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katabatic

178 karma · joined January 23, 2012

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katabatic··on Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers
Before you know it we'll have re-invented LaTeX for a new generation.
katabatic··on Avoid 2:00 and 3:00 am cron jobs (2013)
1) Most software gets its timestamps from the system clock 2) If you have a mismatch between the system time and the application time, then you just have log timestamps that don't match up; it's a nightmare - even more so around DST/ST transitions
katabatic··on Avoid 2:00 and 3:00 am cron jobs (2013)
Common, but not universal - from 2005 to as late as 2014 I worked for companies that used Pacific time on their servers.
katabatic··on Disney to take $1.5B stake in Epic Games
StageCraft WAS Unreal Engine; it is not anymore.
katabatic··on Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th
Deaths are currently at around 2,000 PER DAY in the United States. That is not in any way, shape, or form "extremely lower" than earlier waves. The Omicron wave was equal to the initial wave in severity, and we're still not out of it.
katabatic··on Black 3.0 – The blackest black acrylic paint
Dragging Anish Kapoor never, ever gets old.
katabatic··on Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus
That's nearly 1% of the population of San Francisco. It's already shockingly high.
katabatic··on Apple has made it difficult to use web-based technology on its platforms
Oh, the irony of publishing this on Medium.
katabatic··on No Radical Changes in GNU Project
2016 IS very recently. Three years ago does not count as "many years ago". Richard Stallman is 66 years old. To have only realized that pedophilia is bad at age 63, only when other people had to convince him..welp.
katabatic··on Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law
How is that different than, well -- anything? In the United States all 50 states can make their own laws; it's a fundamental part of our legal system.

As for every country making their own laws - well, yeah? That's what sovereignty is all about?

katabatic··on Go Creeping In
> There's a big difference between standard styling and optional styling.

THIS.

This is not stated enough in the value of gofmt - it's the standard formatting style for everything. I've worked in Java and C++ for a couple of decades, and while every team has had its own style guidelines, and occasionally tools to enforce them, even different teams in the same organization would have difficulty understanding each other's code.

The value of gofmt is that it's the only formatting standard, thus I never have to learn a new formatting style when reading the code for an open-source library, or coming in to a new job. It's exactly the same as what I've been reading for the last 3 1/2 years of working in Go.

katabatic··on SEC Asks Manhattan Federal Court to Hold Elon Musk in Contempt
This is true for every employee of every public company on the planet. We're discussing it here because Mr. Musk thinks the rules don't apply to him.
katabatic··on Apple blocks Google from running its internal iOS apps
Paying a random consumer $20 does not make them a contractor. Do you think they all got 1099s?
katabatic··on Show HN: ColorMe
Very cool. One minor usability suggestion - it would be fantastic if the adjusters didn't reset when the base color changes.
katabatic··on Grafana 4.0 with alerting is released
Go code compiles to compact, statically linked binaries with relatively compact memory usage and reasonably good concurrency support, and an excellent standard library for handling networking - it's a natural fit for monitoring stacks. Even some monitoring systems that aren't Go on the back-end have Go-based collectors.
katabatic··on Grafana 4.0 with alerting is released
Datadog will cost you $165,600 a year for 600 hosts. That is objectively equal to a very well paid engineer. So no, the statement is not untrue.

(I picked 600 because that was the approximate number of machines we had at my last job, where we used Graphite maintained by one guy, part time).

You included a LOT of redundancy in your OSS list. Multiple timeseries databases. Multiple collection daemons. Multiple dashboards. Multiple alerting systems (Who in their right mind would use Nagios AND Icinga?). You're effectively arguing about maintaining multiple monitoring stacks, some of which are quited aged.

katabatic··on Smartcrop.js – content-aware image cropping in JavaScript
Indeed - I'm working on integrating this into the static site generator I use, so it's only run offline.
katabatic··on Deploying ECMAScript 6
Yes, however some features in TypeScript are only supported when targeting ES6 (such as "const"), so there's still some value in double-transpiling from TypeScript -> ES6 -> ES5 (I'm doing that on a couple of projects).

That may have changed somewhat in the TS 1.5 alpha - they're supporting more features on the ES5 target than they did in 1.4.

But yes, you still can't use ES6 features that TS doesn't know about.

katabatic··on First successful beam at record energy of 6.5 TeV
Thank goodness 60mph+ baseballs don't annihilate matter when they impact baseball bats!
katabatic··on Docker Says Absolutely Not to Collaboration on Standard Container Specification
Irrespective of the public back & forth between Docker and CoreOS, that's a completely reasonable stance to take. Standards need to be proven in the real world before being adopted. That's why the ANSI and ISO standardization process takes so much time (EDIT: or at least, one of the reasons).

When you write "standards" without implementation, what you get is the Object Management Group, which published spec after spec that are impossible to actually implement.

katabatic··on MetricsGraphics.js – D3-based library optimized for visualizing time-series data
Tessera (https://github.com/urbanairship/tessera) has pluggable renderers - I haven't checked out metricsgraphics suitability for rendering Graphite data yet, but it would likely be quite straightforward.

Standard disclaimer - I'm the author of Tessera.

katabatic··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2014)
Urban Airship is hiring full time senior software engineers in San Francisco and Portland.

We're looking for people to join our back end team (which is primarily Java, hbase, cassandra, high volume RPC services), and our web team (JavaScript, python/django, d3, etc...)

Our San Francisco location is a small, engineering and operations-focused office in SOMA. We have the feel of a much smaller company, but we operate at a scale of billions of events per day. If working on APIs that get called 40,000 times per second, all day, every day sounds interesting, you might like us.

Doing interesting things with a firehose of kafka events is also something we also do a lot of.

We support open source software and believe in good tooling (we just released a new project yesterday -- https://github.com/urbanairship/tessera; full disclosure - that was my project for our internal Hack Week recently, and we're now monitoring our metrics in production with it), and minimizing the obstacles to getting stuff done. We also believe in work/life balance, as well has having room for people to work on their side projects; most of our monitoring stack started as side projects!

In our backend stack, experience with Java, netty, protobufs, kafka, hbase, high volume TCP/IP messaging in general, designing and building REST APIs, postgres, postgis, cassandra, geolocation technology, automated testing and deployment are all valuable.

You can check out the official listings at http://urbanairship.com/careers, or send me a note at alpern@urbanairship.com

katabatic··on Ask HN: What is your favorite diff tool?
Araxis Merge. It's not free, but I've never used anything as good as it.
katabatic··on How I got blacklisted by Uber
You don't need to come up with reasons they banned you; you agreed to those reasons when you signed up for Uber -- you quite clearly and willingly violated their terms of service and encouraged others to do so as well.

"You shall not [...] (iv) reverse engineer or access the Application in order to (a) design or build a competitive product or service, (b) design or build a product using similar ideas, features, functions or graphics of the Service or Application, or (c) copy any ideas, features, functions or graphics of the Service or Application, or (v) launch an automated program or script, including, but not limited to, web spiders, web crawlers, web robots, web ants, web indexers, bots, viruses or worms, or any program which may make multiple server requests per second, or unduly burdens or hinders the operation and/or performance of the Service or Application."

https://www.uber.com/legal

katabatic··on Has Joel Spolsky Jumped the Shark? (2006)
This.

I learned more about the fundamentals of programming in one semester of compiler design than I did in the rest of 4 years of courses. It ought to be a requirement for any comp. sci. degre, IMO.

katabatic··on Business in a Box
Do the math again :)

The receipt printer is $300. I boggled at that too, and then looked around, and that's really what it retails for (or close enough). I have difficulty understanding why it's so expensive, but do keep in mind that it's designed to work for years on end in a retail environment -- it's got to be overbuilt to last.

katabatic··on Microsoft Announces Pricing Details on Surface With Windows 8 Pro
I have the Samsung Windows 8 Developer Preview tablet they handed out at BUILD 2011, and I can confirm that it's going to be very tricky indeed to hit buttons on the desktop.

The Samsung tablet has a screen that's either the same size or slightly larger, and a lower 1366x768 resolution, and I have a lot of trouble using the windows desktop on it with anything other than a mouse (including the digitizer pen -- yes, it's more accurate than a fingertip, but you still have to hold it steady, and holding it steady enough to hit a 4mm target is pretty tough).

katabatic··on Parse Adds Support for Windows Phone 8
I get Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 confused all the time (I'm not being sarcastic here, even though it might sound it - I genuinely do! The names are too similar).

As a developer, it also doesn't help that Microsoft made a lot of noise about them being on the same kernel, even though there's hardly any API overlap between them.

katabatic··on Electronic demon costume is surprisingly unnerving
Major props for the reading material at the end. That's one of the best books on programming ever written, imo.
katabatic··on Still no Windows Phone 8 SDK
Ah, gotcha - I misunderstood what you meant there.

I've seen the current state of the SDK and API, and while I understand porting to a new kernel was probably a lot of work for them, it makes even less sense considering that most of the WinRT APIs available in Win8 are not there in WP8 - it leaves me wondering what, exactly, they hoped to gain; so far it doesn't seem like a win for developers, and you can't write a full-featured native app for WP8. Maybe you'll be able to for WP9 (if the platform survives that long).

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