orangepenguin

I think there's a big difference between "activating" a muscle and "getting utility" out of it. Sure, maybe it activates sometimes, but what does it do? Well... nothing. It's a vestigial structure.

This video from Husqvarna 2 years ago doesn't sound like it's a motor noise. Sounds more like an onboard beeper that can emit single tones. This, in my opinion, is rather disappointing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0_RPlSe344

It's possible that's some kind of motor noise, but it doesn't sound like it to me.

EDIT: I realize when I say "motor noise" there's some ambiguity. I know there isn't a gas powered engine in this little mower. Revving an engine is exactly what I expected, and this isn't that. When I reference motor noise here, I just mean sound could be produced by a servo or similar, but I don't think that's what's happening.

Are you allergic to cellulose or amylose? Because those are the two molecules the plastic is made of. They're not making plastic out of gluten.

All I'm seeing here is a commenter who has made a claim and won't support that claim with evidence. I wish they'd answer your question.

Ah, yep. You're right. I overlooked that part. It looks like it's truly non-reversible—even if you don't care what the resulting input is.

Maybe I'm being incredibly naive, but it seems like this would be trivial. Can you just start with the output hash and then essentially run the algorithms backwards? Obviously the resulting "input" would be random-ish garbage, but it seems like if all you care about is the output, you can pretty much just "pick" any data for the last step that produces the output. Then do likewise for the step prior, and so on.

It's not security through obscurity. In fact, it's the very opposite. You can see the process exactly. The reason this is secure is because the process itself doesn't work backwards. You can create a hash using this algorithm, but you'll never reverse that hash back into the original text.

What was the title previously? I'm not sure I understand the significance of the current title.

In my experience, there's typically more than one "smoking gun". The problem isn't finding one, it's eliminating all of the "smoking guns" that aren't actually related to the outage.

If I worked at an organization with many teams deploying updates multiple times per day and several same day events seemed related, I would probably also put less weight on a gradual, months-long deployment that had completed a day prior.

I had the same thought! Earplugs for the sound might not be a bad idea either.

I asked my thinkingrock if it could think and it said yes. Really though, "thinking" is very hard to define. Do animals think? Do insects think? Do bacteria think? I'm sure somewhere we could find an example of a "living" thing that people consider to have thinking capability whose abilities are substantially more primitive than a CPU. So... why not say a CPU can think?

Ah! That's what happened! I read the article and then came back to HN and couldn't find it. I thought I was crazy...

Well said. If you look into some of the research and theories on leadership, you find a very different picture. You could someone a leader any time they have influence over people toward a goal. With this in mind, you can see that an "individual contributor" can definitely be a leader.

However, in business, leadership is often conflated with "legitimate power" (as opposed to expert or referent power), meaning that the person holds a title and is assigned direct reports. Titles and employees are not necessary for leadership.

I wish that engineering departments were better at highlighting this. A person with practice and experience can be a leader by simply working hard, setting a good example, giving input in team meetings, etc.

It is! Most people pronounce the first part of Hashicorp the way you say "hash" (as in MD5). Technically it should be "haw-shee" because of the last name Hashimoto.

Side note, internally a pseudo company name used for example purposes is "Dadgarcorp" after Armon Dadgar. :D

Yeah, titles like "staff engineer", "principal engineer", etc. are good because they imply expertise rather than responsibility for direct reports.

Ooh, I think "maker" would be a good word for it, though it's pretty inextricably tied to hobbyists.

I honestly don't know why more people don't hear about it and use it. Probably just hasn't hit that "critical mass" yet. I haven't used all of the tools out there, but I've used ECS, K8S and Nomad. Nomad seems to provide the most "efficient use of complexity". What I mean is, for a given increase in complexity, you get more utility out of Nomad than out of the other tools. You don't feel like you're fighting it, or forcing it to do something it wasn't designed for. Even in disaster recover situations, Nomad is surprisingly simple to manage.

I'm an employee, and I doubt he's hiding anything. Even while working as CTO, he has kept an ear to the ground in engineering and periodically participated in design discussions and other things. I really think he just genuinely enjoys engineering work. Internally I think many of us have great confidence in our current leadership, so it makes sense that Mitchell would feel like he can hand the reigns over.

I mean, many great open source projects are still maintained by the original authors. Why would it be suspicious for Mitchell to move into a better position for doing the same kind of work?

Frankly, I love it. The attitudes that have made the open source community welcoming are the same ones that permeate the company. Generally speaking, people are very friendly and helpful. That said, it's a job and your mileage might vary. Personally, it's the best place I've worked, and I don't plan on leaving for many years.

It's strange, it feels this way at Hashicorp, too. I was a little shocked when I was new to see Mitchell occasionally commenting on RFCs, messaging people to ask questions, and updating documentation. If you didn't know his title, you would have thought he was just another engineer. He doesn't elevate himself above others, and Armon is the same.

I honestly think that sort of kindness and respect is actually what allowed Hashicorp to thrive in the open source communities.

Maybe technical contributors? You're right. In the most efficient organizations, leadership lets the technical decisions bubble up from the experts, rather than dictating them from the top.

As an employee of Hashicorp, I'm very excited for this change. Not that Mitchell was anything less than a great leader—on the contrary, I thought he was excellent. It's just that he's also got such a great ability to identify the right abstractions when tackling a problem. The fact that he'll be "in the trenches", so to speak, gives me even more confidence that Hashicorp will continue to make tools that strike a nice balance between power and simplicity.

All of the Hashicorp products are primarily open source products. While there are enterprise features and cloud-hosted versions of some of them, FOSS is the foundation of the company.

Exactly. Once I realized I didn't like Amazon's tactics, I started switching to other sellers. For example, I now buy books on bookshop.org. For every type of product I want, I've managed to find a decent alternative either online or locally.

> "Perhaps the easiest way to avoid outages is to simply to make fewer changes."

The exact opposite is true. When a process happens infrequently, it's more likely that the people involved will make mistakes and overlook steps. The correct answer is to make changes more often, and to develop robust processes and automation around those changes.

I'm familiar with NVC and I think it's an excellent framework for communicating about performance related matters in the workplace. Glad you brought it up!

I'm a bit late replying to some of these. I think this is great advice. I'm definitely aware of how much a poor performer has a negative effect on team morale.

I like how you say "don't be selfish by being nice." You're right that the aversion to doing what's necessary is selfish.

This is interesting. I haven't experienced the type of performance reviews you mention, but I can see how it might happen.

I'm reminded of a clip from the movie Moneyball: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTjhHrcyiQI

I really like your suggestion that someone check in with the person in a couple days. That helps address the charitable desire without compromising the need for performance at work.

Maybe the stress of the workload isn't good for the employee either.