HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

physcab

5,125 karma · joined November 24, 2008

submissionscomments
physcab··on Ask HN: When to make the jump to freelance/consultant?
If you have enough connections to get you through your first 6 months or so then you can make the jump. Often when consulting your rate is double your normal take home so it balances out the period of searching for more work. But you highlighted the key anxiety in going freelance: you will always have to be selling your services. Its just like any startup except you are the product. Having to get new gigs will always be part of the job whether its now, 6 months from now, or 3 years from now
physcab··on Why is Snowflake so Valuable?
I've used Snowflake a fair amount. It's a decent product, probably on par with Redshift / BigQuery. Obviously theres a lot of hype and free money floating around but my take on why they are popular is that they are basically a replacement for large Hadoop installations that have become untenable to manage over the past decade. If a company is already using Redshift or BigQuery I'm not sure why they would switch.

I would be apprehensive in investing in Snowflake long term purely because their product is highly susceptible to being obsoleted in the next 5-10 years.

physcab··on Americans' perceptions of police drop significantly in one week
Violence begets more violence, so I don’t see how that is a good strategy, unless you like seeing more violence
physcab··on YC W20 Online Demo Day moved up due to investor interest
Should continue to do online demo day in conjunction with live ones. Would be a great way to scale the platform
physcab··on The Streets of San Francisco
I’ve lived in SF for 10 years and my family of 4 is finally moving out. Part of it is economic as we can’t really afford to raise kids here. Part of it is rapid deterioration of public spaces. The breaking point was someone blocking my apartment door by shooting up heroin when I brought my newborn son home from the hospital.

It’s not bad everywhere. The Marina, Noe, Pac Heights, Cole Valley, Outer Sunset, and parts of Richmond districts all manage to keep their neighborhoods clean. The mission feels like a 3rd world country.

I’m democrat but I would most certainly vote in a hard line republican DA to take a stand. I’m done having my car broken into and literally shat on. I’m tired of seeing piles and piles of trash like we’re living in some kind of garbage mound. People just don’t care.

It wasn’t this bad even 3 years ago, but it’s certainly taken a turn for the worse. It’s untenable.

physcab··on Anxiety Looks Different in Men
What I’ve heard from my therapist is that anxiety is often a cloud that covers the real emotion underneath. I experience anxiety when I’m really upset because I don’t know how to express anger. But sometimes it is sadness or fear. Anxiety is basically an evolutionary adaptation — we no longer are being hunted or having to hunt for survival, but our minds still think danger is present.
physcab··on The Price We Pay: How Little Most Bay Area Families Can Afford
In an expensive city like SF, its not small. It's a 1 bedroom. Most single people live in a 1bd or studio apt. But to raise a family with multiple kids, it feels tight. My wife and I live in the living room off the kitchen and our kids will take the bedroom. For the same (market) price of our unit, you can get 10x more space in the "country", but then finding work and interacting with friends will be harder. Lots of trade-offs
physcab··on The Price We Pay: How Little Most Bay Area Families Can Afford
I used to be an analyst, and used to make atleast double that. But to earn that kind of salary you often sacrifice work life balance and experience all consuming stress. I decided being poor was more healthy and quit.
physcab··on The Price We Pay: How Little Most Bay Area Families Can Afford
Story of my life. I’ve lived in SF for almost 9 years, my wife for 15 years, and we have a toddler, 90 lb dog, and a baby on the way, making it work in 650sf apt on combined $120k. I’m immensely grateful that the only reason we have savings at all is because my wife bought a below market rate condo with the city when she was single making $40k a year.

It feels weird to make this much but feel so poor. That any hiccup in life could make you miss bills. It’s been fine so far but as our family grows there will be no choice but to leave. Childcare is just too expensive.

I love this city, but over time I’ve felt I’ve gotten less out of it in exchange for more.

physcab··on Ultra Low Latency WebRTC Streaming – Open-Source Media Server
As a former Twitch employee, I lol’d at this.
physcab··on Looking for a new CEO
With new programmers, you can't have the expectation that you're going to get a response or be upvoted. You help them precisely because you like helping, not that you expect anything in return.

Its the long term goodwill that eventually brings new programmers into the field, because programming is hard! Newbies need to know its ok to take risks and there will be a safety net.

physcab··on Diving into Technical SEO Using Cloudflare Workers
Does have to fit in their 1MB limit though (i think)
physcab··on Hacker News BigQuery Dataset
I would also like to know where the data comes from!
physcab··on AWS API Performance Comparison: Serverless vs. Containers
Can you point to some example code that uses fetch more optimally than Cache API?
physcab··on AWS API Performance Comparison: Serverless vs. Containers
There are probably multiple ways to reverse proxy, it’s just that CF workers are versatile to handle many use cases. You don’t have to lose the caching benefits. You can still pull your assets through Cloudflare CDN since workers operate at the request level (afaik).

In fact it can be even more performant. You can use Workers KV to cache as well. So a request comes in, check KV store, return if found. If not, pull from asset CDN.

physcab··on AWS API Performance Comparison: Serverless vs. Containers
Didn’t know that! Thanks for chiming in.
physcab··on AWS API Performance Comparison: Serverless vs. Containers
If you have a blog running at blog.mycompany.com, that is not going to be as effective for SEO as if the blog were at mycompany.com/blog. You want your primary domain getting the credit. But it’s also not ideal to have a separate subfolder if you have two different services (blog and main product).

So the best solution is to reverse proxy so that internet traffic hits /blog, but the worker is actually forwarding the traffic to your internal service.

physcab··on AWS API Performance Comparison: Serverless vs. Containers
Check out the boilerplate here for workers:

https://github.com/detroitenglish/cloudflare-worker-webpack-...

Then invoke lambda with this:

https://github.com/mhart/aws4fetch

Important to note that workers have a 15s timeout, so this is really only good for routing. You probably don’t want this to manage tasks that could potentially take longer.

physcab··on AWS API Performance Comparison: Serverless vs. Containers
I tend to think of these services as fulfilling different use cases.

For Fargate, the ideal scenario in my workloads is async background processing. Add tasks to SQS, Fargate pulls tasks off and does the job. Elastically scales up or down and lots of flexibility on machine specs. Ok with some failure rate.

For AWS Lambda, recently I like the combo of adding a Cloudflare worker in front and using it as an API gateway. More flexibility on routing, faster performance, and reverse proxy for free which can be good for SEO. And you get all the goodies of Cloudflare like DDOS protection and CDN.

physcab··on SQL: One of the most valuable skills
I think the operative word there is complex.

Yes non technical people can’t write complex sql, but they can self service basic questions easier than learning Python or R for example.

And it’s difficult to code review SQL because complex business logic means complex data manipulations and those are hard to visualize and comprehend. You don’t have to think in a 3D space so much when you write python.

physcab··on SQL: One of the most valuable skills
I’ve been a career analyst for about 12 years so I write SQL every day. I know it very well. I’ve developed a very strong love / hate relationship with it over the years.

On one hand, you write what you want to find in fairly common language and you almost always get back what you want if you do it correctly. In many ways, it’s like a precursor to Alexa but in written form. It’s super easy to pick up for non technical people.

On the other hand, it’s extremely difficult to code review, and on a very complicated piece of business logic, errors could mean the difference between hiring 10 more people or laying off 100. So almost always it’s just easier to re-write.

Imagine if engineers couldn’t understand each other’s work, and had to rewrite code every time someone leaves the team. It’s insane to me that this is standard practice.

physcab··on Spotify’s Podcast Aggregation Play
Why is it a shame? I've been a listener of Gimlet since the start as well and Alex has always come off as genuine and hard working. If I lived closer, I would have loved to work for him. Its rare you find leaders with that type of transparency and candor. Most CEOs speak utter bullshit and so over-confident its laughable. While I don't know him personally and what he's like off-air, I can't help but feel genuinely happy. People should be rewarded for their successes, otherwise no one would innovate and take risks.
physcab··on Show HN: Simple Opt Out – Makes it easier to opt out of data sharing
After this past election cycle, I was getting spam SMS from every organizer in each county I have lived in over the past 10 years. Does anyone know any master list to remove contact info? Replying “stop” to each text message wouldn’t prevent others from getting through.
physcab··on Warby Parker built a 1,400-employee company by focusing on team culture
[deleted]
physcab··on Guide to scaling engineering organizations
This is honestly the best barometer of employee happiness. Managers who want to build political empires, don’t have their employees best interests at heart, who communicate poorly, who make questionable moral judgements, or push work down the pipe for the sake of doing work is what makes employees miserable. Companies who empower these types of managers are terrible to work for.
physcab··on Two Years, Four Nanodegree Programs, and a New Career
I’m not so sure anymore. I’ve worked at a couple FANGs and I have never looked at a candidates resume beyond their last job or two. I only look at their degree to calculate years of experience in my head. But ultimately we put faith in our interview process more than a resume. I would totally hire someone who has relevant experience than what their degrees were (or any), as long as they passed the normal interview gauntlet that everyone takes.
physcab··on Amazon's Stealth Brands: Everything on Amazon Is Amazon
No single supermarket controls 49% of all product related searches on the internet
physcab··on Standard Cognition Raises $40M Series A to Deliver Autonomous Checkout
I mean, that is a good pitch in theory, that just doesn't resonate with my experience as a consumer in retail.

Go to any store that has self-checkout currently. Usually there is one attendee servicing 4 machines. No one comes up to you to chat, they only come over when theres a problem. When you go to a manned-checkout, they usually ask how you are doing, if you found everything ok, if you want to join a loyalty program...etc. Some of the checkout people I know very well over the years in my community. One even gave my infant daughter free socks because she has grandchildren.

You wont get that in this future. Those checkers will be gone. You'll just have employees minding their own business tending to their work, like you will with yours.

physcab··on Standard Cognition Raises $40M Series A to Deliver Autonomous Checkout
The “re-humanizing retail” line left a bad taste in my mouth. When I think of lots of cameras in a store designed to get you in and out as quickly as possible without having to talk to a cashier or a stocker, it feels de-humanizing and sterile. It is also one of the ways I interact with people at different income levels. That’s why people go to farmers markets and do CSA boxes - they want to feel connection to their food providers and community.

I don’t doubt this technology is the future or will be a big market, but let’s not kid ourselves that this will generate more human connection.

physcab··on Do the Rich Capture All the Gains from Economic Growth?
No, because what you’re measuring is rate of change vs volume. If you made $1 and now you make $2, that is 100% growth in income. If you made $1M and now make $1.2M that is 20% growth, but in absolute dollars you make way more.
Page 1 of 30Next →