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manigandham

24,990 karma · joined June 13, 2014

Built platforms and companies in automotive, commercial real estate and adtech. Now in finance running a private equity fund. Reach out if there's anything I can help with.

manigandham.com

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manigandham··on DeArrow – Solving clickbait on YouTube
You can also bookmark and go straight to your Watch Later playlist instead of the homepage.
manigandham··on TypeScript 5.2's new keyword: 'Using'
async/await and promises are both just syntax on top of yield/generators.

Most programming languages are just different syntax on top of the same core primitives.

manigandham··on My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things an iPhone still can't do
> "My 5 year old would respond with a better comeback" "No. We is the arrogant, opinionated "power users" and tech-commenters that think that the know what is best for everyone else."

What are you doing? Why is this discussion so triggering for you? You made the initial accusation and failed to see that it describes you.

The "we" is the commenters here talking about features they want, representing themselves and others, just like millions of other users who also have their own specific needs. The discussion is about why these features should exist, the benefits they bring, and the effects they might have.

Do we need to poll a billion users to discuss any functionality? Isn't Apple itself also just a few people deciding on changes that affect billions, while adding features that might only support a small minority? If someone says they want bigger buttons or slower animations, is that invalid because they're saying "what is best for everyone else" or are they just talking about what they want and why?

> "I'm siding with the status quo"

Cool, so just say that and make your argument. Many others have said similar things and there's been plenty of discussion about how this would affect the vast majority. But why get upset and call everyone arrogant because they have a different need or opinion? That's neither helpful nor productive.

> "At least I know not to invest in your fund, especially given your aversion to businesses that make money."

This is juvenile. Maybe take a break from the internet if you need to make personal attacks over this. We're also not open to outside money, perhaps if you weren't anonymous we can help you with investments more fit for you.

manigandham··on My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things an iPhone still can't do
> "I have a problem with any kind of absolutes."

What absolutes?

> "I also have a problem with a self-appointed tech commenters deciding what is best for everyone else due to their own biases."

This sounds like you.

> "but let's not pretend there are no other choices."

Nobody is confused by the current choices. Saying that the iPhone can't do the thing today that we want it to do in the future is just repeating a fact that is literally the reason for the discussion in the first place.

And yes it's strange to take the side of a trillion-dollar megacorp instead of users, especially considering the size and power of such a company.

manigandham··on How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs
There are hundreds of factors for each company and application. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s rarely as simple as retail prices.

Even the same number of "technical specialists" doesn't mean it's the same if one option lets you move faster or remain more reliable.

manigandham··on My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things an iPhone still can't do
> "iOS/iPad OS? Not hard."

Using vague terms like "the platform" are not useful. What does an operating system like "iOS/iPad OS" have to do with the "iOS/iPad ecosystem"? You're not clear even in your own reply. Please try to be more precise.

I'll assume what you're really asking is from the perspective of Apple since the benefit for users is clear - it'll help make more apps available which has network effects of more Apple devices and usage.

manigandham··on My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things an iPhone still can't do
Nobody here is confused. We know what devices we bought, and we know what they do and don't support today. That's the point. Otherwise there wouldn't be a discussion in the first place to talk about what they can, and likely should do.

And that's what this is - a discussion (on a discussion forum). If you're upset that you people don't share your views, the problem is squarely on your side. Plenty of people can understand and discuss the topic though.

manigandham··on My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things an iPhone still can't do
Because the scale of these companies gives them immense power and control over people's devices and (digital) lives. The size of the corporation leads to a geometric increase of power through network effects.

Now that you have an answer, what are you actually trying to ask? Do you have an issue with megacorps providing more control to users?

manigandham··on My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things an iPhone still can't do
I don’t care what other people do with their phone. Why do you care so much that I want to be able to do more with my iPhone?
manigandham··on My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things an iPhone still can't do
What is “the platform” exactly?
manigandham··on My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things an iPhone still can't do
Who said only?

But scale is a quality on its own and should be taken into consideration.

manigandham··on My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things an iPhone still can't do
If you don’t want the extra functionality then just don’t use it.

You can use the iPhone without ever installing any 3rd party apps, but it would be silly to say nobody else can just because you won’t.

manigandham··on My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things an iPhone still can't do
Trillion dollar mega corporations should give their users all the choice and flexibility they want, not the other way around.
manigandham··on My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things an iPhone still can't do
Again, the point is that it should be available to the people who want to.
manigandham··on HBO Max new Captcha system
Had similar issues with the Google recaptcha where the question is satisfied by either all the square or none of them - both being considered a wrong answer: https://twitter.com/ManiGandham/status/1635193312264200192
manigandham··on JobRunr: A library for background processing in Java
That has nothing to do with Kafka, or Java as a language.

Distributed big data processing systems need big data to actually be useful. Small data that fits on a single machine can also be processed on a single machine, which will always be faster than using a cluster with orchestration, distribution and network overhead.

manigandham··on JobRunr: A library for background processing in Java
> "are open source or open core or whatever companies really all that often a slam dunk?"

No, they're often not. Many struggle to ever make a profit.

manigandham··on RedisRaft
Cassandra (and ScyllaDB which is the same data model) allow for customizable consistency level on a per-query basis. You can send 1 write with only one node confirming while sending another requiring full cluster acknowledgement.

More details: https://docs.datastax.com/en/cassandra-oss/3.0/cassandra/dml...

manigandham··on Google Cloud Storage FUSE
Object storage is a higher-level abstraction than block-storage. FUSE and similar tech can do the job for basic requirements like read-only access by legacy applications but rarely works well for other scenarios.

A more complex layer like https://objectivefs.com/ (based on the S3 API) would be more useful, although I would've expected the cloud providers to scale their own block-store/SANs backed with object-stores by now.

manigandham··on Dropbox telemetry can't be disabled
Dropbox became popular because, from the perspective of 99% of users, it provides an incredibly simple and effective UX for syncing files across devices and locations. And better UX is enough to be a billion-dollar company.

Of course you can use whatever you want.

manigandham··on Parquet: An efficient, binary file format for table data
Use Redis. It's an in-memory data structure server, first created to have the same data structures usable and accessible across processes and languages.

Or plenty of other in-memory database products (Apache Ignite) or fast key/value (ScyllaDB) or just use RDBMS (Postgres or SQLite).

manigandham··on Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars
Customers expect privacy.
manigandham··on Quicker serverless Postgres connections
What is your definition of non-boring architecture? I'm curious as to what you consider the exciting architectures necessary for scaling to make sure we're talking about the same thing.

Quora, Pinterest, Twitter, etc are all just big app instances talking to DB instances, with separate systems for background processing, queues, and caching. Are you suggesting that they would scale better with serverless functions instead?

Here's a list of architectures: http://highscalability.com/all-time-favorites/

manigandham··on Quicker serverless Postgres connections
It is a terrible term but in this case it's referring to the client application, not the database instance.
manigandham··on Quicker serverless Postgres connections
Monolithic apps running on big servers talking to databases running on big servers. Very little orchestration overhead or complexity with serverless and the rest.

Everything from StackOverflow to ad serving systems to high-frequency trading exchanges are run this way.

manigandham··on Quicker serverless Postgres connections
Definitely not. I'd much rather scale Postgres manually through layers of sharding and proxies than handle Cassandra.

There is ScyllaDB for a much better reimplementation of Cassandra/Dynamo, but wide-column databases are still best for niche scenarios, especially as RDBMS are rapidly evolving into natively distributed architectures.

manigandham··on Quicker serverless Postgres connections
Planetscale[1] is MySQL that is automatically sharded and proxied with a system called Vitess to scale horizontally. Because it's real MySQL, most functionality still works without the operations overhead.

Neon[2] is Postgres that has a surgically enhanced data layer that reads from a distributed set of nodes and object storage, but is still a single Postgres instance that's started and stopped on-demand and not automatically sharded. Because it's real Postgres, all functionality works including extensions without dealing with issues from sharded datasets, but also without the horizontally scalability and instant start (so far). However because the data layer is improved, the actual compute node is much more efficient in both startup and processing so it works well in many scenarios.

CockroachDB[3] is a proprietary distributed database built to Postgres wire/data protocol with natively separated storage and compute. Their serverless plan also starts and stops instances as traffic comes in but with fast startup because of their specific architecture. Because it's not real Postgres though, there's a good bit of missing functionality.

There's also TiDB[4] from PingCap which is similar to a MySQL version of CockroachDB, and Yugabyte[5] which is somewhat like Neon but with both distributed compute and data layers also using real Postgres components - however neither has a serverless offering.

1. https://planetscale.com/ 2. https://neon.tech/ 3. https://www.cockroachlabs.com/ 4. https://www.pingcap.com/tidb/ 5. https://www.yugabyte.com/

manigandham··on Quicker serverless Postgres connections
Also known as layers of abstractions. The entirety of (software) technology is built on that concept.
manigandham··on Quicker serverless Postgres connections
Being boring has nothing to do with scale. Some of the biggest applications run on incredibly simple architectures, and often are able to scale so well because of that (boring) simplicity.
manigandham··on Push notifications are now supported cross-browser
Yes. Apple's changes have reduced tracking in both modalities but webapps are far more constricted by Safari than native apps.
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