a lottery. Working for startup is risky, but the key is to build a system that increases your accumulated probability of success -- this is exactly why it's important to live in the bay area and work for some startups there, at least before the Covid-19. You get to see a large number of people who didn't fund any company, but still became financially independent or built an explosive career by choosing to join the right companies at the right time. You get to see how those people make their choices. You get to see how those people decide to jump ship. You get to build a social circle where you learn lots of first-hand information about startups.

Yes, it's still risky to join a startup, but no it's not a lottery. The chance of being rewarded handsomely is orders of magnitude higher than buying lottery.

What the author said was a typical challenge in big enough company. Big companies over hire as time goes by, and the number of teams eventually outgrows the quantity of work. As a result, you have meetings all day to align, to coordinate, and to drive. The bigger an organization is, the more you hear about such phrases, and the more time you spend in meetings. BTW, I dare you to take away those meetings - so many people need those meetings to "assert influence", to get visibility, and to be promoted. In a large organization, people focus on Produktionsverhältnisse, aka relation of production, instead of production itself.

This is also why the Bay Area is a truly great place to live in. So many small companies are there for us to choose. They move fast yet have reasonable work-life balance. They offer great financial perspective too, which can be far better than big companies if one's lucky.

Of course, I'm not saying big companies are all bad. Indeed, some people are great at navigating company dynamics. They build solid relationship in a complex environment. They make things happen despite bureaucracy. They lead multiple teams to achieve impossibles. They cut through red tapes like hot knife cutting through butter. They build a company to last.

So, the real question one should ask is: which type of person am I?

Maybe it's because Fowler's target readers are developers of enterprise software who are not familiar with distributed systems at all, and Fowler's background is not in distributed system either. Therefore, he chose to use colloquial terms.

I remember there was a huge discussion about Prop 13 on HN. IIRC, people passed Prop 13 because 1. California government double taxed; 2. Inflation was crazy and people believed that it was cruel that retirees had to leave the home they had been living in for many years just because they couldn't afford the property tax.

What beats me is why Prop 13 applies to commercial properties and investment homes.

Is there any evidence that people criticized Yellen because she is a woman?

I can accept that they ran out of cash. It's just like a company running out of servers when traffic spiked. On the other hand, moralizing their decision and citing misinformation and user-caring erodes trust.

Yeah, you're right. I think this article lacks specifics, but they did mention capital requirements. I was referring to their previous blog entry: https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2021/1/28/keeping-customers-.... In addition, their founder @VLAD on Twitter cited misinformation as a reason.

As for conspiracy, I'd venture to guess that inconsistencies/hypocrisies and opacity turned people into cynics. I'm not saying RH is hypocritical, by the way. Instead, the hypocrisies of other platforms made people trust RH less. For instance, I saw numerous accusations that RH was helping wall street by limiting buying but not selling.

This sounds the real reason that RH limits the trading of a number of stocks today? If so, why didn't they give this straightforward reason? Instead, they resorted to vague excuses like misinformation and "for your own good".

I doubt it. Robinhood is now citing misinformation as the reason to "protect its users". Misinformation and disinformation are really the weapons of mass destruction. Cite it, and you get your superpower. Twitter does it. FB does it. Media, oh media loves it. So, what's wrong with Robinhood again?

I don't know if there's any communication protocol with eye contact. People were so afraid of persecution that they used only eye contact to exchange feelings, or so I read. One may argue that it's different this time aforementioned persecution came from the governments. Well, it's worth remembering that it was ordinary people who voluntarily snitched each other during those horrible times, believing that they were on moral high ground. Or just ask Chinese: who beat professors and school principals to death? Who thought that business owners deserved to starve to death? Who thought eating flesh of person was righteous because that person was born in a middle-class family?

It looks many Chinese have learned their lessons from their own painful history, yet Americans didn't even care about history at all.

Robinhood phrased their message as if it was for user's own good. Moralizing everything beyond protocol and rules and law has serious consequences. It does nothing but driving people cynical. Didn't the elites learn the stories of USSR political jokes, the stories of how East Germans (and ancient Chinese people) talked to each other via eye contacts only? It's not hard to guess what will happen when enough number of people stop trusting the system. For that matter, I'm so glad that AOC and Td Cruz can agree with each other to probe Robinhood's practice.

I thought Stallman created GPL so software can be "free as in speech". It's another dimensional of ideology, and respectably so. It, however, has nothing do with whether it is moral for AWS to host an Apache-licensed open-source package.

So your company cautiously chooses which services in AWS to use, and sticks to infrastructure offerings for now. Netflix called it "paved path", and it worked really well too for Netflix. Over the years, though, the "paved path" expanded and extended to more services. It's worth noting that EC2 alone is a huge productivity booster, bar none. Nothing beats setting up a cluster of machines, with a few clicks, that auto scales per dynamic scaling policies. In contrast, Uber couldn't do this for at least 5 years, and their docker-based cluster system is a crippled for not supporting the damn persistent volumes. God knows how much productivity was lost because of the bogus reasons Uber had for not going to cloud.

Does FOSS mandate that anything and everything must be open sourced? Richard Stallman holds this belief that all software should be free as in speech, but is such belief universally held? Or simply put, did MS violate any license at all?

And no, I didn't imply that FOSS supporters are freeloaders in any way. You got that impression probably because of loss in translation. Rather, people who criticize MS for not open sourcing a specific piece of software are moral crusaders, trying to force a company or anyone to totally comply with their moral standard.

Chinese has a saying, which I don't know how to translate: 升米恩，斗米仇。It roughly means that you give a starving man a bowl of rice, he will be grateful; if you continue to give the same man a bag of rice for him to live better, he will hate you for not giving enough.

It rings very true.

Parsing is frontend of a compiler. That the compiler course focuses on compiler backend does not mean it's not relevant to the industry. I personally find aliasing, flow analysis, and and optimization very relevant to what we needed to do.

As for industry vs academia, wouldn't it be fair to say that professors should teach which ever is more advanced? I certainly don't believe that teaching Java generics, no matter how relevant that is, is relevant to a PhD program, which is supposed to push the state of the art of a subject.

I'm not sure. Most of us voted the same group of politicians year in and year out, right? It looks we lost check and balance years ago, but that's voters' choice, no?

> Classes are only a fraction of the in-person university experience in the USA today.

I guess it really depends on the type of student. If I were a college student now, classes alone indeed are a fraction of the in-person university experience. Besides classes, I'd also need:

  - Challenging homework and rigorous scoring and feedback -- this would be critical to my future success. Standard tests won't cut it as I need my professors and tutors give me feedbacks on my proofs, my homework, my assignments, and detailed and usually lengthy and overly verbose reports. 
  - Opportunities to work on a research project with my professors and senior students. 
  - Office hour with professors. 
  - Seminar-like classes that students and professors dive deep together on a subject. 

Luckily, remote learning can enable all such requirements. The only inconvenience I can think of is that it will be hard to work on a math-intensive problem on a whiteboard, but even that is solvable with something like an iPad and a stylus.

Things I'll miss: libraries. I used to check out 10 to 20 books a time, and spend hours and hours in my college libraries reading them and doing assignments. Classmates turn to friends. There's so much fond memories of hanging out with friends I made in college. We can probably make it up by hanging out online, but the experience will be different from face-to-face interactions.

What I don't need and will be glad to see them gone: all kinds of crazy sports programs. Yeah, football or basketball or whatever. They're nice, but I'm not sure if they are multi-million-dollar nice, at least not to me. I don't give a rat's butt if Caltech didn't win collegiate basketball for 37 years. So what? For all I know, Caltech will be the best college as long it provides the best STEM courses and produces the best research results in the world.

Sometimes it's all about priority. I can't speak for the author and I don't know what the author needs, but my experience tells me, again and again, using cloud services is all about productivity, and people tend to underestimate the cost of lost productivity and missing opportunities.

I'll give two examples.

Netflix focused on productivity. They even popularized the phrase "undifferentiated heavy lifting". They were able to build a metric system, in less than a year, that supported full OLAP query with practically arbitrary number of dimensions. The system ingested > 20 billion data points per minute, ran on more than a thousand machines, and did not set quota to any team or service. The entire system was built and operated by merely three engineers. This was simply not possible without AWS. Similarly, Netflix's data pipeline, Elasticsearch cluster, and Druid clusters were developed and operated by two engineers. They were oncall 24x7, yet they rarely got waken up in the middle of a night. You think this was possible if Netflix tried to build its own infrastructure?

The counter example is Uber. Uber was ambitious and wanted to build everything. The results? More than 200 alerts got fired within 2 hours -- the poor oncall engineer couldn't do anything but to keep ack'ing the alerts. Wanted to use Cassandra? 10-page forms that were more tedious than applying for the Ivy schools, weeks of waits, lots of angry emails, countless meetings, and still no Cassandra instances. Wanted to add 50 machines to your ES cluster? PPTs, meetings, escalation all the way to CTO, and weeks of planning. Want to try out Apache Kudu? No way, because our container-based EC2-like system did not support persistent volume, let alone something similar to EBS or EFS. Wanted to use container for your ES cluster? Same answer. Wanted to create your bespoke cluster topology? Same answer because apparently custom network configuration was not supported. After waiting for more than three years? Same answer. If this was not expensive, I don't know what was.

So, you asked if you should save a few thousand bucks a month for your fast-growing company?

This sounds like mobs in the French revolution. You don't agree with my political view, so you deserve the guillotine. And people do this all in the name of justice and righteousness.

It's interesting BBC noticed so called four great sorceries of Asia (亚洲四大邪术). Applying digital makeup to someone to the point that his or her mama couldn't recognize the person is certainly one of them.

I feel sick to my stomach. I give tips specifically to the drivers, yet those companies took a cut without even telling the drivers. A so-called high-tech company behaves like a rogue restaurant owner. How low can we go?

Thinking colleges don't matter at all in tech is another extreme. It's like saying one should not go to college at all because Carmack didn't and was very successful. Not everyone is autodidactic. Many people do need structured and well paced training. It is ordinary people who suffer in their career when schools lower their standard. See Mark Tarver's article on this: http://www.marktarver.com/professor.html

And speaking of personal experience, mine is exactly opposite to yours. My university made me. If it were not for my university's rigorous training, I would squander my four years, and I would not be able to do what I enjoy today. I owe a great deal to my university, to say the least.

Of course they understand economics. They just don't think it matters or don't care as long as their constituents support them. Well, their constituents do support them -- it's easy peasy anyway. People in California hate Republicans to the bones. As a result, we don't really have check and balance. Without check and balance, we get all kinds of ridiculous policies.

In a word, we get what we vote for.

Isn't this simple supply and demand? The housing price is too high? Build more houses or apartments. Yet San Francisco authorities tried every possible way to suppress supply: rent control and all kinds of regulations, to say the least. So much for so called "we fight for poor people".

Companies should jointly give CIFAR a big fat award too. :-D Without CIFAR's 10 million dollars back in 2003 to the research groups of 15 people, led by Hinton, the research groups may have dissolved due to lack of funding, and our history would be different.

Netflix gives every engineer the same title: Senior Software Engineer. That worked out beautifully: everyone focuses on getting things done and doing the right things. One's total package depends on how important this person is to her team and to the company, and of course Netflix makes sure the person gets paid more than the market can offer. If the person disagrees with the market price, Netflix encourages the person to seek external opportunities.

Can't find a better system for those who don't about titles.

People seem have forgotten the productivity loss of running their own data center. When I was in my previous company, most of things are just excruciating compared with what I enjoyed in Netflix. Dockers did not come with persistent volumes, provisioning machines involved lengthy approvals and sometimes long waiting time; building and deploying services that involved multiple clusters that talked to each other required serious devop-fu; production clusters got broken because infra upgraded system dependencies using a background job and mitigating such simple mistakes may take hours if not days. Deploying any non-trivial service required multiple meetings with some infra teams, for resources, for concerns with stability, or whatever. PS, did I mention that we built tens of thousands of Puppet files that very few people understood and any updates to my system took half an hour to refresh yet the early members of the infra team thought Puppet was the best f@#$ tool in the world? The list can go on and on. PPS, did I mention that we had a 500-person infra team and later probably more than a thousand for a fraction of traffic/complexity compared with what Netflix had to deal with, while Netflix didn't even have an infra team (to be fair, Netflix had a build team and a platform team and a monitoring team, which had fewer than 30 people combined)?

In contrast, EC2 alone would have to save us lots of pains.

You may say that my previous company was not technically great. Maybe. If that's the case, how many companies can be really better? I think the fundamental problem is that companies tend to underestimate the effort to build a world-class infrastructure from scratch as well as the opportunity cost due to loss of productivity. Netflix's leaders were truly wise by claiming that Netflix didn't want to work on undifferentiated heavy lifting early on.

You're right. It's reasonable to argue that Google should or shouldn't respect Chinese laws, and I never implies that Google has a moral obligation to Chinese people. I just want to point out the hypocrisy in the argument that Google is immoral to provide a censored search service in China when it's clear that Google's search service provides much better results than the Baidu.