addisonj

I don't have the evidence so I can't make a judgement about whether Zenimax or Carmack is in the wrong here, but this does point out something strange in our court system and that is where a "jury of peers" which translates to normal people with little to no knowledge of the underlying subject matter.

As our society becomes more specialized it seems a bit absurd to have people make judgements mostly based on how well each side can make incredibly complex things comprehensible and convincing without any real understanding of the underlying principles in the field.

It seems likely that the best expert witness in this case is not the most correct or credentialed, but the most charismatic.

It would be interesting to see how some of these big software trials (Google v Oracle) would have come out if the jury were made up of people who were both impartial and familiar with the industry.

I haven't been following kubernetes as closely for the last 6 months, cool to see that its also being supported...

A lot of our decision to go with mesos was that our first use case is running big data tools (spark, etc) which have a good bit of integration with mesos. Will be interesting to see the level of adoption of projects implementing operators

I knew that was on the roadmap, but didn't know that it was supported yet. Very cool :)

One of the more interesting announcements. ECS has seemed like a non starter for any "serious" project for a while, but as someone who has been implementing mesos for the last few months, its pretty interesting that they would prioritize pluggable schedulers rather than getting better feature parity with kubernetes on google cloud.

Pluggable schedulers is one of the best features that is missing from kubernetes, swarm, and nomad. All the scheduling/lifecycle algorithms are pretty naive when it comes to any stateful (DBs, kafka) or batch (hadoop, spark) services. But even for typical webapps, pluggable schedulers give you a nice place to hook into a lot of the lifecycle that makes things like pre-warming or cleanly killing sockets at scale down a lot simpler.

So this is pretty cool... and makes ECS more attractive... but I wish it was just mesos which is built around the idea of providing a framework for building schedulers and would be way more portable.

for...of isn't only for arrays. Anything that implements the Symbol.iterator functionality can use for..of, which is pretty nifty for some custom classes and also includes things like the new Map and Set collections, see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

However, even in just arrays there is arguably a benefit. Namely, an extra function being created and invoked with forEach. While in a JITing compiler, the performance difference between for...of and forEach might be negligible (or non existent), you can't always be sure what the JIT is going to do. For hotspots, I would probably prefer for..of

Regardless of what you think about all the actors at play here, this is one of those stories to look back on that says... something... about the internet. A few million tweets led to media attention, discourse about schools and race, meetings with presidents and scholarships to prestigious universities. All good things and all was once again well in the world and the internet won.

However, with time, more details come out that make the whole thing not quite as clear cut and it becomes pretty obvious that there might be more than to one side of the story that we all jumped into.

I don't pass any judgement, it just makes me wonder how to bring balance to the social media firestorms and convey a more nuanced perspective to stories like this.

Incredibly fascinating article. The article mentioned both the 'sameness' of pop music as well as blatant copying, but what I find the most interesting is how they pop industry has somehow found some magical rate of evolution to keep most people interested while not changing too fast to alienate certain demographics.

A few years ago, when dubstep was still fairly new, a build up and shift as dramatic as the typical dubstep 'drop' would have been fairly jarring for most pop music. Fast forward to today and you hear elements of it almost everywhere, but it all happened gradually enough to make it feel familiar but different enough to be exciting.

True, but they have (generally) been second class citizens with very little adoption, mostly because targeting JS has had quite a few drawbacks, such as huge payload size or tons of time to parse and optimize.

Assuming wasm delivers on its promises, that should change, and that is when those languages will stop being mostly experiments but real viable platforms.

Prepare for the onslaught of new (and old) languages targeting the web.

While this is welcome news, I am also torn. The possibilities are pretty amazing. Think seamless isomorphic apps in any language that can target WebAssembly and has a virtual dom implementation.

However, it finally seems like JS is getting some of its core problems solved and is getting usable. I wonder if it might have short term productivity loss as the churn ramps up to new levels with a million different choices of language/platform.

Either way, it will be an interesting time... and a time to keep up or risk being left behind.

These comments seem to illustrate something I have felt for a while: yagni is incredibly divisive topic and for every person saying praising it is another who is at the very least cautious of its application.

It makes me wonder where the divide is.

Perhaps more large 'enterprise' shops where projects can spin out of control into what they 'must have' whereas the small shops where you need to get a product out ASAP?

Or maybe age of developer, with the young eager guy confident he can whip out all n features in 3 weeks so we might as well add that feature too vs the experienced dev who knows better and we will add it once it is needed?

I have put some time and effort into asking people about this very question, but still am no closer to understanding why some really appreciate it and others hate the phrase.

Personally, my guiding principle after being bit by yagni is that it is a wonderful principle to use when making product/feature decisions but should be exercised very carefully when making architecture decisions. Which makes sense, features come on and go, but architecture is generally something you need to live with. In other words, whenever yagni is used is an argument against what are more good coding and design practices than practical problems, then it may be something more of a case of 'no really, we are going to need it'

Mongo absolutely nailed creating a database that is easy to get started with and even do things that are traditionally more 'hard' such as replication. It is still super attractive for me to pick it up for small projects, even after dealing with its (many) pain points both in development and operational settings.

Given this, it is so tragic to see how dismissive they have been in regards to the consistency issues that have plagued the db since the early days. Whether it was the stupidity of bad defaults in drivers to not confirm writes, or easily corruptible data in the 1.6 days, or now with not seriously looking at the results of jepsen, the mongodb organization has never taken the issues head on. It would be so refreshing to see more transparency and admitting to the faults rather than wiggling around them until eventually pushing a fix buried in patch notes.

I often feel like a mongodb apologist when I admit that I don't mind using mongo for small (and not important) projects and while the mongodb hate can be a bit extreme at times, the companies treatment of these sorts of issues may justify some of it.

This may be different now, but when I used Prediction API a few years ago, I don't remember it having any data analysis tools or multi-class classification. The UI was also pretty lacking. Haven't looked at in a while but perhaps it has gotten better?

At first glance, this looks to go somewhat beyond Google's Prediction API, which (at least from my experience) is pretty limited in its usefulness.

Its nice to see tools for analyzing your data as well as multi-class classification, and some tune-able parameters but this doesn't seem to bring anything 'new' to the game.

All the hard parts, feature selection, noise, unlabeled data, etc are still up to the end user, which makes me wonder how many people will try this out and get poor results.

It would be nice to get an idea of what sort of model they are using on the backend or even having a choice of models.

Huh... Not sure I will ever understand the idealogical debate of different OSS software licenses.

Ultimately, different licenses work well for different projects. More permissive OSS licenses (BSD/MIT and other) seem to be the best choice for libraries and other bits of code that can be freely shared and used without worrying about modification restrictions, linking, etc etc.

GPL on the other hand has really found its niche in larger projects for complete software packages that often are primarily developed by a single entity but made open to allow contributions and customizations.

Both types fit a use case, both types are useful and we have seen success using both models. Why isn't that good enough?

I give credit to CoffeeScript with really helping to push the ES specs forward and think it helped introduce more people to JS and grow the ecosystem. Heck, I used it for a year, liked it, and had it change some of my approaches to writing JS.

That said, I hope it slowly fades into the background as more people go back to vanilla ES6 or go with something more powerful such as TypeScript (or Flux). With the progress around es6 and es7, gradual typing, macros, and other tooling around the language, I think CoffeeScript risks becoming a drag on getting people to learn modern JS and instead sticking with a language that has a lot of ambiguous constructions and fewer and fewer advantages over JS.

Awesome!

It is really easy to be cynical about government policies and feel like there is little that can be done to change them, but it seems like what you are doing and orgs within the government, like 18F, are having success in changing the game, at least when it comes to tech.

Thanks and keep up the good work.

Out of curiosity, I wondered what sort of data my home county (Salt Lake County) kept and if I could get access to it.

It was easy to find... but apparently will cost me $1000 dollars to access it...

Perhaps I don't understand exactly how the Assessor's office works, but it seems pretty wrong that public data from an organization funded by taxpayers isn't freely available for download.

The article doesn't mention it, but it looks like LA County charges as well.

This is really interesting news and I think signals what will be a really large change in digital video in the next few years.

Moving from flash to HTML5 adaptive bitrate is not trivial task and if you are familiar with MSE/EME, it shows how powerful the browser has become in delivering rich video content, either pre-recorded or live streaming.

With this, it seems to me there is a big gap now for encoding to new adaptive codecs, like MPEG-DASH and tooling to make something like livestreaming easy to do without flash.

I am lazy and (apparently) suck at scrolling smoothly, dropping this in the console worked well :)

    setInterval(function() {
      window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollTop + 5)
    }, 60)

  Location: Utah
  Remote: Yes
  Relocate: Yes, only to Seattle (preferred), Bay Area, and Las Vegas
  Technologies:
    Lots of expertise - JS and Node.js, Go, MongoDB, Chef, RabbitMQ, EC2
    Learning - Clojure, Cassandra
    Want to learn - Rust, React, anything else I need to
 Résumé/CV: http://bit.ly/1peirRz or www.linkedin.com/in/addisonj/
 Email: addisonj and it is a gmail address
 GitHub: github.com/addisonj
 

I have worked as a full stack engineer who also dabbles in devops for the last 3 years. My best asset is my ability to learn and adapt quickly which has helped me solved a varied set of challenges. I have built large micro-service backends, tackled large ETL problems, crafted hardware and software for dealing with lots of HD video, optimized full stacks to operate at scale, and engineered complete automation and monitoring of it all running on EC2.

I am looking for a position where I can have a large impact and work with really smart people that I can learn from. I don't much care about the size of the company, but the organizations that will be most appealing to me will have a solid pedigree and have shown that they are viable.

If you are interested in talking more, it would be really helpful to me if you included a description of what problem you are trying to solve, who your investors are, what stage your company is in, and a short description of your engineering process and team.

Timely post, I just heard back from Facebook today and didn't get an offer. I was pretty crestfallen at first, but I am kinda realizing that interviewing is really somewhat of a crapshoot.

At the time, I thought I did pretty well but as I went back over the questions, I realized that I missed a lot of the sort of "tricks" of the questions that they wanted to see.

It was really simple stuff, using a hash where I should have used a trie and not seeing an edge case initially, maybe not being super efficient in a design problem. After thinking about it, the result could have been drastically different (worse or better) using a different 4 questions.

CS is a broad problem space, its not surprising to come across something that you fail at and in my mind, thats to be expected. While this time luck wasn't on my side with a few questions I didn't do amazing at, it may be better next time. Its kinda crappy how arbitrary it can seem, but I don't know if there are much better alternatives.

I have a Google interview tomorrow, so I will try my best, but also remind myself that there is a lot of chance involved.

Very impressed.

Spreadsheets have never quite "clicked" with me, but this did. It exposes a lot of functionality that your average person would want out of a spreadsheet in a much friendlier way.

I am really curious on the "database" side though, can this handle a couple of tables with 10k rows linking to one another? Maybe an API that allows me to return JSON with some query language? If so, would be a great tool for CRM like tools and any small/medium data set where a nice UI for editing would come in handy

I am somewhat surprised at this topic. Of all the the issues Node.js has on windows, this seems like a fairly minor one. In my eyes, the biggest issue is simply this:

A lot of module writers don't care about Windows.

A big part of the node ecosystem is that there is a module for practically anything. While node core has great support for windows, and also helps aid developers in writing code that is windows compatible, from what I have seen, its not often followed.

Any number of simple things break modules on windows, using a '/' as a path separator instead of path.join, native modules, bash or shell scripts used in pre- or post-install scripts and probably a hundred other small ways to screw it up. Even trying to make your own module Windows compatible is often thwarted by a dependency that doesn't. Like Java's promise of "Write once, run anywhere", its a great idea, but hasn't completely panned out.

I really hope that as the node community matures, there can be more of a focus on making sure things work on Windows. Node is a great platform partially because of all those modules and getting them all working will make writing cross platform apps and services a heck of a lot easier.

How about something simpler - Make images load slowly using JS.

A ton of popular consumer sites - facebook, instagram, reddit/imgur are hugely image based. A few lines of JS to make them slowly load (perhaps PNG artifacts for bonus points) and you could very effectively get the point across all while quickly serving a nice large banner.

Offtopic: As a google fiber customer myself, his mention of not remembering the upload speed, made me think of how we need bandwidth to get to the point where it doesn't matter. CPU speed used to be something you quoted. For the last few computers, I don't care anymore, because its simply "enough". I fear the current telco/ISPs wouldn't agree with that idea...

Very impressed.

This coalesces a lot of different ideas together into what seems to be a really tight package to solve hard problems. In looking around at what most companies are doing, even startupy types, architectures are becoming more distributed and a (hopefully) solid tool for discovery and configuration seems like a big step in the right direction.

The argument for Oculus to push forward and usher in new forms of communication certainly isn't new, but with a company like Facebook behind it definitely legitimizes it...

And also makes it suddenly incredibly scary...

I literally was going to do this this coming weekend, same name even!

I was going to take a much different approach however - I was going to use rabbitmq speaking STOMP over a websocket [0] with two queues, one for client moves, which the server would consume and write to the moves queue, which each client would consume. This would allow the server to do more fancy rate limiting / throttling as not to just lead to a message storm. This, along with storing the game state in a db, allows for scaling out app servers.

0 - https://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2012/05/14/introducing-rabbitm...

Looks very cool, but one piece of feedback: Let the user know it is in invite-only beta on the homepage.

I downloaded the command line util and tried to login, only to be let down :(

Excited to try it out!

hrm, seems sad that you have to dig through jira to find the (arguably) most important feature of the 2.6 release

Another really interesting tidbit in that comment: 2.6 apparently supports multiple indexes per query (!)

Somehow, it seems like the change list [0] doesn't indicate that at all...

0 - http://docs.mongodb.org/master/release-notes/2.6/