96 karma · joined February 11, 2011
> A lap-belt restrained adult dummy in an aircraft seat, with an infant dummy in a carrier, was subjected to a 9G dynamic sled test. The severity of the pulse was based on the results of a static load test. The commercially available infant carriers tested were not able to restrain infants under crash situations.
https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/research-and-analysis-r...
Remote: OK
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: go, python, postgres, ClickHouse, kafka, K8S, and various other things tied to high throughput backend systems. Also have an MSc in stats from LSHTM.
Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BQUA3tVHzEZKyUQjOBIZKf453m9...
Email: (see CV)
I'm a career backend engineer who's worked most lately as a technical lead/manager delivering reliable, high throughput, containerized job scheduling to enterprise customers. Ex Twilio, Cloudflare, Segment. Looking for a long term opportunity in anything tied to high performance backend services or data infra, be that in a lead, EM, or IC role.
I've done a lot of early stage work and am a generalist at heart, though these days I'm most interested in post series A (including public) companies.
Anyway. Cloudflare's always been pretty cost efficient machine wise, so it was a natural choice given the performance needs we had. In my time in the data team there, Cap'n Proto was always pretty easy to work with, and sharing proto definitions from a central schema repo worked pretty well, too. Thanks for your work, Kenton!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Anger , his book from 2017, isn't perfect but it's a good read of what he's about.
The 1st issue is that ZMQ implementations generally have an IO thread handling all socket IO. REQ/REP patterns tend to work out just fine, because the client is going to wait for a reply from the server. But things like PUSH/PULL become...harder to follow. You can push things in the client, but how do you know when they've flushed out of the IO thread and made it to the server? Those sorts of things matter when shutting down a process, running integration tests, etc. In contrast, with an HTTP request, you're basically always doing REQ/REP, and so you know when the data has been pushed.
The 2nd issue is that ZMQ implementations tend to be harder to observe / operate than a more common path like HTTP requests. (HTTP requests can go through a load balancer, have standard response codes, use headers for authorization, etc.) For these reasons, I've tended to avoid ZMQ ever after -- it seems like often, you're best off either using REST or GRPC if by HTTP, or raw TCP if it's purely a data push kind of operation (e.g. forwarding structured logs, with framing, to a remote TLS endpoint).
I think the most surprising insight is his commentary on Heart of Darkness as a novel about bureaucracy -- it's worth a read.
Just say no and hit send.
> In February 2018 Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein of Wired wrote a deeply reported piece that mentioned the 2016 meeting. It was called so that the company could “make a show of apologizing for its sins.” A Facebook employee who helped plan it said part of its goal—they are clever at Facebook and knew their mark!—was to get the conservatives fighting with each other. “They made sure to have libertarians who wouldn’t want to regulate the platform and partisans who would.” Another goal was to leave attendees “bored to death” by a technical presentation after Mr. Zuckerberg spoke.
There's some physiology to explain this, but one key point is that once you're in a coordinated turn, even a descending one, your weight is still going straight down the vertical axis of the seat. So, you'll think you're doing fine, and possibly even pull the turn tighter (the graveyard spiral), and fixate on things other than the attitude indicator and your plummeting altitude.
> Today when a periodical asks its readers a question, it does so in order to collect opinions on some subject about which everyone has an opinion already; there is not much likelihood of learning anything new. In the eighteenth century, editors preferred to question the public on problems that did not yet have solutions. I don't know whether or not that practice was more effective; it was unquestionably more entertaining.
> In any event, in line with this custom, in November 1784 a German periodical, Berlinische Monatschrift published a response to the question: Was ist Aufklärung? And the respondent was Kant.
(https://www.libarts.colostate.edu/leap/wp-content/uploads/si...)
* Hour restrictions for passenger transport are significantly more stringent than for freight.
* Southern Air's fleet consists 737s and 777s -- not small planes.
* These plans have to fly over and into major metropolitan areas.
* Many parts of flying can be automated, but in the end, and for aircraft this size, you probably want a human operator in the plane for the sheer reason that they are better equipped to handle unplanned emergencies.
It's a tough call whether flying freight or regional airlines pays worse -- but in either case, you're anywhere from a quarter to half of what a software engineer of similar years experience in the bay area would make. The hours are in a lot of ways worse -- mostly because you're away from home a lot of the time, and you have really limited control of your schedule. (As someone who's worked as an on-call engineer for ten years, and who also flies, I'd take the on-call responsibilities over flying freight any day of the week.)
I'd agree that the article lacks for details. But, a relatively quick reading through things like airliners.net will give you an idea of the kind of hours and pay these guys typically work -- it's not an easy job. If we care about their safety -- and our own, given the number of freight aircraft flying over us every night -- we shouldn't write them off as just asking for money they don't deserve.
It's been good so far. Good support from the maintainers, too.
It doesn't end well.
Peachum [The Beggar King]: "Because they don't know that we need them."
--Die Dreigroschenoper (1931 Film)
Your queries tend to break down into ones where you're hitting a small number of shards (such as when we serve data for the analytics page), or else ones where you tend to aggregate up into temporary, non-distributed tables for further analysis (such as you'd do for infrequent business reporting).
All told, it's been one of the easier tools for us to operationalize, largely thanks to the fact that it's "just PostgreSQL." The one thing I wish we had was better documentation of what kind of consistency guarantees to expect, although for an append-only store like our current use case, that's less of a concern. And to be fair, Ozgun and the other guys at Citus have always been really happy to answer any questions we have.
With this code now going open source, it should be pretty easy to look into these sorts of internals.
It's a good product, and it was even fairly easy to do a major version upgrade / cluster relocation. At least as easy as such a thing can be. :-)
"Un récit? Non, pas de récit, plus jamais."
The best part of using Helix was that the people doing data entry, and the people who worked closely with them, really could and did update the forms themselves.
I like paper for a lot of things, but in software, I've always hoped we can arrive at systems where users get more of a hand in shaping the tools they use. We're not there yet.
Many here have complained that Derrida is hard to read, or worse, simply makes no sense. You may take a side in this, if you like. But I would encourage you to read some short piece of his instead. In so doing, and as the interview itself remarks on reading, you may make your own interpretation.
@mbrock has listed several items. To these, I add what my instructor for composition at Deep Springs (himself a student of Derrida) assigned us, "Declarations of Independence." It is but a nine page talk on the US Declaration of Independence. But within it, many of Derrida's persistent concerns on language and action come to light.
You can find it online, starting at page 5 in this PDF: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cole0384/academics/files/Derrida.PDF
Les is a long-time epidemiologist and sanitation engineer; he's served in dozens of outbreaks and conflict situations including both of the cholera epidemics in Goma following the Rwandan genocide.
I'm glad people care, but for me, these are first world problems compared to drug shortages, inadequate facilities for water and sanitation, missing diagnostics, payroll shortfalls, and so many things.
Sadly, though, these are not problems that programmers can do much to fix.
Rebel Code (http://books.google.com/books/about/Rebel_Code.html?id=kIU1s...) does a pretty good job summing up how Linux migrated from tarball source releases to BitKeeper (and eventually, of course, git). It appears that Steve Weber also writes on this, in a format that may be easier to read. (http://books.google.com/books?id=78SLSiWqy14C&pg=PA117&lpg=P...). The e-mails sent at the time around this make this thread seem, well, pretty friendly, actually. (http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9809.3/0493.html)
To the Postfix maintainers' point, Linus appears to have had quite reasonable reasons for maintaining the changes himself in the years up to then. Only when the number of active contributors got large (I suspect significantly larger than Postfix's) did this model break down. It's not the best for everyone, but I'm really glad they're maintaining a great open source product. The early 2000s in particular were not an easy time for MTAs.
I'm really not sure how the two facts we see here -- of people working exceptionally hard to better themselves, and of a company going out of its way to help people do that -- have to do with a bubble. It's hardly a new idea that companies do better financially when they help their employees learn to do work that they couldn't do before, or to do it better.
As the technology community, it's in all our interest to help people learn things they couldn't do before. Twilio's story is one example. Other great ones include RailsBridge, PyLadies, the Boston Python Workshop, and PyStar. Let's do more of this!