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halbritton Gemini AI

To add some color to this, the culture for a very long time would reward folks that came up with novel solutions to problems or novel products. These folks would dedicate some effort into the implementation, land the thing, then secure a promo with no regard for the sustainability of the aforementioned solution. Once landed, attention goes elsewhere and the thing is left to languish.

This behavior has been observed publicly in the Kubernetes space where Google has contributed substantially.

halbritton The death of a public intellectual

> Ah. So what we have here is, regardless of whether you agree it's true or not, a political agenda masquerading as a personality test. It's purpose is to argue Peterson's vocal political belief that the gender pay gap is not an issue, because women are biologically better at being nurses instead of engineers. His proof? Just look at those Scandinavians, they have completely solved sexism (citation needed) and still see this gap

I'm not sure it's a political belief per se so much as a refutation of the implicit assumption that the gender pay gap is entirely the result of sexism and more likely the result of other factors, not least of which are the traits and proclivities of either sex.

I'm not prepared to debate whether or not his argument on the topic is legitimate, but it is something that he has elaborated on and supported with some data.

halbritton Show HN: Every Breath You Take – Heart Rate Variability Training

The H10 is the gold standard for HRMs and the one most commonly used by anyone doing experimentation with HRV. I don't have the specs memorized off hand, by my recollection is that it does a better job of capturing the entire waveform.

halbritton My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

> you can only compare performance across a cohort

I can't accept this premise. Optimally the persons responsible for managing engineering staff should be able to independently determine whether the work being produced was of sufficient quality or not regardless of the cohort.

At issue here, I believe is that this is a difficult thing to cultivate consistently in many corporations and so there's some desire to create standardized metrics for performance against which a cohort is measured. Regardless, most large tech firms have some kind of well defined rubric against which the engineers are measured.

halbritton My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

To say nothing of the ethics of cheating, I think this behavior speaks to the value of the interview process. If it can be gamed so easily, it's likely not a great measure of the quality of the candidate and the companies that have implemented deserve the hires they make.

It'd doubtful the folks at the company actually mind that the interviews are being cheated. If the candidates appear to be qualified and appear to be fill the role for which they were hired and appear to be competent in that role, that's sufficient for most corporations and one of the problems working in "tech". That is to say, there are plenty of people in it that appear to be doing a thing, but aren't actually capable.

Somewhere in this thread a poster mentioned woodworking, which is a nice contrast. If you hire a carpenter, it becomes obvious pretty quickly if the carpenter is competent.

halbritton Homemade Heat Pump Manifesto (2009)

> air source heat pumps have been getting a lot better

Mitsubishi, specifically, makes a heat pump with the marketing vernacular, "H2i" or "hyper heat" which has reasonable efficiency down to -13F/-25C.

halbritton 6 Raspberry Pis, 6 SSDs on a Mini ITX Motherboard

I love it, but when it fails at scale, it can be hard to reason about. Or at least that was the case when I was using it a few years back. Still keen to try it again and see what's changed. I haven't run it since bluestore was released.

halbritton Amazon’s HR Failures

How is a DEI policy "left" or "right"?

halbritton TimescaleDB raises $40M

Cool. I'm keen to try it. Wondering how well it works with multi-terabyte data sets.

halbritton TimescaleDB raises $40M

Curious how large a dataset you're using?

halbritton What nobody says about startup moms

The content of this discussion does an excellent job of explaining the reasoning of the people that have downvoted this comment.

halbritton Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

How does interacting with reps have anything to do with "onboarding"? This is more or less an evaluation of how easy it is to take advantage of credits.

I'd be more interested in how easy it is to use a credit card and get a service off the ground. What is the relative quality of the products on offer by either vendor?

halbritton AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

Yes, that's a small amount of data. I've worked at small companies with an order of magnitude more data per day and larger companies with three orders of magnitude more data per day flowing into a text indexing service.

halbritton AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

Was at a small startup, SAAS company, handful of large customers. Logs going into ES were north of 1TB/day.

halbritton AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

> I send about 100GB a day to Amazon ES

This is why you haven't noticed any issues.

halbritton Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

Excellent point.

halbritton Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

Well, what, then?

SOLR?

halbritton Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

Again, very minor use case. Not worth expending effort on. I attempted to convince the lawyers that we should just yolo it because the product had no actual revenue.

Didn't go well.

halbritton Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

Mongo offers what? A license to use their software and have them not harass me or attempt to upsell me or force me to use their management tooling?

Nah.

halbritton Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

In my experience, corporate lawyers don't really understand the distinction and will opt for the route of least risk, which generally entails a commercial relationship with the company. Unfortunately, neither Mongo nor Elastic really offer useful commercial relationships. That is, pay them a sum and be free to use the widely adopted open-source version of their thing.

The overhead to those relationships for what they do offer is significant.

halbritton Understanding ProRAW

> try to learn zone system. Learn to evaluate highlights and shadows and adjust your exposure without any meter. Use it to make pictures you want in lighting with extremely high dynamic range

This is pretty hard to do with the stock iphone camera app.

halbritton Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

"seceding"

halbritton Kafka Is Not a Database

I recommend his book, "I heart logs". It's a short read, but changed my perspective.

halbritton Kafka Is Not a Database

The author presumes that every use case requires a transactional database. ACID is nice, especially if it's needed, but generally not needed, especially in many streaming data applications for which Kafka is most suitable.

halbritton Nest Outage for Apps, Thermostats, Protect, and Live Feed

Ecobee is the only real mass-market competition to Nest. Depending on the specific HVAC equipment one may have, there are other "smart" alternatives from the manufacturers themselves.

Generally speaking, they all offer a portal and an app in which one can adjust the HVAC settings. Also, generally speaking, these apps and portals are being developed by companies for which software engineering is not a primary function, so they're about as good as you would expect.

halbritton Hiring Myths Common in Hacker News Discussions

I spent the first part of my career as a network engineer, moved into management, started doing "cloud" stuff for whatever that means, and have very obviously not been an IC for a long while. Been in the bay area tech scene for over 20 years.

I'll still get pinged by recruiters for a senior network engineering job in Idaho or some such.

halbritton Hiring Myths Common in Hacker News Discussions

I’ve been a hiring manager for a few roles. Every one that was posted publicly received approximately 20 applicants that were obviously not suited to the role for every one that was.

This is exclusive of any level of seniority, which I like to be flexible on where I can.

While I wouldn’t say this is fraud per se, the candidates were obviously using a shotgun approach to apply to any job in the industry.

halbritton 'Wild West' mentality lingers in modern populations of US mountain regions

I lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains for a while and had a tolerable commute into San Jose. A 911 call would yield a response no sooner than 30 minutes. So, not very far out at all, but definitely a set of circumstances that encouraged self-reliance.

halbritton Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data

> Might be worth noting that you can opt out of their data collection (on the e-reader, at a minimum) as well. Settings > Device Options > Advanced Options > Privacy or in the device management console in your account on amazon.com

Good tip, I'm going to give this a whirl. Unfortunately, all the network calls add a significant amount of latency even if one didn't care about privacy.