fatnoah

> He got the prompt, asked questions about throughput requirements (etc.), and said, “okay, I’d put it all in Postgres.” He was correct! Postgres could more than handle the load.

I had this happen in a Google interview. I did back of the envelope math on data size and request volume and everything (4 million daily events, spread across a similar number of buckets) and very little was required beyond that to meet performance, reliability, and time/space complexity requirements. Most of the interview was the interviewer asking "what about" questions, me explaining how the simple design handled that, and the interviewer agreeing. I passed, but with "leans" vs. "strong" feedback.

I worked at a no longer extant networking equipment manufacturer as an intern in college in the late 1990's. My role was to work on software for an in-development 45Gb network switch, and a bunch of the software I wrote ran on prototype boards.

Since fabricating new boards took time and was expensive, a lot of work was done to make in situ modifications that involved an insane amount of wirewrapping. One member of the team did that all day, every day as their full time job, and I was always amazed by their ability to focus consistently at that level for so long.

I don't know where my car keys are, but I still remember a significant portion of the "Our Father" that I had to memorize in Old English in the early 1990's.

> Also, _Discord_ deleting them is really only half the battle; random vendors deleting them remains an issue.

This really is the issue. Of the 5 or so data breach notifications I received last year, none are from an entity I have a direct relationship with. They're all from a vendor used directly or indirectly by these entities.

The real answer is more serious penalties for having data breaches. Having 6 concurrent "identity monitoring" services is of zero value to me.

>The wider implications of this are left to the reader.

IMHO, it's actually worse than we realize. The Medical Loss Ratio requirement is good because it requires insurance companies to spend 80% or 85% of premiums on health care. It's bad because one way for insurance companies to make more money is to have inflated health care prices to justify increasing premiums so they can get 80% of a bigger pie. It also gives them incentives to provide care themselves so they can capture some of that 80% spend.

> For the uninsured this sort of thing is actually really common. Had an online friend who had to get emergency treatment and they sent him a bill for $20k.

I experienced this personally with my own insurance. My bill was over $20k, and it took a year to convince the insurance company that removing a few feet of my intestines was actually emergency surgery. I ended up paying $800. My roommate in the hospital had no insurance and ended up not paying anything (which I did not begrudge them at all, since the reason for no insurance was debilitating back pain that led to unemployment)

Thank you! I'll have to check it out when I'm not on a work computer that's convinced filebin is a darkweb haxx0r paradise.

Is there a text version of this somewhere?

I'm sorry for your losses.

My dad died of cancer when I was 26, and I had very frequent dreams where it felt like he was real and present, though never speaking or interacting directly with me. The grief persisted for years.

Nearly 25 years later, my mom passed away this summer, and it's been a totally different experience. The grief was just as intense as when my dad passed, but contained to a few weeks.

Our bodies and brains are complicated.

In general, many (most?) internet plans specifically prohibit running a web server with a residential account. A business account would be necessary in these cases.

The very first DVD player I ever purchased was a Pioneer model with all the possible outputs, from composite to component video, 5.1 discrete audio channels, and coax + optical digital audio outs.

I purchased it somewhere in the 1996 to 1998 timeframe. When I graduated to Blu-Ray, I gave it to my mother who used it once or twice a week up until she passed away this year.

Obviously that's purely anecdotal, but that one unit was a workhorse.

> Zune

The Zune was 100% uncool, but man did I like the hardware and software sooo much better than the iPod / ITunes. I was just sad that I never found anyone to "squirt" at.

> You’re not paying for a service, you’re bidding in an open market.

IMHO, this isn't a new phenomenon. Close to 18 years ago, I lived in a city with a popular pizza spot that was about a 10 minute walk away. Normally I'd walk, but having a newborn make that challenging, so I'd get delivery.

Typically, the delivery would take 60+ minutes on a busy night, but after a few consecutive Fridays of a decent tip for the order, the pizza would arrive "burn your fingers" in about 20 minutes.

App Store rules are completely arbitrary. Many moons ago, I worked at a startup that made a mobile messaging app (back when SMS cost money). We were mostly a consumer app, but had a trio of businesses that wanted white-label versions of the app for their own employees, and we naturally obliged.

The white-label versions where 100% identical in appearance and functionality except for name in the app store, startup logo, and color scheme. Our original app had been in the App Store rules for many years. Our results in submitting the three white-label apps to the App Store for review were: 1 approved immediately, 1 approved after some back-and-forth w/explanation of purchase model, and another that never got approved due to every submission receiving some nonsensical bit of feedback.

> And most importantly you have to write. A lot. Writing allows our brain to structure our thinking. Enables us to have a structured dialogue with ourselves.

I feel like to goes beyond writing to really any form of expressing this knowledge to others. As a grad student, I was a teaching assistant for an Electrical Engineering class I failed as an undergrad. The depth of understanding I developed for the material over the course of supporting students in the class was amazing. I transitioned from "knowing" the material and equations to being able to generate them all from first principles.

Regardless, I fully agree that using LLMs as our form of expression will weaken both the ability to express ourselves AND the ability to develop deep understanding of topics as LLMs "think" for us too.

>This will almost never be the case. This doesn't account for different share classes, liquidation preferences, preferred stock, all of which get exercised before common shares.

>Equity as an incentive truly favors the employer. With vesting, equity rarely works out to be better than having a market rate salary, unless the company becomes a household name

I've worked at 4 different startups. Two were acquired and two are still going, with one making a small profit and being a lifestyle business for the founder, and the other having a great product and still growing.

For the two acquisitions, one of which I held 1% equity in, the value of my options was $0, which was very disappointing. In that case, I did get a cash bonus as the VP Engineering and an offer from the acquiring company that was 3X my cash comp, but the stock was worthless.

At this point in my career, I value stock in private companies at exactly $0 and treat it like a nice bonus should it ever amount to anything.

> Who's going to buy it, though? AWS, Google and Microsoft do have European datacenters and many users here use these regions but the whole point is to be politically, financially, and "privacy-ally" completely independent from the USA.

This is the real issue, IMHO. I work for a European SaaS and we've had a small number of customers ask about our plans to host our services in datacenters not owned by US companies.

On the other side of the coin, my always healthy dad did 6 weeks of physical therapy for hip joint pain that turned out to be cancer, which was immediately detected when they finally decided to perform a CT scan. He passed away almost exactly 1 year later at 46 years old.

I was laid off by a consultant. It was somehow even worse than Up in the Air since they made my manager sit in on the call.

As an MIT reject (technically waitlisted), my very first post-graduation job was at Raytheon and much later in life, I ended up at Facebook, where I managed a team that had several engineers that joined directly from MIT. While I can't speak to the entire MIT grad cohort, fFacebook was the first-choice for everyone in this particular group.

It's multilayered. I've had technical and non-technical bosses at large and small companies, and the universal thing that made them "good" or "bad" was whether they gave me sufficient context and trusted me to get the work done. The best ones challenged me in good faith and provided honest feedback.

Even stranger was the experience of my company being acquired by a large name-brand tech company. My manager (Director) and their manager (VP) were the worst kind...non-technical and second guessing everything in silly ways. Meanwhile, the co-founder and CTO popped into our tiny office one day because they were in town, rolled up to my desk and said "hey, you're fatnoah, right? I have some questions" and then pulled me into a conference room where we went deep on our entire tech stack. He got everything the first time and understood the how and why of what we built and why.

> That is great QAing. It also speaks to why QA should be a real role in more orgs, rather than a shrinking discipline.

As a software engineer, I've always been very proud of my thoroughness and attention to detail in testing my code. However, good QA people always leave me wondering "how did they even think to do that?" when reviewing bug reports.

QA is both a skillset AND a mindset.

>This genuinely threw me because in my experience the suburbs are the antithesis of this, just lots of people occupying neighboring space and rarely talking to each other.

I've lived in both settings, and my own experience has been a mix. In the (walkable) suburbs I've lived in, I've connected with my immediate neighbors, strength of connection rapidly dissipates with distance. We are friendly, occasionally have a BBQ or meal together, and lots of random chats while going for a walk or doing yard work.

When I've lived in cities, it's been a much larger and more active community where the connection is less about proximity of our homes, and more about being in the same place at the same time since our daily errands and living were generally on foot. For those and the simple reason of small homes, we were more likely to meet somewhere or do an activity. I was also FAR more likely to run into someone I knew in my city than I was in my suburbs.

> Probably no leetcode-equivalent for managers?

For FAANG, most front-line manager roles have a leetcode style coding round, though it may be easier and/or weighted less heavily than for an IC.

> it's that this style of violence really is so pervasive

Agree, and it's tragic that this is were we are in the US, and the only concrete action we're willing to take (thoughts and prayers don't count) is to try to mitigate the impact of a shooting rather than preventing it.

> I know I’m behind the times, but I was surprised recently when, at an elementary school in the US, they showed me painted lines on the floor of the classroom, indicating the zones out of the line of fire for somebody shooting through the small, jail-like window in the door

It all seems overdone and ridiculous, but when you get a phone call from your child as they sprint from the school building to the safety of the woods due to shots fired in the building, you're glad they did prepare for the "when to stay" and "when to run" decision...and then after you realize that it's even more ridiculous that they had to use that training.

That was the longest couple hours of my life, but knowing that the kids got the f** outta there made it a bit more bearable.

> It’s not supposed to work like this, but it plays out this way in many companies.

Absolutely, and I've been on both sides. We go much more with a carrot approach than a stick approach, and have no ability to "block" any product team from doing things. Our goal is to ship things that are useful and lower the effort required for product teams to ship their products, which is handling basically everything except product-specific features. However, product teams don't have to use the platform, but then they own the operational burden of whatever custom stuff they're using. When that happens, we still work with them to minimize that or bake that capability into the platform and eventually take it over if it's useful to the wider org.

"Success" of the platform team really depends on serving the product teams, so blocking or being a barrier goes very much against that. We try to provide opinionated golden paths, but also try to build a properly abstracted stack of capabilities so teams can also extend/consume at a lower level if that better suits their needs.

> Then they become gatekeepers, refusing to allow anything on their platform unless it conforms to their ideal vision

As the owner of a platform team, this very common attitude of platform teams kills me. Yes, we have a long-term vision that we're working towards, but our main goals are two accelerate developers AND produce more robust systems. Outside of totally egregious violations of company standards, my team is expected to focus on how to get things done. That means being flexible, working side-by-side with other teams, etc. to make sure that a) they're able to deliver what they need and b) we help them build it in such a way that it can eventually be aligned with our utopian long-term vision.

> All paid for by the company they worked for.

One of my internships in college was at Sun Microsystems in the org that provided this connectivity to employees. My job was to automate pushing updates to connection software and modem firmware down to clients, but I ended up doing a lot of technical support as well.

> The technical aspect that contributed the most to this burnout was both the lack of observability tooling and the lack of organizational desire to invest in it.

One of the most significant "triumphs" of my technical career came at a startup where I started as a Principal Engineer and left as the VP Engineering. When I started, we had nightly outages requiring Engineering on-call, and by the time I left, no one could remember a recent issue that required Engineers to wake up.

It was a ton of work and required a strong investment in quality & resilience, but even bigger impact was from observability. We couldn't afford APM, so we took a very deliberate approach to what we logged and how, and stuffed it into an ELK stack for reporting. The immediate benefit was a drastic reduction in time to diagnose issues, and effectively let our small operations team triage issues and easily identify app vs. infra issues almost immediately. Additionally, it was much easier to identify and mitigate fragility in our code and infra.

The net result was an increase in availability from 98.5% to 99.995%, and I think observability contributed to at least half of that.

> And though they would have you believe so, Meta and Apple are not evolving these HMDs into the spectacles form factor.

FWIW, when I was at Meta, and working on wearable devices, it was stated up front that all day wearable AR glasses was the final goal. Shipping other products was as well, but also as a means to explore how to build abd productionize the tech required for AR. That's why you have things like Oculus, Ray Bans, wrist wearables, huge investments in 3D world mapping, research in hands-free controls, off device-compute, etc.