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schmichael

4,455 karma · joined January 6, 2010

  Live:    Portland, OR
  Work:    ▲ | ex-HashiCorp Nomad Eng Lead
schmichael most places on the internet, hmu
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schmichael··on Baffled by generational garbage collection – wingolog
This is absolutely true! I haven’t stared at a JVM GC graph is over 8 years.
schmichael··on Baffled by generational garbage collection – wingolog
Go optimizing for latency over throughput means the GC very rarely interferes with my applications SLO at the cost (literally $) of presumably requiring more total compute than a GC that allows more fine tuned tradeoffs between latency and throughput.

As someone who is not directly paying the bills but has wasted far too much of my life staring at JVM GC graphs and carefully tuning knobs, I vastly prefer Go’s opinionated approach. Obviously not a universally optimal choice but I’m so thankful it works for me! I don’t miss pouring over GC docs and blog posts for days trying to save my services P99 from long pauses.

schmichael··on VSCode’s SSH agent is bananas
I think the difference is that what VSCode is doing is not an SSH Session like you get in a terminal with the ssh command or putty.

VSCode is installing a remote agent on the target machine that happens to use ssh as its transport protocol, and offers to share that transport with the user.

Is this a problem? Not if it only does things you want it to do. However any agent based system exposing an arbitrary API is suddenly a much bigger attack and risk surface area than the well trod (and still fraught) path of emulating a terminal over ssh.

schmichael··on Microsoft Is Dead (2007)
Alternative title: antitrust works.

It didn't kill Microsoft. Microsoft isn't dead. However Microsoft does now have competitors. The takeaway here is that antitrust is fantastic for consumers and innovation.

schmichael··on Detroit’s revival takes shape after decades of decay
> Why spend 2-10x as much to live in one of four coastal metros

I think you answered your own question: it’s not (entirely) an economic decision. Weather, culture, nature, civic amenities. There’s a lot in life that money can’t buy. Sure I could own a McMansion on a palatial plot of prairie, but what if the square footage of my house and acreage of my yard isn’t what’s important to me?

schmichael··on Should we use AI and LLMs for Christian apologetics? (2024)
There are many religious questions people probably are scared to ask a human. Imagine any closeted gay or trans kid wanting to know if the way they feel is “wrong.” Just asking the question to your parents or a faith leader could raise suspicions and be dangerous.

So while I wish the world were one in which people didn’t have a reason to be scared to ask questions, that’s not the world we live in. Are LLMs an answer? I have no idea, but I understand the impulse to try.

schmichael··on World's largest pumped storage power plant fully operational in China
Nuclear requires an extremely mature bureaucracy to handle the serious longterm risks efficiently. Here in the USA I'm just not sure our government is mature enough for the task. Every 4 years we may have someone come in to slash safety regulations or erect impossible regulatory barriers, not to mention all of our defense treaty obligations and their churn. Every year (or less!) our congress may decide to let the government shutdown and stop paying critical contractors. Trains carrying spent or unspent fuel may derail thanks to inefficient regulation. etc etc.

One of the massive benefits of wind and solar is that it can be scaled down to a size even a consumer can deploy. This makes it relatively resilient to regulatory whims compared to massive undertakings like nuclear. I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I suspect the recent emphasis on smaller nuclear plants has more to do with navigating regulatory hurdles and uncertainty than efficiency.

All that to say I am quite jealous of countries with mature bureaucratic regimes that can efficiently manage nuclear!

schmichael··on Server-Sent Events (SSE) Are Underrated
I’ve never understood the use of SSE over ndjson. Builtin browser support for SSE might be nice, but it seems fairly easy to handle ndjson? For non-browser consumers ndjson is almost assuredly easier to handle. ndjson works over any transport from HTTP/0.9 to HTTP/3 to raw TCP or unix sockets or any reliable transport protocol.
schmichael··on Go Protobuf: The New Opaque API
The article goes into great detail about the benefits of an opaque api vs open structs. Somewhat unintuitively open structs are not necessarily the “fastest” largely due to pointers requiring heap allocations. Opaque APIs can also be “faster” due to lazy loading and avoiding memcpy altogether. The latter appears in libraries like flat buffers but not here IIRC.
schmichael··on Show HN: Performant intracontinental public transport routing in Rust
A quick search of “c++” on HN shows many C++ related posts explicitly mention the language. I would assume many other language specific posts also name the language they’re using to save uninterested parties a click. There’s really nothing particularly interesting about this: it’s a fairly natural pattern in a multilingual community like HN.
schmichael··on Fly.io outage – resolved
The prices are just one click deeper. Hardly a nefarious dark pattern.
schmichael··on Bocker: Docker implemented in around 100 lines of Bash (2015)
Yes, from the README:

> Bocker runs as root and among other things needs to make changes to your network interfaces, routing table, and firewall rules. I can make no guarantees that it won't trash your system.

Linux makes it quite hard to run "containers" as an unprivileged user. Not impossible! https://github.com/rootless-containers/rootlesskit is one approach and demonstrates much of the difficulty involved. Networking is perhaps the most problematic. Your choices are either setuid binaries (so basically less-root as opposed to root-less) or usermode networking. slirp4netns is the state of the art here as far as I know, but not without security and performance tradeoffs.

schmichael··on Salmon return to lay eggs in historic habitat after Klamath River dam removal
Trucking is definitely not an efficient way of moving salmon past dams: https://www.opb.org/article/2023/10/31/willamette-river-salm...
schmichael··on 14-Year-Old Casper Wind Farm Has Not Turned a Blade in at Least 3 Years
The government, local, state, or federal, should have the opportunity to nationalize unused infrastructure like this. Give Chevron an opportunity to tear it down or turn it on, but otherwise pay a market rate just like with eminent domain and let the turbines spin.

I'm guessing this was just some greenwashing by Chevron to avoid being forced to actually cleanup their nuclear waste.

schmichael··on 14-Year-Old Casper Wind Farm Has Not Turned a Blade in at Least 3 Years
Chevron is an oil and natural gas company, not an electricity production company. Directly producing green energy is a bit like Apple selling Windows PCs.
schmichael··on My Time Working at Stripe
The author appears to be solidly millenial from their resume.

As an Elder Millennial myself I hope HN and our industry is free of ageism against young and old. Comments like yours don’t help.

schmichael··on Ultra fast key value store (in C btw)
Just post your source. Benchmarks should be reproducible.
schmichael··on Ultra fast key value store (in C btw)
Flagged because without code or even binaries there's no way to learn anything from this. Is the code memory safe? Does it gracefully handle error conditions? What tradeoffs were chosen?

Plenty of OSS "simple redis clones" exist with performance better than Redis. I think it would be more useful to re-post those than share this.

schmichael··on Eye Contact Correction: Redirecting the eyes to look at the camera
Also a fully remote company worker since pre-COVID, and I vastly prefer calls with the video on. It's the norm at our company. Facial expressions convey enormous amounts of information. Also our team silently claps for people which is admittedly quite silly but hey, we like it.

I'm rarely on calls without video, but when I am I find it jarring when voices just appear out of the ether with only a little flashing icon to indicate who it is I'm listening to.

To each their own!

schmichael··on Evolving GitHub Issues
You misunderstand: the keyword in that quote is “project.”

GitHub projects are boards, not repositories. I don’t know if there’s a limit on the number of issues repositories can have (nomad is over 5k).

I’m not actually sure how valuable a board with over 1k items on it is in practice.

schmichael··on Open-Source Flipper Zero Firmware: Unlock Your Device's Full Potential
Why send agents with flipper zeros when American consumers willingly buy millions of consumer electronics from China every year that could be part of a supply chain attack?

It’s really bizarre that you bring up physical border security when Israel just demonstrated that’s not at all necessary.

schmichael··on Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?
> Does Telegram let them see it: I don't think so.

This is exceptionally naive. Even if he was arrested for not sharing with the French, what about for other countries? Was he arrested for not ever sharing or not sharing enough? Even if he, personally, has never shared, that doesn’t say anything about his employees who have the same access to these systems.

Your data is not private with Telegram. You are trusting Telegram. It is a trust-based app, not a cryptographically secure app.

If you trust telegram, that’s your choice, but just because a person says the right words in interviews doesn’t mean your data is safe.

schmichael··on All of Earth's water in a single sphere (2019)
> The blue sphere over Kentucky represents the world's liquid fresh water (groundwater, lakes, swamp water, and rivers).

So the medium blue sphere includes groundwater and swamp water while the tiny dot does not.

schmichael··on Making Machines Move
Why iSCSI instead of NVMEoF?
schmichael··on Why Americans aren't having babies
> There are plenty of poor countries (and folks) having children.

Does having children impact their earning potential? The US offers a relatively high earning potential, and having children really directly interferes with that. If you don't have high earning potential, having kids may not have an appreciable impact.

Childcare alone can easily cost over $1k/mo. Daily Starbucks and eating out is nothing compared to having kids.

schmichael··on I Started a Bike Bus (2023)
I did a bike bus with my kids school elsewhere in Portland this year! Great way to get kids riding. We’d have 2-3 parents on cargo bikes block busy intersections for the kiddos to ride across at their own pace. Probably annoyed some drivers, but they never showed it. Once a car even pulled alongside, slowly and safely, to block traffic even more completely for us.
schmichael··on Group chats rule the world
That is their core problem! The good news is that anyone who knows 2 or more other people that share an interest can quickly and easily start a group chat. They're free and if no one ever posts again, nothing lost. I've started group chats around something as momentous and permanent as fatherhood and something as silly and ephemeral as the 2003 film Master and Commander.
schmichael··on Group chats rule the world
I'd like to say it was the 2016 elections, 2020 pandemic, and 2022 Musk acquisition that killed Twitter for me, but the truth is exactly what this article points out: I replaced nearly all of my traditional public social media usage with group chats in that time period. Those events just made the transition much easier!

I use Mastodon occasionally and Reddit only as a passive consumer. I miss virtual communities a bit; as a youth in rural Illinois they were extremely formative for me. I hope disconnected folks still find their virtual communities, public or private, but I think I'm just in a different phase of my life where de-emphasizing them comes naturally. It's hard for me to disentangle whether it's me or the Internet that's changed, but from the positive reaction here and in group chats to this article: I feel safe assuming I'm at least not alone.

schmichael··on German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice
I remember walking to every computer in primary schools to do operations in the 90s, so I figured might as well play it safe with “20 years.” :)

There’s definitely been solutions to this problem since the dawn of computing, albeit with uneven availability.

schmichael··on German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice
Linux has directories and config/package/fleet management as well. No one in the past 20 years should be walking to every desk in 1,000 desk building installing software.
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