throwawaythekey

Innovation and standards/large companies tend to be at opposite ends of the spectrum. Hence the need for startups!

I hope that you're correct however.

There's a classic blog covering this that has done the rounds here a few times. I recommend giving it a read if you don't think becoming a top achiever is possible through non-heroic amounts of sustained practice.

https://danluu.com/p95-skill/

I've become that person. In small teams a lot of magic happens and the feeling is somewhat addictive. I don't think it's wrong to long for times when the company had more output, at a higher quality, while using fewer resources. The past will never repeat itself but it seems meek to not attempt to preserve the good parts.

I'm not sure if it's unique to my place of work but most requirements are made up. If something is or isn't implemented in the final solution has no real bearing on happiness. The thing that everyone seems to be after is a well thought out solution with empathy for the users. Strict requirements get in the way of that in my experience.

I'm going through this at the moment at a startup...

I thought I could count on the charismatic leader to save my bacon by only calling on them for help when when things are visibly on fire and my own minor charisma hasn't been enough. In the end the leader didn't show up and now I've got a HR complaint against me for following up consistently when the fire didn't get put out. The whole thing has been fairly stressful because I'm struggling to understand the particular social dynamics, my best guess is it's just power protecting power, but I am naive/delusional enough to want to believe there is more to it. Now I'm taking a month off from work to try and unwind a bit.

All of that was just a long way of saying that you never know when you'll need to call on your stress/conflict managing skills, so best to keep them sharp at all times. I thought my skills were already good, but that was quickly revealed as false when challenged by tougher opponents :).

I'm still unconvinced that tiktok holds much data that is valuable to any government. As a node in the information tree it might have some marginal utility but my understanding of tiktok is that the data primarily is how much you enjoy cat videos. Maybe the chinese government can work out your sexual orientation, or that you are anti communist, but this is only a problem if you live in China.

Even if the data is valuable, as far as I know there are no backdoors available to tiktok that aren't available to other apps (e.g any tencent game). The security model at the os level seems to be the proper place to ensure privacy, and the witch hunt against tik tok seems to only exist because it is popular.

This is known as a zero bug policy [1]. I've had decent success implementing it with my team. The main advantages are:

- Prioritizing is hard, so avoid wasting brain cycles deciding how important your bugs are

- It encourages all of your team to get things right the first time, because if they don't they know they will be going back to fix it immediately.

- If you want to create a culture of quality then it's an obvious first step.

- It saves time in the long term by addressing problems when you have the most context and by avoiding building hack upon hack upon hack

In extreme cases you can relax the policy, but be aware that if you don't quickly correct course then things will be permanently worse. Also accept that hard external deadlines are not suited to this approach, but using triage some of that can be mitigated.

[1] https://sookocheff.com/post/process/zero-bug-policy/

There have been several cloudfront outages that have effectively been semi global outages

If you have the right team maybe 10M (to pay for the SaaS you bootstrapped off) and 1 year. If you have the wrong team then God help you.

It's been a while now but we saved about 10-100x moving from aurora to dynamo for a pure/simplish OLTP use case. Lost a lot of flexibility but the aurora costs were going to send us under.

We also had a few issues where aurora was giving us *incorrect query results* and aws support were not helpful. Most of the issues were denied, even with simple reproductions, and then got fixed years later (~2-3) after we had given up. We still use it today but stay away from cutting edge features, unusual query patterns, and high volume use cases.

Having said all that, SQL still seems like the correct choice for getting an MVP out quickly.

If the story is of public interest then it's fair game to run it regardless of the source (once verified)

I'm not sure if I buy this. Any sufficiently motivated leaker could just release to another source if wikileaks were blocking important information.

For consumer markets the newest AMD products (Zen 4) are great chips but simply too expensive. Logical increments [1] is pretty good at showing what is the best choice at various pricepoints (taking into account local pricing) and has Intel and AMD trading blows across the range with Intel taking the majority of the wins.

All of the tech youtubers have been making similar points lately (LTT, GamersNexus, HardwareUnboxed).

Data centre does seem to be in AMD's favour at the moment, but I don't know enough about the space to know if their advantages will be long lived.

[1] https://www.logicalincrements.com/

It sounds like you've identified the issue yourself. You are relying on ordering when processing events. You need to either loosen that requirement or do better testing to prevent head of line blocking.

I don't know much about your application but the fact that you can mitigate the problem by scaling the number of workers suggests that the order requirements might actually be fairly weak. As a worst case outcome you may be able to push all events interdependent to the one with an error to a DLQ using a temporary blacklisting mechanism, but by that stage I think I would just prefer better testing.

It would be an interesting case study for leaders around the world - confiscate a huge chunk of liberty and you will have a fringe protest, lose a few thousand pounds from chequebooks and you will have blood.

Do you know of any good resources that explain why smoothing should be used?

My intuition is that in your given example (stock prices) smoothing would probably be doing yourself a disservice as it would hide the optimal hour or day of the week to make purchases/sales.

Is it mostly related to the timeframe of your analysis and needing to trade off near term precision for longer term precision?

A possible explanation is that the mellowing is due to the loss of acuity with age. The more likely explanation is that it's an evolutionary adaption in response to how ones function in society changes with age.

If you combine layoffs the reduction in burn can be pretty significant. The exact numbers vary per company but for a startup delaying layoffs by one month can be the difference between having one year of runway remaining or one month once all is said and done.

This is not the exact link I was looking for but goes into it somewhat https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3Z-advice-for-companies-...

It sounds like you might be a future version of me!

We are an adtech startup in the hundreds of millions per day right now, expecting billions per day by the end of the year. Management would be happy if I said I have a plan for tens of billions.

The main difference is that we would probably lean towards the cloud version instead of self hosted (do we still need to think about clusters then??)

Does any one on here have some real world experience with scylla?

We currently make heavy use of dynamo and are interested in something cheaper/faster. The marketing material is pretty compelling but I'm unsure of how hard scylla is to operate at scale.

We used ipinfo for a while because we didn't know much about the space, they had good SEO, the data appeared to be high quality, and it was easy to use. We were pretty happy with it!

We ran into some minor problems along the way, mostly around cost, and eventually had to switch to something else. We still don't know much about the space and the main thing that stood out about our new provider is that it is cheaper but the data seems to be of lower quality.

I tend to under explain using lots of phrases like "it gets pretty mathy" as an excuse for hand waving details away. Most of the time I think I am doing the audience a favour but for the most part it seems like they actually want an explanation that they won't understand. I think lack of understanding gives them confidence that the implementation is as technical as they imagine it to be, and that I am actually engineering and not just talking bullshit.

Going forward I think I'll prefer to be more technical for the self advancement.

Took a bit of digging but I found the SEC filing [1] and the press release [2]. I'll quote from the press release because it is more easily understood. I condensed it a bit but the gist should be clear.

> In general terms, it works by imposing a significant penalty upon any person or group that acquires 15 percent or more of the shares of Common Stock without the approval of the Board.

> the rights will become exercisable if an entity, person or group acquires beneficial ownership of 15% or more... in a transaction not approved by the Board

> each right will entitle its holder (other than the person... triggering the Rights Plan, whose rights will become void...) to purchase.... additional shares of common stock

The SEC filing is a bit dense but then if you scroll down to a bit you get

> entitle the holder thereof to purchase, for the Exercise Price, a number of shares of common stock of the person engaging in the transaction having a then-current market value of twice the Exercise Price.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001418091/000119312... [2] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-adopts-limi...

What team size would you say this applies to?

At the moment I have flexibility in how many people I hire underneath me and would like the team to remain small enough where I can be both a force multiplier and part of the force. The goal is to be an elite small squad.

The other option is to hire a larger number of people, handle more of the project scope, and cease being an IC. However I'm new to being a formal manager and am guessing this would probably be bad for my sanity.

An open question to those advocating for poison pills as a mechanism for existing shareholders to exercise control - why don't companies have permanent poison pills?

The fact that they are enacted only in certain scenarios to me is the indicator that they are hostile and discriminatory.

The whole point of the poison pill is that the hostile shareholder is not treated equally. He would not have the opportunity to buy the discounted/newly created shares that would be triggered by him purchasing stock. In essence upon hitting the trigger he would be diluted differently to other stockholders.

I interviewed at Fast last year as an experienced startup engineer. I was given the "describe a production incident you were involved in" question.

I detailed a case where a recent deploy I had done had resulted in elevated error rates for some of our clients and how I had solved it with a quick follow up push to prod. The interviewer asked why it wasn't caught in staging and I mentioned that it could have been but as a small company we have to make velocity vs bug tradeoffs and in general it feels like we are currently at a sweet spot. The interviewer was unwilling to explore that space at all, or the concept that different companies might want to land in different places.

Later I was given feedback that I did exceptionally well in the technical interviews but the company didn't want any cowboys on their team. All of that is probably just a long way of confirming the other anecdotes in this thread that from the outside fast seemed somewhere between delivery hostile and overly cautious.

> stuck in a rut where each area of code only has one maintainer/gatekeeper.

Why do you assume it's a rut? It might be an organizational liability but it can be a great while it's working. It's common folklore that design by committee leads to poor outcomes, or at best average outcomes completed slowly.

Why assume that we need to build code by consensus or a series of interchangeable cogs?

I agree that it's very hard for consumers to understand. But to be honest how often do you need high speed usb? How many >5gbps thumb drives exist? Even if they do exist how often are you transferring enough data to care?

You're still talking about minutes at most to dump your whole phone.

Left to me feels more pro fairness but anti freedom. Either way though in most conceptualizations libertarianism/authoritarianism is usually separated from left/right

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Political_Compass_stand...