alexgartrell

14 ms·

91.
by alexgartrell 12y ago
You can't just throw out a platitude like "it's all unix when you break it down." That doesn't actually make any sense. When you use a bunch of different languages the primary difficulty you run into is interop. S
92.
by alexgartrell 12y ago
I don't think latency is the primary issue here, as you're probably really far from your users and the hop is a mild cost compared to transiting the internet. In my mind the bigger issue is limited throughput, packets per second a
93.
by alexgartrell 12y ago
""" A clean-room implementation of TLS v1.2 by Ashwini Oruganti (an especially timely project given recent events). It's an ambituous undertaking, but she's narrowing scope by focusing on designing and implementing
94.
by alexgartrell 12y ago
Why did you guys need a /10?
95.
by alexgartrell 13y ago
Sorry, to be clear I'm more curious about how it's integrated with version control and how things like MVC are done. I really haven't got a clue. For that matter, are people mostly using HHVM via fast-cgi?
96.
by alexgartrell 13y ago
So coincidentally I work at Facebook and know a bunch of these guys pretty well, but I don't actually interact with the Hack stuff at all (as I work in infrastructure doing flash and network stuff, primarily). I recently played around
97.
by alexgartrell 13y ago
The short, uninteresting answer is that it's a work in progress. Initially we built FIFO into our caches because it was easy to build and didn't interact badly with flash disk craziness (write amplification specifically). You ca
98.
by alexgartrell 13y ago
Dear any Stack Overflow Developers, Can you describe the network infrastructure in finer detail? Specifically what type of load balancer are you running? And what's peak RPS? Where are your network peaks? (I'm guessing major pe
99.
by alexgartrell 13y ago
It's a meritocracy because anyone can grow up to be a banker. Edit: not 100% sure why this Got down voted but I was being serious. Meritocracy fits as long as the basis of assignment is merit. Just because the system is broken doesn&#
100.
by alexgartrell 13y ago
Intrusive datastructures were the thing I missed most from C, but boost::intrusive satisfies my desires when it's absolutely necessary. In general, I'm anti-boost, but I think it's a personal bias and we use the hell out of i
101.
by alexgartrell 13y ago
> write a very simple UNIX-based operating system in C++ (does anyone else smell a contradiction?) I'm going to use this as an opportunity to champion C++ for systems programming despite the fact that it wasn't really your argu
102.
by alexgartrell 13y ago
I'm an engineer on Facebook's CDN and Edge network, and, in my experience, the hardest places to serve people quickly are South America, Africa, and Asia. You should try to get some timing data for those places.
103.
by alexgartrell 13y ago
I chose Facebook over Google two years ago (despite a more lucrative offer from Google), because I wanted to go where I could have more of an impact. The interview processes are nearly identical. One of my go-to questions was a question I
104.
by alexgartrell 13y ago
Anyone have any thoughts on the difference between this 87 key keyboard and the leopold tenkeyless? I've been using an ancient wired 87 key apple keyboard that I love but I'm intrigued. http://elitekeyboards.com/p
105.
by alexgartrell 13y ago
I never understood Google's desire to keep things like GGC tight to the chest. Another search engine isn't going to win or lose based upon their ability to run caching http proxies in ISP data centers.
106.
by alexgartrell 13y ago
It's really hard to not come across as ad hominem when you're disagreeing with OP's take on a personal experience, but I have very little patience for someone who sees or experiences something negative and does nothing more t
107.
by alexgartrell 13y ago
With equity packages, base and bonus, many Google/Facebook employees crack the 200k figure.
108.
by alexgartrell 13y ago
So I was a memcached engineer. The memcached team barely works on memcached anymore, because there are no real returns. Being product focused means that it doesn't make much sense to really increase the perf on something when there's other
109.
by alexgartrell 14y ago
Technology doesn't go away. In 10 years, you'll be able to build this rifle with a 3d printer, an arduino kit, and plans from the internet. However you feel about gun control, you've got to acknowledge that strict gun control will be unre
110.
by alexgartrell 14y ago
My first reaction when I saw this submission was "Holy shit, who leaked kiln?"
111.
by alexgartrell 14y ago
It's actually all SSD by default, but you can pin the buckets into memory if you'd like. We generally do this in the memcached-replacement use case and specifically for CDN. However, we do have another use case not emphasized in the artic
112.
by alexgartrell 14y ago
Excuse me for stating the obvious but [citation needed]. Apologies to good HNers for feeding the troll here, but I've always been curious about how holocaust deniers could have the balls to carry through with their opinions despite a prepon
113.
by alexgartrell 14y ago
C++11 is the superior option because it is easier to write correct code with it, plain and simple. And we aren't talking about orders of magnitude difference in throughput or latency, we're talking about a slight increase in CPU idle. And
114.
by alexgartrell 14y ago
So I used to agree with you, but I've done extensive performance critical C development at Facebook (memcached, a new thing we are about to talk about) and I have also done extensive performance critical c++11 development (our layer 7 load
115.
by alexgartrell 14y ago
These are probably off-net cache servers for Google, which means that to save money on transit costs, Time Warner has installed special servers and Youtube references them directly for Comcast subscribers (lot's of things give this away,
116.
by alexgartrell 14y ago
Fault, error, failure, hazard. Technically speaking, nothing actually matters until it becomes a hazard (if you're a cynic, this means "costs you money"). I think that this is one way of thinking that engineers could benefit a lot from, in
117.
by alexgartrell 14y ago
Write patterns still matter until you're talking about like megablock granularity. Mmap will swap out pages at random (relative to disk layout) and page granularity is far smaller than a megablock. It's certainly possible for controllers to
118.
by alexgartrell 14y ago
If I had to guess, I'd say better cache locality. It's tremendously more expensive to go to main memory for something than to go to the cache.
119.
by alexgartrell 14y ago
I'm sure the auditing and control is more than enough to stop your average creeper employee from reading normal people's inboxes, but I very much doubt that it's enough to stop a very smart, very determined spy from doing the same. At the
120.
by alexgartrell 14y ago
I know that this is a pot shot against the American legal system (especially with regard to copyright stuff), but it really makes no sense. A spy would likely be no more expensive than a legal team (in fact, he'd be subsidized by his salar

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