HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

steven2012

3,896 karma · joined March 3, 2013

submissionscomments
steven2012··on Ask HN: How do you deal with atomicity in microservice environments?
Calling external services "microservices" is fundamentally wrong. They are "services". All that will do is create a lot of confusion because you are utterly misusing terminology. You can't just decide to misuse terminology. That's like calling "red" "blue". You don't gain information by misusing well-defined terms, you create confusion and misinformation.

That said, your ideas on distributed systems is wrong. Any point in a workflow can and will fail. You need to account for all of this. You can successfully create an account on Stripe, and then when you bill that account, it could return an error. Or even worse, it can timeout, meaning you don't know whether or not a user was charged.

You have to take into consideration all of these failure situations. There is no atomicity in the way that you expect. Whenever things deviate off the happy path, you fail quickly and decisively so that everyone knows where they stand. That gives people the option to retry or call support.

steven2012··on Robinhood raises $323M at a $7.6B valuation
It's absolutely a basic feature. It's the opposite of buying a share, and your profit/loss is easy to calculate. With options, you need to worry about premium, time decay, spreads and lower liquidity, etc.
steven2012··on Robinhood raises $323M at a $7.6B valuation
For a brokerage managing short position risks are exactly the same as managing long positions. And the implementation is the same too. Do real-time checks and once a position has lost more than X%, sell the position immediately.

The biggest problem presumably for Robinhood is managing the borrowing of the shares. They're probably not large enough to have a pool of shares to consistently borrow from like other larger brokerages.

steven2012··on Robinhood raises $323M at a $7.6B valuation
Yes, a pure short position is much cheaper than buying puts. You pay a lot of premium with options and almost no premium with shorts, depending on what the rate to borrow is. Also, liquidity is much better as are spreads. It makes a huge different to the profitability of a trade.
steven2012··on Operating a large distributed system in a reliable way: practices I learned
This is an incorrect statement. CPU utilization and memory matters because it limits how many other containers you can load on the same host, and means that it becomes more and more expensive to run that particular service.
steven2012··on Ask HN: How do you deal with professional envy?
It looks like it came from his Louis TV show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNo_Hhm5r8o

steven2012··on “10x engineers”: Stereotypes and research
It would never have been prioritized. The time to convince others that this was more valuable than other tasks would have far outweighed the time that he spent working on it on his own time. He thought it was a cool idea and just did it without seeking permission.
steven2012··on “10x engineers”: Stereotypes and research
It's mostly raw passion. You can't get a 9-to-5 worker excited enough to learn something from scratch over a weekend just to do something she thinks is "cool".

There's also a difference between a better programmer vs more productive. I will never be as productive as the two that I mentioned, but I'm pretty good at programming. I have enough experience to know how to develop a feature and a set of code such that it's easy to read, easy to maintain and doesn't have very many bugs. That's just something I've learned over time. Others may be much more productive than me, but I rarely have to revisit features due to bugs. So there are different measures based on what you want from a team.

steven2012··on Ask HN: How do you deal with professional envy?
Louis CK once said "The only time you should look at what's on some else's plate of food is to check if they have enough." That really put things in perspective to me.

If I'm not making enough for the amount of work that I do, I will find another job.

steven2012··on “10x engineers”: Stereotypes and research
I've worked with 2 10x engineers in my career. I don't know if they were precisely 10x, but they were the most productive engineers I've ever seen. At the startup I worked at, this was the VP. When he left, the company almost collapsed because he was singlehanded doing so many different jobs that we didn't know about. I would say that was more of a negative than a positive, but just from the sheer amount of work he did, he was definitely more productive than the entire team.

I had another friend who was also extremely productive. He never graduated from college, but he was a programming genius. One day he decided to learn ANTLR. Then he decided to deconstruct our query language for our product into ANTLR and discovered several bugs and inconsistencies in the implementation that made it impossible for ANTLR to parse it. Then I said "Hmm, it would be really cool to use ANTLR to read our XDR files and spit out some code that would implement the migration between versions." He said "great idea!" and accomplished that over a weekend, hand-constructing the grammar by hand. He saved the team probably 1 month of work every release cycle. He was absolutely astounding and the best programmer I ever had the honor of working with.

steven2012··on The challenges of teaching software engineering
No offense to the OP but the syllabus is ludicrous. This isn't teaching anything. It's so packed with random software technologies, they will leave the course with nothing. Cut down on the syllabus and focus on a few topics. Make it project based so that you're building on the same project over the 4 days and learning more about programming.

Split the other stuff like git, databases, OOP, functional programming, machine learning my God, for another course. There is no way anyone taking this course will get anything from this, it will just be a confusing mess of information that is quickly forgotten.

steven2012··on 7.1 magnitude earthquake strikes Southern California
Agreed. There is no way that a startup is capitalized enough to survive a payout. Their CEO and investors must be sweating bullets over the next few days, worrying if an earthquake hits closer to LA
steven2012··on 7.1 magnitude earthquake strikes Southern California
Also sinkholes and flooding caused by global warming!
steven2012··on A short history of Bigfoot sightings and lore
I just don't understand how people continue to believe that Bigfoot exists. The footage from the 1970s, once stabilized, looks embarrassingly like a man in a gorilla suit. Plus they admitted their faking it. The fact people still believe this makes me understand exactly how conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers believe what they do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q60mSMmhTZU

steven2012··on When a Fatal Grizzly Mauling Goes Viral
Honestly, when you're dealing with the scale of the Internet, ie. billions of people, do the disgusting comments of a few dozen, hundreds or even thousands of people matter? It's not something you encounter in the "real" world, but it feels like we need to change our scales logarthimically when talking about Internet comments.

Probably a million people read about that article and 99% didn't think those horrible thoughts, but maybe less than 1% did and commented on social media. Just by sheer numbers, you're going to get a lot of terrible comments, it seems like this is the "new normal" and growing thicker skin is something we all need to deal with, unfortunately. To a regular person, a few dozen shitty comments will be hard to take from real people, but when considering the scale of the Internet, it's probably not significant and it's something we all need to learn, unfortunately.

steven2012··on Impossible Foods' next product is sausage
I tried Impossible Meat last week and I was shocked at how tasty it was. There was a Better Meats option for hamburgers but I don't want to waste $8 in case it doesn't taste good. They would do so much better if they had a stand at Whole Foods, Costco, etc giving out free samples so that I could taste it without wasting food or money to see if I like it.
steven2012··on Updates to Works with Nest
Google has become a big horrible disaster. I'm extremely disappointed in what is going on these days.

I am a heavy user of Nest (7 cameras, other accessories). I've fully bought into the ecosystem. I literally have no idea what's going on. It sounds to me who is only casually paying attention that they're killing off Nest and the Nest brand. Whether that may or may not be true, they need to understand the perception of their actions to their users. Do they really expect most people to say "Okay, I need to spend 10 minutes and read through exactly what this all means."

Now I'm left with the dreaded feeling that my Dropcams and Nestcams will no longer work in the near future.

Google has really damaged their brand because I no longer consider them reliable. If I buy a brand that is associated with Google, I expect that it will get changed in the next year or so into something that I can't comprehend or don't want, and it makes me want to search for alternatives.

I don't want to "merge" my accouns with Google Home. I want to keep my single account on Nest like I have for many years now, and I just want alerts and to be able to see my cameras. All this other nonsense that they're trying to pull me into is not what I want as a consumer, and it upsets me that Google is becoming this kind of company.

They are in many ways worse than Microsoft was at their worst. Before Microsoft used to be a monopoly on the desktop, but Google is now turning into a monopoly in my entire life.

Meanwhile, Nest has been dormant for most of its existence, releasing only a few features. But in terms of cameras it's the most reliable which is why I stick with it. But there are so many opportunities for them to improve this service and it feels abandoned. Instead of adding features, like animal detection or car detection, they are worried about how I log in or who my account is? That's just stupid.

steven2012··on Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand
Google as a company is worth almost $1T. It's hard to argue that's the wrong approach when they are so ridiculously successful.
steven2012··on The one-salary experiment, ten years in
Right now I'm struggling with whether or not to leave. I'm currently at a well-known company, and I'm uncharacteristically happy because my WLB is the best it's been in my career.

However, I'm getting a bit bored and I also know I could make at least $50,000 a year more if I leave. Hell, even the new engineers joining my company at the same level are making more than I am.

But the culture and pay at my company is just good enough such that staying isn't a horrible decision. And I don't want to start studying dynamic programming again for my interviews (I've never used it except in interview environments, so I keep forgetting and losing the ability to quickly answer questions).

So yes, I could make a nice amount more (plus large sign on bonus) but WLB is good enough to keep me, at least for another year. I pick up my kids every day at school and I love it, it's worth the money for now.

steven2012··on Apple News Service Said to Feature WSJ for $10 a month, Without NYT or WP
> Publishers are also concerned that they won’t have access to important data about the consumers — credit cards, email addresses and other subscriber information — as part of the deal.

Why are credit card numbers important information? All they would know is what the credit card is, but it's not like they can sell the credit card or use that number to get more purchases, etc, from that number, can they?

steven2012··on New iPad Air and iPad Mini
My kid is 6 years old and all he uses is an iPad. I think the next generation will be using iPads and tablets and think using laptops are for old people.
steven2012··on Python: Even a Feature That You Do Not Use Can Bite You
This isn't a good article to post. It's just one person complaining about a change he didn't know about.

It's really just a syntax change. I probably wouldn't have chosen that particular syntax using colons, or I would have forced another keyword like "set" in front of it, but it is what it is. He created a bug and he likely won't do it again, so problem solved.

steven2012··on A Humility Training Exercise for Technical Interviewers
Did you do something about these terrible interviewers? Your company is particularly famous for a terrible interview experience because of interviewers such as this. I've personally experienced them a few times myself, and if you know they are bad, hopefully you've taken them off the interview rotation and reeducated them.
steven2012··on Oregon Bottle Deposit System Hits 90 Percent Redemption Rate
The waste company has people that go through the recycling and pull out all the salvageable bottles and get the deposit themselves, so you can consider it a "donation" to SF Recology or wherever you live.
steven2012··on What Happens When You Try to Sue Your Boss
It sounds like the OP got a second-hand storytelling of what happened, and the original storyteller didn't know the exact details or made things up. It doesn't make sense for the lawyer to not to suggest settling especially if the company is going to go under.
steven2012··on The Octopus Is Smart as Heck, But Why?
How does an octopus know how to match its body with its background? All video I've seen have been with the octopus eyes up, it's not even looking at the background, so how does it know a) what the background color is, and 2) that its body is matching the background, since it's not looking at itself either.
steven2012··on Ask HN: What are you thankful for?
I'm thankful that I love programming even after 2 decades, and that I'm very well paid for it. And I still come into work every day and love the challenges. There was a time where I was burnt out and needed to take a year off, but thankfully since then I've been able to center myself and my expectations and I've been thankful every day since.
steven2012··on The Art of Job Interviewing
This sounds like it was written by a complete amateur. "Try and avoid bias" isn't even grammatically correct.

Their part on bias is woefully inadequate. "We’re all human, and we’re all biased, so the best thing to do is just accept this." sounds like they have no idea what unconscious bias actually is.

The worst unconscious bias is "this person isn't like me, so they can't possibly be good." People unconsciously would rather be around people similar to themselves. This creates groupthink and monocultures, and the reason why there are so many issues in tech. They see a candidate who is a female or a different race, and maybe they approach problems differently, and the interviewer rejects this because it wasn't THEIR way of thinking, which obviously to them is the best.

There are many ways to solve problems, and the best interview problems are the ones where people are free to use their own creativity to solve a problem, not regurgitate the exact same CTCI answers ad nauseum.

steven2012··on Google Titan Security Key now available
I would prefer one from Apple. I don't trust Google as much as I do Apple, simply because I know they don't make money from my data. The fact that the FBI couldn't get into an iPhone makes me trust Apple much more. If I start using this Google key, I'm not sure how far in bed they are with the government and if they can crack my accounts.
steven2012··on Consumer startups that said no to investor money
I was sad to see Tuft and Needle get acquired by Serta. I bought 3 TN mattresses from their post here, and I love them. I vociferously recommended them to anyone I know. I really doubt their quality will continue to be maintained now that they are in the grips of Serta, but I guess next time I am in the need for a mattress in about 10 years, I'll check.
Page 1 of 25Next →