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skj

2,779 karma · joined September 30, 2013

Two Sigma, xoogler.
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skj··on Google pays ‘enormous’ sums to maintain search-engine dominance, DOJ says
Unless something big changed since I left two years ago, the org chart is totally visible to the entire company, and so are levels except when someone explicitly opts out (most do not bother).
skj··on Ivermectin Didn’t Reduce Covid-19 Hospitalizations in Largest Trial to Date
Are you knocking the knockers? No one is suggesting they be arrested. They're just being ridiculed.
skj··on Managing People
Pretty uncommon at tech companies, but it's entirely based on the company's policy. The company can fire you at any time (as long as it's not one of several specific bad reasons like racial discrimination), but it's the company that employs you, not your manager. So only the company can fire you.

Generally big tech companies don't give your manager the authority to blindly fire you, but only because that's a decision the company made.

skj··on Dad and the ten commandments of egoless programming (2012)
My former boss too! That message was sort of the beginning of the end for the trust I had. Very disappointing.
skj··on Lessons from my PhD
Yeah but it's a lot easier to not care.
skj··on Facebook's reputation is so bad that they must pay more to hire, retain talent
What I tried, in a similar situation, was being clear that I did not support the company or its leadership and for them to never contact me again. It worked.
skj··on Chinese tennis star recants sexual assault allegations against CCP vice-premier
She didn't.
skj··on Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again
eh?
skj··on AWS us-east-1 outage
Pretty low chance that the status page is automated, especially via health checks. I imagine it's a static asset updated by hand.
skj··on Bob Dole has died
Little known fact: "Bob Dole has died" were his last words.
skj··on Ask HN: Dependency Graphs for Cloud Services?
It's GCS.
skj··on ChaosDB Explained: Azure's Cosmos DB Vulnerability Walkthrough
When we designed the security model for Google Cloud Build (I do not work there anymore), we decided that containers were not valid security barriers. So, all partitioning was done on the VM and network (configured outside the VM) level.

It wasn't hard to convince anyone that this was the right way to handle things.

skj··on Vertiwalk Vertical Walking
I don't think "this is a dangerous idea because people might need it to function" is a great take.
skj··on Incident Affecting Google Cloud Infrastructure Components
Last I checked, which was not recent, it was hosted out of an S3 bucket.
skj··on Amazon Time Sync Service
Google uses map reduce extensively... where it's appropriate.

True time helps with things like spanner transactions. It's just a totally different use case.

skj··on Peter Bourgon: I have been permanently banned from all Golang community spaces
Well.... bye!
skj··on Is π the Same in Every Universe?
I measure distances in the time it takes light to traverse them, don't you?
skj··on YouTube alternatives: P2P video hosting that uses up to 60% less bandwidth [pdf]
The host can put their CDN inside the operator's network. And, generally, a centrally operated CDN can be smarter than p2p.
skj··on Google Compute Engine VM takeover via DHCP flood
Hmm cloud build spoofs it :) if the customer build accessed the underlying VM's metadata it would be very confusing (though not a security issue).

It was not straightforward. I learned a lot about iptables and docker networking.

skj··on The mathematician who saved hundreds of flight crews
Ok, now I understand that survivor bias meme.
skj··on An industrial designer who inspired Steve Jobs
A self-made mining billionaire? Indeed that is fascinating. He must have been working really hard down in those mines to make that much without any help.
skj··on Half a million lines of Go
"this context" is using a map from the beginning and not having that slice.
skj··on Half a million lines of Go
With big python projects it's often difficult to figure out what code is going to be executed next due to inheritance and mix-ins.

With Go, it's usually pretty straightforward. Yes, there are interfaces, but they're used in places where people actually want the choice of code to be dynamic, rather than people just having fun building up crazy hierarchies in the name of DRY.

So, with Go I find it very easy to read because of high code locality and the ease of following to the correct destination with function calls.

For things that are already local, "ease of reading" is just code for "familiar". Go is strictly easier to read because tracing through is strictly simpler. Anything else is just spelling and those barriers disappear with only minimal experience.

skj··on There’s no such thing as a tree, phylogenetically
The limit there is likely that no one has figured out how to make an annual fruit or nut tree.
skj··on Why psychology isn’t science (2012)
How close are we to a black hole?
skj··on Designing a guitar with hot-swappable pickups
You can definitely hear the difference between many guitar models. Are you suggesting that pickups are the only difference?
skj··on Zanzibar: Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System (2019)
It ABSOLUTELY is a SPOF and was responsible for several high profile outages at GCP last year.
skj··on Zanzibar: Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System (2019)
In Google, auditing is handled separately.

The availability guarantees necessary for basic authorization are far more strict than auditing. Auth fails closed, audit fails open.

Anything that can be stripped out of auth should be, even if we're talking about a best effort extra rpc from the auth service.

Auditing typically needs more information than auth as well, and making the auth pipe wide is a risk.

skj··on What was the point of [ “x$var” = “xval” ]?
"there must be a reason" hahahahahaha
skj··on Commits are snapshots not diffs (2020)
Some commits cannot be cherry picked. This is because there is no coherent diff for them, like with merge commits.
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