xb95

Honestly, this doesn't sound like a bad batch of drives or the like -- sounds like they weren't doing scrubbing on their RAID.

In case it's helpful, and for general knowledge dissemination:

What likely happened is that a drive "failed". This is usually when the RAID card decides that a drive has had enough command errors that it fails the drive. It may actually be fine, and just had a spate of bad responses. You might try to online the drive again and let it rebuild, but that's debatable.

At any rate, so they replaced the drive. That's fine. But then, to rebuild the RAID back to optimal state, it has to read all of the data off of the other drives. Here's where a bad scrubbing policy bites you -- because if those drives have any sectors that have gone bad or problems with the hardware, those drives might fail as soon as the rebuild runs.

Scrubbing should be done regularly (weekly?). What it does is, in essence, test every sector on all of the disks in the array to make sure that all of them are still fully functional so that -- if there is a failure -- you're pretty sure you can rebuild.

The downside of scrubbing is that, for better or worse, it does exercise your disks fairly heavily. Also, if you don't have a suitable trough period then you might even find it difficult to have the available I/O bandwidth to do it.

That said, you should do it if you're not.

Amusingly, this post made a lot more sense when I remembered that boxers are a type of dog.

That said, it's a great post and something that is all too easy to forget when you work with people, who often get angry at you when things aren't going their way. It's really kind of unfortunate, too; most companies have trained people that anger really is the best way to get something. If you yell, you might get a manager, and eventually the company just wants to placate you so that you go away. Now, people just reach for anger...

I think that in a lot of ways it's because of the roots of the organizations in question. Instead of saying "yeah, we have money, we can go buy this solution and trust in the vendor to support us" (an objectively viable solution in many situations) we instead say "we've got $100,000 in seed money and one engineer plus some friends she's convinced to help out pro bono, that won't buy us a sideways glance from Oracle".

Once you've survived the first year or two and gained some traction, suddenly the decision to investigate other solutions becomes a break from tradition -- and no engineer wants to throw away their work. It's incredibly hard to do a full stop, look around, and reevaluate your needs to see if you should just go in a different direction. I'm not sure I've ever seen it happen, really; we always just bow to the organic growth and inertia that we've established.

There is also a strong tradition of Not Invented Here (NIH) at work in this ecosystem. If it wasn't written by one of your peers (other startup people) then it's just not very cool. Use a Microsoft or Oracle product? Hahaha, no. Open source or bust!

...

To be fair, though, I've never worked for a startup that could afford that kind of software, so I guess the point is moot. I'm not spending 20% of my startup's cash reserves on software licenses to Oracle, when I can instead use that $2m to hire a few people to build it for me and know it inside and out. Plus, then they're invested in my company.

Also, please don't think I'm denigrating open source software with this commentary. I just think that the kind of zealotry that precludes even considering all of the options is, in general, a bad business decision, but one we seem to make all of the time.

But Google's will still work. :)

It turns out it's a hell of a job to go through and figure out what to delete. It's far cheaper to just buy more disks and continue expanding the storage system and never delete anything...

For me, the really interesting point of the article was less "yay, it's faster than Python" (which is generally undisputed), but more that (to paraphrase):

"I didn't know anything about Go other than 'it sounds cool', so I decided to rewrite this very important bit of Disqus' infrastructure. In one week, from start to finish, I had it implemented, tested, and deployed and improved latencies by several orders of magnitude and reduced the capacity requirement from four fully loaded servers to 20% of one!"

To be able to say that is pretty impressive, worth writing about, and definitely interesting to me as someone who wants to see Go used more. Disqus is well known, has lots of traffic, and so a recommendation from them carries a lot more weight than some random benchmarks. (As cool as they are.)

One of the most solid news sources for EVE lately is http://themittani.com/ -- it's actually more than just EVE, but they have a large number of EVE related articles.

If you're not a player it can be hard to figure out what's going on, though, as many of the articles target people who are pretty familiar with the game.

I am not acquainted with what language every framework uses. It would be useful for me in interpreting the data if you could annotate -- Java/JVM, PHP, Python, Perl, etc.

This is great work, though. Thank you for doing it -- and double thank you for taking submissions from each of the communities so they can try to submit their best shot. That really helps make sure the tests are as ideal as possible.

Well, if your argument is that it's easier to contribute to NPM, then you should consider that Perl has been managing the same output for 18 years that the Node community has for the past four: about 6700 modules/year.

For what it's worth, uploading to CPAN is not very difficult. Getting a PAUSE account is easy and uploading is no problem. It's really no harder than the PyPI system.

In my experience with an underperforming employee on my team, it was exactly like this. Everybody knew what the problem was; they were constantly talking about him in my one-on-ones. "Man, Ted did this thing and it pissed me off." "Ted didn't do his job again." "Ted dropped the ball on this project." There was a lot of frustration.

I don't think that publicly shaming him in the team meetings would have done any good. There would have been blood in the water and that would have just been a bad meeting. I've certainly been in meetings where that's happened and nobody walks out feeling good -- it's so easy to let the fire catch you and out come the pitchforks... it's just ugly. People should have the chance to redeem themselves. If you've chosen to humiliate them them in public, though, that becomes a serious long-shot.

In my case, after several months of working with my particular Ted I did let him go. It was the right call for the team -- and for him, I think. (Although I admit that might be hubris; I hope it was the right thing for him.)

It wasn't just being mean.

First-hand experience in my case. He and his GNAA attacked my volunteer-run open source project and did many things, including calling Child Protective Services (CPS) and making false complaints -- leading one of my volunteers and his children to have to undergo interviews with CPS to suss everything out.

They emailed one person's professors at university and made false, damaging claims. Bosses were tracked down and jobs were contacted. Parents were found and harassed. Our web site was attacked and taken offline. Our business associates were contacted and they concocted a fictitious business persona to file spurious complaints with our payment processors, leading to us being dropped from two providers.

weev was not just "being mean", he transcended that to stalking, bullying, and harassment. He caused emotional harm to my volunteers and staff and fiscal harm to my business. All in the name of "trolling".

And yes: we pursued the legal route. The FBI is just not super interested in tracking down some random dude on the Internet for harassing a small business. They were happy to talk to us and very compassionate and gave us some advice, but that was the extent of it.

This advise seems like it's suited for the business world and not well placed here.

In the tech/startup world, I would advise against doing this sort of in-depth questioning of references. Really, most of these checks are going to be done by your HR team/recruiter and all they're really trying to establish is that they are who they say they are. They're not trying to establish how awesome the candidate is.

The "awesomeness" part is something you need to establish through the rest of the process:

* interviews with the hiring manager and team

* code samples via Github or some other project

* a coding challenge that is reviewed by several people

There are some other things you can do. I for one am a proponent of the "social interview" idea. I like to have candidates come over for some part of the event where they aren't sitting in a conference room and you aren't asking them technical questions. See if you can have a conversation with her, figure out if he's friendly and interesting, decide if you're willing to spend the next two years "in the trenches" with this person.

If someone is connected then they can just talk to their connections and get the information and help they need.

I'm just saying it's not good to post these postmortems publicly. "We got hit by X. We did Y." Now when Q comes along to attack you, they know what not to do and also know how you mitigated X so they can more efficiently attack you. The EV from posting attack postmortems is just not there.

General practice in the industry is not to discuss the details of attacks publicly.

As much as it sucks, the rule of thumb is that you need every advantage you can get when it comes to being attacked. You gain little by talking about these kinds of things publicly and stand to lose much (by giving away how you're mitigating the problem, for example, possibly leading the attackers to adjust their attack). It's just generally safer not to.

If you are someone who runs a web site, once you hit a certain size where you have to worry about DDoS attacks you will certainly have the kind of industry connections where you can talk about the issue privately and get help and/or help someone. Below a certain size you just don't generally have to worry about it -- and if you do get attacked, the response will mostly be done by your provider as there's not usually a lot you can do if you're just a few servers.

FWIW, those documents are a fantastic start and contain the sort of things that I wish I had known about MongoDB and Riak before embarking on quests to use them.

I hope you do well -- the world really needs a good amalgamation of strong data integrity (ACID, transactions) and the ease-of-life that distributed databases generally give you. Since I don't work in an industry where I need microsecond reads, I'm perfectly happy to pay the cost of "it might take 10s of milliseconds to commit this" if I can avoid having to go down the "okay, now I have to shard my project" path for an eighth time. :-)

It is my impression that BTC are mostly used by people who either a) want to stock up for the future "just in case" or b) want to minimize their digital paper trail for online purchases.

Think of it as "cash" but for the online world. Some people pay cash for everything possible just to eliminate the paper trail. Not because they have anything to hide, but just to reduce their digital footprint. A noble goal, I think, and one that I'm glad to see is starting to become a realistic goal online.

Yeah, I found it incongruous and strange to have that picture on top.

I really want to be excited by this.

For better or worse, after being in this industry for a long time now all I can say about a new database launch is: cool, I'd love to talk to you in 3-5 years when you've had time to work out the hinks and people have figured out what your strengths and weaknesses are and where the real gotchas will getcha.

Until then: good luck. A distributed, linearly scalable, easy-to-admin NoSQL database with transaction support and full ACID would be delicious indeed.

Speaking as a hiring manager, a resume is still good to setup a basic framework. What has this candidate done (names, places, types of work), what do they find interesting to highlight, what kind of extra stuff can I glean?

What's interesting to me is less the actual words on the page and more how you put it together. Some questions I am asking myself when going through resumes:

* Does this person know how to spell and can they use relatively proper grammar? I don't care if you're "Just" going to be a programmer, I expect a certain level of ability to document and write English. (And yes, if you're clearly not a native English speaker, that is taken into account. I still expect you to spell well -- spellcheck! -- but the rest is more fluid.)

* What is their organization style like? Did they convey the information in a straightforward, easy to parse way, or is it a complete organizational mess?

* Did they mention any open source volunteering or projects they're part of? This is a strong indicator of someone who is proactive and engaged with the world.

* Do they list code references? A Github or Sourceforge account would be ideal, but I'll take anything I can get.

* Do they tell me about their hobbies? (I generally hope not.) If they do, what do I think about them and what that means about a person? (Note: it's not fair to judge someone by the fact that they are a fly fisher, but it's damned hard not to, so please: stop putting your hobbies on your resume!)

* Do they list a bunch of accolades and Greek societies? If so, they probably value certain types of recognition more than others. (This isn't a negative, it's just interesting to note.)

* Do they hop from place to place, or are they the type who has been at Google for 8 years? These aren't necessarily pros or cons -- it all depends on why they made the decisions they did, and how open the candidate is about things.

Uhm, now I'm rambling. Anyway, hiring is hard, resumes are hard, but I still really enjoy reading them. I understand that I could get most of the same from a portfolio -- and certainly, someone's Github profile would give me most of this -- but I still like to see someone out of their element. Most of us are engineers, but sometimes we have to document or present and I really enjoy seeing how people handle those sorts of tasks.

"If it comes to this, don’t get down on yourself. Taking the rejection is an important part of the process. If it comes down to this, don’t get down on yourself."

The first sentence is repeated twice in that paragraph. :)

I'm a country boy who grew up in the midwest and came here when a company I worked for in Portland got acquired. I've been stuck here for 8 long years, now, and constantly dream about going somewhere else.

California is fine, the SV is okay, there are certainly jobs and lots of opportunity and at this point I've built quite the network ... but seriously, I miss being able to go outside and see a field of corn from time to time.

One day...

Andrew Auernheimer, known online as "weev" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev), is nothing like Aaron Swartz. I speak from personal experience with weev.

Thanks to weev and his associates, my business partner, many of my volunteers, some family members of the above, and everybody who weev and his "trolls" could reach were subjected to a months-long campaign of constant harassement.

* One volunteer had to interview with Child Protective Services and the police because of false complaints made by weev and his friends.

* Another volunteer had trouble at her university because they tracked down her professors and made false claims.

* Our business faced several Denial of Service attacks and false complaints to our merchant processors and hosting providers.

* Harassing voicemails, phone calls, emails, IMs, IRC messages, etc etc etc.

The list of things that weev and the so-called Gay Niggers Association of America (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Nigger_Association_of_Ameri...) did to us is pretty long. It's sad, really.

In the end, it stopped when (I can only assume) he got bored. We developed a strong relationship with our hosting provider, our new payment processor, and we did as much as we could to help people who were put in bad situations because of weev's actions. Ultimately, we lost some volunteers and bled money for 3 months, but we survived.

So, weev has a good enough story to get his "confession" in TechCrunch and on Twitter and people think that he's another example of the over-broad reach of law and the destruction of young lives by powerful corporations/organizations.

Maybe it is.

But if you value the legacy of Aaron Swartz, do not for one minute confuse him and Andrew Auernheimer. One was a man driven by a vision who helped defeat SOPA and did many other good and noble things, the other is a self-described troll who spent years of his life doing his best to extract "lulz" from the pain and suffering of his fellow human beings.

There's a lot of conversation in this thread about how they take the whole computer.

I can say that in 2006, in San Francisco, the police took just the hard drives out of a tower PC in my apartment. They left the tower itself. (They were after my roommate, but since I had hardware in the "shared spaces", it was impounded along with all of his stuff. It sucked.) They also took all of the laptops whole (including my girlfriend's).

The police held on to the equipment for months. We tried everything short of hiring a lawyer to get it back, but they would not release it until they actually finished the case against the guy and he got out of jail. Then, magically, our hardware was available to come pick up.

Given that they had been working the case for months, I imagine that they were just sitting on the hardware long after forensics was done with it. Punitively, I suppose. Luckily, my employer at the time was very gracious and loaned my girlfriend and I hardware so we weren't completely out of pocket.

When the hardware was returned to us, we had to go pick it up. The guy handing it back over made some asinine comment about "you shouldn't be copying music", and we were free to go. Everything was in bad shape. There was tape all over things, one power adapter never came back, and my girlfriend's external hard drive enclosure was cracked and clearly had been dropped.

Pro tip: if you share space with someone, make sure your hardware lives in your private space. Don't leave your computers in the living room, or they will become confiscated if the people you live with get in trouble.

Amusingly, the time police raided my stuff (well, they went after my roommate, and my stuff was in the living room and got taken along for the ride) -- they took the hard drives out of my media server. It was a software RAID-5 setup.

I imagine that they have the technology to rebuild the drives, but I have always smiled at the thought of some tech sitting there trying to rebuild this and wasting weeks of his time trying to figure out exactly how everything went. (It was actually a really terrible partitioning setup that was non-intuitive, with a "dead" partition that wasn't part of the RAID and used for reduced redundancy storage.)

Absolutely, yes. In my case I was annoyed that my round trip from Orbitz took me through Hong Kong for 3 hours, so I went to Flightfox to see if I could make it 3 days. They said yes -- AND made the flight cheaper!

The other option was to try to book multiple round trips or a multi-city with Orbitz/Expedia/etc and in my case it was driving the cost way up. I wasn't happy with the result, and couldn't get the price sub-$3500 to do what I want -- and then I would have had to pay food and accomodations on top of the higher price.

In my case on Flightfox, the person was clearly just using some software. The time investment was probably minutes.

The value for me is that this person knows all of the rules -- cheap legs, good days to fly, how to get X or Y, fare codes, etc. Plus they have the underlying software that powers ticket searching, they don't have to use ridiculously terrible web portals like us normal folk.

In my case, Flightfox took what was a simple round trip "I am flying to Sydney for a conference" for $2400 and turned it into:

* Fly to Sydney * Return via Manila, stop for a week * Return via Hong Kong, stop for a few days * Return to San Francisco

They teased out my layovers into full-fledged stops, and brought the total cost down to $2100. They found a way to get way more value out of this trip than I would have otherwise.

Of course -- then they gave me a pile of fare codes and letters and said "call the airline, good luck!" I haven't actually booked the tickets. :(

I wasn't aware of/able to find the travel agents, so I paid the finder's fee but never actually booked tickets. It was too intimidating for me and I was too worried about ending up with half of the tickets and the other half becoming unavailable and ending up holding expensive partials.

Anyway, I'd be happy to pay for someone to handle it -- I'd even pay going rates -- but the whole process of me having to take the itinerary to someone else (that I have to find via Yelp or some other vehicle) or spend time on the phone with a couple of airlines is just too much for me. I'm super busy, and my expertise lies in tech -- not travel. :(

Flightfox is neat, but the thing that wasn't super clear and I found out later, after paying a finder's fee, is that you have to go through hoops to book your tickets.

This isn't just -- they put it together and you click a button and suddenly you have your tickets.

This is "now you have to spend hours on the phone, attempting to book these tickets, and you don't have enough information to really do it -- nor enough confidence to pull it off".

So I love Flightfox and I hope they succeed, but I'm hoping to save time -- and Flightfox definitely doesn't. It saves you money at the cost of adding a lot of extra time to your booking process, but that's not a tradeoff that is apparent from the start, IMO.

I can't speak for every introvert, but I will say that, for me, introversion does not preclude me from maintaining a blog, Twitter, etc.

Yeah, I don't broadcast my life -- but I talk about things that are interesting to me, and the Internet gives me a nice medium that I can use without feeling the willpower drain that comes from having constant face-to-face interaction.

Yeah, I was going to say, I know of at least one web site with lots of people on it where people do most of this. There is no explicit rating of people though, but there is certainly implicit: you see how many "likes" they get, how many followers, comments, etc. You know who's "good" at your kink and who's new, etc.

In this particular site, it's actually pretty well done. I think that they accomplish a great "this is a useful service for a portion of the population that areinterested in whips and chains" without crossing into "oh wow, this is totally creepy".

That said... I think that the author's overall point re: the desecration of meaningful things by turning them into cheap online experiences is totally valid. I am also depressed by the direction the world is going, and continually contemplating what I can do about it.

This doesn't stop ServerBeach, FWIW.

http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/agents/d/drmwidth.pdf

My business, Dreamwidth Studios, has a duly registered agent and has since 2008. We pay roughly $8,000/month to ServerBeach, and we've had bad experiences with ServerBeach's AUP and mishandling of DMCA notifications.

In our case, they refused to send us the DMCA notification, claiming that there were privacy concerns. (Sending it to us would violate the privacy of the person submitting it... yeah, blew my mind, too.)