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myusernameisok

64 karma · joined July 25, 2017

Software Developer in NYC
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myusernameisok··on Docker Is Raising Funding at $1.3B Valuation
> All Docker images are glorified tar layers that are compressed with gzip. By definition, all users of Docker are users of gzip and tar. I understand what your point is (it's not as visible) but I don't agree with saying it's "core to more businesses".

Definitely. I was a little unclear, I meant core as in visibility, which you pointed out.

Also about Kubernetes, I can't comment on that because I've heard used it (but I've heard of it). I think it' s possible that there are a lot of businesses out there (such as the one I work for) that use docker but not Kubernetes.

The more visible an open-source project is, the more likely people are to donate to it. I could definitely see companies supporting docker in the same way that they support the Linux foundation or various Linux distros.

myusernameisok··on Docker Is Raising Funding at $1.3B Valuation
I feel like docker is core to more businesses than compressing/decompressing files. A lot of business package things in docker containers and are probably more likely to donate based on that. Compressing/decompression feels more like a low-level utility and users are probably unaware of whose code they're running at all.

If the creater of "ls" or "cd" asked for donations, would you even realize? If docker asked for donations, would you realize?

myusernameisok··on MoviePass wants to let you go to the theater once a day for $10 a month
One nice thing about the movie theatre is that you're paying a large amount of money (~$5/hr) to be there, so you're more likely to pay attention. I find with netflix, people take shows less seriously and spend time on their phone whilst not paying attention because "its just netflix."

I think if theatres had an "all you can watch" model, people would take it less seriously, and the quality of the experience would degrade.

myusernameisok··on Airbnb's preferred smart lock vendor accidentally bricks 500 door-locks
For the most part, adding complexity to anything increases the chance of failure. For average people (who don't generally give out their keys) it's not a great idea, but for airbnb hosts, making a key that is hard to copy is a good idea.

However, I've seen some airbnbs that have a pin door code or a key fob, which are arguably more secure than a regular key lock but have less chance of failure in my experience.

myusernameisok··on Snap sold fewer than 42K Spectacles, down 35% in Q2
I wasn't even aware they existed until I saw this thread.

I don't understand why companies feel they need to start selling average household products, but with cameras, microphones, wifi, and bluetooth. Maybe I'm just paranoid but I don't even like my laptop having a camera.

myusernameisok··on Let's Remove the Global Interpreter Lock
I'm fairly certain you're incorrect. With the GIL you don't have to lock shared memory because the assumption is that only one thread will be running at a time. For example shared data structures won't be changed while being being read/written to by multiple threads, because only one thread is actually running.
myusernameisok··on Google is paying Apple billions per year to remain on the iPhone
Yes, I'm sure Google has analyzed this. I'm just saying it's fairly surprising considering that $3 billion hinges entirely on the assumption that people won't change the default. Apparently there are approximately 700 million active iPhones in the world [1], so Google is willing to bet $4 per user on that assumption. I'm not saying it's a bad assumption.

[1] http://www.siliconbeat.com/2017/03/06/many-iphones-use-analy...

myusernameisok··on Google is paying Apple billions per year to remain on the iPhone
> "Court documents indicate that Google paid Apple $1B in 2014, and we estimate that total Google payments to Apple in FY 17 may approach $3B," Bernstein analyst A.M. Sacconaghi Jr. said. "Given that Google payments are nearly all profit for Apple, Google alone may account for 5% of Apple's total operating profits this year, and may account for 25% of total company OP growth over the last two years."

It's crazy considering even if Apple switched default search engines I'm sure a lot of users would switch back to Google.

myusernameisok··on Let's Remove the Global Interpreter Lock
I tried. My company has a python API that we run on our machines, we sell the machines to businesses and don't manage them ourselves. We wanted to see if we could get some easy performance increases without too much investment.

At the time (a year ago) there wasn't a way to precompile using pypy, which meant shipping pypy along with gcc and a bunch of development headers for JIT-ing. Additionally a one of the extensions we used for request validation wasn't supported so we'd be forced to rewrite it. I also found that the warmup time was too much for my liking, it was several times longer than CPython's and it became a nuisance for development. I guess I could've pre-warmed it up automatically, but at that point I had better things to worry about and abandoned trying to switch.

I'm sure, given enough resources, it would be a lot better. But it's not quite as simple as switching over and realizing the performance increases without some initial investment.

myusernameisok··on Let's Remove the Global Interpreter Lock
It's the same issue with Python. AFAIK there are a number of Python libraries that are not thread-safe, and the GIL prevents them from being an issue.
myusernameisok··on Reserve the 418 status code
Some APIs I've seen just use 400 for all generic client-side errors, including request syntax errors, impossible requests, duplicate requests, etc.

I would argue that most of the time, for any sufficiently large application, you'll need to use application specific status codes anyway (as you said), so why bother trying to be specific with the HTTP error codes? Certain client-side applications parse out if the response is a 2xx, 3xx, 4xx, or 5xx, and log it differently. At which point you just need one of them to trigger the different logging behavior.

The only special case I can think of is 401, which you need to send to trigger the basic authentication pop-up window for most browsers.

myusernameisok··on Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
Take this for what it is - I'm a software developeer who works in the cloud, not a cloud expert.

The abstraction behind AZs is what every AZ counts for at least 1 data centre. So for every region there is at least 2 AZs, and every AZ means at least 1 data centre (or 5 in your link).

This just means it's harder to take out a whole region by destroying individual data cetnres. Since most regions consist of 2-5 AZ, and AZs consist of 5+ data centres, that means destroying dozens of data centres.

myusernameisok··on How Canada became an education superpower
California is the most populous state. Most Americans treat Canada like it's some uninhabited wasteland, which is somewhat untrue. There are parts of Canada which are less populated but there are also densely populated parts which are comparable to the USA.

Anyway, Americans will say "How can Canada become an education superpower when California has the same population?" to which I say, that's a disingenuous comparison. How can Boston become an education superpower if China has 500x the population? To which Americans will say "MIT and Harvard", To which I will say "Waterloo, Toronto, and McGill."

Obviously I'm being slightly facetious, I'm just trying to illustrate how population != educational excellence.

myusernameisok··on How Canada became an education superpower
This is very disingenuous in my opinion, California is the most populous state. Most of Canada is not populated. Most Canadians live within the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor [1]. Its a fairly small (densely-populated) area compared to the total area of Canada and especially compared to California.

For example, If southern Ontario were a state then it would be the 6th most populous state [2] [3] (between Illinois and Pennsylvania in population) and also more dense than Illinois.

I feel like Americans don't really appreciate how most Canadian cities are so close to the border.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_City%E2%80%93Windsor_Co...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Ontario

myusernameisok··on Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
The S3 outage was across the whole US-EAST-1 region, not just one data centre.

I know my company and a few others that are redundant within a region (ie if one AZ goes down), but not if a whole region goes down.

myusernameisok··on Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
Especially because AWS regions are broken up into multiple availability zones (data centres in the same area). So taking out a single data centre won't do much if the AWS customers have correctly designed their systems for high-availability (ie having redundant instances in other AZs/regions with their data backed up elsewhere).
myusernameisok··on Canadian cable companies interrogate, search Montréal software developer
Only in Quebec is this allowed though, not the rest of Canada [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Piller_order#Quebec_.28c...

EDIT: turns out I'm wrong, disregard this.

myusernameisok··on TypeScripts Type System Is Turing Complete
I don't understand how this is fundamentally different from just doing it in regular javascript. You could write a javascript function that recurses forever on condition x: just write a function that calls itself with the same parameters unless condition x is met. How is it fundamentally different if the type system does it?
myusernameisok··on If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture?
Google also seemingly hasn't been trying very hard to make Youtube profitable. Spotify has a free tier, but you only get the "standard" 160 kpbs bitrate, as well as ads. To get the "extreme" 320 kbps bitrate you need to subscribe. Youtube could have easily restricted 720p and 1080p to paying customers, but didn't. I think now it's too late for Youtube to reverse their decision on that without some backlash.
myusernameisok··on If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture?
Radio stations still exist and they survive primarily on audio advertisements. That's also without any of the internet fingerprinting which can be used to cater advertisements and potentially make Soundcloud's advertisements more lucrative.
myusernameisok··on If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture?
I don't know if that's necessarily true. Youtube is to Netflix what Soundcloud is to Spotify. Netflix and Spotify are successful because they charge a small fee to allow users to consume high quality content. Youtube and Soundcloud are both free and allow users to consume community-generated content. This is a bit of a rhetorical question, but why is Youtube so successful when Soundcloud isn't?
myusernameisok··on Rust: Not So Great For Codec Implementing
> The only legitimate complaint there is that it's tough in Rust to get two arbitrary mutable slices into the same array. Rust wants to be sure they're disjoint, to prevent aliasing. For some matrix manipulation, this is inconvenient.

I've only looked into Rust briefly, but I thought this was the point of unsafe blocks? You can roll your own multi-dimensional array data structure using unsafe blocks if you're certain what you're doing is actually safe.

myusernameisok··on Chromium Windows builds now use Clang by default
Well certain Linux distros (Gentoo comes to mind) are designed to support their users compiling applications from source. Some users just want to be able to compile using -march=native, and aren't interested in fixing compiler warnings that they didn't introduce. I personally would hate it if I wanted to compile an application from source but -Werror stopped complication through no fault of my own.
myusernameisok··on Without Systemd
> it has no business doing random tampering like intercepting logins and DNS requests and renaming device nodes

I agree with the resolving DNS requests complaint, wasn't aware of that to be honest. That actually does seem somewhat odd.

However the other two make sense, systemd is used to init your system. Supporting login functionality as well as mounting and managing devices through udev (which supports renaming devices, as you said) doesn't seem too odd to me.

> Breaking "nohup foo & logout" is shockingly inappropriate;

Can you explain this to me? I never heard about this and my googlefu isn't returning anything fruitful.

> end users should never ever care how an admin may have booted the system much less have to know how to interact with it!

Unless you have an advanced user running `systemctl --user` or trying to check logs then I highly doubt the average user will need to know which init system you are using. For the most part, if you are just using your computer as a facebook/youtube/netflix machine then you probably don't care about the init system your computer is using (which I suspect describes 75% of users), assuming you even know what an init system is.

myusernameisok··on Chromium Windows builds now use Clang by default
Presumably end users who are compiling from source wouldn't want to enable -Werror though.

If you are an application developer and a compiler X gives warnings that compiler Y doesn't for your application, then ideally you should probably fix the warnings from compiler X. An end user probably doesn't care either way, they just want to compile the program without any issues.

myusernameisok··on Without Systemd
> Why is that now a systemd thing? Just cause systemd is the creepy uncle that likes to touch everything it can? So I'm just gonna pipe that crap into syslog anyway... and don't get me started on LP's shenanigans.

Feature creep falls under the umbrella of sticking to the UNIX philosophy too closely, the first point of the UNIX philosphy is:

> Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features".

In any case, I think it's arguable if it's feature creep or not. The goal of an init system is to start your system up, it makes sense that the thing that starts daemons would also monitor them, take logs, and do other support actions as well.

The only complaint I actually agree is that systemd/journald uses a binary format to store logs, but I don't think that's a good enough complaint to warrant all the hatred.

myusernameisok··on Without Systemd
With the exception of slackware (which aims to be the most Unix-like Linux distro) I don't understand all the hate for systemd and why people continually try to remove it from their system. I've read countless blogs on the pitfalls of systemd, but all the benefits of systemd outweigh the downsides. It seems there are a lot of people who get way too hung up on sticking to the UNIX philosophy as closely as possible without taking other factors into consideration.
myusernameisok··on Higher-paid, faster-growing tech jobs are concentrating in 8 US hubs
Rent in Toronto broke 1600 CAD for a one bedroom apartment recently. Not quite 3000 USD, but also consider you'll get paid significantly less than half and probably get less office benefits (such as free meals) as well.
myusernameisok··on Justin Trudeau – Profile of an interesting man
Trudeau also has a much higher approval rating, sitting at about 50% approval and 40% disapproval [1]. Trump is sitting at 38% approval and 55% disapproval [2]. Regardless of your opinion on them, Trudeau is more popular in Canada than Trump is in the US.

[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/leadermeter/index.html

[2] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/