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whorleater

1,372 karma · joined July 2, 2014

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whorleater··on Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer
unserious article written by inane consultancies feeding at the trough of linkedin. The diagram itself is hideous.

Software consultant, solution architect, solutions eng, all do what an "FDE" does without having the weirdly cringe palantir branding.

whorleater··on Wide logging: Stripe's canonical log line pattern
Honestly I'm kinda down on most of FB's tech, but them pioneering Scuba was pretty sick. It has all the wide logging/apm/tracing/etc, and it's hard to describe how useful it is if you haven't seen it in action.
whorleater··on A community-led fork of Organic Maps
A fork of a fork I guess, Organic Maps was originally `maps.me`, and I suppose we're forking it again
whorleater··on Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing (2023)
One thing I haven't seen being discussed is the BEAM internals becoming a little long in the tooth. We still have static reductions before the scheduler switches to another task, the priority system in scheduling is a bit dodgy, flipping vmargs is kinda complex, lock counting and crash dump tooling kinda suck, etc.

BEAM is great, although it's definitely missing something like pprof for go or java flight recorder.

whorleater··on Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing (2023)
Yeah, I don't know why this falsehood continues to persist. WhatsApp and Ericsson engineers continue to work together to evolve Erlang, alongside a bunch of other people across the industry.

Source: I work at WhatsApp

whorleater··on Using Erlang hot code updates
WhatsApp very long ago used to hot reload across all nodes with a ssh script to incrementally deploy during the day
whorleater··on Re: Do people IRL know you have a blog?
Huh, kinda funny, I feel the exact same way. Few people IRL know about my website, 2-3 people occasionally write in a year about something, but weirdly it feels like the idea of a personal, non commoditized internet space has become so rare it's seen as odd.
whorleater··on Ask HN: Anyone left software to study non-STEM subjects?
I have consulted for UNDP and DPPA during my time in Iraq, although that left me with complicated feelings about that industry.
whorleater··on Ask HN: Anyone left software to study non-STEM subjects?
I went and did a masters on Middle East studies, focusing on Shia rituals in Iraq. I moved to Baghdad (and south Iraq) for a year, wrote up my research here: http://malloc.dog/karbala/, http://malloc.dog/field/iraq/

My day job was writing cpp and elixir, although I kept my job and returned to it. I've been thinking about leaving software completely though.

whorleater··on Executing Cron Scripts Reliably at Scale
I would be curious why kube cron jobs didn't seem to fit the bill, my favorite part of these posts are when they have a section hinting that they explored other options picked specific tradeoffs
whorleater··on Think in Analog, Capture in Digital
Physical notebook and data entry later.
whorleater··on Ask HN: How Do You Utilize Your Personal Knowledge Base?
I keep all my zettles at https://wiki.malloc.dog/.

When I was doing my masters in anthropology at the same time as my SWE job, I ran into this issue of having too many notes and not enough organization. Random other tools never quite did it, generic search didn't work, notion et all kind of sucked, so I ended up rolling my own thing on top of Org roam. It's all plaintext org files, easily accessible.

When I do scholarly work, it's great because all of stuff is in one place. It's also useful for tracking the breadcrumbs I do for my real tech job.

whorleater··on For the sixth year, Algeria blocks internet to prevent cheating during exams
Why is this news? Iraq does this, Jordan does this, it's common throughout the region to block internet. It's not effective, and usually there are carveouts (office internet still works, usually it's only cellular and public internet, etc). When I was living in Iraq this was just something you dealt with, like a rolling blackout once a while.
whorleater··on Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?
http://malloc.dog/ - anthropology of Islam stuff and distributed systems
whorleater··on Where did the long tail go? (2022)
If we buy into the fact that we can account for "culture" onto this distribution, this article assumes that the distribution has remained the safe size and shape, and so he draws the conclusion that the long tail is declining or disappearing.

But the nature of the long tail is that it is comprised of a series of outliers. To use the author's analogy, what might be happening is that there's a distributional shift occurring at the same time the general amount of "stuff" under the curve is increasing, which gives the appearance that things have become more alike, even though what has actually happened is that the bump has just gotten bigger.

whorleater··on Ur
it's fine, there's hordes of youtubers roaming through. I'm a foreigner living in Karbala that's fluent in Iraqi Arabic, so I'm typically not in those circles. Visa on arrival for p9 + eu countries though.
whorleater··on Ur
I actually live close to here, and trek out occasionally to show friends the ziggurat. There's some live excavation going on sponsored by the UN, but what's wild is that every random rock in the area that you kick over has Sumerian writing on it.
whorleater··on Contributing to WebSockets – Cryptocurrency Users
come on dude are we really equating LGBT rights with "will answer tickets for Bitcoin users"
whorleater··on Write Simply
seems like he's arguing that the pinnacle of communication is the API spec
whorleater··on Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.
interesting how different this is from the salaries at large companies on levels.fyi. annoyingly, the dice URL is broken currently, so I can't verify the underlying dataset.
whorleater··on A New Take on RSS
Man even though the third party Fever apps were mostly terrible they had such a scrappy vibe to them. Really liked Fever, back in the days when you could sell a self-hosted thing for 30 bucks.
whorleater··on Pulsar vs. Kafka
pulsar was seeing quite a bit of hype back in ApacheCon 2019 already
whorleater··on Where to Blog
This truly feels like https://www.aleksandra.codes/tech-content-consumer/, where every blog post rehashes the well tread territory of Hugo/Jenkins/Netlify/GH Pages or Wordpress/Blogger/Ghost/Medium/Neocities, or even the newish "minimal" ones like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313196. You can even blog to specific audiences with the rise of "send a newsletter" SaaS things!

IMO, very few people are at a loss on "where to blog" or "how to blog", but rather actually writing. If you're a dev, you've got text files you can serve (or convert to html). If you're a non-tech person, you've got a dearth of places to blog on, with nearly a decade of tutorials about how to setup a domain and site. It feels like the demand for these "where to blog" posts are mostly to bikeshed on the tools and not actually the writing part.

whorleater··on Kafka Removing Zookeeper Dependency
If ZK wasn't such a pain in the ass to manage I'd agree with you.
whorleater··on Old box, dumb code, few thousand connections, no big deal
The typical response to these types of posts is "oh your /toy/ server doesn't account for x, y, z in my use case, like ddos, network issues, etc. But how many people actually handle those cases in your production application? I can say for the majority of the applications I've written at large companies handling significant traffic API compatibility was far higher on the priority list than the cases that people often bring up.

IMO she's right, I wish we didn't mess wrap around gunicorn and gevent for some of our services. Certainly would've made my life easier and the services faster.

whorleater··on Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
Yes, but we work in financial information so very weird requirements.
whorleater··on Never Send Your CV via Gmail
Wait I'm confused, are they not sending around a pdf file for their resume??
whorleater··on Mental Model Fallacy (2018)
IMO mental models are relatively useless for what they're supposed to do on the tin, but they're useful for illuminating aspects of the world that would've been left otherwise undiscovered, like a unknown-unknowns thing. Like this article says, most mental models don't survive codification, but do make for fun reading, similar to a healthy-snack version of books.
whorleater··on Living without a SIM card
This is modern minimalism to its peak: getting rid of your stuff by relying on others
whorleater··on Ask HN: What's your cross-platform PDF / ePub reading workflow?
Zotero with Zotfile to extract highlights, highlights get sent to Devonthink
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