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misterbowfingeron Ask HN: Accessing personal email on FAANG work computer?

Cool good to know!

Out of curiosity - do you just not check personal email at all at work? Or do you use your phone and don't connect to corporate wifi?

misterbowfingeron MariaDB acquires Clustrix

Thanks! Is there a diagram that shows how it works? I'm still having trouble visualizing it.

misterbowfingeron MariaDB acquires Clustrix

Couldn't really parse out the website for what Clustrix actually is. Is it basically a leader node that distributes writes to key-value stores, and then the reads figure out where the data is by a partitioning scheme, with the benefit of MySQL protocol? Similar to CockroachDB?

misterbowfingeron In defense of a third way in open software licensing

I'm still confused about the paranoia around AGPL.

If MongoDB is AGPL, why does everyone else throw a shit fit? Despite its faults, MongoDB is still massively popular, so I assume it's used at many enterprises.

Also, side note: can anyone point a blog post (preferably from a lawyer) that explains why AGPL is so problematic?

misterbowfingeron Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

I'm honestly confused why they didn't just postpone TGIF and then ignore the election. Just say someone got sick or something. Let employees deal with the results themselves and move on.

misterbowfingeron Ask HN: Where do you work on your side-hustle?

Yeah, possibly...

misterbowfingeron Ask HN: Where do you work on your side-hustle?

Yeah I'm starting to think that I have to get a coworking space. There are some libraries and stuff, but they don't seem consistent.

misterbowfingeron GRPC and JSON

Interesting! I wonder if there's a bug in the gRPC library that you used?

misterbowfingeron Graphd – The Metaweb Graph Repository

For those that didn't know what GraphD or Freebase were:

https://medium.com/@iainsproat/freebase-is-dead-long-live-fr...

misterbowfingeron Shifting Gears

Hate to be that person, but what's "Cloud Native" even mean? Is there a glossary for buzzwords somewhere?

misterbowfingeron Changing Our Approach to Anti-Tracking

Firefox will [...] block storage access from third-party tracking content.

Is that an impact on LocalStorage?

misterbowfingeron SurveyMonkey S-1

It's weird that they go on and on about how traditional Enterprise approaches suck, but they then offer SurveyMonkey Enterprise as a market opportunity. How are they different?

misterbowfingeron A majority of US teens are taking steps to limit smartphone and social media use

Thanks for correcting! Good to know!

AmeriSpeak seems to have national representation, so I can only assume it was drawn randomly throughout the nation.

misterbowfingeron A majority of US teens are taking steps to limit smartphone and social media use

Uhhhh... what?

This particular survey featured interviews with 1,058 parents who belong to the panel and have a teen ages 13 to 17, as well as interviews with 743 teens

Link: http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/08/22/teens-and-screen-time-...

I get that surveys are really hard, but.... 743 seems like a ridiculously low number.

Looks like the surveys are through the "NORC AmeriSpeak panel".

Pew links to this about AmeriSpeak:

http://www.norc.org/PDFs/AmeriSpeak%20Technical%20Overview%2...

I don't know.... maybe someone who understands surveying & statistics can validate these numbers & their significance better than me?

misterbowfingeron A majority of US teens are taking steps to limit smartphone and social media use

Original study:

http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/08/22/how-teens-and-parents-...

misterbowfingeron Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

The example of why Elixir is less productive makes 0 sense:

Doh Phoenix and Elixir are trying to do all the best to help developers be productive, when you are a technology that promises such a huge scale you need to introduce practices that need to be decoupled => bit slower for developers.

Good example of this how a “model” writes to database. Module (with schema) need to call a changeset, changeset call repository, repository writes to database (example). That’s 3 manual steps where in Rails you have in in one.

Phoenix & Ecto work that way because 1) Elixir is functional, and 2) ActiveRecord mixes a lot of concerns that suck in the longterm.

IMO the real thing holding back Phoenix/Elixir is deployment & operational issues. It's being worked on a lot with Distillery, but from what I understand there's still a lot of kinks to be worked out.

misterbowfingeron What Dropbox dropping Linux support says

> The biggest issue is that very few within the Linux Desktop community seem willing to untie behind these solutions and instead prefer to keep everything fragmented

I suspect this is the case with most open source communities that don't have a clear "market leader".

But if it's all open source someone can run with it and solve all the things if they wanted to, right?

misterbowfingeron What Dropbox dropping Linux support says

Thanks for the detail and the link!

I was perhaps a bit naive and continue being so...

It feels as though the issues you listed seem solvable? As in, the work to create a distro & craft a community that solves the above problems is work that can be monetized, possibly in a RedHat-like way. I don't know much about RedHat's customers, but I'm curious what percentage of them use RedHat for desktop GUIs.

It'd for sure be a lot of work, particularly the hardware support since you'd have to convince other vendors that it's in their best interests to play nicely. It really feels like there's huge potential upside here because you'd be able to drive down prices (with open source development) and have contracts on the enterprise support angle.

misterbowfingeron What Dropbox dropping Linux support says

> But you'd have to have one or two distros that were particularly good for gaming that the majority of them used

Right, that's probably closer to what I'm getting at. There's probably always going to be a bunch of options for Linux, but there should (?) be a few main ones for most people. And then anyone who wants to customize can then customize to their liking.

But it'll all be open source, not proprietary

misterbowfingeron What Dropbox dropping Linux support says

> Given the disaster that has been Windows over the last few years, and that Apple hardware is often out of the price range of the average user, Linux should be primed to take over the market.

I feel similarly. I'm a big Mac fan, but I'm confused why Linux isn't the obvious alternative. I'm guessing the issues are the following:

1) PCs/Laptops to consumers ship with Windows installed by default, likely a distribution partnership w/ Microsoft

2) Popular games run best on Windows

Problem (1) is difficult because of Microsoft's deep pockets. But it feels like it's possible to attack problem (2).

The gaming industry has huge sway on the market. For example, many serious gamers build their own rigs. If gaming companies introduce an open standard that Windows OS's need to abide by to build games, then.... maybe Linux can benefit as well?

I suspect this hugely benefits gaming companies too, because they would be able to develop on open source technology and not have to test their builds on proprietary technology. Honestly, that workflow sounds miserable AND expensive.

misterbowfingeron Writing Documentation When You Aren't a Technical Writer

> I could go on for years about all sorts of interesting tips for improving your writing

Please do! Do you have a blog or something to follow?

misterbowfingeron Introducing the Cultural Leadership Fund

> It's always the same. Every single "diversity" measure needs to be chaired by a hip-hop producer or a fashion designer. This is why blacks will never be seen as true equals in our society

Hm, maybe in the short term, but I think the idea is that this fund will change that in the long term. Take Kobe Bryant's investment in Body Armor - it practically doubled his net worth, which means he has more funds to invest. If this fund is closely guided by a16z, it stands to reason that they'd benefit handsomely as well, thus hopefully funding more black scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.

The fact that current VCs worked in tech before is a red-herring - that hasn't always been the case. Those VCs ostensibly raised money from people who never worked in tech, and possibly knew nothing about "the business world". Have hope. This can definitely change.

Also, realize that raising money from Kevin Durant is materially better than raising money with the same terms from another VC. The marketing mojo is really effective.

misterbowfingeron Redis will remain BSD licensed

Here's an example of a high-profile one:

https://twitter.com/antirez/status/1032271799529218048

misterbowfingeron Redis will remain BSD licensed

> I think that Redis Labs Common Clause page did not provide a clear and complete information, but software companies often do communication errors

In their defense, many programmers can be so spiteful and cynical that basically nothing could've been done to change this "communication error."

It's helpful that Salvatore clarified, but I suspect that there are many who won't care or won't be convinced. The headline is all they needed to trip their "GTFO" line.

Personally, I think the move was fine. There are much worse companies out there.

misterbowfingeron Kotlin 1.2.60 comes with native compiler binaries

I do think it's great, but I'm worried that as Kotlin grows, so does Jetbrains hold on IntelliJ and the IDE market. IMO, any change that benefits IntelliJ should theoretically be applicable to NetBeans.

Maybe it's already this way? I'm really not sure, but I'd appreciate a NetBeans or IntelliJ dev to clarify. It'd be awesome if these changes were done collaboratively.

misterbowfingeron Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

Could we change the title to "Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users"? The zero to one bit is irrelevant and obvious to programmers.

misterbowfingeron New evidence challenges the story of the Stanford Prison Experiment

> Zimbardo explicitly coached the "guards" into treating the "prisoners" harshly

Right... shouldn't the guards have refused, then? Wouldn't that be the expected "moral" behavior?

misterbowfingeron Products Are Functions

I've seen this idea go around a bunch, and I think it makes sense for how a company thinks about product internally.

But it basically makes 0 sense for customers. "Brand" is the exact opposite of a pure function - there's side effects all over the place. Any bad thing that Facebook or Twitter do greatly overshadows the good. Same goes for any other company or flagship product.

This is challenging, because product branding is often championed internally at any company. So thinking about product as "functions" will likely fall apart quickly outside of any engineering org.

misterbowfingeron Design Thinking: B2 APIs and the Hidden Costs of S3 Compatibility

Honestly surprised that AWS, GCP, or Azure haven't acquired BackBlaze by now. Seems like an obvious move.