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gresrun

1,169 karma · joined January 31, 2011

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/gresrun; my proof: https://keybase.io/gresrun/sigs/qslnYax7ZVzINm7KbNQW2xvnaDTRDtua49lhpMWt3vw ]
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gresrun··on Falcon 9 Rocket Launch Scrubbed After Delta Air Flies into Restricted Airspace
The ATC was very much aware of the launch in progress[0]. The ATC made a mistake by instructing DL480 to fly a more northern route than the aircrew originally filed.

[0]: https://youtu.be/4RMhf0YELrA

gresrun··on Show HN: BudgetFlow – Budget planning using interactive Sankey diagrams
You should check out Projection Lab[0]! Not affiliated; just a happy customer!

[0]: https://projectionlab.com/

gresrun··on VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
"Rich asshole makes demeaning comments about situations they don't know" More at 11.

Seriously though, how out-of-touch do you have to be to think that entire organizations full of smart people are so incompetent as to have 100% bloat?

  Could you lay off 50% of Google today and still have a functional, competitive product tomorrow? Yes.

  Would you still have a functional, competitive product in 2 years? No.
Engineers are building and maintaining the product, SREs are keeping the jobs, servers and infrastructure humming, sales is bringing in new clients and keep existing clients happy, marketing is... OK maybe Google does need a marketing overhaul...

Deep cuts will also signal to employees and competitors that blood is in the water. Any remaining loyalty would evaporate and MSFT, AAPL, AMZN, & META would all be eager to scoop up that talent to build competing products to Google Search & Ads and bolster their cloud & AI offerings.

Disclosure: Google employee

gresrun··on Show HN: Celest – Flutter Cloud Platform
How do you handle versioning? Are there any guidelines/rules one must abide by?

It looks like you using Flutter's Dart<=>JSON serialization; do you recommend using built_value for immutable data structures?

Do you support protobuf/cap'n'proto?

gresrun··on Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges
L3 is entry-level for fresh college grads.
gresrun··on Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges
That's a dangerous, biased assumption.
gresrun··on Royal Navy says quantum navigation test a success
While I'm 100% positive the details of operational concerns like this are classified, there are 2 distinct types of submarines today with 2 different objectives:

1) Attack Submarines (e.g. Los Angeles-class & Virginia-class for USN) which usually roam within a designated operations area, surveilling, tracking, and generally keeping tabs on other nations' surface & sub-surface fleet dispositions. These subs typically have multi-week sorties and may intermittently surface for surveillance & comms.

2) Ballistic Missile Submarines aka "Boomers" (e.g. Ohio-class for USN) which are given a strategic area in which to operate and their objective is to remain silent & undetected, waiting for the hopefully-never-coming order to launch their SLBMs. These subs usually have multi-month sorties and often don't surface until the end of their patrol.

gresrun··on Deposit Outflows Shine Light on Fed Program That Pays Money-Market Funds
Currently, cash accounts get 4.30%[0]

[0] https://www.wealthfront.com/blog/why-is-wealthfront-cash-acc...

gresrun··on Who owns private home security footage, and who can get access to it?
UniFi Protect[0] is a decent on-prem solution and has all the main features of Nest/Ring. Certainly expensive though, minimal system for a doorbell cam is $199 for the camera[1] + $199 for the smallest NVR[2].

[0]: https://ui.com/camera-security [1]: https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-protect-cameras/produ... [2]: https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-protect/products/unif...

gresrun··on Google stores billions of lines of code in a single repository (2016) [pdf]
Context: Staff Eng @ Google for 7+ years

1) This is solved by 2 interlocking concepts: comprehensive tests & pre-submit checks of those tests. Upgrading a version shouldn’t break anything because any breaking changes should be dealt with in the same change as the version bump.

2) Google’s monorepo allows for visibility restrictions and publicly-visible build targets are not common & reserved for truly public interfaces & packages.

3) “Code churn” is a very uncharitable description of day-to-day maintenance of an active codebase.

Google has invested heavily in infrastructural systems to facilitate the maintenance and execution of tests & code at scale. Monorepos are an organizational design choice which may not work for other teams. It does work at Google.

gresrun··on The Oceanic+ app comes to Apple Watch Ultra
In sidemount diving, each diver carries two completely independent tanks & regulators, one on each side of their body.

While it is used primarily in cave diving because it is more streamlined and less likely to collide with cave ceilings and features, I find it also quite comfortable for recreational dives with a pair of AL40s.

It’s also a fun conversation starter with other divers who are curious about my gear!

gresrun··on Show HN: Open-source non-blocking NIO Java HTTP Server
Would love to see your set up!
gresrun··on Show HN: Open-source non-blocking NIO Java HTTP Server
If you’re only getting 500qps out of Netty something is deeply wrong with your set up. I’ve written multiple HTTP & socket servers based on Netty (albeit 6+ years ago) and they all could handle 20kqps+.
gresrun··on Nearly Half of San Franciscans Have Been Victims of Theft, New Poll Says
I tried to file a report with video evidence from the car 2 years ago. I was never able to get through to anyone at the police who would take the report, just passed to a voicemail and no one ever called back or acknowledged the report.
gresrun··on Slab City reaches its boiling point
FYI, any email-ish looking value works. E.g.: afdasdf@gfgs.com
gresrun··on Fishing gear accounts for an alarming amount of plastic in oceans (2021)
It was also built to allow the U.S. Army to rapidly move convoys of trucks, tanks, & materiel around the U.S.[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...

gresrun··on Technical Writing Courses from Google
Dart's documentation is comprehensive, well-written, and provides tons of meaningful examples.[0].

[0]: https://dart.dev/guides

gresrun··on Show HN: Login with HN (Unofficially)
Some quick Googling yielded: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=38...
gresrun··on Lottie – Use after effects animations in web and native apps
Skottie: Lottie player using the Skia graphics library[0][1]

Skia powers Google Chrome[2], Flutter, & Fuchia[3].

[0]: https://skia.org/docs/user/modules/skottie/ [1]: https://skottie.skia.org/ [2]: https://skia.org/ [3]: https://skia.org/docs/dev/flutter/

gresrun··on California halts Pony.ai's driverless testing permit after accident
Waymo built a bespoke, 113 acre facility for this very purpose back in 2017[0][1].

Full disclosure: Google employee, working on nothing to do with Waymo.

[0]: https://blog.waymo.com/2020/09/the-waymo-drivers-training-re... [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/google-waymo-self-driving-car-ca...

gresrun··on Migrating Facebook to MySQL 8.0
YouTube used to use a MySQL-based system called Vitess[0]. It no longer uses it and has migrated to Spanner.

[0]: https://vitess.io/

gresrun··on U.S. moves to double Canadian lumber tariffs
At least in FL, slab-on-grade with concrete block for the first story + wood frame for additional stories is incredibly common because it is far less susceptible to termite & moisture rot damage than slab + wood frame or wooden pier + beam.
gresrun··on Midair Collision over Denver
ATC comms with visualization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5tb2dVWJqc
gresrun··on Launch HN: Enombic (YC S20) – Create your own stock indexes
This product seems very similar to Motif.com, which shutdown about a year ago. How do you plan to avoid sharing their fate?
gresrun··on Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
5+ yrs @ Google, Google is my 5th company.

Google has all the building blocks for great backend services and front-end development and, if you know where to look and have some experience with them, you can build a rock-solid product in <6mos, also assuming you have a team that can execute and the political will to ship it.

Politics/consensus building is where the real roadblocks lie in Google, and presumably other large companies. Trying to make high-level product & technical decisions when you have 10 stakeholders with 3 VPs, all in different orgs, is serious exercise in patience; months of emails & meetings await you.

gresrun··on Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
I believe you’re referring to “Notecards”. In the US they come in 2 common sizes: 5”x7” & 4”x6”
gresrun··on Why nullable types?
Compose can also be implemented easily:

    extension NullableExtensions<T> on T? {
      R? map<R>(R Function(T) transform) => this == null ? null : transform(this!);
    }
    
    V Function(V) compose<V>(Iterable<V Function(V)> functions) =>
        functions.reduce((composedFunction, function) {
          return (V value) => composedFunction(function(value));
        });
    
    num add3(num val) => val + 3;
    num multiplyBy10(num val) => val * 10;
    num subtract5(num val) => val - 5;
    
    final doABunchOfMath = compose([add3, subtract5, multiplyBy10]);
    final optionallyDoABunchOfMath = (num? value) => value.map(doABunchOfMath);

    doABunchOfMath(10); // 98
    optionallyDoABunchOfMath(10); // 98
    optionallyDoABunchOfMath(null); // null
The nullable syntax (${Type}?) also makes it clear to readers that this is a type which may or may not contain a value. If you don't supply the trailing '?', Dart will enforce that the value must exist at compile-time and you can write your functions without worrying about nulls sneaking in where they're unwanted.

In effect, int? is almost nearly Option<int>, except you cannot represent Option<Option<int>> with Dart's nullable syntax.

Check out https://nullsafety.dartpad.dev/ to play around with the possibilities!

gresrun··on Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval
The University of Florida has a 100kW training reactor since 1959[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UF_Training_Reactor

gresrun··on Artificial eyespots on cattle reduce predation by large carnivores
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_R._Mickelsen_Safeguard... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safeguard_Program
gresrun··on Ask HN: How do I prepare for a job as an Implementation Consultant?
My recommendation is to hone your "soft skills": make sure you're on top of communication (be quick to respond to clients and don't let emails sit for more than 24 hours), be patient (working with clients means a wide variety of team dynamics and work paces), be humble yet confident (clients like help but they also want to "be right"), and prepare for the politics inevitably dumped onto outside consultants (consultants often are called in to make hard calls that internal teams don't want to make for political reasons).
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