kidintech

While working on an enterprise platform, one of its customers in the banking industry wanted to migrate from on-premises to running it on whatever cloud was popular at the time.

The migration was long, tedious, and overly complicated in its own right (i.e. one proposed solution for the "how do we migrate all data safely across the continent?" question involved armored trucks) but just as we reached the T-1 day mark, I realised we had forgot something.

The customer was regulated by various entities, and so it had to deliver periodic audit logs in a particular format. The raw logs (stored in a cloud hosted bucket) would not be sufficient and had to be parsed; in order to process the logs into the desired format, the customer wrote thousands of lines of code in the platform that I was in the process of migrating. This code could only run on the platform, due to some other esoteric privacy regulation.

So there I was on a Sunday, with :

- a few hours to deliver up-to-date, formatted audit logs to regulatory entities or risk legal action

- raw logs in a cloud bucket that required ingestion and processing

- a new cloud platform that could process the logs but was unable to ingest data from the other provider's cloud bucket (due to some temporary allowlisting ingress/egress issue and this being one of the first migrations onto the new cloud)

- an onprem platform being decommissioned and no longer allowed to process the logs BUT capable of ingesting them

The solution I came up with was to have the data flowing:

log bucket in cloud provider A -> decomissioned platform running onprem -> connector I wrote that evening and had no time to test -> platform running on cloud provider B

The ship was afloat the next morning and everything was in order despite cutting it close; I am now a big fan of exhaustive planning, months in advance.

I'm fascinated that at a 175k employee company, two employees I know nothing about, in business areas or positions I know nothing about, could possibly use different tooling for their day to day duties.

*Surely* at your place of work, the cleaning staff is familiar with the CTO's dearest tools and vice versa?

I'm at Google and am not entirely sure what you are referring to, but I'd love to try it. Could you provide an internal codename I could search for? Or is it integrated somewhere in Cider (the name is public knowledge so I'm not leaking anything by using this) that you could guide me to (i.e. X dropdown -> 3rd option) while preserving ambiguity?

473 comments, 0 mentions of Rafic Hariri or Hezbollah. HN, I really had higher expectations.

Very late to the discussion but I might be missing something; a majority of you are bashing this by saying "it's just a demo"/"games never end up looking like that":

a) If this demo is runnable at real time fps on ps5 hardware ($400-500 WITH markup)...that's a technologically phenomenal feat in itself.

b) If the engine IS capable of running something like this...they are not lying. The responsibility for "good looking games" then falls on to game studios to deliver instead of halfassing something just to hit a deadline.

Where am I wrong?

I guess confidence really is key when making code public...

Sorry for not contributing to the discussion, just want to note that this is a very nicely worded reply. I usually stare in disbelief and am rude when confronted with this exact situation, so hats off to you.

What happens in the case where you have two properties, A and B that "work together"? For example disable A and visually the element stays the same, disable B and visually the element stays the same, but disable A and B and the element changes (and based on the way you regress it might falsely tell you that A or B is effective depending which one you disable latest).

I am not a philosophy grad nor is English my native language so I am sorry but I am not educated enough to continue this discussion.

I agree with you that he could have been more specific, but I do not agree with > said life was great (I summarise). In my interpretation of their comment, I took it to mean life has the potential to be great.

For the other two terms I have no opinion, will leave that to OP. But damn, if this is at all representative to what studying philosophy is like, isn't it exhausting?

surely this has got to be the edgiest comment on HN.

> 'surely'? - how does one justify saying that?

life is the superset of all possible experiences. If any element has a property (i.e. is deep) it will be contained within life.

I don't think anyone is trying to take anything away from your tragedy, but we are discussing semantics. Life can be "not very deep" and still be the deepest thing in existence, by definition.

Hey, could the readme provide a list of how far along this project got (i.e. material types, object imports, textures, optimizations for collisions)?

Very out of left field, but how does one start doing these kind of things?

My background is in CS and math, and I could have come up with and built everything up to exporting the mesh into triangles, but would have needed months of google searching and trial and error to do the actual "machining" part of things.

And then even if I went through the painful process of learning it on the job for this task, the learned skills would probably not transfer very well into the next adventure. Additionally, I imagine the machine used in the video is fairly expensive and not worth purchasing for one experiment.

I'm asking this because I find these kind of builds fascinating, but I'm always humbled about my skills when I think about the transition from digital to material.

While I can see what you're saying, you also have to properly compute, on your end, a cost for a False Positive and a cost for a False Negative.

In my opinion, in the case of security, I think a False Negative should weigh a lot, and thus measures to prevent it should be in place (i.e. not having an intern mindlessly looking through issues and sorting them into buckets).

Of course, the cost of each will depend on your app/company, its industry, its size, and so on.

I have those as well! Definitely more rare than my dumb days though. It's not so much the fact that I'm sharper, but life is just...rose-colored.

OP says "we couldn't find anyone with an urgent problem that they were willing to pay to solve" and "there was no market to capture". Wouldn't a counter example contradict those statements, regardless of the size of Palantir's clients?

I don't think so, at least not for this case.

I'm a sucker for slow burns in cinematography and books, but you can't just have no pace or structure and then say "yeah, these kids have no patience".

My completely uneducated opinion of the glass bead game was that Hesse was describing what could be a very interesting concept in a very poor manner, always high-level, and abstract enough that at times I thought he didn't flesh it out in his mind either and couldn't convey it properly.

Palantir is successful as well, but no clue what the hateboner on HN for them is, since it never even gets mentioned in these threads.

wow, that sounds worthy of a re-read in english just for that. thanks!

just in case there are other Romanians around, the best translation I've found is the one by Antoaneta Olteanu (from Corint).

A lot of friends that I respect and people on HN recommended "Master and margarita". I have only got back into reading ~4 years ago, so I haven't gone through all the great literature, but this felt different right after its midway point (starting with Satan's ball). My advice is to look for a translation with plenty of footnotes, because historical context plays a big part.

It's different to anything I've ever read, and definitely stays with you.

YMMV. I'm a big Hesse fan, and I tried reading The Glass Bead Game twice; couldn't get past 30-40% of it in either try, it was just too boring.

> one death today means 800 true cases today

this is serious. Take it seriously.

> the assumptions are well known field axioms. They form a good starting point.

I gave Peano as an example. I don't mind the assumptions, as long as they're reasonable and presented before the proof. Another comment pointed me to the fact that they were mentioned in an earlier paragraph, so my issue is resolved.

Okay, I either didn't see it or that was added after my comment. Either way, that is exactly what I wanted.

I strongly dislike these kinds of articles/posts due to one reason:

if you're going to prove such a fundamental thing, can you please provide the axioms that we start from? I.e. "we know" that a - a = 0, multiplication is distributive, and a x - b = - a x b. These seem arbitrary properties and "equally" fundamental to -a x -b = ab. Either start from peano and prove everything along the way, or tell the reader your assumptions. Don't just divine things along the way.

EDIT: Assumptions are in the third paragraph of the post. I highly doubt they were there when I wrote the comment. Either way, my concern has been resolved.

with the acquired information, the researcher has a few options:

- bulk acquire stolen credentials, bypass 2FA, bypass the security checks when sending money, and accumulate wealth

- sell above process to anyone that has an internet-connected device, the desire to accumulate wealth, and willingness to commit fraud (which I would guess is a non-trivial % of the world's population)

- disclose the vulnerabilities to paypal through any available channels

The fact that they went with the latter AND were punished for it doesn't shock you? Jesus.

played with this for ~5 mins and it's insanely bad (maybe it "guessed" right 3/15 tries?) i.e. slightly better than random guesses, even with very clear handwriting :(

Thanks for the feedback too!

Since you seem to have similar taste (or people you respect?), what other books/authors have you enjoyed/would recommend? I am a big fan of Hesse, despite his works being very unrelated to anything on my list.

how are you finding it?

My compiled list for 2020, as suggested by friends I respect and HN:

General

====

- Master & Margarita (w reader's guide)

- Why we sleep

- The righteous mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion

- The wisdom of insecurity

- The denial of death

- The three body problem (friend's advice: slow burn, stick with it)

- The dubliners

- The devils (Dostoyevski)

- The name of the rose

- Enten-Oller (Kierkegaard)

- Zero to one (Peter Thiel, recommended reading as palantir new joiner - not fantastic but has some thought provoking ideas; i.e. which very important truth would very few people agree with you on?)

Economy/finance

===

- Basic economics (Thomas Sowell)

- How an economy grows and why it crashes

- Know the city

Math

===

- Coffee time in Memphis

- Real analysis (mathematics textbook)

- Problems from the book (Halfway through this one, and I found it really enjoyable, even with only a CS bachelors)

If anyone has read any and has feedback/notes, I'm looking forward to hearing them!

This looks fantastic and gets me excited about where the field is going, despite the performance issues.