markdoubleyou

I found this irritating, too. I had to google LNKD--it's the stock symbol for LinkedIn. Made me feel dumb for not figuring it out from the context.

Right. Rippetoe is very clear that GOMAD is only intended for underweight 19 year-olds who are trying to add mass.

My son won a Clapper in the family's white elephant gift exchange. We hooked it up to our Christmas tree lights, and, I gotta say, the thing is pretty great for that use case--no more reaching through pine needles to reach the plug.

And somehow it manages to do this without running TCP/IP stack. I'm working on a project in the IoT space right now, and a Clapper is making me feel kind of silly about it.

I thought it was a joke, too, until I came here and started reading comments.

It is predicted that by 2022, 90% of new apps will feature a name that's a spelling variation of the word dapper.

Yeah, they have deep pockets, but IBM receives more patents every year than any other US company. They probably don't want to see the system reformed.

Wow, I wish more technical books used LaTeX for typesetting like this. Beautiful.

A language doesn't make code automatically reliable, but it can certainly help.

Ada can do overflow checking, so choice of language can have an impact on reliability, but the software engineers deliberately disabled some of those checks to save CPU cycles on a computer that was running at/near capacity. Their reasoning was that it was impossible for the variables in question to overflow given the known flight characteristics... of an Ariane 4.

Redis lets you store and manipulate some basic data structures like linked lists, maps, and sets -- so a value in Redis doesn't necessarily have to be a big, serialized blob (though I bet that a lot of people use it this way, as if it was a drop-in replacement for Memcached).

https://redis.io/topics/data-types-intro

Yeah, they're back to owing Spring again. I wonder about the future of developer-centric Pivotal products. VMWare already acquired Spring, RabbitMQ, and GemFire back in 2009/2010 and then spun them off into Pivotal. So now that they've gone and acquired them again, will they divest again and just hold on to the K8s bits? VMWare is totally geared toward selling into IT orgs and has never seemed interested in dealing with developers.

This stuff has been out there for a long time, but it's never become popular outside of outside of safety-critical or high-integrity systems. Examples include:

Microsoft's C/C++ annotations: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/code-quality/u...

Ada's ranges: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Types/range

Fun stuff to learn about in theory, but, unless you're working at a place where formal verification is part of the culture, good luck selling these tools to upper management.

More resources discussed here: http://highscalability.com/blog/2018/9/19/how-do-you-explain...

Yeah, this gotcha doesn't bother me nearly as much as the classic:

  [9, 10, 11].sort()

  [ 10, 11, 9 ]

I just looked up the Domino joiner. It looks amazing, but good lord, it's $1500 after you add in the different sized cutters.

"The Silicon Valley company and the F.T.C.'s consumer protection and enforcement staff have been in negotiations for months over a financial penalty"

Honest question: What gets negotiated in this kind of settlement? What leverage does Facebook have in this situation to say, "no, that fine is too high"?

Privacy Badger detected 16 potential trackers, and uBlock stopped requests to 13 out of 30 domains the page tried to connect to. It's not usatoday.com levels of absurdity, but it's getting there.

Great analysis, thank you.

I think their sales team is going to be in for a long, hard slog. Yes, Redis is popular right now, but the middleware space gets harder every year. Cloud providers slurp up the easy, low-hanging fruit ("click this checkbox to add a managed Redis instance to your deployment"), so all that'll be left are the big, slow, complex enterprise sales. Yeah, they pay well, but it's a brutal, competitive sales cycle, and that kind of customer often wants a lot of high-touch post-sales engineering services.

I wonder what VCs expect of Redis Labs now that they've raised a total of $146M. Let's say the VCs are shooting for a 10x return... does that mean everyone's expecting a sale/IPO for $1.5B (with revenues of maybe $25M/year)? It took RL 7+ years to get to this point, so what do investors see that I don't see?

"After about a month of consistently practicing problems each day (maybe 2–3 hours/day, more on weekends)..."

I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.

I'm interested in the http://seastar.io/ networking library that the Scylla guys built. Looks like it runs on DPDK and might be a nice way to do user mode networking. Anyone tried using it in other projects?

The two I know of are Google's Blockly (https://developers.google.com/blockly/) and Microsoft's Touch Develop (https://www.touchdevelop.com/), which is more capable as a standalone app development platform.

I've tried writing a small program with each on my phone and quickly grew frustrated. It just isn't efficient for me. I much prefer the familiar ground of using Python on Termux using Hacker's Keyboard, and, even then, only to tackle trivial stuff that a calculator can't quite handle.

Great article, thank you for sharing!

It's more databasey. Airtable is to Sheets the same way that MS Access is to Excel... for example, you can do many-to-many relationships between tables using junction tables.

The Persistent Memory Development Kit (PMDK) offers high-level abstractions over DAX. Looks like most mortals would use libpmemobj (or its C++ bindings).

http://pmem.io/pmdk/

I'd be surprised if Azure Stack sees big adoption any time soon; they aren't just letting you run some Azure services on existing hardware... the way they're doing it is to really take the "cloud in my datacenter" concept to the extreme:

* Subscription pricing like a cloud service, even though it's on-premise.

* Only runs on certified hardware appliances... You're looking at an investment of at least $300,000 for a base configuration.

So, OK, I get it, you're getting a private cloud and you're not supposed to worry about hardware anymore, but it's probably too big a mental shift for most traditional enterprises. And people with that kind of budget are already locked into a VMWare infrastructure for the next couple of years.

My company just started using XenForo, and we've been pretty happy with it. We're self-hosting on a cheap AWS Lightsail instance.

We really wanted to to like Dicourse, but everyone on my team found some little thing that really annoyed them ("why does it hijack ctrl-f?", etc.). It was death by a thousand cuts. XenForo is the most modern of the traditional forum platforms that I reviewed. Everyone just gets it.

Exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.

Yes, very helpful, thank you! I'd like to see methods like this go mainstream. The prevalent view these days seems to be that software construction begins and ends with unit tests... I don't know how Uncle Bob and his ilk managed to drown out all of the other approaches to construction, but it's always bothered me that even lightweight approaches to verification (like Design by Contract) haven't gotten the same traction. (I suspect it's because formal verification involves more requirements gathering and design work up front, but a lot of teams short-change that because "we're doing agile!!")

Anyway, thank you for putting this out there. I took a look at your first couple of chapters on Safari and your treatment of the subject is much more approachable to me than the wall of math I encountered in Leslie Lamport's stuff.

It seems like this book would have a pretty limited audience since, looking at Wikipedia at least, TLA+ is primary used at big cloud providers who are writing low-level distributed systems stuff.

Can any mortals who've used TLA+ discuss their motivation for using it and the impact it had on their project? I imagine you'd have had to work in a technology-driven environment to be able to justify it to management since formal verification isn't even in the vocabulary of most ordinary development shops.

Hooray for domain knowledge! Any process or tool that drags developers out of their cave to learn about the business context is worth its weight in gold. I recommend pretty much any video where James Coplien yells at a room full of developers about how we're doing software wrong, such as: https://youtu.be/gPP7Bleg214?t=1860

I've been looking at this, too, after the recent surge in HN Prolog headlines.

You're probably looking for Datalog. The Wikipedia topic has a list of systems that support it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datalog

Also, I found that AllegroGraph is a production graph database that supports Prolog queries... I don't think you load it with Prolog syntax, though--probably RDF triples instead.