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stangles1

63 karma · joined September 11, 2016

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stangles1··on Why I'm in the Army Reserve – an explainer for my friends in tech
I question the relevance of your point to this article, which speaks exclusively of the British Army Reserve, specifically the Cheshire Yeomanry.
stangles1··on Breaking Through Scaling Barriers with Bigtable
>Why would it matter how they do it under the covers?

It doesn't really matter, I suppose I just got nerd-sniped recalling the details of Spanner's internals and their (somewhat superficial) relevance to the issues of timekeeping mentioned in the blog post :)

stangles1··on Breaking Through Scaling Barriers with Bigtable
I have never heard of Yugabyte DB until just now, so no :)

One of our constraints that Bigtable met for us is native GCP support. I do see Yugabyte has a GCP provider though.

stangles1··on Breaking Through Scaling Barriers with Bigtable
Good points - sharded Postgres is more likely to be a better choice in most instances. I wouldn't be surprised even if sharded Postgres would have worked well for us, but as you mentioned, for this constrained use case, Bigtable works fine.
stangles1··on Breaking Through Scaling Barriers with Bigtable
To be honest, it never even made it onto our radar, not for any particular reason though :)

IIRC, Spanner relies on precise timing to make certain guarantees, which is definitely relevant to our use case. I wonder how its write performance would stack up against Postgres and Bigtable.

stangles1··on Breaking Through Scaling Barriers with Bigtable
You're right, it does and we actually did do some performance testing that relied on single-row transactions early on in development but ultimately found slightly better performance with prefix/range scans (in addition to avoiding some limitations with retries and replication IIRC).
stangles1··on Why are used cars so expensive right now?
I noticed the same when I attempted to search for text on the page, very disappointing.
stangles1··on How exercise in old age prevents the immune system from declining
I'd be curious to know if similar effects are observed in orthogonal types of physical activity from cycling, e.g. strength training.
stangles1··on Practice Doesn't Make Perfect
What does having perfect eyesight have to do with becoming a commercial pilot? In the US, you can become a commercial pilot as long as your vision can be corrected to 20/20 [0].

[0]. https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/av...

stangles1··on China Will Resurrect the World's Largest Plane
The comparison to the C-17 rather than the C-5 seems rather deliberate to me (along with using lbs instead of tons for the unit). It's more sensational if a future Chinese military cargo plane "beats" a US cargo plane in cargo capacity by XXX,000 of anything.