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stillicidious

133 karma · joined November 12, 2021

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stillicidious··on The QT Timebomb
> The notion that changes in interest rates, which generally correlate with inflation, would alter the price of stocks is not obvious to me. Not sure what mechanism you would propose that would cause that to happen.

Higher rates -> reduced accessibility of personal credit -> lower spending -> lower corporate revenue -> higher cost of borrowing -> higher cost of debt service -> lower profits -> stock price

Rates act as a global parameter that impacts performance of companies differently, with the consensus understanding that it impacts debt-fuelled (or what we now usually call growth) companies the most.

stillicidious··on PostgreSQL query performance bottlenecks
You could easily observe this with a cache-cold query performing lots of random IO. EBS latency is on the order of milliseconds, even cheap baremetal nowadays is microseconds
stillicidious··on Why isn't there a universal data format for résumés?
Clearly written by an applicant rather than employer. Your resume is your chance to shine, use the opportunity or pay a service to do it for you.

The reason the author is trapped long enough in meat grinder hiring to notice this "problem" is likely precisely because of some indistinguishable cookie cutter bullet point soup getting them nowhere. If you can capture it in a data structure, it's not a resume!

See also: why isn't there a universal UI for web sites?

stillicidious··on Set up a practically free CDN
If you think it's cheap now, wait til you see it after a 50bps rates move
stillicidious··on Set up a practically free CDN
CloudFlare's stock price changes are related to narratives from the past 2 years rapidly fading, like the retail investing world finally learning what a CDN did right at the start of COVID, and expectations of the interest rate environment shifting. AFAIK there has been no material news to justify what's happening to its stock recently, other than many large players rushing to exit extremely crowded trades they all had in common.

There is currently a widespread fear that quantitative tightening could arrive very rapidly, with disastrous effects on high multiplier tech stocks and other debt-fuelled businesses. They've all been getting hammered in uniform since at least December.

stillicidious··on Cloud Native Interactive Landscape
I built out my first ISP in 2001, worked in FAANG by 2006, haven't the slightest comprehension of what this is for. Is it some kind of certified partner directory?
stillicidious··on Format Strings in Rust 1.58
Definitely concur. In a well designed language, I'd expect it to be possible to express something a bit closer to C++'s ios but without the crazy verbosity, and without switching mode. It's not that general language features like this aren't possible, it's often that they simply haven't been discovered yet. User-defined literals are a recent concept that helps eliminate some crap in a related area.

Meanwhile, can't complain all that much if zero-cost features can be added to Rust to make it easier to market it to scripting folk. I think that can only be a good thing, even if the feature design is far from ideal.

stillicidious··on U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
> Interesting how one might choose to their faith over their life.

The belief in the right to a predictably long life is a new idea barely a few centuries old at most. Not that I'm personally complaining, but the statement did make me think, the value of living longer for everyone is not self-evident (at least from where I am standing), and the presumption that it is seems in itself dogmatic.

Actually, I could suggest a few non-faith approaches to rationalize the benefit of early death

stillicidious··on Match Group file multiple lawsuits after repeated failed acquisition offer
Interacting with match.com still appears to be associated with picking up incurable ailments after all these years
stillicidious··on UUIDs are popular, but bad for performance (2019)
That's only part of it, the major problem with classic UUIDs are that writes occur randomly across the entire keyspace. Whether it's represented as a string or in binary, ordering does not change, and so the underlying indexing method must cope with these random orderings at insertion time.

At least btrees perform much worse with random insertions. I don't know how much impact it has on LSM

stillicidious··on Arm-Based 128-Core Ampere CPUs Cost a Fraction of x86 Price
Totally meaningless numbers without at least some normalized performance/watt to compare against
stillicidious··on The FIP-FS “Microsoft” Scan Engine Failed. Can’t Convert “2201010001” to Long
The codebase is from at least 1996.
stillicidious··on Big data may not know your name, but it knows everything else
33 bits of entropy, not just 33 bits
stillicidious··on Using BeOS on a Power Mac (2001)
Awesome career twist, potentialy more interesting than the article :) Did you go from professional -> professional, or not much past hobbyist tech?
stillicidious··on Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]
Someone has pushed a button and it's run the equivalent of cookiecutter on the repo.

Original author could send a DMCA, or they could simply enjoy Christmas and assume a ticket will undo this sometime in January.

stillicidious··on South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew
Such a number would be difficult to interpret, or entirely meaningless, without understanding the classification methods and policies of each constituent region. This also holds true of overall death statistics.

Finally with local statistics, you still have political dramatics like https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/1473480933579923456

stillicidious··on The Great SPAC Scam: SPACs a Great Deal for Sponsors, but Not Others
Thorough study from a year ago for interested folk: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/11/19/a-sober-look-at-s...
stillicidious··on Postgres is a great pub/sub and job server (2019)
Be careful not to confuse average load with peak instantaneous load. Bursty workloads are the bane of capacity planners everywhere.
stillicidious··on Cloudflare Experiencing Latency Issues
I'd suggest you are doing far more damage to the reputation of the board by conflating commentary with free marketing. The comment I replied to was the latter. If advertising is permitted where critique from actual paying users is openly punished, what is that saying about the board?

As for the extremely disappointing asshole comment, coming from a moderator is quite frankly astounding. "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith".

stillicidious··on Cloudflare Experiencing Latency Issues
And yet I'm learning about this outage from HN. How did that happen?
stillicidious··on Show HN: 10-40% faster LZMA decoder using x86 CMOVcc
Probably 10-40% of what your browser is served nowadays is brotli, it's in Chrome so all the major CDNs support it by default
stillicidious··on Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?
It sounds like you deserve a new job with more challenging peers. Environments like that can suck the life out of a bright flame

Reminds me of a younger self going to interview for the technical team at a bank. I arrived full of youthful zest, thoroughly aced the interview. One of the interviewers, who already looked rather zombie-like, accompanied me to the exit. As I walked off he lit a cigarette and shouted after me, "don't accept the offer, this is not a place for someone like you!"

Made a variety of friends over the years who have shared stories of that bank. It's notorious, the interviewer was absolutely right.

stillicidious··on Issues with Cloudflare Images
Those are some seriously egregious egress fees!
stillicidious··on New EC2 Instance Types of re:Invent 2021
It's by design, many features of EC2 are unrelated to the chip itself. For example burstable scheduling, availability of enclaves, IO and networking bandwidth and a variety hypervisor features are all tied to the instance family. These are often far more important to a buildout than the exact chip you're running on
stillicidious··on Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances
It's a valid one. Engineering teams work with AWS kinda in the same way mass market 90s C code was written. They get it running, but boy are there huge leaks and crashes hiding in plain sight.

From that perspective, I think it might be ok to say that most eng folk complaining about AWS billing need a safer language (higher level abstraction) where they are protected from causing harm or being harmed.

stillicidious··on AWS free tier data transfer expansion
> what are you trying to say

I'm saying this is my bread and butter, and I've seen the same pattern in every company I've crossed the doors of. It's no made up scenario when a team of contractors have spent 12 months building out some service, not a single person will have given a damn about costs, so cost optimization is purchased separately. The contractors aren't wrong nor is the business wrong, nor is this pattern unique to cloud spend.

> I happen to work in the security industry

Then surely you will understand how an entire subindustry can exist to mop up after engineers who could otherwise 'simply' avoid most mistakes if they just spent more time Googling.

stillicidious··on AWS price reduction for data transfers out to the internet
They launched Cloud in the US this month, very likely dedicated will be offered soon enough. The bang for buck on Hetzner is insane, really love them, but have and would rip them out of any business environment I come across, largely due to network quality and attitude to support.

If you haven't experienced Google translating insistently German responses from one of their DC techs you probably haven't been using them for long enough ;)

As for networking, would encourage installing something like Smokeping

stillicidious··on AWS price reduction for data transfers out to the internet
I'm a Hetzner home user and a huge fan, but let's not compare the quality of networking you get for free from them with the networking you get from AWS.

I don't think I've seen a latency spike on AWS in 10 years. Hetzner, it's often possible to observe latency and drops over 10 minutes (and the situation hasn't changed much in about 10 years)

stillicidious··on AWS free tier data transfer expansion
> So why is cost optimization a constant point of conversation with AWS if it's so easy?

Limited IO bandwidth in middle and upper management alongside difficult schedules (we covered that one already). Take 2 steps above engineer on an org chart and detail becomes invisible, the vast majority of tasks begin to resemble a teenager at a mall with their dad's credit card. Meaningful technical validation phases are almost unheard of in many organizations, and largely antithetical to agile.

> Why do outfits like Digital Ocean advertise on the notion of clear billing as a positive differentiator compared to AWS?

Because they market to folk who never take the time to model comparative costs. In any project I considered them for (3 I think, <$15k/year each), Digital Ocean was significantly more expensive than AWS. I follow my spreadsheets, the industry follows marketing.

> Nobody thinks of AWS as a security company

They're the only vendor I deal with who are on first name terms with the NSA and sell in tremendous quantities to the US government. CloudFlare on the other hand, to this day, default to MITMing SSL connections for new accounts and downgrading them to cleartext en route to the back end. It seems our perceptions differ wildly.

stillicidious··on AWS free tier data transfer expansion
> his entire liveihood and business runs on the fact that AWS pricing is not even remotely clear

Corey's business exists because prevailing engineering culture encourages pretty much the entire industry to consider optimization as an afterthought, not because engineers can't understand AWS pricing, or interpret a few bar charts in Cost Explorer, and in the face of a deadline, if it's not on the agile board everyone knows it doesn't exist.

Many of Corey's technical posts are around finding sweet technical substitutes for niche use cases, but as I'm sure he'll tell you, 80% of what he does is easily discovered a few clicks away from the AWS home page.

> as they build out their pivot towards targeting the enterprise market

Cloudflare have a solid sales pipeline, but they're a sitting duck if any of the big clouds ever decide to replicate the business model like-for-like. One of the reasons this may not have happened yet is because Cloudflare's whole presentation is consumer oriented, starting with domain configuration management that is hell to version correctly when 20 people have access to the account. Outside some sweet Javascript cold start hacks they basically have no moat, and there are far more situations that could send the company into desperate measures than otherwise.

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