EricBurnett

12 ms·

31.
by EricBurnett 6y ago
Depends on selected compressor, but yes, you can. I've definitely observed zstd-1 to be a net savings, where compression/decompression costs were offset by pushing fewer bytes through the RPC and network layers - and this was only
32.
by EricBurnett 6y ago
Related tip: anywhere you're looking to deploy compression in a backend, consider zstd ( https://facebook.github.io/zstd/ ). I've found it suitable for streaming compression (Gbps+ flows without exorbitant CPU
33.
by EricBurnett 6y ago
> 5) Forge -- basically Blaze's remote build execution (what Bazel calls RBEs). Almost every build at Google is extremely parallelized, and if you need to run flake tests, running a suite of tests 10,000 times is almost as fast as r
34.
by EricBurnett 6y ago
HTTP/1.1 is not being retired though, so I'm not sure I follow the argument about any forced switching cost for small companies. (Which I attempted to cover in my 100k estimate anyways, though you're free to dispute it). Off-
35.
by EricBurnett 6y ago
(Disclaimer: Googler on build tools; Canadian) Tiered how? By IP? With most content served by a CDN or DDOS shield already, that's arguably fine; most meaningful on the customer IP where you'd want fairness across customers anyway
36.
by EricBurnett 6y ago
(Disclaimer: Googler on build tools). I hear this argument a lot, and fail to be convinced. Optimizations at scale matter a lot. Let's posit that 100,000 developer-years have been spent implementing HTTP/2 and tools to interact wi
37.
by EricBurnett 6y ago
Why is this more plausible? You don't know her, and are applying a psychological condition to her with no basis whatsoever. Just because you don't want to believe it's true, I assume? My wife has something similar. Caught it
38.
by EricBurnett 6y ago
This all rings true to me. I summarize senior engineer responsibilities as "think holistically" - cost of development, cost of maintenance, path to adoption, upfront investment required before you can determine if you'll succ
39.
by EricBurnett 6y ago
The brain is always a fun comparison. It's this crazy super-scalar architecture that can do thousands of trillions of primitive operations per second (petaflops), yet with pretty terrible latencies: propagation through synapses on the
40.
by EricBurnett 6y ago
It's worth re-reading Buffett's 2019 annual letter ( https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2019ltr.pdf ; first page especially) in this context, as he was already warning against over-reading oscillations
41.
by EricBurnett 7y ago
I can't speak for the others, but I wouldn't use Google as an example there. Java is something like half the LoC but only 1% of the compute cycles (handwaived). It's very rarely used in the systems that do the heavy lifting.
42.
by EricBurnett 7y ago
The differences between bazel and BuildXL are less about platform and more about philosophy. Bazel is about opinionated builds - declare everything, and you get fast correct builds. Hard to adopt, but super powerful. BuildXL is more about m
43.
by EricBurnett 7y ago
You say that like bazel hasn't already been proven out on a few billion LoC :). You're quite right that exceptions will exist - your job is to either fix them or squeeze them into the build system. Both are well trod paths. You&#x
44.
by EricBurnett 7y ago
I love this example, but more because it shows just how obtuse make is even for simple programs. There's one self-explanatory line in this whole program (`SRCS = foo.cpp bar.cpp baz.cpp`), and everything else is magic you'd just h
45.
by EricBurnett 8y ago
(Disclaimer: at Google) It's not quite so black and white. It's true that repo-wide refactorings often get carved into little changes and so aren't made atomically, but they're the exception rather than the rule. Any sma
46.
by EricBurnett 8y ago
That's not the non convex case though (as e.g. 1 and -1 is). You're right that chance can be convex; the premise of the article is that that's the property of interest, and that randomness alone isn't sufficient.
47.
by EricBurnett 8y ago
The expected value of an infinite series of coin flips centers on 0. Sure, you might get lucky, but you can't leverage that as a strategy to ratchet up value. That's the point about luck in the non convex case. To your mining exam
48.
by EricBurnett 8y ago
It looks more like Go code than a bash script - the tradeoff we settled on is that pretty much as soon as you need to add any sort of logic it's no longer really a simple "script" and you _know_ it's just going to grow i
49.
by EricBurnett 8y ago
(Disclaimer: at Google) My team has ~200k lines of Go code and I'm exceedingly happy with the state of the codebase. Having previously maintained a C++ codebase of similar size, I can say that the pace of changes is higher, the effort
50.
by EricBurnett 8y ago
Hmm, good for usage you say. Ok, let's stick to "standard" imperial units. How many feet in a yard? Yards in a mile? What the hell is a quart? And since base 12 is great, what is 12 feet called? 144 feet? A 12th of an inch? O
51.
by EricBurnett 10y ago
I use [1]. Does this work for you? I'm not sure the exact criteria at play. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gerrit-ui-switcher...
52.
by EricBurnett 10y ago
I liked https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n07/daniel-soar/the-most-expensive... for its explanation of the political situation the F-35 is being built in, and the multinational ties that make it extremely difficult t
53.
by EricBurnett 10y ago
Another fun start I recently learned is that about half of the area on the die on a modern chip is taken up by wires for the clock alone, in large part to ensure the length of wire to each component is the same length. http://m.c
54.
by EricBurnett 10y ago
Surprisingly this is an ambiguous question to answer due to the nature of the expanding universe, but if the statement is that "the origin is 2.5 billion light years away" it was _probably_ transmitted 2.5 billion years ago. http
55.
by EricBurnett 10y ago
The catch here is that if DFP were to enforce technical standards to the extent of including performance, publishers would leave en masse. What they want from DFP (as I understand it) is hosting that just works; they don't want anyone
56.
by EricBurnett 10y ago
> That mobile doesn't have a way to block ads is probably a failure of Google, Apple and other players to allow extensions. To be honest, I see this as short-term painful, long-term desirable. Ad blockers make the incentives of the
57.
by EricBurnett 10y ago
You read correctly, but it also doesn't tell the full story. I've edited to be "not related to AMP" to try to convey this better. In short: AMP itself is not part of Ads, but there is a group within Ads focussing on AM
58.
by EricBurnett 10y ago
My apologies. I work at Google, used to be in Ads (not AMP), these days I'm in Technical Infrastructure.
59.
by EricBurnett 10y ago
Can we assume they'd be willing? Here in Canada I use orders of magnitude more water than oil products, and would be willing to pay commensurately less.
60.
by EricBurnett 10y ago
This post seems to conflate two ideas (1) AMP being an insufficient implementation (update-ping not working, and that being an awkward pattern anyways) and (2) AMP being actively harmful to the web ecosystem in principle. (1) Comments on

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