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Agreed on both counts - excellent write-up.

I use FreeBSD jails and get a lot of value out of separate network stacks for each (vnet jails).

Would the NetBSD approach here be to lean more heavily on your lan infra to register hostnames with static addresses (pointing at NetBSD host) and then run a host proxy to forward & port-map to the relevant cell? Or is this the wrong kind of use-case for cells?

I was doing some looping recently with tcl and comparing against another implementation (called Jim [1], a very cool project in its own right) and wondered why datetime formatting was so slow when using `clock format`.

The code at [2] provided an alternative approach using C via critcl. It was interesting to see how malleable tcl can be.

[1] https://github.com/msteveb/jimtcl [2] https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/speed+up+clock+format+and+clo...

Surely you’ve come across situations where line number 10,000,021 of a 60m line CSV fails to parse because there aren’t enough fields in that line of the file…? The issue is that you can’t definitively know which of the 50 fields is missing, so you have to fail the line or worse the file.

In my experience (perhaps more niche than yours since you mentioned it has been your day job), the lack of fall back options makes for brittle integrations. Failing entire files due to a borked row can be expensive in terms of time.

Having to ingest large CSV files from legacy systems has made me rethink the value of XML, lol. Types and schemas add complexity for sure, but you get options for dealing with variances in structure and content.

Sounds useful from a mental health perspective .. am I right in thinking detractors are concerned about the loss of privacy needed to enforce the bill, or is it something else?

Nah, that's not ironic.

What would be ironic is getting RSI after you chose to write less code in order to avoid getting RSI.

Your post was very clear, nicely done!

Oh I see - thanks for clarifying. Also, apologies - I could have asked a question about AI demand instead of assuming you were slapping a "now with AI" label on your product.

I’m sure that website didn’t mention AI at all a year ago; now it seems if you’re not doing something AI you aren’t the customer they built this platform for. Strange.

I’m sure the role is meant to have some sort of value, but in the last decade I’ve only seen one human do a good job of it.

That person delivered value to the team and made a tangible difference to velocity (removing blockers) and effectiveness (retros, reminding people to apply lessons learned). As a consequence the team worked well and delivered good things.

The other Scrum Masters I’ve worked with seemed to operate on the assumption that having Master in their job title meant they knew more than everyone else.

Would it be correct to say the these client libraries provide the functionality (eg ease of transactions, once only, recovery) whereas your cloud offering solves the scaling / performance issues you’d hit trying to do this with a regular pg compatible DB?

I do a lot of consulting on Kafka-related architectures and really like the concept of DBOS.

Customers tend to hit a wall of complexity when they want to actually use their streaming data (as distinct from simply piping it into a DWH).. being able to delegate a lot of that complexity to the lower layers is very appealing.

Would DBOS align with / complement these types of Kafka streaming pipelines or are you addressing a different need?

FFS - thanks for the paywall.

Land was a productive asset, made so via farming by the people who lived on the land and did the work. Someone else will be able to point out when serfs stopped being a thing.

I would imagine it's a similar number per unit of area/yield/weight to that required to feed animals.

In both instances, the crops are harvested and transported for use in very similar ways.

I don't know whether I'd include or exclude ground crops that are eaten by livestock in situ - not sure what percentage of crops they would amount to.

What was your line of thought with this comment?

Yes! That has been my experience at a (now long since failed) start-up.

We didn't communicate top-down, or cross-functionally very well. The executive team, with lots of support from HR, rolled out a really heavy, very process-centric OKR system and assumed that by announcing that Google uses OKRs and providing a portal that we'd start aligning.

It was an abject failure - not because (IMO) OKRs are a bad idea, but because the leadership teams made the mistake of confusing process for communication.

After the big announcement, it was mentioned only ONCE ever again. Seriously.

My team (of six) and I made use of it, but it was very difficult to align it with the goals of, say, our chief revenue officer; someone we met about three times in four years. We went back to using team & personal goals, creatively using our backlog and one-on-ones because there was no input, no updates and no communication about the OKRs.

The start-up failed because it wasted time chasing tactical low-value (tangential) deals instead of delivering against a viable, sustainable strategy. Great place to learn some hard lessons!

I'd use OKRs again for sure - both for their intended purpose, to help avoid the process-as-communication-proxy trap, and to gauge the nature of the organisation implementing them.

I assume you're referring to being consistent - keeping the team focused on the (predefined) strategy, not getting distracted and going off on tangents...

Seems pretty reasonable to me.

Comment made my day :-)

I've found that when a (good) boss realises that you're solving organisational (boss-relevant) problems and getting things done, they start pushing harder problems your way.

When done in a supportive way, this helps propel you up a level of competency; then the raise/promotion is effortless and obvious to everyone involved.

Conversely, in my experience I've never been giving the money / title before I had performed the role.

Disease, starvation, predation, accidents -- you are aware that animals do in fact die outside of farms, yes?

You are aware of the classification 'carnivore' yes?

Perhaps my first question wasn't clear enough - I'm talking about animals that proactively seek out their own death; not carnivores that kill over things - sorry for the confusion. The context was that for me, it's not okay to go killing animals because we fed them well / gave them some free space before we killed them. One of the reasons that it's not okay is that it's unnecessary because we have alternatives.

What about agriculture? It destroys the environment, destroys animal habitats causing them sometimes to go extinct.

Yes, agriculture destroys land, trees, ecosystems. Are you suggesting that animal production is in some way less destructive? If I recall correctly something like a 1/3 of global crop production goes into animal feed.

What about the worms in the soil getting chopped up by farm equipment? What about necessary pesticides that kill insect life?

Worms and pesticides are straw-man arguments, so I'll pass on getting bogged down on that tangent.

It dumbfounds your family probably because they're more capable of critical thought than you are.

That's interesting - I never said I was an activist. I shared some points of view. My family are very critical. They get all the benefits of sitting in a microcosm and ignoring the rest of the world. Ignorance truly is bliss for them.

Like a lot of 'activists' I seriously doubt you do anything in your life that actually improves life on this plant for people or any living thing.

Nah, that's not true. I'm not overly keen to share specifics because I prefer some semblance of privacy here. I make choices in the small that, IMO, add up over time: No leather for the last 20 years (belts, shoes, car seats, jackets, etc). No silk. No meat, dairy, eggs, fish, insects etc. No international flights. Found the second-smallest small car that would fit a family of three. Commute to work on public transport. Buy local organic food that is freakishly expensive but IMO better for the environment. Provided a safe home for two rescue dogs (took them two years to feel safe and confident after their experiences).

Veganism is about people searching for identity. It's a marginally difficult diet to follow and it gives you something to constantly complain about, thereby drawing attention to yourself.

Yes, it does seem to be that for many people I've met. It often seems to draw the type of person who likes to be on the outside, throwing stones. Now that it becoming more mainstream, this is thankfully less so. Some awesome people here on HN, too. Hi!

If you want to actually change the world for the better go do it. It's hard. You probably don't have what it takes.

Here I am, talking to you, right?

Stop pretending your soy latte makes one modicum of difference and stop whining about what others choose to eat.

Nah, it's too important to not discuss.

Question for you - you said it's hard changing that world? How do you know?

Yes, the litany of difficulties that provide a scaffold upon which people can give themselves permission to do... nothing. I wonder if sometimes a clearly vocalized moral view strikes people as judgemental, so there is a reactive need to identify inconsistencies?

Interesting point of view regarding definition of vegan.. Not trying to annoy you, but surely the society that coined the term should be the reference for describing what that term means?

Thanks for the book link - it looks quite densely written and I'm embarrassed to say I struggled to follow the 'introduction' preview on Amazon. If you did find it of value, then I'll take that as a recommendation and make an attempt at it.

In your last sentence, were you meaning to minimize animal explotation (or just exploitation in general)?

I ask because I think veganism is often confused with lots of other good things..

I like to refer to the original (AFAICT) definition: https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism

"Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose."

(I posted that link yesterday too, but have no affiliation with the site)

It seeks to exclude, where possible, where practicable. It doesn't rail against industrialisation or the global economy. It's not directly concerned with the environment or being kind or being healthy or improving human conditions. Those are all Good Things, but separate things.

When I get asked those questions (and the 'where do you get your protein', 'what about if you were on a desert island?', 'where do you get your protein?', 'what about happy cows?', 'where do you get your protein?', 'what about grass fed cows|chikens|whateva?', etc) I say that I'm vegan because I don't believe there is any need for the society I live in to use animals for any purpose. I'm okay with contradictions and inconsistencies - I evaluate and make the best choice I can, day by day. Those choices add up over time.

If I get pressed, then I posit two questions: 1) Do you know of any animals that proactively seek out death? 2) At the end of an animal farming process, does the animal die?

So if animals are killed at the end of a farming process, and no animals want proactively to die; the only reason I'd support that regime is for my own selfish preferences.

Given there are viable alternatives, I have the option of choosing not to support the systematic death of hundreds of millions of animals every day. Sounds rational and good to me.

That logic still dumbfounds my family - literally speechless, even in 2019. Sigh.

that was a good read and quite interesting. liked that it provided a viable strategy for doing a reset and cycling use so that you still get the health benefits.

Plant-based diets and veganism are often conflated.

"Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose." (https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism)

Good on you for carving out a couple of days a week for plants, it all helps. FWIW, I've been 100% whole food plant-based since 2003 and have enjoyed a very healthy life with lots of physically demanding activity. I'm not even dead yet. Win!

I've been thinking about the walled garden thing recently. Several of my friends who are /long/-time users of FB - thanks to its ability to gather scatterlings from across the world - have started talking about creating (logically) local and durable (not lost in the ad-injected update feed) content, memories and information.

As someone who long since gave up trying to provide that type of thing (because corps did it better/faster with no learning curve, excellent reach, etc), I find this shift interesting. It speaks of non-technical people wanting to have real control of their own content; not some token effort that ultimately enables monetization.

To me, there is still value in the ideas behind older unix services and protocols; things like gopher, old-school blogs (pre mega-corp platforms), irc chat, usenet, etc.

I see ActivityPub and IPFS as interesting developments; I'd love to know what other tools we could string together to help create other (presumably connected but distributed / federated?) spaces that aren't backed by a monetization engine.

It would be neat to see a "distro" that stood up a node with long and short-form content, chat, news and "groups" capabilities. Something a keen but inexperienced individual could spin up on AWS / GCP / DO / Azure, etc.

Am I crazy?

PS: Wasn't chat solved by Jabber (now xmpp)? IIRC, Yahoo and Google at the time didn't support it (other than by using brittle bridges).

They are different worlds.. each actor would be analogous to an independent stream app; or one stream app with lots of KStream/KTable “components”, which feels like an anti-pattern.

Irregardless, you say? So that would be, what, a lack of a lack of regard.. so, with regard then. Jolly good!

Would it be accurate to say that your ability to count something new, starting from a previous point in time (i.e. not just from 'now') is dependent upon how easily you can replay your stream (I'm thinking in Kafka terms); or is there something in your architecture that allows you to consume from the stream from a (relative? absolute?) point in time (again, Kafka thinking leaking into my question)?

Thanks.

Thanks for that link.

I'm taking a portfolio approach, whereby I'll average in over time until I'm holding about 20 or so plants. Worst case I'll have some lovely shade and beautiful green trees.

Whatever. In my part of the world the seed market is excellent. I recently planted out 9 pumpkin seedlings, which are doing well thanks to the recent rain.

I've also got about 30 capsicum seedlings and two lychees, which are coming along nicely. That was a substantial seed round, Series B. Recently I added to my seed empire by planting three avocado pips - they will take some time to grow. I think that makes them Series C.

These are all heirloom and organic (actually, veganic) and will reduce my food bill by a tangible amount, which is great because my investors are demanding and hungry for more. Where I live, organic produce is exorbitant.

Of course should the seed market tank, I've got a hedge in that my day job is primarily focused on designing distributed data pipelines and data-related architecture.

I'm a bit late to the party on this post, but a lot has changed since 2015, too:

- Kafka writes its topic offsets into, er, Kafka, rather than Zookeeper; which means ZK load is much lighter. I'd be interested in knowing more about why people find ZK heavy weight - I've found it to be light, unobtrusive and very robust. I also use it for managing state (distributed locks) as brokers boot up and obtain a consistent Broker ID from a defined list of available 'slots' (e.g. if broker 2 goes down, I want the replacement node to also boot up and be assigned broker ID 2; if two nodes go down, I want those free slots to be allocated to the next two nodes that boot up).

- Kafka v0.10 released the Streams API, which has many similarities to Samza, but removes the requirement to run another cluster for your streaming applications (no YARN requirement - phew! Kafka will load balance your consumer-group streaming-app; kill/restart/boot as you see fit). Consume data as streams and build virtual tables (persisted to disk via RocksDB for get/put operations, written into Kafka for availability/persistence); join stream->stream, stream->table, filter, map, aggregate via time windows, write your own processor/transform classes.. it's very flexible without always needing to dive into the lower level Processor API.

- Kafka v0.10.[01] also included an Interactive Queries API - what you get when you realise that your stream apps have created intermediate aggregates/tables of information that would be so handy to query (by other apps, or internally, from across the cluster). I haven't used this API yet, but anticipate doing so in 2017.

Samza to me always felt like it was in tech preview - not comprehensively documented and the only real source of knowledge was reading the source and asking questions in the mailing lists (of which there were excellent and high quality answers).

What other architectures are people using for streaming data pipelines/apps (things that do more than count clicks, i.e. transforms, enrichment, etc) - i.e. lowish latency (event to output in less than, say, five seconds) where relational databases aren't a natural solution?

I'm leveraging Kafka at my day job as a distributed data backbone (company-wide focus - think application logs, app usage logs, usage-derived billing, subscriptions, master data, etc), which when coupled with Streams (new breed of application at this company) gives us our first steps towards event-driven processing and data delivery as a stream of new information, rather than periodic batches.

This provides us with an alternative to the API+database model we've used for more than a decade and which works very well, but there are times when polling isn't the answer. Decoupling producers of data from consumers has subtle but substantial benefits (data liberation, for one, removing/reducing point-to-point integrations for another).

what a wonderful, positive addition to the internet. thanks to the people involved in making this freely available and so easily explorable.