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tylerl

1,047 karma · joined August 17, 2015

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tylerl··on Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible
It's curious then that they're suing Domino's.

Domino's has a phone number, and every capability the company offers over the web it offers over the phone. In fact, since this business in particular was built on telephone-based ordering, the the phone option is actually the first-class experience, with the web offering only a fraction of the options otherwise available.

So at least in this case, ordering pizza over the phone instead of web is precisely as suitable a substitute as speaking to a waiter instead of reading your Chinese menu in braille.

The plaintiff will argue that regardless of the fact that no business services are actually unavailable, it is the website itself that is being denied. And falling back to a compatible communication medium is inherently unsuitable regardless of whether the fallback is sufficiently functional.

And if that's the case, then it's functionally equivalent to say that failing to provide accessible menus in a restaurant, and falling back to having the menu spoken aloud, is a denial of rights.

I'm not going to say whether it's right or wrong, but it is certainly different than how the law had been interpreted in the past.

tylerl··on Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says
>> Like Office 365 being part of their cloud division, including when people download and install office on their computer.

It's even sillier than that: Microsoft counts (a significant portion of) boxed copies of Office that you buy in a store as Azure cloud revenue. The justification being that buying a copy Office in a box gets you the right to the cloud-based version rather than the offline one you actually bought. Ultimately it's about flexibility.

And in this case, the flexibility to make your Cloud business whatever percentage of your total company revenue it might take in order to claim the market share numbers you want.

tylerl··on XMPP: A Communication Protocol for the Internet of Things
When I'm building firmware for an ATMega or a Cortex-M0 or Tensilica device, the idea of dedicating the required space in my firmware for an XML parser, burning the CPU overhead for doing the parsing, losing the network overhead for the verbose text encoding... all this is absolutely absurd. Just so I can use XMPP? Why? That's my battery life getting wasted, that's my features getting displaced.

There's no place for XML in iot, and definitely no place for XMPP. Even json is luxury you often can't afford, not if you want to make a reasonable cost target or battery life.

tylerl··on An Update to Our Community and an Apology
This is pretty bad. It would have been way better to post nothing than to post this.

If you want to have a community, then treat your community like intelligent humans. And to be clear, you absolutely _depend_ on the good will of your community. This is non-optional.

Admit your mistake and fix it. And if you think that your mistake was the timing, then talk to someone who understands the situation.

tylerl··on An Update to Our Community and an Apology
Ya...that was a joke. "I'm sorry you feel that way" is the classic apology-free use of the word "sorry". It means "I pity you for your plight" rather than "I recognize my mistake".
tylerl··on Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?
> _Everyone in a shitty position has a right to speak up._

Yep. But they _don't_ have the right to make anyone else care. Say whatever you want about your own problems, but if your situation is comparatively better, then don't expect people to give a damn. And complaining is not without risk. It's not uncommon to make your situation _even worse_ by speaking out when your problems are comparatively light.

Speaking up in a situation where those who take notice want to help you, that's real courage. Speaking up such that those who notice don't care, that's just whining. The only significant difference is how others interpret your situation, and the primary factor is how your problems compare to others.

And you're right, that's not fair. Sorry.

tylerl··on Processing 40TB of code from 10M projects with a dedicated server and Go
Can't you do all this same research in just a few seconds for like pennies, just by sending a few sql queries to Google's BigQuery? I'm pretty sure we've had stories about that here.

https://medium.com/google-cloud/github-on-bigquery-analyze-a...

tylerl··on Ask HN: Will getting a PhD lead to a more interesting life?
If we're talking about Computer Science, a PhD will generally not get you a job. The good jobs all look for skills rather than credentials, and formal education is mostly ignored, both during hiring and at work in general.

The case where a PhD will actually help is when your research topic is relevant to the business, where the work you did to get your PhD actually broke new ground in an way that makes you an expert on a problem the company wants to solve.

tylerl··on Google to stop showing news snippets for French users
Right, so like I said, their only benefit is to their brand. It preserves the expectation that Google is the best place to find everything.

And the French law applies to all companies in Google's position, not just to Google. So the there's still nowhere better than Google for users to go.

The only losers in this deal are the French news agencies, and perhaps French users if you consider them worse off for not finding French news sources.

tylerl··on Google to stop showing news snippets for French users
Google news doesn't have ads. There's no money to lose.

The whole concept France is pushing has been ludicrous all along. There's no revenue to share or for Google to lose. It's just a free service. Just free. No ads. No money.

The ads are on the search page. Not the news page.

tylerl··on Google to stop showing news snippets for French users
> ...they hope that Google will suffer enough from this decision that they'll have to reconsider in the future...

Google loses literally nothing.

Google doesn't make any money off Google news. They make money sending traffic to advertisers, not to news sites. And the Google news page doesn't run ads. It's just a free service.

The only benefit to Google is that it makes their brand better.

This has been the irony all along; Google's been running a 100% free (NOT ad supported) service to help users find news sites, and the news sites demand to be compensated. So OF COURSE this is going to be the response; there was never any money to share.

tylerl··on Culture Fit Interview Questions
As someone who ALSO does these interviews, it sounds like you're doing more harm than good. Interviews are never the place for adversarial questioning or psychological games. If you wouldn't feel comfortable writing your questions and their answers verbatim in your interview feedback, you shouldn't ask them.

Getting a useful signal is as much about the interaction as the questions, and if you're acting like a jerk then the most appropriate response for a strong culture fit is for the candidate to not want to work with you. Which is probably not something you're capturing very well.

tylerl··on Culture Fit Interview Questions
The relevant bit in "Why do you want to work for our company" is the unstated "...as oppose to another." Ideally the answer is some property of the company that aligns well with the candidates ideals. But it presupposes that the candidate knows of some attribute that fits this frame.

A better question might be to make the company attribute hypothetical. Something like: "if you could propose a rule for all employees at the company where you want to work, what would it be." You'd definitely need follow-up questions and promoting, but it could be way more insightful.

tylerl··on How Apple Kills Indie Developers
The problem it lookes like is that apple locked the account because they were reviewing something, but didn't say what, and didn't say why, and didn't provide any more information other than "just sit tight, we'll eventually tell you why your account is locked, and maybe unlock it." They even acknowledge this screws over the end users, but that's life and quit complaining.

And then that's it, for months.

That is DEFINITELY Apple's fault.

tylerl··on Strengthening Congressional Independence from Corporate Lobbyists
So, like Harry Reid was for the Democrats? Yeah, we got baddies on both sides, especially in positions of authority.
tylerl··on The /e/ Google-free, pro-privacy Android clone is now available
I see no reason reason to expect that this will fail to capture enough market share to justify maintaining it, and then stop providing updates, leaving its users with an insecure and unmaintained fork that offers no compelling benefit over it's better-maintained alternatives.

None at all.

tylerl··on Employer health plans are getting pricier and skimpier
And here I was expecting that an environment that suppresses price information and and eliminates competitive pressure would just get cheaper and better over time.

Silly me.

tylerl··on A ‘Grass-Roots’ Campaign to Take Down Amazon Is Funded By Its Biggest Rivals
>> So you're saying, "All regulation is insitutionalized violence." Okay...

> Yeah, essentially.

Nifty! If all appeals to government intervention are by definition violent, then that would mean that, for example, filing a sexual harassment lawsuit or pressing charges against a kidnapper is actually just, "solving the problem by resorting to violence." That really spices up a headline.

As someone else mentioned, words have meanings. We all (well most of us, apparently) agree that given words refer to specific things. That's how we communicate. Appropriating a word with the desired connotation to an arbitrary definition just because you can find a way in which they're associated -- that's misleading. It's using inapplicable words intentionally, for the purpose of causing others to incorrectly understand what you're talking about.

It turns out we have a special word that refers precisely to that very type of communication: "lying."

tylerl··on Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law
Bullshit. "Respect users data" means different, incompatible things to different people and in different circumstances. You can't "respect" all of them at the same time.

Take the data deletion requirement. I know of many instances where users have permanently lost absolutely critical data because of that provision (already found in other privacy laws). When a user (accidentally) indicates they want you to delete their content, the provider has to permanently delete it within a reasonable timeframe, including purge from all backups.

Most users don't give a flying f'ck about all this privacy BS, but they care very much about what happened to their Master's thesis. They want a company who will be able to rescue them from their own mistakes. They want dependability. But they get "privacy" instead, and their accidentally wishes that you purge all their stuff gets obeyed.

Maybe you call that progress. But it really sucks when you purchase vague hypothetical benefit at the cost of real-world misery.

tylerl··on Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law
It makes it extremely difficult to legally be a tech firm unless you're already a tech giant, just like the FDAs procedures make it impossible to invent a new drug unless you're already an established, giant pharma company.

None of the big names in tech will have any trouble at all complying with this; I'd be very surprised if any at all are not already compliant today.

At the same time, the percentage of tech startups that are already compliant with this law is likely around zero, and few will ever become so. Unless this is precisely what your startup is about, small firms, especially with venture funding, can't afford to invest anything at all into privacy beyond the surface. If your startup fails because it gets sued into oblivion, that's no worse (and way less likely) than it failing because nobody actually wanted a chat app for dogs.

tylerl··on Solar and Wind Power So Cheap They’re Outgrowing Subsidies
Problem is that if the word "subsidies" is used exclusively to mean a specific and narrow concept around cash transfers when talking about renewables, but then you use the term to include a much broader set of scenarios when talking about fossil fuels, while directly comparing the derived numbers, then you're misusing the language in order to deceive, regardless of all else. You're communicating that the numbers represent the same calculations for both forms of energy, when you know that they actually don't.

Define the terms however you like, as long as you are careful to not to induce people to believe someone that is untrue.

tylerl··on Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
Yeah, I agree.

You can learn it in like 30 minutes, and understanding the concept behind it (not just the notation) is the core of understanding why some algorithms work better than others.

tylerl··on Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
Very few "real" tech companies require degrees now, certainly none of the sensible ones do. Looking at the front page of job listings on this board, you see Dropbox, Google, Uber, Oracle, Amazon, Visa, Atlassian, and Bank of America all with serious tech jobs (some of them quite senior) with no education requirement.

But what you will need is the knowledge that you would have otherwise gotten with a CS degree. If you don't know a priority queue from a linked list, or you can't name an example of an O(nlog(n)) algorithm, then you're going to struggle in way more than just the interview; this crap comes up in real life more often than might be obvious.

Luckily there are more than enough free places to learn this stuff. It's far less structured than a college, and requires an absurd amount of discipline to do on your own time, but nothing is missing. Beyond the ad-hoc content, several top-tier universities put their CS courseware online for free, and you can totally get the same CS education that others pay $200K for. You don't get the paper that says you did it, but you don't really need it.

Getting through the resume barrier is a bit more tricky, but here's a tech recruiting open secret: Stack Overflow. It's gold for recruiters, and extremely heavily used. They find people who consistently post strong answers on topics relevant to the company they're recruiting for and directly recruit them to interview. Skip the job listings. If you have a strong S.O. profile and provide enough information for recruiters to track down who you are, you'll get no end of attention.

That and GitHub. Write some code that demonstrates good design and put it up. When I was doing talent vetting for small firms, a person's Github page was a far more valuable signal than their "qualifications".

tylerl··on How the “Mail & Guardian” got taken down
Maybe, perhaps if you're a serious news organization you might not want to host your site on Linode.

Not that Linode is bad or anything; I'm super happy with them myself. But the way a company deals with abuse complaints (including takedowns) reflects the volume of these that they have to deal with, and the blowback they've experienced by overreacting.

If the provider is tiny, then takedowns are rare and interesting. They'll examine each one based on its individual merits. Though small companies don't have the resources to dump a lot of money into making things right, so they may just take the cheap route and kick you out.

If the provider is reasonably large, they'll get these all the time, and they'll have an automated and inflexible solution for dealing with them. It'll be heavily weighted on minimizing the cost to the provider, and will tend to overreact just to be on the safe side.

If the provider is huge (like, top N kind of huge) then they'll have started with the automated overreaction solution, but then they'll have had some massive disaster because their automated abuse system took down a client like Sony or the New York Times or something. So then the'll have dialed back their abuse system a bit and made it more expensive to run, but less prone to being destructive.

tylerl··on Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Boost Its Own Products
Amazon: fast shipping, easy returns. That's literally the beginning and end of their entire value proposition. If any other company can fill that niche, they can have my money with no regrets.
tylerl··on If you have something important to say, don't say it in a paywalled publication
I have a response to this comment which represents the result of 16 months of dedicated research, and will have a positive effect on both the discussion and also the industry as a whole, provided my content gets the attention that it deserves.

It'll cost you $15 to read it though. Research like this is expensive, and since you're the party who will benefit, you have a duty to pay me.

If you refuse to pay me to read what I have to say, it means you hate the truth.

tylerl··on A Kubernetes/GKE mistake that cost me thousands of dollars
>> There is a reason why these DevOps certifications exist in the first place...

Yes there is a reason, but you're not going to like the answer if I tell you what it is.

tylerl··on Building a Better Go Linker
> it is several years past due for Google to start investing seriously in a Go toolchain based on a mature compiler stack.

That's a bit presumptuous, prescribing specific implementation details based on the fact that it's "several years past due" that they replace their tech stack with one you would like to see improved.

Remember there already is a mature C compiler alternative for Go: gccgo. There's also already a first-party LLVM based Go toolchain created by Google (gollvm). Whatever hypothetical benefits you might presume would emerge from this kind of synergy already exist. But the community mostly isn't interested.

Also, Google also already invests a massive amount of resource into LLVM. In fact, the principal author of LLVM and Clang works at Google. But even when he was at Apple they were already shoveling resource into the project.

tylerl··on A high-speed network driver written in C, Rust, Go, C#, Java
If you can't see or interpret the graphs (mobile browser, etc.) here's a quick description of the relative performance in terms that might be useful even without the graphs.

Bidirectional forwarding, Packets per second: Here, the batch size matters; small batches have a lower packet rate across the board. Each language has increasing throughput with increasing batch size up to some point, and then the chart goes flat. Python is by far the slowest, not even diverging from the zero line. C is consistently the fastest, but flattens out at 16-packet batch at 27Mpps. Rust is consistently about 10% slower than C until C flattens out, then Rust catches up at the 32-packet batch size, and both are flat at 27Mpps. Go is every so slightly faster than C# until the 16-packet batch size where they cross (at 19Mpps), then C# is consistently about 2Mpps faster than Go. At the 256-packet batch size, C# reaches 27Mpps, and Go 25Mpps. Java is faster than C# and Go at very low batch sizes, but at 4 packets per batch Java slows down (10Mpps), and quickly reaches its peak of 11 to 12 Mpps. OCaml and Haskell follow a similar curve, with Haskell consistently about 15% slower than Java, and Ocaml somewhere between the two. Finally, Swift and Javascript are indistinguishable from each other, both about half the speed of Haskell across the board.

Latency, at 90, 99, 99.9, 99.99.. etc., percentile. 1Mpps: All have zero-ish latency at the 90 percentile point, then Javascript latency quickly jumps to 150us, then again at 99.99%ile jumps again to 300us. C# is the next to increase: at the 99%ile mark there's a steady increase till it hits 40us at 99.99%ile. Then a steady increase to about 60us. Haskell keeps it at about 10us until 99.99%ile, then a steady increase to about 60us, and a sudden spike at the end to 250us. Java latency remains low until 99.95%ile, then it quickly spikes up reaching a max of 325us. Next OCaml spikes at around 99.99%ile, reaching a max of about 170us. Next comes Swift, with a maximum of about 70us. Finally, C, Rust, and Go have the lowest latency. Rust and C are indistinguishable, and Go latency diverges to about 20% higher than the other two at the 99.999%ile mark, where it sways, eventually hitting around 25us while C and rust hit about 22us.

tylerl··on A high-speed network driver written in C, Rust, Go, C#, Java
Go isn't designed to feel mature, it's designed to be boring and effective. It's designed to keep code complexity low even as the complexity of problems and solutions increases. It's designed to allow large teams of medium-skill programmers to consistently produce safe and effective solutions. The most precise description ive heard to date is: "Go is a get shit done language."
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