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throw93

411 karma · joined May 12, 2019

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throw93··on HuffPost India is history, thanks to new FDI norms
It is crazy because in India political parties can indirectly accept foreign funding through a recent change in constitution by ruling party.

Foreign funding of political parties is equally if not more dangerous than foreign funding of news media.

throw93··on HuffPost India is history, thanks to new FDI norms
Whether HuffPost was popular in India is besides the point.

To provide some contrast, the same govt amended a law originally designed to prohibit foreign funding of political parties and changed it to allow funding from local companies which have more than 50% foreign ownership.

So basically political parties can indirectly accept foreign funds through above loophole which the ruling party itself created but news organizations cannot.

“ the controlling Bharatiya Janata Party government passed a retroactive amendment through a 2016 Finance Bill that excludes from the definition of “foreign sourced” contributions from local companies even though a foreign company owns more than half their shares, provided certain direct investment requirements are met”

Source: https://www.loc.gov/law/help/elections/foreign-involvement/i...

throw93··on Indian government blocks access to forty-three mobile apps
PayTM which is huge in India has Chinese investors like Ant financials and Alibaba. Ant being largest share holder with 29.71% ownership.

So it’s curious to see the selective retaliation. At what point a company is Chinese?

PayTM raked in immense profit following demonetization in India(overnight invalidation of several currency notes). And it continues to handle large amounts of financial transactions on daily basis.

throw93··on InfluxDB 2.0 Is Out
InfluxDB stores individual events e.g. error occured at 11.01am whereas Prometheus stores the aggregates i.e. number of errors occured between 11.01am and 11.02am.
throw93··on InfluxDB 2.0 Is Out
It actually depends on your usecase. My usecase was to monitor key business metrics as well as JVM performance details and send alerts in case a metrics seems off.

I initially evaluated InfluxDB and was impressed by it, but I was introduced to Prometheus I did not find any reason to go back to InfluxDB.

1. Prometheus has pull based of consuming metrics vs push based mechanism of InfluxDB. I see it as a plus point in terms of scalability especially if you have high traffic application.

2. If you are interested in zooming into a single event e.g. "error thrown at 11:01am" then Prometheus isn't for you. In that case you should evaluate timeseries databases like InfluxDB, TimescaleDB and others. Prometheus will only give you aggregated stats i.e. "errors thrown between 11.00am and 11.05am". You can label the events in Prometheus and group by those labels to draw some insights & define alerts.

3. The PromQL query language used to query metrics in Prometheus seemed much more powerful than InfluxDB to me. I find it much more advanced and flexible compared to any other solutions. e.g. you can compare current metrics value e.g. errors thrown per 15 seconds to the same value exactly a week ago which I find very cool. However PromQL has some learning curve. Luckily people have published common PromQL queries, so it's not that bad.

4. InfluxDB is a commercial product, which means some advanced options like distributed setup are available in paid version. This isn't a negative point, but just putting it out there. In contrast, Prometheus is open source.

5. I liked the deduplication and grouping feature in AlertManager(prometheus).

6. InfluxDB needs some serious hardware. This is understandable, because it stores each and every event. I was testing on a low spec machine, so InfluxDB used to crash after running for few hours and it consumed insane amounts of RAM(15-16 GB at times). I used the same hardware for Prometheus, published the same metrics under same load and I did not see any query performance issues. The RAM & CPU usage was very low(1 GB at max) in comparison This is mostly because Prometheus stores the aggregated values i.e. number of errors in 15 second windows as opposed to all the errors(which could be hundreads or thousands). So number of events do not affect performance in Promethues, only number of metrics do.

7. In comparison of setting up InfluxDB and other supporting components, I find Prometheus pretty straightforward to maintain.

8. The federation feature in Prometheus was very important for us. Basically you can pull data from one Prometheus instance into other Prometheus instance at lower resolution. This way I could monitor a fleet a 1000 nodes without any complicated setup or high spec nodes. e.g. you can configure a prometheus instance to pull metrics from 10 nodes at 15 second resolution. Then another prometheus instance would pull metrics from 10 such leaf level promertheus nodes at 1 minute interval. But since you are pulling lower resolution data, you can use the same hardware spec for leaf level prometheus instance and it's parent instance. When you are looking into Grafana, you can first look at higher level prometheus instance data then zoom into a subset as necessary. This is something I find easy to configure and manage.

This is what I can gather from top of my head, there could of course be other pros and cons in both solutions.

Official comparison by Prometheus team - https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/comparison/#promethe...

throw93··on Facebook Manipulated the News You See to Appease Republicans, Insiders Say
This is eerily similar to what happened in India. It was alleged that a certain Facebook official resisted banning certain profiles, despite recommendations from their own team, only because those profiles belonged to high ranking BJP(ruling party) leaders and banning them would hurt their profitability. Interestingly the ruling party in India is right wing as well. However I think Facebook is just driven by profitability rather than any political inclination. Reference: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-53803256
throw93··on Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay
+1 I was never asked about my immigration status before me accepting the offer. I had interviewer training afterwards and there was no mention of immigration status in interviewer guidelines as well. This was 20000+ employee company. It doesn’t seem logical from company’s perspective to hire a direct employee who’s gonna be with them for many years, just on basis of their immigration status.
throw93··on Modi government to set up app store alternative to Google Play, Apple App Store
I would not trust any state run App Store. In past their “Aarogya Setu” app has been criticized for privacy concerns. Note that the people who complained about Google’s review policy aren’t indie Developers but big Players like PayTM who benefited immensely from demonetization mandate. Clearly violating a policy that’s in place to protect the user and then complaining that your app got taken down is ridiculous. Agree, App Store review process isn’t perfect. There are mistakes in review process which get some apps wrongfully rejected. But I would rather have stricter policies than no/questionable review process. Another point is specific to this govt. The govt and the PM don’t exactly have a great track record when it comes to minorities, which makes such interference more scary.
throw93··on YouTube please give back option to stop seeing an ad
Got flagged. Changed the title to a neutral tone. All I care about is the option that YouTube has taken away. Don’t care about any party.
throw93··on YouTube please give back option to stop seeing an ad
Do you see “Stop seeing this ad”? I’m not and that’s what bothering me.
throw93··on YouTube please give back option to stop seeing an ad
I thought I was the only one bombarded with these ads every day, until I discovered this support ticket. To clarify I’ve paused search and watch history.
throw93··on Madhya Pradesh man cycles 105km to ferry son to Class X exam centre
Quite an interesting read on Wikipedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PM_CARES_Fund

1. According to article some government organizations deducted percentage of salary towards this fund by default. After some protests this default was reversed.

2. This fund is exempt from audit because it’s not a “public fund”. Can someone throw some light on what this actually means? I’m referencing “Accountability and transparency” part of the article.

3. Part of this fund was used to buy ventilators manufactured by a local(Indian) company. Some hospitals returned these ventilators because of quality issues. Source - https://m.huffingtonpost.in/entry/agva-ventilators-pmcares-c...

throw93··on India, Jio, and the Four Internets
> Jio also collects (or said it would collect) information about its users and their habits through traffic analysis and deep packet inspection

You have a source for this, especially regarding deep packet analysis? Just curious.

throw93··on Google contractors in Pittsburgh vote to unionize
As someone without any context, 1. Why they are unionizing? 2. Why are they joining a union from a completely different industry? What would this achieve?
throw93··on Backlinks for Small Business
author here. we wrote this article keeping small businesses/startups in mind. it starts from really basic stuff and gradually introduces complex concepts. this article aims to be a living document to backlinks. We'll keep it updated.
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