4,993 karma · joined July 22, 2010
Also - and perhaps this is just me - but the world “guild” just makes me think of Dwarves and fantasy games. “The dwarvish guild is requesting more iron ore to make hammers”. Hard to get taken seriously.
Guild is not a term in corporate parlance. Perhaps “think tank” resonates a little better? IDK
We need to find a way to incentivize that otherwise it’s not going to happen. Perhaps looking how the security industry works with “buy bounties” is a place to borrow ideas from?
Specifically the design of algorithms in dating apps is interesting. In effect Tinder at all could play “eugenics” with users based on who they show / hide.
I would assume that’s already happening to some extent as they weight profiles based on how engaging they are to others.
The other aspect is they have a strong disincentive to encourage too many successful couples, as that means lost users / revenue.
And Match.com owns 40%+ of the dating market.
I find myself asking “what does this mean for the future of the human race?”
> Heads up: Medium isn’t using this tool anymore, but you’re welcome to!
The problem with things like this is the typical engineering mindset, when shown a graphical or numerical analysis of their performance will zoom into analyse every detail and in the end it's just backed by the managers impressions and judgement.
For similar reasons I have a strong opinion that engineers shouldn't be paid performance related bonuses, because no matter what happens, it's just going to upset them - the best case - maximum bonus - just equates to a "meh". Better to pay a good base salary upfront ...
Anyway use tools like this with caution IMO.
Listening to that it seems clear Blake knew he was likely to be fired but in his eyes it’s some kind of a duty to tell the world.
One interesting point he makes in the Podcast is Lamda is not one thing like GPT-3 but a bunch of different systems across Google interacting as one and he argues the interaction of the whole is what makes sentience.
It’s a pretty “far out there” podcast but worth the time IMO
And usually pager duty is done in rotation, rather than you only get paged for your own code. It's one thing to ruin your own sleep, but if you ruin the sleep of the person that sits next to you, you start to think about consequences in production.
It amazes me, for example, how often I've seen developers leaving their application logging, via something like log4j, in a default configuration where eventually it WILL fill up a disk, bringing down a server, rather than investing the 10 minutes it takes to switch the configuration to say "rotation" so that only a finite amount of space will be used, or just writing a bash script to clean up old files. And this is something that's very hard to pass on as best practice without sounding condescending - like the only way to learn to take stuff like this seriously is by dealing with the consequences in production.
> our role is to enable and facilitate developers in getting features into the hands of customers
The problem here is this creates the wrong kind of incentives for developers… somehow elevating the to a level where they don’t have to care about how their code works in production.
As someone that remembers being a developer back in the days of sysadmins, we were AFRAID of upsetting the operations people. If your code brought a server down, you were at least going to face some very awkward conversations. The cartoon “The Bastard Operator from Hell” immortalized that era.
Meanwhile at one company I worked at years ago - an airline - the development team was responsible for keeping the system running 24/7. Nothing makes you think more carefully about your code in production than meeting a colleague on Monday morning who got woken up at 2am by your code failing.
While I’m not arguing for hostility in the workplace, giving developers incentives to care about their code in production seems to me to be one of the things devops got wrong
Exactly! In fact I‘d go further and say - in some cases - “innovation” has made things worse not better.
As a kid our family TV had one remote control. You switched the TV on and it “just worked”. Today to watch your “Smart TV” you need at least 3 remote controls apparently and the time between switching it on an actually watching anything seems to get longer and longer. Sure there’s all this choice now available of what to watch - although mostly it’s a choice between many variations of low quality content - but the basic usability of a TV is way worse than what I had when I was 10.
Another example is “smart lights” … it used to be you just switch a light on and it worked. But now there’s at least an additional 200 ms to wait for a light to turn on, and a little glimmer of anxiety when you’re unsure what “mode” the light will boot up in, especially when your Wifi was down…
I do a comedy podcast and we were ranting about this stuff a little while ago about how “innovation” is making things worse https://youtu.be/HvtCfUMJEk0
Ultimately they created a show that fed into the publics desire for revenge, post 9/11, and made a big success out of it.
What it leads to is the point I already made - the goal torture is oppression; to create fear and thereby obedience, not gathering information.
I mean the poster at the top of this thread immediately tries to make some justification…
> This is the kind of stuff that probably makes some people’s job down the pipe easier and at the same time undermines the Western civilization.
No! It’s just wrong! We should never do this to other human beings. Period. But you want a GOOD reason why not ?
Because the people you trained to torture abroad one day return home and get jobs like security outside the nightclub your teenage kids are going to. You’re literally training psychopaths which later get unleashed on the public at home.
Also we know torture doesn’t work for information gathering. It’s only useful as a tool of oppression. Which is why we’re actually using it.
But seriously. I can’t believe I need to make the case against torture. It’s just wrong.
Or they see it like Poker as an "all in" move. Either lose now on their own terms in Ukraine or eventually they lose anyway as Ukraine joins NATO and Russia's nuclear advantages are "neutralized". Meanwhile there's the chance NATO may not intervene so take the risk...
From a distance it's very hard to judge what's true and what isn't. My level of trust in the media these days is extremely low so reading stories about Nazi Flags I'm thinking "click bait". Meanwhile forums like reddit - and slowly HN as well - are clearly filled with "paid shill" accounts. So what to trust?
> I've been living in downtown Ottawa for weeks, I've been harassed.
I'm sorry to hear that. I did check your HN profile briefly and you "seem legit"
Seriously? This smells like an attempt to paint the truckers as extreme right. Any quality sources for that claim?
Potentially Cardano could become one of the most significant uses of Haskell in the wild, if it gets traction of course
Despite that we still have people that assume “I sent an email and I’m important therefore everyone got the message”. Try running those emails through some tool like Mailchimp and you’ll probably find less than 40% even opened the email, let alone read beyond the first paragraph.
I’ve done a lot of organising events for engineers inside companies where there are like 500+ engineers. You need email, slack, calendar invites and more to get people paying attention. And often they’re paying more attention to LinkedIn than what’s happening on the “inside” … you can run campaigns on LinkedIn that target your own people…
> Why did this happen in the first place?
> My answer is something I call “consistency sin”. Understanding the cause lets us avoid similar situations in the future.
Oh seen this happen. Something like...
Random boss: "Our iOS and Android apps are not consistent!"
Mobile PM/Dev: "But Android users don't care what the iOS app is like. They want the best version of our app for Android"
Random boss" "But our iOS and Android apps are not consistent!"
Mobile PM/Dev: sigh
At 3 minutes the little girl says "Echo loves to to play music" ... i.e. it's expected that children will project emotions onto Echo, which in turn means an implied level of trust they will have to the device. Also the girl in the video is using at times _without_ parent supervision...
So sorry the whole "it's just a dumb device designed to search the Internet and you should know better" argument doesn't fly here.
> Safe: Implemented in Rust programming language and using Tokio runtime ensures memory and thread safety.
Does memcached have issues with memory and thread safety? I've never heard of them if it does.
> Fast: Can process thousands of requests with minimal overhead.
For a network cache you want _predictable_ performance more than "fast" performance, so that you're able to predict how a system will scale. "Fast" is among the top priorities for choosing a network cache implementation.
> Compatible: memc.rs is 100% compatible with memcached binary protocol. No need to rewrite your code. Just start a server and use your favorite language/framework.
What about tools for monitoring memcached in production? Does it support consistent hashing across a pool memcached servers?
Ultimately: why?
Interesting number. Wonder if that gives us a rough idea of the global ratio of celebrities to normal people?
8 billion people on the planet vs. 5.8 million celebs means there are on average ~ 1500 normal people for every celebrity?
Seems kinda low... or that there are way too many users Facebook regards as "high profile".
The ratio gets even more suspect when you remember Facebook "only" has 3 billion monthly users (src https://backlinko.com/facebook-users) ... 517 normal people for every celeb
Meanwhile Redis - used in a large codebase - seems to be tempting for developers to use it in different ways, sometimes as a cache, sometimes as a database. That in turn makes problems for devops who have to start worrying about how different redis instances are being used.
Perhaps I'm just too much of an old goat but to me, reading through all the cool features Redis has, it smells like it violates the Unix philosophy of "do one thing, well" ( https://hackaday.com/2018/09/10/doing-one-thing-well-the-uni... )
Also this video does a reasonable job of analyzing the UX and understanding the user base https://youtu.be/auG2E53dFas
The first was net neutrality, where you found various think tanks doing stuff like YouTube explaining why it’s bad to lose net neutrality. Once I dug into who was funding one of those think tanks and it looked a lot like Google. Given the % of bandwidth that is people watching YouTube, Google had potentially some big bills coming their way with the loss of net neutrality.
The other one is Kevin Rudd in Australia taking on Rupert Murdoch while Google is at risk of having to share ad revenue on news with NewsCorp. I haven’t researched this much but the question is simply who’s funding Kevin Rudd to fight Murdoch.
Once most people discovered their well thought-out blogpost got only 100 page views while a meme with a cat got 10 million, many just gave up. But what's missing in those numbers is, of those 100 page views, perhaps 10 were people you actually respect, have influence in your field, were actually using your Open Source project etc.
By optimising metric like page views we lost sight of the genuine impact we might have had with good writing.
Since then I just keep a list of 3-5 topics in my head that are important to me at some level and that’s it. It's a list of "these are the things I actually care about".
The underlying realization is: you can't get everything done. We're probably deluded by that brief period in our lives - as a student or early in our careers- where it was actually possible to get everything done, because we were being given so little responsibility to manage. The moment you become in some way "successful", leading a team, being a parent or whatever, your TODOs will far outweigh the time you have available to get them all done. Plus anyone working in startups / digital will always work in a space where the amount of useful work that could be done vastly exceeds the available time to do them.
The answer to me is we need software that makes us "smarter" in managing what's most important - our time. One example of this to me was Google Inbox, which for a brief year or two actually made me feel like I was managing my email in a clever way, enabling me to "scale up" and not waste time on the tool. And sadly Google killed it while pretending they'd ported the "best features" to GMail...
And unfortunately there's a big problem I see in software in general. There doesn't seem to be enough money in building things that make people "smarter", truly more efficient. The money seems to be in making things addictive... so I'll stick to the list in my head.