g9yuayon

11 ms·

91.
by g9yuayon 3y ago
Strangely, I find theories, at least up to junior graduate level, amazingly useful in building systems.
92.
by g9yuayon 3y ago
I remember when we were taking an algorithm course, the professor gave us a proof question on the CLR book. It's a property of universal hashing and it used to be a well known corollary. It took me multiple hours to crack the insight t
93.
by g9yuayon 3y ago
Different styles of college? My college shaped me and what I learned carried me until today. Case in point, I don't think I would learn how to write a database engine, albeit a single-threaded one, from scratch with progressive difficu
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by g9yuayon 3y ago
I always wonder why we lose the efficiency and intensity over time that we enjoyed in college. When in college, we took five pretty intense courses a semester. We didn't have to wait for "a big chunk of time" to work on our h
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by g9yuayon 3y ago
> We have become so detached from nature so much we have forgotten seasons exist, True for me as I enjoy reading and programming, but I'm not sure if it's true in general, at least not in the metro area where I live. It looks o
96.
by g9yuayon 3y ago
I'm not sure if a process can be a cancer. Instead, an institution that uses processes, Scrum included, to hide their ineffectiveness and inefficiency is.
97.
by g9yuayon 3y ago
I grew up in China and the guess culture was predominant there. It was quite a culture shock after I came to the US. In a training session back when I was in IBM, the VP of marketing told us a story about the ask culture: he was an American
98.
by g9yuayon 3y ago
Hi, Jordan! :-) I consider myself lucky to have worked with you.
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by g9yuayon 3y ago
My own experience is that there was enough ambiguity in what we needed to build. Take building a CDN for instance, what tech stack would you use? How would you deploy them? What's your caching strategy? How would you partner with ISPs?
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by g9yuayon 3y ago
> Were failures punished by low ratings, bonus? Netflix's culture stack used to say that culture is all about who gets rewarded and who punished. So, yes, people did get punished for their failures. The key here is what behavior led
101.
by g9yuayon 3y ago
I don't know if anything went wrong afterwards. I left in 2014, so I only spoke for what I saw when I was there.
102.
by g9yuayon 3y ago
I joined in 2009 and left in 2014. So the timeline was anywhere in between.
103.
by g9yuayon 3y ago
Absolutely. To start with, leaders must not be afraid of their teams making mistakes. Copying from another comment: "Netflix's culture demands very strong leadership and probably works only when the company is small enough. From C
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by g9yuayon 3y ago
I left Netflix years ago, so I don't know their current culture. Netflix's culture demands very strong leadership and probably works only when the company is small enough. From CEO and down, leaders in every level need to know how
105.
by g9yuayon 3y ago
I really like the approach of Netflix of 10 years ago when it was still small. They hired mature people so they could get rid of processes. Indeed, they actually tried to de-process everything. As a result, things just happened. Non-event w
106.
by g9yuayon 3y ago
> at the local cram center. If school covers the advanced topics, we wouldn't need any cram center. Case in point, my teacher gave my class such challenging problems when I grew up, that tutoring schools were never necessary. Also,
107.
by g9yuayon 3y ago
Yeah, Ozone looks interesting. I was just not sure who used it at scale other than a Japanese startup. The community engagement seems much lower than other communities, though.
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by g9yuayon 3y ago
S3 is a truly amazing piece of technology. It offers peace of mind (well, almost), zero operations, and practically unlimited bandwidth for at least analytics workload. Indeed, it's so good that there has not been much progress in buil
109.
by g9yuayon 3y ago
This is such a great article. Amazon tackles this problem by emphasizing "working backwards", but it ultimately depends on the people who enforces such cultural value. I remember in one of the Uber all-hands meetings, an engineer
110.
by g9yuayon 3y ago
Maybe I'm biased, but my experience in Netflix was so good that I never felt the need for a DevOps team. Netflix engineering team did three things right: 1. Any task is an API away and everything except getting a Cassandra keyspace is
111.
by g9yuayon 3y ago
Wow, isn't this extortion. If this allegation were true, someone in Yelp should go to jail.
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by g9yuayon 3y ago
The US is a strange place. On one hand, teachers do not treat academic performance as prominently as those in hyper competitive countries, say, China. Classes in high school are easy. Exams are generally easy. Teachers normally do not spend
113.
by g9yuayon 3y ago
Why? More jobs are still more jobs, no? In addition, each factories may hire fewer people than 50 years ago, but I hope we have a lot more factories. Having more skillful talent does not contradict my hoping that more Americans will have ch
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by g9yuayon 3y ago
Maybe fewer jobs per square feet, but it's the natural evolution of manufacturing. What matters is we need engineers and workers on the floor so we can innovate and develop more senior talent.
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by g9yuayon 3y ago
I hope this trend is real and will continue. Manufacturing is so important to a country. It creates jobs. It builds talent. It stimulates innovation. It improves the lives of millions of people. It keeps a country's defense strong and
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by g9yuayon 3y ago
> Intelligent Brains Take Longer to Solve Difficult Problems I find such summary ambiguous. Difficult for who? Isn't it very common that a difficult problem for me is a piece of cake for thee, like the PDE that Bezos couldn't s
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by g9yuayon 3y ago
> I think one of the chief challenges over the last 5 years is that “tech” became a fashionable, prestige job This is especially interesting given that Americans used to mock nerds in pop culture and in schools. A trajectory question tha
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by g9yuayon 3y ago
Same for the teachers in the Bay Area? I always think this is a great problem for K-12 education. If a teacher has to spend 2 hours to commute to her school, I can't imagine how the teacher would have enough energy to teach kids well.
119.
by g9yuayon 3y ago
Is it just me or somehow programming languages and frameworks are not my focus any more? I'm still interested in programming language designs and implementations, but I'm quite neutral on what language/framework to use in my
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by g9yuayon 3y ago
That's the point of the thread. We really don't need that much sugar to get good taste. The level of sugar in a cake made by, say Safe Way, hurts my throat.

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