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cetico

70 karma · joined August 22, 2010

sysadmin turned site reliability engineer turned entrepreneur

https://yvesjunqueira.com

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cetico··on Weaveworks is shutting down
Wait, I thought Uber became profitable last year and remained so..?
cetico··on Langchain Is Pointless
Can’t you simply create a custom LLM interface that does whatever query logging you want?
cetico··on My observations on the complexity of software after building test acceleration
What library was used to create that visualization of the dependency graph? I couldn't clearly tell from the page source.
cetico··on Liquidity Is Coming
What are, in your opinion, things that startup founders should do to make things more financially rewarding for employees?

Any low hanging fruits you suggest we look at first?

cetico··on If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
Newsletters and podcasts are somewhat decent replacements worth considering.
cetico··on PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub
SpankChain.com may be a alternative?
cetico··on Startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 1
Reportedly you have a lot of customers. How did you find them? Any tips to share? Thanks :-)
cetico··on U.S. Designates China as Currency Manipulator
Every currency has onshore and offshore rates. For example, you can buy dollars or Eurodollars, which is simple US currency kept offshore.

Eurodollars have different exchange rates because they don't have the reserve requirements from the Fed. i.e: it's less regulated.

The RMB has a heavier regulation whereby the exchange rate isn't allowed to fluctuate. This does increase the difference in value for the onshore and offshore currencies.

But having that distinction does not by itself make it a currency manipulator.

cetico··on Root cause analysis: significantly elevated error rates on 2019‑07‑10
Yes this was very surprising. The system was working fine after the cluster restart. There was no need for an emergency rollback.

Doing a large rollback based on a hunch seems like an overreaction.

It's totally normal for engineers to commit these errors. That's fine. The detail that's missing in this PM is what kind of operational culture, procedures and automation is in place to reduce operator errors.

Did the engineer making this decision have access to other team members to review their plan of action? I believe that a group (2-3) of experienced engineers sharing information in real-time and coordinating the response could have reacted better.

Of course, I wasn't there so I could be completely off.

cetico··on Ask HN: How do you flag features in your codebase?
I ran the production systems for various Google products and this was an interesting challenge there because there were many engineers and many changes done every day.

One imperfect but helpful technique is to use release notes for your application.

Ask the team to write good commits when changing code, and aggregate all code changes done to the application into a page that describes what went in that release. GitHub releases do that for you automatically. When a release is pushed that breaks something, it's easier to scan the release notes and find who changed what.

Another technique is to use explicit feature flags to protect all code changes. Then use a dashboard that shows recent changes to feature flags – again this helps tracking down the culprit.

cetico··on 1100 layoffs at Bay Area tech companies
Oracle cut 1,500 globally. These numbers are for Bay Area only.
cetico··on Google Fusion Tables Shutting Down
I worked at Google for almost 10 years. In my experience, these end-of-life projects often get shutdown because nobody wants to work on them.

There are a ton of interesting projects at Google for people to work on, so people select for interesting things with potential high-impact. If a team can't be formed to own the product, maybe someone will volunteer to take care of it in their 20% time. But there are these company-wide mandates to move production systems from a storage system to a newer one, and a part-timer doesn't see the point of doing such thankless job.

Management can also play a role. If a VP wanted to support the product, it would get supported. But they use the basic heuristic as above ("is this an interesting project with high potential impact"). In this analysis a VP is just a proxy for 100 engineers making the same decision.

cetico··on A List of Open Questions
MMA is new, historically speaking.

BJJ is the best fighting style that fits the rules of MMA. Change the rules a bit and a different style will work better.

cetico··on Ask HN: Open-source commitment for commercial software?
This is largely forgotten now, but notch promised to open source Minecraft if it ever stopped selling.

Obviously it still sells today. He doesn't own it anymore and it's not a proper license like what you're asking. But it's a precedent.

cetico··on Evolution may occur through a dependency graph, not the conventional simple tree
Indeed, thanks for clarifying. I apologise for posting pseudo-science in the first place.

(Although a little bit of divergent thinking is healthy for the mind)

cetico··on Evolution may occur through a dependency graph, not the conventional simple tree
Would this imply that species have a clever way to acquire "modules" from other species?

Would that happen via crossbreeding? Or some mysterious form of gene "absorption"?

cetico··on Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?
Marketing is hard. What did you try at the time? What would you try these days, with the benefit of hindsight?
cetico··on A deep dive into the Go memory allocator and garbage collector
IMHE, generations are a nightmare to operate for high performance servers at scale because you have to balance the sizes of those heaps manually and it can change abruptly with code changes or workload fluctuation.

Go allocations are indeed costlier but the performance critical sections of applications can be profiled and optimized accordingly to remove allocations.

I'd rather have Go's amazing low GC latency and slightly higher allocation costs vs the operational nightmare from HotSpot.

Automatic management of generations has never fully worked in Java. Every new JDK version just adds more knobs. Sounds like you have a different experience?

cetico··on Today, Y Combinator sent me a rejection letter for Startup School… by mistake
> I completely accepted we weren’t in. This was like a tearful goodbye at the airport and then running into the person again.

That's a perfect description of how I felt.

cetico··on Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
Is there a way for companies to tell if they are on the Advisory Track, besides the emails?

That's totally OK, mistakes happen, but I'm not sure what the emails say. If startupschool.org perhaps had the final status (advisory track or not), that would be super helpful.

cetico··on Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?
Yes. But I understand you, and I agree. I was there. I quit my job in a big tech company a few months ago so I could work on more interesting problems. I started a company a few months, and it's been hard - exactly what I was hoping for.
cetico··on Supernova-propelled white dwarf found zooming through Milky Way at 5 million mph
And I used to worry about asteroids..

Looking forward to the Hollywood movie in which heroes have to stop a STAR from hitting Earth.

cetico··on Ask HN: Is Kubernetes too complex for most use cases?
It depends on how you define "most use cases".

If you need containers to solve the "it works on my workstation" problem, and you need to make your containers run in production and scale them easily, and you have lots of applications to setup and deploy, then Kubernetes is fantastic. But if you can get away with just running your application in plain VMs and the burden of maintaining a Consul-based app discovery isn't a problem for you, your proposed setup makes a lot of sense.

Custom infra has an operational cost that is proportional to the number of applications. Kubernetes has a high fixed operational cost that you always incur, whether you have 1 application or 20. Once your operational complexity is high enough, it makes sense to use Kubernetes.

Soon higher level solutions will come along that will delivery the same advantages of Kubernetes but remove the learning curve and ops cost of Kubernetes.

cetico··on The Most Isolated Man on the Planet
FYI, related story with video footage: http://www.newscientist.com/blog/shortsharpscience/2007/07/m...