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I think a hard part with lots of these “what do I use x for” examples is it starts with the tool and the discusses the problem that it solves. I find it more h

I think a hard part with lots of these “what do I use x for” examples is it starts with the tool and the discusses the problem that it solves. I find it more helpful to start with a problem, and discuss the various tools that address it, in different ways. Forget email, say you have a app that scans links in comments for maliciousness. You rely on an internal api for checking against a known blacklist, which follows shortened links first, and an external api from a third party. You want the comment to appear to submit instantly to the poster but are comfortable waiting for it to appear for everyone else. What are your options? You could certainly use message queues and workers. If you’re cloud native maybe you leverage lambdas. Maybe you spin up an independent service that does the processing and inserting into the database in the background, and all you need to do is send a simple HTTP request on an internal network. Your solution depends on your throughout requirements, the size of your team and their engineering capabilities, what existing solutions you have in place. Everything has its pros and cons. Pretending that celery/redis is useless and would be solved if everyone just used Java ignores the fact that celery and redis are widely popular and drive many successful applications and use cases.

StavrosK 6y ago
While I agree with the rest of your comment, the sentence "if you’re cloud native maybe you leverage lambdas" made me irrationally angry.
- CalRobert 6y ago
  Can you explain why? I use lambdas often and they seem to solve the problems they're meant for well.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    It wasn't the lambdas, it was the combination of "cloud-native", which is a very salesmany term, and "leverage", which is my pet hate word. It's exactly as useful as "use", only much more pretentious. I'm just easily triggered with language :P More off-topic (or, rather, on-topic), I find lambdas great for things like a static website that needs a few functions. I especially like how Netlify uses them, they seem to fit that purpose exactly.
    - normalnorm 6y ago
      > I'm just easily triggered with language :P Me too! It makes me irrationally angry when people regurgitate linguistic clichés. I was already mad with: "python does not have a go-like concurrency story" when it would be enough (and 1000x less cringe) to say: "python does not have go-like concurrency" I think these mindless clichés make language really ugly and dysfunctional, and even worse they are thought-stoppers, because they make the reader/listener feel like something smart is being said, because they recognize the "in-group" lingo. In my experience, people get really offended when you point this out. It's kind of an HN taboo to discuss this. Which is also interesting in itself. Going forward we should pay more attention to our communication use cases. Btw: I wonder if we can stack several of these clichés. For example: "leverage" + "use case" = "leverage case".
      - StavrosK 6y ago
        I agree, I think Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" is spot on here. I try to use simpler language whenever possible, I agree that people think that using longer words makes them sound smart but is just worse for communication. I've found it's a taboo to discuss anything even slightly personal. People are averse to feeling bad, so criticism needs to be extremely subtle in order to not offend. > Btw: I wonder if we can stack several of these clichés. For example: "leverage" + "use case" = "leverage case". I hate you for even thinking of this.
        rumanator 6y ago
        > I've found it's a taboo to discuss anything even slightly personal. People are averse to feeling bad, so criticism needs to be extremely subtle in order to not offend. The personal association you made between "discussing anything even slightly personal" and "criticism needs to be extremely subtled" makes it sound that your problem isn't language or Orwellian discourse but the way you subconsciously link discussing personal matters with harshly criticising those you speak with for no good reason. If your personal conversations boil down to appease your own personal need to criticise others then I'm sorry to break it to you but your problem isn't language.
lmeyerov 6y ago
We've been experimenting with nice compromises for using pydata on-the-fly compute with caching. Basic tension is indiv requests get blocked by their blocking APIs, while caches (eg, IP-pinned) are best when same-python-app-thread. Right now, we do hypercorn multiproc -> per-proc quart/asyncio/aiohttp IP-pinned event loop -> Apache arrow in-app cache -> on-gpu rapids.ai cache. But not happy w event loop due to pandas/rapids blocking if heavy datasets by concurrent users. (Taking us back to celery, redis, etc, which we don't want due to extra data movement..) Maybe we can get immutable arrow buffs shared across python proc threads.. Ideas welcome!

StavrosK 6y ago

While I agree with the rest of your comment, the sentence "if you’re cloud native maybe you leverage lambdas" made me irrationally angry.

CalRobert 6y ago
Can you explain why? I use lambdas often and they seem to solve the problems they're meant for well.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  It wasn't the lambdas, it was the combination of "cloud-native", which is a very salesmany term, and "leverage", which is my pet hate word. It's exactly as useful as "use", only much more pretentious. I'm just easily triggered with language :P More off-topic (or, rather, on-topic), I find lambdas great for things like a static website that needs a few functions. I especially like how Netlify uses them, they seem to fit that purpose exactly.
  - normalnorm 6y ago
    > I'm just easily triggered with language :P Me too! It makes me irrationally angry when people regurgitate linguistic clichés. I was already mad with: "python does not have a go-like concurrency story" when it would be enough (and 1000x less cringe) to say: "python does not have go-like concurrency" I think these mindless clichés make language really ugly and dysfunctional, and even worse they are thought-stoppers, because they make the reader/listener feel like something smart is being said, because they recognize the "in-group" lingo. In my experience, people get really offended when you point this out. It's kind of an HN taboo to discuss this. Which is also interesting in itself. Going forward we should pay more attention to our communication use cases. Btw: I wonder if we can stack several of these clichés. For example: "leverage" + "use case" = "leverage case".
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      I agree, I think Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" is spot on here. I try to use simpler language whenever possible, I agree that people think that using longer words makes them sound smart but is just worse for communication. I've found it's a taboo to discuss anything even slightly personal. People are averse to feeling bad, so criticism needs to be extremely subtle in order to not offend. > Btw: I wonder if we can stack several of these clichés. For example: "leverage" + "use case" = "leverage case". I hate you for even thinking of this.
      - rumanator 6y ago
        > I've found it's a taboo to discuss anything even slightly personal. People are averse to feeling bad, so criticism needs to be extremely subtle in order to not offend. The personal association you made between "discussing anything even slightly personal" and "criticism needs to be extremely subtled" makes it sound that your problem isn't language or Orwellian discourse but the way you subconsciously link discussing personal matters with harshly criticising those you speak with for no good reason. If your personal conversations boil down to appease your own personal need to criticise others then I'm sorry to break it to you but your problem isn't language.

lmeyerov 6y ago

We've been experimenting with nice compromises for using pydata on-the-fly compute with caching. Basic tension is indiv requests get blocked by their blocking APIs, while caches (eg, IP-pinned) are best when same-python-app-thread. Right now, we do hypercorn multiproc -> per-proc quart/asyncio/aiohttp IP-pinned event loop -> Apache arrow in-app cache -> on-gpu rapids.ai cache. But not happy w event loop due to pandas/rapids blocking if heavy datasets by concurrent users. (Taking us back to celery, redis, etc, which we don't want due to extra data movement..) Maybe we can get immutable arrow buffs shared across python proc threads.. Ideas welcome!