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infomaniac

166 karma · joined April 14, 2014

Staff Engineer @ coder.com
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infomaniac··on Shipment of KitKat bars stolen en route from Italy to Poland
Let's hope the investors have a break (through)
infomaniac··on Top engineers at Anthropic, OpenAI say AI now writes 100% of their code
It shows.

They use all those spare brain tokens testing the product behaves correctly, right?

Right?!

infomaniac··on Charles Proxy
Fantastic software that I've used for over a decade. Interacted with Karl a few years ago about Adobe's AMF format; very generous with his time. I was surprised to learn that it's over 20 years old! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Proxy
infomaniac··on If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?
> Amazon does not use relational databases

This is false, at least in my very thin exposure to the company: I interviewed for a team last year which was maintaining EC2 SSH keys using MySQL.

infomaniac··on Ask HN: What would you preserve if the internet were to go down tomorrow?
Can you elaborate on how you're storing this data?
infomaniac··on What I tell people new to on-call
Worked for an eCom store for 3 years, was on-call 24/7 for most of it due to understaffing. In this context, every second of downtime was actual money being lost. CEO drilled in the gravity of each outage.

Took me a good few months after changing jobs to not get crazy anxiety every time my phone rang.

After working in a much healthier on-call setup later in my career supporting a large SaaS, I actually really like it. High stakes produce quick learnings.

Not for everyone, but everyone should try it (and be compensated FFS).

infomaniac··on Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
Galaxy brain business model: shame the app developers and offer a tool to help them fix their mistakes.
infomaniac··on Google Cloud Renaming Ingress and Egress SKUs
Perhaps it's less about billing and more about disincentivizing excessive use? Even if the service is free, it's not infinite and is ultimately a shared resource that should not be monopolized.
infomaniac··on In-memory database Redis wants to dabble in disk
memcached has recently gained the ability to spill to disk: https://github.com/memcached/memcached/wiki/Extstore

we recently implemented this to grow our caches to >50TB

infomaniac··on An underwater landslide knocked out two critical submarine cables serving Africa
Nothing interesting to add, just an anecdote. As someone based in a semi-rural part of South Africa, this dual cable break was a huge PITA for a few days. Latencies went through the roof; remote work was made very difficult.
infomaniac··on Africa’s Richest City Is Crumbling Under Chaos and Corruption
Joburg native here, moved away about 12 years ago.

I still have people there, and every time I go visit its in an even worse state of disrepair; quite upsetting.

infomaniac··on SVB Collapse in Plain English
I found it very useful, thanks!
infomaniac··on Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
This is addressed in one of the linked tweets.
infomaniac··on Show HN: Noctie – A chess AI that predicts your rating
Very accurate! Just 10 points off my chess.com rating.

Although, there was an unfortunate bug... I couldn't promote a pawn, and that severely impacted the endgame. I'm on mobile Brave, and attempting to promote presumably tried to bring up some modal, but instead it just glitched.

infomaniac··on Phlare: open-source database for continuous profiling at scale
It replaces no other projects. Continuous profiling solves a different problem to Mimir, Cortex, and Tempo. Mimir and Cortex are for metrics, Tempo is for distributed tracing, Phlare is for collecting profiling samples over time.

Profiling is a layer below tracing and metrics in that it requires very minimal and generic instrumentation (of the runtime), while the others require specific instrumentation (of the application).

Profiles like CPU, heap allocs, goroutines, etc are collected on a continual basis, allowing you to see at any time how your application was making use of its runtime resources.