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ook

214 karma · joined August 12, 2009

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ook··on The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss
I used to read DF semi regularly, like many others I didn’t always agree with the opinions but broadly I appreciated the thought and effort that went into them.

I stopped abruptly when posts and tweets became (to me) shockingly pro Israel and excused/justified/diminished the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

I understand the situation in Israel is complicated, and there is a strong relationship between the US and Israel, but as a citizen of a former occupied nation I can not stomach any attempts to rationalize the genocide happening in Palestine.

ook··on Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch
Royalties.

Quality Control.

Brand Alignment (historically a big deal for Nintendo).

Scheduling input.

Security by obscurity.

ook··on Decoupling IP from services and sockets for addressing agility
https://research.cloudflare.com/publications/Fayed2021/ has a link to download the full pdf of the paper.
ook··on VanMoof’s team of ‘bike hunters’ appears to succeed where the city doesn’t
> sounds like vancouver police

We had 4 bikes stolen from our shed in Vancouver and the police were helpful. We called the non emergency number and an officer followed up quickly via email, sent a case number for insurance claims and one of the bikes was returned a few days later on a Sunday evening from a chop shop bust.

They even have a dedicated bike theft officer - https://www.macleans.ca/society/meet-canadas-only-full-time-...

ook··on Mental health impacts of a big tech job
At a previous company I asked to be a Conscientious Objector from the performance review process as I was just going to get an On Target rating anyway (I did).

(Not retired yet, I knew I was quitting a week or two later. Amazingly my boss was surprised when I gave my notice …).

ook··on Engineering Management
- “Managing Humans” by Michael Lopp aka rands - https://managinghumans.com/

A edited collection of blog posts with other material that does a very good job describing how to tackle the transition from Engineer to Manager.

- “The Truth About Managing People” by Stephen Robbins https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/program/Robbins-...

An invaluable “Cliff Notes” style book about many topics (truths) in management. Each topic (“truth”) gets a page or so overview, key points and links to the standard “references”.

ook··on Engineering Management
Put another way this is focused on project management and software architecture. It’s a good list for a tech lead or architect but is no where near complete for a people manager.

There are many other areas a good manager should cover:

  - hiring & internal talent pipelines
  - career progression - mentoring, coaching, 1 on 1s
  - performance management - promotions and firing 
  - budgeting and other finance areas
  - if required vendor management, purchasing, dealing with legal etc
  - cross team / org collaboration; working with your peers (other managers and leaders)
  - managing upwards - reporting status, flagging risks and blockers and asking for help/time, advocating for the team and projects etc
  - providing clear direction for the team while balancing that with shielding them from crap so they can focus 
  - for services - Service Ownership, Cost to Serve, On call, Security and Compliance, Legal liaison for open source use, post mortem retro’s etc  
  - general admin; vacation scheduling, expenses, it escalations, tracking mandatory training etc
  - product management and long term view - either owning it, working with an agile product owner within the team, or working with product management org
  - anything else that would fall through the cracks otherwise to keep team on track - “servant leadership”
This is just off the top of my head as a former manager and manager of managers. Depending on your org and methodologies there may be others who own lots or the above, either within the team or elsewhere. As the manager though the buck still stops with you.
ook··on Ask HN: Mobile phone addiction help?
Reading replies I see you are doing CBT and exposure therapy, excellent.

Hopefully you have already discussed this with your professional support team. If you haven’t yet you should, it can be embarrassing but their job is to help you not judge you and at least in my experience sharing a problem helps reduce the burden. Explain to them how it has gotten worse and ask them to help you come up with a plan to work on it with regular check ins.

ook··on Ask HN: Mobile phone addiction help?
I keep work and personal devices separate as much as possible and turn off notifications.

My phone is the one device that “crosses the streams” (I don’t want to carry two phones). As it’s my work phone it only has work apps plus some essentials for when I am out and about (Map, Music, Fitness etc apps).

“Scroller” apps are strictly on my personal tablet which has weekly time reporting turned on.

If I’m using my personal tablet in a way that is causing problems then I either put the tablet out of the way or set a time limit. If it’s really causing problems I’ll ask my partner to enable parental controls or hide it.

You also need professional help if possible. Unfortunately getting help may take some time as support services are overloaded. As an immediate step the Coursera Yale Science of Well Being course is good. Do the workbook and other assignments, especially if they are tough to do at first.

ook··on Why Dark didn't choose Rust
http://www.tara.tcd.ie/handle/2262/77562 - "Design and implementation of an ahead-of-time compiler for PHP" is the PhD thesis in question.

A google tech talk related to this work is on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKySEUrP7LA

You can find multiple other papers on google scholar where Paul was an author all related to programming languages, compilers etc.

ook··on Refurbishing the Rancilio Silvia Espresso Machine
Yes I was sincere. I enjoyed the machine, the support experience after it failed was appalling.
ook··on Refurbishing the Rancilio Silvia Espresso Machine
Good luck!

I got a Breville Dual Boiler a few years ago and it was ok if temperamental for 2 years and 4 months. Then it died suddenly.

I had to pay Breville ~$400 for an out of warranty repair and drop it off personally at the local repair centre. The repair took two weeks and it died with the same symptoms a few days after I picked it up.

Breville refused to refund me for the repair attempt and it took escalating to get them to ship me a brand new replacement with 3 to 4 weeks estimated shipping.

I bought a Rocket instead and when the Breville showed up a month later sold it on Craigslist to cover a small portion of the wasted time and money.

The Rocket is much simpler but much more consistent. My wife a chef loves it but hated the Breville.

The Rocket did cost more but with regular home maintenance and an occasional service should last 15 to 20 years.

ook··on The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]
And Glenn Fieldler has an excellent series of articles on his blog:

http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/

http://gafferongames.com/building-a-game-network-protocol/

http://gafferongames.com/networked-physics/introduction-to-n...

ook··on The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]
For anyone interested in game networking the Quake 3 Network model was covered by Fabien Sanglard in this great blog post:

http://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/network.php

ook··on OpenSesame – A device that can open fixed-code garage doors in seconds
"but most of all, samy is my hero"

Context - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm)

ook··on Prometheus: Monitoring at SoundCloud
This looks really interesting - thanks for sharing!
ook··on Tilde.Club: I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds
Try c-hey! It's skinnable write :)

http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~c-hey/

ook··on Tilde.Club: I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds
Please tell me someone has setup c-hey? http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~c-hey/
ook··on Malawi app 'teaches UK pupils 18 months of maths in six weeks'
https://onebillion.org.uk/apps
ook··on DNS Outage Post Mortem
A reasonable approximation is to model a sine wave per region with peak amplitude based on typical usage patterns. For example entertainment services will peak in evenings and at weekends, business services will peak during typical core hours Monday to Friday. With enough users spread across enough regions you never have a good time for all users so in practice it is better to engineer things so you can do deploys / maintenance whenever is best for the teams working on the service.
ook··on CoreOS: Boot on Bare Metal with PXE
Use iPxe (http://ipxe.org/) to boot from a http image server.
ook··on Logstash joins Elasticsearch
I think any of Logging/Monitoring/Metrics at scale can be thought of as Chicken & Egg problems.

They are important, hard to do well and have a bad habit of only causing issues which swallow engineering time when you are firefighting furiously trying to scale core services.

That's why as someone pointed out separately Spunk is a $5Bn company and people who have had these problems previously are very excited by this news.

(It's also why StatsD&Graphite/OpenTSDB, Riemann/Sensu etc etc are all super interesting)

ook··on Stephen Watt keynote at Infiltratecon 2013
Security Professional with hacker buddies who did TJ Maxx hack talking at length frankly about his prosecution under conspiracy charges by same prosecutor who prosecuted Aaron Swartz.

See http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/17/convicted-hacker-steven-wa... etc

ook··on Things I set on new servers
Automating infrastructure and treating it like code is a similar shift in mindset to embracing test driven development for the first time.

It appears daunting, but once you get over the hump you can't imagine how you ever survived without it.

If you have a mythical quiet Friday afternoon install Vagrant and try and replicate your manual setup steps for a new server and share it with your development team.

Even just having the steps required to set up a development environment represented in re-usable versioned code is worthwhile.

Next time a new hire starts that afternoon repays itself when they have a fully working dev environment ready in less then an hour.

Going from that, to doing this stuff in production is a lot of work, but you get similar pay offs at every step as long as you're willing to invest a little time.

ook··on Things I set on new servers
Nothing

Automated network installer (eg cobbler) installs OS, which installs a configuration management system (eg puppet or chef or ansible) which sets up the server appropriately.

Done correctly someone logging into a non development server should be an alertable "red flag".

Even for a development server you should use veewee, vagrant, box grinder etc etc to produce something consistent and repeatable.

"Editing a file in /etc directly 'by hand' should be an obscure art done to teach internals or to scare children on halloween." -@yesthattom

ook··on Some months and hard work later, Metricfire announces pricing and GA
I heartily endorse this product and/or service.
ook··on Ask HN: How does one gain expertise in scalability?
I just found these slides from a MSC Module at an Irish university on "Software in Production" which are well worth reading through if you're tasked with scaling systems and have a Software Development background:

http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~niallm/day[1-5].pdf

ook··on Ask HN: How does one gain expertise in scalability?
I have helped scale (non web) low latency systems in some pretty stressful situations.

In addition to the sage advice about monitoring / metrics, mentoring and not scaling until necessary I think the following are useful:

* Design Services not Software. In particular read "On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services" (http://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_Lisa.pdf) and at least the first chapter of "The Art of Unix Programming" (http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/)

* Get to grips with debugging and profiling so you can figure out what's really happening. Tools like sar, sysstat, [d|k|s]trace, tcpdump, gdb etc and the equivalents for your datastore & application frameworks are invaluable and unfortunately for whatever reason you inevitably won't have all the metrics and monitors you need.

* Do try to understand every layer of your service. I have helped debug scale out related issues from Layer 2 to Layer 8. I have also had to debug many Layer 1 issues while bringing up a new Site or similar. I may not be a DBA, Network Engineer or Software Engineer but in the past I have had to wear those hats while scaling.

* Despite comments elsewhere about learning through Mentoring and baptism-by-fire there is a lot of real engineering & science theory you can lean on. Looking back on courses I took in school while I didn't do any courses on Scalable Web Programming over the years I have used content from courses on Computer Architecture, Math including Queuing Theory and Statistics, Systems Programming (OS & Network).

ook··on Let's be Clear: I didn't invent Bitcoin
A follow up to https://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/10/03/141011155/did-a-r...

Which was discussed in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3068991

ook··on Did a reporter just solve the bitcoin mystery?
There's a pretty good interview with Michael Clear in todays Irish Times:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/1008/122430...

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