vchynarov

I agree the economics here don’t make sense, but leave where? The rest of the world has increasingly strange, or at least unattractive, economics too.

The US is a difficult and long process to get a green card. Other English-speaking countries aren’t necessarily better: Australia seems similar in terms of being a natural resource extraction economy with insanely high real estate prices. Same productivity and salary concerns with the UK.

Apart from network latency, one of the behaviours I've seen with Redis is that reads/write latencies are fairly linearly proportional to the amount of keys queried - which seems to be shown in your chart as well.

We had a different problem, where our monolithic app used both Postgres / Redis for different use cases and worked relatively well. However - it was a lot easier to shove new functionality in the shared Redis cluster. Because Redis is single-threaded, one inconsiderate feature that does bulk reads (100K+ keys) may start to slow down other things. One of the guidelines I proposed was that Redis is really good when we're reading/writing a key, or small fixed-cardinality set of keys at a time, because we have a lot of random things using Redis (things like locks and rate limits on popular endpoints, etc).

However, in your case, I'm guessing Redis shines in the case of a naive single-key (IP address) lookup, but also doesn't do well with more complicated reads (representing your range query representation?). Cool write up overall, I don't have a deeper understanding of how SQLite performs so well when compared to a local Redis instance, so that was unexpected and interesting to observe.

+1 on Jon Bernthal. I was very skeptical at first but he gets very unique guests such ex-gang members and policemen.

Many popular podcasts just have guests who are obviously trying to promote a new Netflix special or book.

He stutters and the outcome isn’t that polished but if you can adapt to that his podcast feels very authentic.

I’m constantly astonished “Thinking Fast and Slow” is so highly recommended - I question if the advocates actually read the book in depth.

I remember reading most of the book and skipping a couple of chapters. While the results and ideas are great, I feel most of the chapter is the historical background, Ie “Tversky and I were doing this in the 60s …” It could be heavily reduced and still get the point across.

Despite your name referencing insanity I love your comment and it's a beacon of rationality in the current tech interview bubble. So generally I agree, but unfortunately sometimes the format and expectations of the coding interviews really demand prior grinding. I don't like it but it's the reality.

IE let's say you have a graph question that requires either BFS and DFS. You're a competent engineer who both recognizes the applicable algorithm and could reasonably implement it from scratch.

Some problems then have additional constraints such as adding bounds-checking (if searching inside some sort of "map") and checking visited nodes. The engineers who've grinded leetcode have muscle memory ready to regurgitate code for those conditions.

Competent engineers are able recognize these and implement them, but that lack of muscle memory wastes vital time for the interview. (Yes, those seconds are never a real constraint in the day-to-day).

If people would like to support for this further, please spread this on other platforms.

I made a dedicated Twitter account to track the progress of this petition: https://twitter.com/norussiancloud

I have started a petition to restrict Russia's access to American cloud infrastructure. Existing sanctions against Russia don't go far enough symbolically, nor economically, to account for the massive devastation they have inflicted on Ukraine.

My petition requests US political and cloud business leaders to remove their services from the Russian market.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of which companies I'd like to stop offering services to Russia: - AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform - IBM Cloud, Oracle, Rackspace - Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly - Cisco, Juniper, F5, Palo Alto Networks

Today I just want to get at least 100 signature on the petition.

Starting next week, I'll reach out to my network to find people who work at these companies to share this message with leadership.

I work there currently and I agree - I can imagine frustration for a while after leaving and not having a good place to make a bunch of posts.

Posts and work groups are actually a generally good way for scalable work communication - and leaving a public and searchable record. This doesn't replace Google docs and wikis, but serve as another layer to organize them. (I promise this doesn't lead to needless bureaucracy, that still happens but not because of Workplace).

I have seen no indication of system design documents falling out fashion. If anything, the problem is the initial, pure document is used as a reference for too long instead of proper up-to-date documentation.

I'm currently putting together a design document (very simple system and still high-level) to ensure my idea is communicated concisely and unambiguously.

The main motivation is I'll have a refined reference to point people to so I don't have to worry about repeating context to all possible stakeholders.

@ryanar - Good to hear but disappointing. I was planning to start the second book next year.

Fiction:

"The Lies of Locke Lamora"

I found this book because I just finished playing Dishonored 2 and I wanted to read a book with a dystopian steampunk alternative-Victorian vibe.

The events take place in a gritty, corrupt city of waterways and canals controlled by different factions. The factions represent either the legitimate nobility or the extensive underground criminal empire. A charismatic leader of a small young group of thieves and pickpockets comes up with an epic, layered con that will break sacred agreements and make him enemies with everyone - and pulls it off.

Yes, autopilot interrupt, and initially as a shame factor - shaming myself not to go through with it and stick out the rest of the day phone-free. However, now this is more of a mental block since once I decide to have a phone-free day the bags are mainly symbolic.

~The Triple Ziploc Bag method.~

I dedicate a few days a month to being absolutely phone-free. The key point is I'm allowed to use Reddit/IG but I have to use a laptop/desktop to access them. This method requires a key ingredient: three ziploc bags.

I wrap both my work phone (when not oncall) and my personal phone in three nested ziploc bags and put them in a drawer. This acts as a great deterrent most of the time.

I've started doing this on/off since last December. Each month I aim to have at least like 6+ completely phone free days. This isn't to say I still don't have bad days where I'm completely addicted to my phone, but overall I feel so much better with this habit.

My therapist who deals with other software engineers has mentioned me as a positive case study for people with similar problems :)

I have ranted about the terrible quality of consumer telecommunications in Canada for years - I am terribly excited. I have lived in both the US and Canada, moving between both for the past 6 years, and I am always thrilled to use American providers.

Anecdotal data point: For a while, AT&T had an North-America wide plan for $~40/45 for month with 10G LTE with the rest being 3G. I kept this in Canada because there would be nothing close to this there - it was cheaper to use the American service.

I've always used my own phone with prepaid plans and the cheapest plans in Canada are awful compared to the cheapest plans in the USA. I also lived in the GTA, not some remote village.

How is this borderline racist? If you can't defend that accusation you should not add it. The point in question here was the choice of which countries to compare US to, and the other comment about the ranking has no links to race that I can see.

I am a student of the university of Waterloo and I have lived in San Francisco on two separate occasions in both San Francisco / Mountain View.

Are you seriously comparing SF living to Waterloo living? There's a reason it's 1/4 the price. It's a running joke between every single undergraduate student with significant experience in SF that we want to get out of Waterloo.

LRT opening up? That's a joke. How exactly is the LRT going to help the startup scene?

TN-1 is because of NAFTA. (Source: http://www.canadiansinusa.com/Working-in-the-US/tn-visa.html).

Trump is well-known for being extremely against NAFTA.

I view this post as being a rant against this particular shop with potentially subpar management practices which is frustrating, and I sympathesize.

However, if you intend this as an argument against general software project management, I must disagree. (See: "He introduced us to ‘Jira’, a word that strikes fear into the soul of a developer.")

Lately I've had the opportunity to work at a place with very forward-thinking, progressive, and helpful PMs and generally good organizational structure.

I like our approach and here is why:

* We are not afraid to change things. This might lead to some temporary disagreements between technical leads and PMS, but EVERYONE in the team has transparency into the process, and an opportunity to voice an opinion.

* We taking scoring tickets very seriously. I've been at places where everyone on a team might vote on a ticket, even if they cannot appreciate the true scope of it. Here it's different. For instance, we have seen that in the last couple of weeks, our velocity was unusually high. This might indicate we are scoring tickets too highly, and from what I've seen of my own work, I'm inclined to agree.

I've had a length interview with a PM who spent some time afterwards telling me about his metholodogies (I gladly listened.) When given the choice between Gantt charts which have cliffs (indicating poor future planning and rushing to get things done last minute) and nice step-ladder charts, we see why PMs prefer things the way they do.

Sometimes it gets in the way of just writing code sure. But with good organizational structure, especially in a mid-size company that has upcoming deadlines and business features to ship, we identify priorities quickly while still being aware of things like reducing code debt.

Generally I agree with you. However I can provide a personal counter-example. I am a student with a modest sum saved away (with great help from my parents) in an index tracking mutual fund. Due to the way my bank offers investment packages, I am far below the minimum portfolio balance required for significantly less fees. However, I can have a mutual fund in a different type of account offering which is essentially the same as an identical ETF.

This is (Canadian) RBC - Direct Investing.

In addition this particular fund also significantly outperformed other ETFs during 2008-09.

I am hesitant to start the whole typed vs untyped debate here, but this is exactly what your comment is highlighting. Where does all this evidence come from? I have recently started using Scala and while initially the learning curve was quite high, I have been so happy to have such a comprehensive type system.

This is such a nice explanation I've never heard before and I too have been guilty of thinking like this.

This is a slipper slope if I've ever seen one. Aid to Syrian rebels is already known, one of the parties to which a proxy war might be a somewhat reasonable assumption. However, given the long involvement of the US in Iraq, this is a very far-fetched conspiracy theory to say the least.

What? "America plays the proxy war game too. How much of ISIS armament is of American origin?". America's proxy war involvement is well known, but you picked the most ridiculous conflict that has nothing to do with this. Your argument is ISIS equipment being American. What? That's because equipment given to Iraqis being captured, a very well documented problem. Your implication is the most ridiculous thing I have read in this thread so far.

That may be true statistically, but is that survey based on a nation-wide basis? I am asking because the culture between provinces and regions can vary extremely widely. I have lived in Canada for 17 yeara and no one I know has a firearm. Most of my friends and their families are the same. Which is to say that I've lived near Toronto and Southern Ontario, but where a sizable portion of the Canadian urban population lives. Of course there are many Canadians living in rural areas where owning firearms makes more sense, but culturally speaking, our gun ownership mindset is still generally far more restrictive. You'd be hard pressed to find a lot of gun owners in major cities and suburbs.

It's interesting how a search for "metaclasses" in the given link doesn't yield any results.

I too am a CS student attending a university that particularly flaunts their levels of startup incubator availability. Ignore them, do your own thing is what I found works for me.