5 ms·

> When you think about the dizzying array of touch points Thrift generators and/or a decent FFI can resolve a lot of those. Yes, other teams might try to make

> When you think about the dizzying array of touch points Thrift generators and/or a decent FFI can resolve a lot of those. Yes, other teams might try to make noise and threaten not to support you, but I've yet to see one go so far as to blacklist a service because they disagreed with its implementation choices (including language). > libraries better than anything in open source Only in their authors' minds, in most cases. NIH at its worst. > Build times are the thing that will kill C++ Certainly up there, and I wish more people realized this. Every test/deploy pipeline is an order of magnitude slower than it should be because of this, and perpetuating it is part of why I think those libraries aren't really better. In fact many of them make it worse, because they're the most aggressive users of features that increase compilation time.

benreesman 6y ago
There was a time when F14 and Swiss were internally available and not in open source. You think there aren’t other things that aren’t open source yet that those guys have? folly/absl/gtest/glog/tf/pytorch/etc/etc aren’t perfect, but they have stuff that no one else has, and they had it before Github did. “The guy who wrote the book” so to speak often works at one of these places, and while some of the stuff makes it into open source some of the time, some of it doesn’t. Google gets Borg, OSS gets k8s. Citing NIH is kinda flamey as an alternative to citing examples IMHO.
- notacoward 6y ago
  The "g" in "gtest" and "glog" doesn't stand for Facebook, so I don't even know why you include those. Folly is open source. PyTorch is open source. You can't be "better than anything" in a category that you're in yourself. Yes, there's stuff in folly that's available internally before it's open sourced. Yes, some of it's good stuff. Some of it's so Facebook-specific that it's only useful inside, or it's just plain junk that the rest of the world is spared. After eight years working solely on open source at Red Hat, I've seen nothing particularly exceptional about the quality of Facebook's proprietary code. People who have no experience beyond school see something new, they think it's the bees' knees, surely they think they must be blessed to work at a place where such things are created ... but they're not uniquely blessed. There are people all over this industry pushing the state of the art. Facebook engineers think that Facebook hires the best people in the world, but people at Google think that they do, and people at Apple think that they do, and people at random startups think that they do. Not without reason in any case, but still incorrectly. It's a common kind of sampling error. The reality is that there's good and bad code everywhere, and the larger a company is the more it tends to regress toward the mean.
  - benreesman 6y ago
    I mention Swiss/glog/gtest/tf because I was always talking about FANG companies, high finance (Renaissance, Jump, etc.) and to a lesser extent some of the unicorns. You know, the elite places with boundless budgets and counter-productively high technical hiring bars. Hence “these places”. When it comes to “who hires the best?” it gets a bit fuzzy and anecdotal, but roughly RenTech hires the best. Google hires the best on average in the valley, though FB has made multiple deep cuts through their top quartile with money, which is why so much Facebook stuff seems like “close but not quite” Google stuff. Other massively resourced companies also get quite good people, and there are plenty of little pockets of genius at various universities and think tanks (INRIA comes to mind). I don’t know exactly why a tangent about having F14FastMap or MPMCQueue (and proprietary friends) before the rest of the world has evoked such a strong reaction in a point about C++ making sense at MegaCorp du jour, but calling people who think the cutting-edge internal stuff at the elite companies is a plus for C++ new grads is where I step off this train. I share your frustration with the consolidation of power, money, and talent at a small number of elite institutions to some degree, but you can take it out on someone else.
    - notacoward 6y ago
      > consolidation of power, money, and talent at a small number of elite institutions Stop projecting. I'm not the one who's frustrated here. I benefit from that concentration as much as you did, but thanks for the ad hominem anyway. However, I've also worked at a lot of companies over a long time, both big and small, both inside and outside of the SV or WS bubbles. I didn't burn myself out after one decent stint at one company. Yes, power and money are highly concentrated. Because of that the opportunity to capitalize on talent is also concentrated, but the talent itself isn't. To think otherwise is pure egotism, and it's your strong reaction - to the idea that talent exists elsewhere than you've been, apparently - that got us here.
      - benreesman 6y ago
        You’ve taken a comment that adds something to the conversation (a conclusion about build times that you agree with), grabbed a tangential aside about good libraries and spun off a flamey side-thread by going after internal library authors as being delusional, done that god awful cherry-pick “>” citation thing, made repeated appeals to authority about your extensive experience, cited zero examples of OSS libraries to make a substantial counter point (which can be done), ratcheted up the temperature first with NIH, second with disparaging remarks about new grads, and finally with a bizarre contention that I must be angry that I can’t get a job at a place I got a job. All the while I’ve made all my points under my own name, and you’re safe behind an alias. Your profile lists you as a moderator. Why are you throwing fuel on this instead of steering it back to the technology as I’ve repeatedly tried to do by bringing up actual examples of actual code? In spite of a 12 year tenure as a site member I comment pretty rarely because there are only a few topics where my perspective is all that unique, I don’t care about karma points, and the odds that someone is going to pick a fight make it easier to just get back to work and not risk it 99/100 times. You’ve succeeded in sending me back to the orange bar for however long, so mission accomplished: someone is still wrong on the internet but you’ve driven them off their cookie.

benreesman 6y ago

There was a time when F14 and Swiss were internally available and not in open source. You think there aren’t other things that aren’t open source yet that those guys have? folly/absl/gtest/glog/tf/pytorch/etc/etc aren’t perfect, but they have stuff that no one else has, and they had it before Github did. “The guy who wrote the book” so to speak often works at one of these places, and while some of the stuff makes it into open source some of the time, some of it doesn’t. Google gets Borg, OSS gets k8s. Citing NIH is kinda flamey as an alternative to citing examples IMHO.

notacoward 6y ago
The "g" in "gtest" and "glog" doesn't stand for Facebook, so I don't even know why you include those. Folly is open source. PyTorch is open source. You can't be "better than anything" in a category that you're in yourself. Yes, there's stuff in folly that's available internally before it's open sourced. Yes, some of it's good stuff. Some of it's so Facebook-specific that it's only useful inside, or it's just plain junk that the rest of the world is spared. After eight years working solely on open source at Red Hat, I've seen nothing particularly exceptional about the quality of Facebook's proprietary code. People who have no experience beyond school see something new, they think it's the bees' knees, surely they think they must be blessed to work at a place where such things are created ... but they're not uniquely blessed. There are people all over this industry pushing the state of the art. Facebook engineers think that Facebook hires the best people in the world, but people at Google think that they do, and people at Apple think that they do, and people at random startups think that they do. Not without reason in any case, but still incorrectly. It's a common kind of sampling error. The reality is that there's good and bad code everywhere, and the larger a company is the more it tends to regress toward the mean.
- benreesman 6y ago
  I mention Swiss/glog/gtest/tf because I was always talking about FANG companies, high finance (Renaissance, Jump, etc.) and to a lesser extent some of the unicorns. You know, the elite places with boundless budgets and counter-productively high technical hiring bars. Hence “these places”. When it comes to “who hires the best?” it gets a bit fuzzy and anecdotal, but roughly RenTech hires the best. Google hires the best on average in the valley, though FB has made multiple deep cuts through their top quartile with money, which is why so much Facebook stuff seems like “close but not quite” Google stuff. Other massively resourced companies also get quite good people, and there are plenty of little pockets of genius at various universities and think tanks (INRIA comes to mind). I don’t know exactly why a tangent about having F14FastMap or MPMCQueue (and proprietary friends) before the rest of the world has evoked such a strong reaction in a point about C++ making sense at MegaCorp du jour, but calling people who think the cutting-edge internal stuff at the elite companies is a plus for C++ new grads is where I step off this train. I share your frustration with the consolidation of power, money, and talent at a small number of elite institutions to some degree, but you can take it out on someone else.
  - notacoward 6y ago
    > consolidation of power, money, and talent at a small number of elite institutions Stop projecting. I'm not the one who's frustrated here. I benefit from that concentration as much as you did, but thanks for the ad hominem anyway. However, I've also worked at a lot of companies over a long time, both big and small, both inside and outside of the SV or WS bubbles. I didn't burn myself out after one decent stint at one company. Yes, power and money are highly concentrated. Because of that the opportunity to capitalize on talent is also concentrated, but the talent itself isn't. To think otherwise is pure egotism, and it's your strong reaction - to the idea that talent exists elsewhere than you've been, apparently - that got us here.
    - benreesman 6y ago
      You’ve taken a comment that adds something to the conversation (a conclusion about build times that you agree with), grabbed a tangential aside about good libraries and spun off a flamey side-thread by going after internal library authors as being delusional, done that god awful cherry-pick “>” citation thing, made repeated appeals to authority about your extensive experience, cited zero examples of OSS libraries to make a substantial counter point (which can be done), ratcheted up the temperature first with NIH, second with disparaging remarks about new grads, and finally with a bizarre contention that I must be angry that I can’t get a job at a place I got a job. All the while I’ve made all my points under my own name, and you’re safe behind an alias. Your profile lists you as a moderator. Why are you throwing fuel on this instead of steering it back to the technology as I’ve repeatedly tried to do by bringing up actual examples of actual code? In spite of a 12 year tenure as a site member I comment pretty rarely because there are only a few topics where my perspective is all that unique, I don’t care about karma points, and the odds that someone is going to pick a fight make it easier to just get back to work and not risk it 99/100 times. You’ve succeeded in sending me back to the orange bar for however long, so mission accomplished: someone is still wrong on the internet but you’ve driven them off their cookie.