collinf

Universal Studios is owned by Comcast [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Pictures

Anecdotally speaking, I have a couple friends in medical school right now and they do everything on their iPad + keyboard. My mom has used an iPad as her primary computer for the past 5 years. For a lot of people who primarily interact with their computer using PDF's, slideshows, a little email and video, I think that it is a totally respectable replacement.

I would be curious to see what percent of the market is people that want their computer to be doing things powerful enough to justify a computer more powerful than an iPad pro is.

Disclaimer: Obviously a $300 chromebook destroys an iPad in price but you know so do a lot of Android phones and people still pay the premium for iPhones because they are sexy[1].

[1]https://www.recode.net/2017/9/12/16290910/apple-event-iphone...

Ah got it, according to Amazon it isn't released until August 4th.

https://www.amazon.com/Site-Reliability-Workbook-Practical-I...

This book is pretty well known in the HN space, are you referring to "The Site Reliability Workbook"? That looks like it hasn't even been released yet in print, which is very cool that they are offering free downloads.

If so, thanks for the link! Can't wait to pour through this bad boy.

This seems like it would be a nightmare to deal with if things ever went wrong. Is this actually a viable option?

What an amazing read. These folks really pulled off some fantastic engineering without a JIT. It will be interesting to see if the team decides to add additional knobs to configure the Go GC for different workloads like Java has now.

Well, there is the overhead of creating and removing namespaces each time a container is ran, or communicating with the Docker daemon.

I think to most people it would be negligible, but fb operates at a scale where these normally insignificant pieces matter. I would be interested to hear more about the _why_ of a system like this over containerization.

edit: rwmj's comment has a good discussion over the benefits of this over containerization.

Richard Hipp (creator of SQLite) had this to say about Rust and SQLite in the comments:

> Rewriting SQLite in Rust, or some other trendy “safe” language, would not help. In fact it might hurt.

Prof. Regehr did not find problems with SQLite. He found constructs in the SQLite source code which under a strict reading of the C standards have “undefined behaviour”, which means that the compiler can generate whatever machine code it wants without it being called a compiler bug. That’s an important finding. But as it happens, no modern compilers that we know of actually interpret any of the SQLite source code in an unexpected or harmful way. We know this, because we have tested the SQLite machine code – every single instruction – using many different compilers, on many different CPU architectures and operating systems and with many different compile-time options. So there is nothing wrong with the sqlite3.so or sqlite3.dylib or winsqlite3.dll library that is happily running on your computer. Those files contain no source code, and hence no UB.

The point of Prof. Regehr’s post (as I understand it) is the the C programming language as evolved to contain such byzantine rules that even experts find it difficult to write complex programs that do not contain UB.

The rules of rust are less byzantine (so far – give it time :-)) and so in theory it should be easier to write programs in rust that do not contain UB. That’s all well and good. But it does not relieve the programmer of the responsibility of testing the machine code to make sure it really does work as intended. The rust compiler contains bugs. (I don’t know what they are but I feel sure there must be some.) Some well-formed rust programs will generate machine code that behaves differently from what the programmer expected. In the case of rust we get to call these “compiler bugs” whereas in the C-language world such occurrences are more often labeled “undefined behavior”. But whatever you call it, the outcome is the same: the program does not work. And the only way to find these problems is to thoroughly test the actual machine code.

And that is where rust falls down. Because it is a newer language, it does not have (afaik) tools like gcov that are so helpful for doing machine-code testing. Nor are there multiple independently-developed rust compilers for diversity testing. Perhaps that situation will change as rust becomes more popular, but that is the situation for now.

These are pretty cool and we actually have them in our office, I see my current company on your list of companies using them.

Unfortunately, team culture takes precedence over neat tools. It's just a common thing on my team to do take calls at your desk.

This is certainly a good point and part of the reason why I just deal with the noise. Desk segregation based on noise levels rather than teams is actually a pretty good idea. Not sure of the implementation of something like that.

My biggest issue with my open floor office is that it seems like everyone just takes calls at their seats. We have private spaces and enclaves for that, but I am just bombarded with 4 people within 10 feet of my workspace on their phone. To counteract I throw on some Ambient music on my headphones, which sort of works but I still find I prefer to work in silence.

Does it not seem like open-office etiquette to take a phone call in a private space when other people are trying to work?

> I don't want a serious gaming monstrosity, I just desired something that can do the job well, had great build quality and could run the Unix-based tools I need to use to get through the day while offering reasonable battery life. It's a tall order, but should be feasible.

Proceeds to not touch upon a single way the Surface 2 is UNIX-y in any sort of way? I know the WSL is there but the biggest stop for me using anything other than a MBP is that I wouldn't be able to develop without a *nix environment.

Somewhat interesting. I have a different reason for the declining weekday rates of the MTA (NYC's subway system). More and more companies every year seem to be alright with their employees being remote on a more regular basis, which would attribute for the _slight_ decline in weekday ridership.

Literally just listened to his podcast he did with Freakonomics Radio yesterday. Definitely a great mind.

For all of you developers/operations folks out there, I recommend reading his book The Checklist Manifesto. Every team can learn so much from that book about their everyday practices. We read it at our company book club, and began taking checklists and documentation much more seriously which I attribute too much better productivity, operations and less siloed dev.

I use Personal Capital and really think it's a great piece of software. If you're worried about a cloud solution that has access to your financials, you might as well use a spreadsheet.

I'm pretty sure YNAB (You Need a Budget) does not require cloud storage of personal information.

Sent this to all of my non-techie friends who asked wtf GitHub was and how it was worth $7.5b.

Great read.

Wow, for anyone who hasn't read into this, check out the Wikipedia page[1]. Feels like sci-fi dystopian futures are closer everyday.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

Unrelated, but this reminds me of one of my favourite Mitch Hedberg bits.

“I bought a doughnut and they gave me a receipt for the doughtnut... I don't need a receipt for the doughnut. I give you money and you give me the doughnut, end of transaction. We don't need to bring ink and paper into this. I can't imagine a scenario that I would have to prove that I bought a doughnut. To some skeptical friend, 'Don't even act like I didn't get that doughnut, I've got the documentation right here... It's in my file at home. ...Under "D".'

Really funny when you think about how this joke aged in this era of rampant privacy abuse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWx6uA5aCrE

I haven't seen anyone touch on this, but I remember reading about this in Data Intensive Applications[1]. The way that they solved the celebrity feed issue was to decouple users with high amounts of followers from normal users.

Here is a quick excerpt, this book is filled to the brim with these gems.

> The final twist of the Twitter anecdote: now that approach 2 is robustly implemented,Twitter is moving to a hybrid of both approaches. Most users’ tweets continue to be fanned out to home timelines at the time when they are posted, but a small number of users with a very large number of followers (i.e., celebrities) are excepted from this fan-out. Tweets from any celebrities that a user may follow are fetched separately and merged with that user’s home timeline when it is read, like in approach 1. This hybrid approach is able to deliver consistently good performance.

Approach 1 is a global collection of tweets, the tweets are discovered and merged in that order.

Approach 2 involves posting a tweet from each user into each follower's timeline, with a cache similar to how a mailbox would work.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Data-Intensive-Applications...

I find it hard to believe you _only_ use Septa to get around Philadelphia. I have the regional rail pass for my commute as well and Philadelphia's public transportation system is not great for getting anywhere in the city. I uber all the time to get around Philadelphia to supplement my Septa pass. It still definitely beats a car payment, insurance and the hellhole of parking though.

At least compared to NYC, where I could hop on the subway to anywhere in the boroughs.

What sort of Fortune x00 company doesn't use a corporate VPN?

As an intern, no less.

As far as a technical book, Data Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppman. This book covers distributed systems as well as databases, data-warehousing, and data-processing.

A lot of tools and patterns you don't see in school that describe how most of the "magic" behind high-powered software we use is implemented.

From the Q4 Earnings Report, it looks like it was a one-time tax on foreign earnings:

> 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act

On December 22, 2017, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (the Tax Act) was enacted into law and the new legislation contains several key tax provisions that affected us, including a one-time mandatory transition tax on accumulated foreign earnings and a reduction of the corporate income tax rate to 21% effective January 1, 2018, among others. We are required to recognize the effect of the tax law changes in the period of enactment, such as determining the transition tax, remeasuring our U.S. deferred tax assets and liabilities, and reassessing the net realizability of our deferred tax assets and liabilities. In December 2017, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) staff issued Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 118, Income Tax Accounting Implications of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (SAB 118), which allows us to record provisional amounts during a measurement period not to extend beyond one year of the enactment date. As a result, our provision for income taxes increased by $2.27 billion and our diluted EPS decreased by $0.77 for both the fourth quarter and full year 2017. Since the Tax Act was passed late in the fourth quarter of 2017, and ongoing guidance and accounting interpretation are expected over the next 12 months, we consider the accounting of the transition tax, deferred tax re-measurements, and other items to be provisional due to the forthcoming guidance and our ongoing analysis of final year-end data and tax positions. We expect to complete our analysis within the measurement period in accordance with SAB 118.

[link] https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

I think one thing that people get caught up in with Go as well is... well it's stupid easy to learn and work with.

I work for a giant enterprise company and the range of programming talent that we have is incredible. I know some people that couldn't code there way out of fizbuzz. Unfortunately, getting these folks onboard to learn the functional abstractions doesn't always sell (especially to the biz folks).

One of Go's biggest strengths is that anyone can pick up the language and be somewhat productive in it after a week.

My 2 cents in the bottomless well of programming language opinions.

Seems like a lot of hoops to have to jump through! Thankfully I managed to avoid having to go through all of these trials by being turned off that it didn't have systemd. Your response makes me glad that my unwarranted dislike for other init systems kept me from going down that path, though.

Thanks for the response, and hats off to you for making lemonade in that situation.

Security guide is for RHEL6? Nobody is actually running K8s on RHEL6 without systemd, are they? Are they?!?!

> Like the FTC on Facebook (link is external)

Really got me there, lol.

I'm sure the executives take issues like this incredibly seriously. None of this stuff is insidious in nature, it's just what happens when people bypass processes.

Engineer doesn't take the time for proper password management -> Password gets left in source -> Other engineer who does code review misses password -> this continues for several iterations -> product gets released.

Unfortunately this definitely happens more often than you would want to think.