atomic77

In a case like that I wonder if they did it partly for fun - they easily could have played the last 8 seconds with an empty net.

The hockey goalie is an interesting role because it is a very specialized skill relative to the other players, and typically done by the same person for most of a season, with a backup that plays maybe 10-25% of games.

I think the closest thing would be a pitcher in baseball, but even there, it's hard to imagine an injury scenario that would result in an amateur being put in, because there are so many relief pitchers, and others not in rotation that could sub in.

They had to failover to a warm standby only minutes after their hot standby failed too.

I'm impressed that there is a process in place for this. I would not have been surprised if the story was that the equipment manager has put on whichever goalie's equipment fits him better, in order to get into the game to prevent a forfeit.

Interesting, so you would tend to agree with the parent comment, especially if you hadn't known anything about the author beforehand? It's a great illustration of the range of interpretations possible of any artistic work.

I've also read that Demons expands upon many of the ideas in C&P though I had a bit more trouble getting into it. After hearing about these newer translations though I might have to give one a try.

Though it also doesn't contribute much, I just had to say that the laugh I got from this comment isn't properly compensated by a mere upvote.

I also coincidentally re-read Crime and Punishment a few months ago and was also struck at how differently I saw it today than as a college student.

I would be interested to understand how you came to the conclusion that he argued for both sides? I saw a scathing repudiation of the socialist utopians of the era (and 'rational' ideologues of all sorts). He 'argued' their sides too, but with the goal of making them appear ridiculous. By the time Raskolnikov's fictional essay about the "extraordinary" comes up, i think it's pretty clear what Dostoyevsky is trying to say. Though that's just my interpretation.

And for any that are skeptical about the gambling link, think about the now-ubiquitous pull-to-refresh gesture on mobile interfaces -- does it remind you of anything... like a slot machine perhaps?

I am not a lawyer either, but contracts can be breached and damages paid when it is a more favourable outcome [1]. I doubt he was suggesting anything that would undermine the rule of law, though.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/efficient_breach_theory

That was fascinating, thanks for sharing. I had no idea Disney World was about the size of San Francisco (!). It seems to operate like a sovereign city-state in the middle of Florida.

"Mr. Tory, who has praised the Sidewalk initiative but has not seen the text of the deal, says no commercial agreement could strip the city of its authority"

Seems to fit with your explanation. I'd like to think the mayor would have some familiarity with the details of an initiative like this.

What strikes me about this is that Toronto notably gave relatively little in terms of incentives during the Amazon HQ2 hoopla [1], yet here we have a case where it seems that the city has ceded a bit too much in order to land a headline-grabbing deal. It's tough to tell which side is being unreasonable.

[1] http://business.financialpost.com/technology/ontario-to-offe...

Banks are better described as tech companies than the media / advertising behemoths. Information security is their bread and butter.

As far as I can tell, the only thing that qualifies a company as "tech" nowadays is a technical tradition of building on open source from the ground up (eg. LAMP and its successors), while banks have traditionally been dependent on a constellation of vendors.

The open source approach has proven a more effective model and it seems that this realization has finally spread outside of silicon valley. It's about time.

All the countries on the list are OECD members, and Poland is the only one that was not a member prior to the end of the cold war.

Maybe it's a reflection of a sort of long term, virtuous loop. Stability brings wealth, wealth reinforces the need for stability. Shocks can occur (e.g. Japan and Germany most recently) but note how quickly they're right back where they were, at least on multi-generational timescale.

Something I can't help but notice: all of the countries on the list are currently wealthy, advanced economies.

Cause or effect?

Yes, it's a trap, but not much different than the traps other companies are attempting to lay for you.

Remember that the majority of people working at Microsoft today probably have little to no memory of the tech world of the early 2000s. They don't seem too much better or worse than others in attempting to shape open-source projects to their benefit - that's something you should always be wary about.

I also think the shift is genuine. The parallels with how IBM evolved from being the Prime Evil in the tech world to a large but relatively benign tech company are interesting.

Notably, the Canadians in my various social media feeds were not talking about moving back.

The fact that in Canada cheese tends to be more expensive than beef, by weight, has always struck me as a strange artifact of some kind of political arrangement

Presumably they preferred to stay within the mysql world. I didn't read the article in detail, but I couldn't help but wonder why not use innodb more directly [1]? Imagine how much CPU is wasted using a full blown RDBMS SQL engine on top of InnoDB just to do key-value read/writes.

I have some experience with this having worked on an experimental storage engine for mysql that we connected to a transactional in-memory k-v store. The performance penalty for simple k-v workload through mysql was quite substantial, though our storage engine code was probably not sufficiently optimized. It would be interesting to explore this for innodb though

[1] https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-memcached.htm...

This is an interesting question, and seems to get to the core of Nassim Taleb's ideas [1] about fragility and the limits of what we can understand, and how many of our attempts to create artificial stability ultimately bring about the opposite.

That said, based on this post-mortem, I think Google, and our industry as a whole, is doing a pretty good job. Periodic failures like this are inevitable, and if they serve to make it less likely that a similar failure occurs in the future, then that is a system as a whole that could be described as "anti-fragile".

[1] At least my interpretation of them

From TFA:

> Juergen Schmidhuber, a Swiss AI researcher, is also credited for trumpeting deep learning methods through its dark period. Several DeepMind researchers came from his lab.

You raise some interesting points.

FB shelled out $15B for Whatsapp, and clearly the contents of these messages was a major factor in that valuation, especially once the subscription fee was phased out.

Now they're voluntarily encrypting. The only explanation I can come up with is that they are realizing that they will not be able to keep the contents of these messages for themselves in the face of motivated nation-state actors, and so they're killing that golden goose rather than share it. This seems pretty extreme and makes me wonder what is really going on behind the scenes.

My assumption is that there is a contingency to monetize metadata (something I'm not seeing discussed here too much) but I can't help but wonder if FB is now looking at the $15B as a huge overpayment.

I think this is among the best answers - getting to know your future boss and coworkers ahead of time is the best way of figuring whether you like these people or not, probably the single most important determiner of your happiness at that job. A good boss knows how important this is and should be equally cautious in bringing you on. If not, a big red flag that you're being brought into a potential sweatshop/sausage factory.

A lot of this starts from how you found the position in the first place, and why I believe it's generally better to job hunt at tech meetups and conferences - before you've been thrown into the formalized process of interviewing, you've met these people already in a more natural environment.

... still waiting for someone to workflow+1

Pretty much exactly what I was intending (except I'd have used a hockey analogy instead of baseball :)

Notice that many of the arguments presented here about why younger workers are favored would equally apply in more conservative professional fields, like law - it's certainly not the 50y old partners doing all-nighters on a regular basis. But there does seem to be a certain level of inter-generational respect among lawyers that is absent in tech. Why, I don't know.

I suspect that ageism in tech also contributes to higher levels of risk taking - if we know or believe we will be put out to pasture at 40, it makes it more urgent to get a big payout at some point along the way.

CockroachDB is probably the closest system to spanner that I've come across (and built in Go)

https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach

I wanted to like this article. But this:

> Considering the first point we decided to give up external caches like Redis, Memcached or Couchbase mainly because of additional time needed on the network.

Even mysql+innodb can easily handle 10k read/write queries against a simple pk table with "millions of entries" on desktop-grade hardware.

If the article was "here's a fun experiment to make a cache server in Go", fair enough.

For me, the answer for the given scenario was so straightforward and obviously "yes" that I wondered why a whole blog post was necessary?

This now has me wondering if I am a bit more drunk on the container koolaid than I may have thought!