keule

Ah thank you. I remember now. Still weird that this can also happen (and is allowed to happen) in an energy market.

I understand put options and short selling, but how on earth can the price of a commodity sink below zero? How can you make a „sell“ order that is negative? Can someone explain please?

To be clear: With short-term I meant the mentioned 6 hours of the article. They use those 6 hours to create forecasts for up to 10 days. I would think that the initial predictors for a phenomenon (like a hurricane) are well inside that timespan. With long-term, I meant way beyond a 14-day window.

IMO a chaotic system will not allow for long-term forecast, but if there is any type of pattern to recognize (and I would assume there are plenty), an AI/ML model should be able to create short-term prediction with high accuracy.

Thank you for sharing the unforeseen depths of a monolith :D

As in, "we have a PHP monolith used by all of 12 people in the accounting department, and for some reason we've been tasked with making it run on multiple machines ("for redundancy" or something) by next month.

Usually, your monolith has these components: a web server (apache/nginx + php), a database, and other custom tooling.

Where would someone start ?

I think a first step is to move the database to something managed, like AWS RDS or Azure Managed Databases. Herein lies the basis for scaling out your web tier later. And here you will find the most pain because there are likely: custom backup scripts, cron jobs, and other tools that access the DB in unforeseen ways.

If you get over that hump you have done your first big step towards a more robust model. Your DB will have automated backups, managed updates, rollover, read replicas etc. You may or may not see a performance increase, because you effectively split your workload across two machines.

_THEN_ you can front your web tier with a load balancer, i.e. you load balance to one machine. This gives you: better networking, custom error pages, support for sticky sessions (you likely need them later), and better/more monitoring.

From thereon you can start working on removing those custom scripts of the web tier machine and start splitting this into an _actual_ load-balanced infrastructure, going to two web-tier machines, where traffic is routed using sticky-sessions.

Depending on the application design you can start introducing containers.

Now, this approach will not give you a _cloud-native awesome microservice architecture_ with CI/CD and devops. But it will be enough to have higher availability and more robust handling of the (predictable) load in the near future. And on the way, you will remove bad patterns that eventually allow you to go to a better approach.

I would be interested in hearing if more people face this challenge. I don't know if guides exist around this on the webs.

You reminded me of the HikariCP library and it’s documentation: Clear and simple with references to other libraries trying to accomplish the same thing. It is not in the clojure space though.

https://github.com/brettwooldridge/HikariCP

You may want to check out Blinkist. https://www.blinkist.com/ They give you the condensed information. Usually it is enough to get an overview. For a deep dive you can follow up by buying the book.

Really glad I took the extra time to switch to logback

It seems to me that people with dry sarcasm can not live that out in the media. Putting things out of context or blowing single events out of proportion has become too common. Very unsettling.

It makes sense though. The largest Monolith has the largest Repo. ;)

I had the same thought and agree with what you wrote. But when you think about this set of evolutionary steps you still end up with the same scenarios: you are rare, you are first, you are fucked. So in that regard, you can subsume all of these steps into a filter.

So I only have a basic/intermediate understanding of SSL and X509, but I am curious about your opinion: Is the awful code design just a flaw in that particular implementation, or are the standards involved so hard to implement correctly?

https://what-if.xkcd.com/11/

Yes. I did use systems in the past that had questionable versioning, milestone releases a.s.o. and they proved to be just fine. Docker on the other hand is not just a third-party library in your project.

Docker is a container, and I therefore apply the same set of standards that my linux distribution/kernel should fullfill.

Oh I am not disagreeing with you on that one. Definitely a subjective matter. Just the statement about "production-readyness" of docker comes from the docker developers themselves.

Though I like automated deployment flows and docker, the author should have stated that docker itself claims to be not production ready in the current 0.9 version. I am a true fan of bleeding-edge technology, but when it comes to production I would like to see a more conservative approach.

Avoid loosing WW3 due to congestion control...

I agree! There are also a lot of spam-mailers that use their unsubscribe link just to confirm that the email adress actually belongs to a human. Thats why I tend to ignore the unsubscribe button, when the mail looks fishy.

Now you bringing up a keyword: expectation.

I am starting to get sick of every argument that tries to defend these rediculous investment decisions these days. Currently everyone doing that is citing network effects, potential growth, the next big thing.. And for sure, if someone wants to invest his or her money, I will not judge that decision or the person itself.

But looking at the situation as a whole, so many decisions are made based on highly flawed expectations. A nice designed marketing page and multiple years without revenue? Here take some $m because <insert overestimation in here>.

Consider Airbnb.. I use it myself, but I am by no means locked in as a customer. Maybe it will crumble due to new/old regulation. Maybe too many weird people will start offering their spare-rooms, and it won't feel cool and hip anymore. Maybe hotel-chains react by offering better prices... There are so many maybes in that company alone.. simply believing in the network effect should not be the basis of a meaningful valuation.

I am highly sceptical about the current behavior of this part of the investment market. My concern lies not in the companies or the investors themself. They probably did hedge their risks. I just feel that the next bursting bubble will stretch far beyond the whatsapps and airbnbs out there.

"This publisher has not implemented Quantcast Measurement. Data is estimated and not verified by Quantcast"

Do you still got a reference to news/blogs about that botnet install?

What? I think you did not understand what I meant by that.

Legislation in this case does not eliminate your freedom, but protects it, forcing companies to obey to privacy and data protection.

The only freedom that would be eliminated here is the freedom of a company to abuse data they do not own.

So let's go back to the pre-electrified area.

You send a letter to a friend with sensible information. The letter is transported by the post office from door to door. While in transit, the post office recognizes, from a 3rd party, that a letter exists, that contains sensible information about the post-office's business. Therefore the CEO of that company demands a internal investigation, which searches for a letter with the given senders/recipients address and then opens it.

IANAL, but at least where I come from, there exist laws that acknowledge the intimacy and privacy of these letters and would sentence this behavior.

So why on earth is everyone talking about policy, terms of service, the lack of alternatives a.s.o? Nobody sees the desperate need of legislation here?

Thank you for that link! That was really an eye opening talk.

In the US, banks are regulated by the Federal Reserve

I hope you know that the FED is not a independent institution, but owned by the banks themselves?

$50k a day over a period of multiple months makes you a millionaire, independent of people's income around you.

Thats not quite true. Apple has multiple subdomains, each for some part of their site. www.apple.com hosts most of the marketing stuff, but have a look at other pages, e.g.: http://store.apple.com/robots.txt