pianoben

14 ms·

151.
by pianoben 4y ago
> I'm currently trying to change my relationship to art from something I pursue to make money, to something I enjoy doing to fuel my soul. This may not be a useful anecdote for those who want to thread the needle between passion and
152.
by pianoben 4y ago
I had the same confusion! In my browser, with the default monospace font, the two characters are so similarly as to be indistinguishable. Reading the next example, showing an encoded dictionary, was what made the penny drop. Bencode doesn
153.
by pianoben 4y ago
They're very interesting pianos! They are incredibly refined, very high quality, and the equal of the best of Steinways. They're rather uncommon in the USA due to the virtual duopoly of Steinway and Yamaha in concert halls and
154.
by pianoben 4y ago
> Twitter (and really, BigCo in general) engineers are accustomed to their foosball tables, catered meals, wine bars, beer taps, rooftop gaming session, and endless meetings and code reviews. Tell me you've never been hired at Twitt
155.
by pianoben 4y ago
Oh, I'd buy that in a heartbeat. SAL is, shall we say, most useful in the presence of non-public tooling, and it's also in general a fairly awkward language extension. Doesn't surprise me at all to hear that third-party dev
156.
by pianoben 4y ago
a) Not just the Windows kernel - Office uses SAL, too, in numerous places. Mostly in legacy places predating more modern C++. b) It's not true to say that kernel devs don't really use it. They use it a lot , though there are
157.
by pianoben 4y ago
Yeah, after like a decade or more of inattention. Even if they somehow block all robocalls, it's going to be years before people begin to trust their phones again, if ever. They (telecoms and regulators, all) really screwed up hard
158.
by pianoben 4y ago
When I was a kid, the most frustrating technical challenge around TVs was how to get the VCR clock to stop flashing. How the world has changed since then!
159.
by pianoben 4y ago
By definition, that's how "grading on a curve" works. You fit your population to the curve. Some end up at the extremities.
160.
by pianoben 4y ago
Oh my god I feel so seen right now! I'm in a similar position, and it is an incredible struggle to convince people to raise their head up from their work and think about the context in which they are doing that work. I've gene
161.
by pianoben 4y ago
It boggles the mind that workers would give up the right to strike as part of their work agreement. Strikes are like the main tool workers have to defend themselves and their working conditions! I'm sure there must be a rational e
162.
by pianoben 4y ago
Amen to that. We had a high-level engineer who sincerely believed that Rails and Postgres were the right tools for Everything. Consequently he shipped a mission-critical query engine whose API is - you guessed it - just ActiveRecord! It&#
163.
by pianoben 4y ago
> At some point, the NT kernel isn't going to cut it. If you'd like, would you please say more on this point? What leads you to believe that?
164.
by pianoben 4y ago
I'd be more inclined to believe in just a Linux instance running Office. The NT kernel is so incredibly different from the Linux kernel, and the Windows shell takes such extensive advantage of it, that I can't even begin to imagin
165.
by pianoben 4y ago
Not really; it was an attempt at making fast and responsive software. If you can just blit a file into memory, why not? It's a hell of a lot faster than parsing and validating bytes and then converting them into your runtime data str
166.
by pianoben 4y ago
These are not commonly used in application code, but are "commonly" used to implement reclamation in languages without memory management for concurrent mutable data structures.
167.
by pianoben 4y ago
Even simpler is Weighted Rendezvous Hashing ( https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/SDC15_presentations... ). It's quite a bit easier to implement and verify than consistent hashing, and carries the sam
168.
by pianoben 4y ago
Having written production-level compilers, my advice: use ANTLR for as long as humanly possible. It can remain adequate far, far longer than you think, and will save you months/years of stress. When you outgrow it, you'll know
169.
by pianoben 4y ago
Travel back in time with me to the halcyon days of 2012, when Tumblr was the hot new thing. highscalability.com did a writeup on their novel "cell-based architecture", a whole decade earlier than this paper. It certainly inspire
170.
by pianoben 4y ago
I never gave the Visual Studio WSDL code-generator the respect it deserved at the time. With hindsight, it was amazingly easy to use and generally "just worked". > (if the API was written properly) A very important caveat! I
171.
by pianoben 4y ago
I was just thinking about Syncplicity this morning, and found your comment. What a trip! Looking back, it feels like a completely different world. Hope you're well. You're right about MSFT's long-term platform advantage.
172.
by pianoben 4y ago
> the modern version of folks offended that the GUI version broke keyboard shortcuts are people convinced that because they managed to find things in the cluttered confusing menus, the ribbon must be awful To be fair , the real "co
173.
by pianoben 4y ago
If you deal with (some parts of) the public sector, you certainly will encounter SOAP. For example - those online drivers-ed courses you buy in California to get rid of a ticket? They all talk to a SOAP backend maintained by the State. Ce
174.
by pianoben 4y ago
I was _not_ prepared for soccer - I saw MLS and thought, "what on Earth is Apple doing with real-estate listings?!"
175.
by pianoben 4y ago
Monorepos do require upkeep beyond that of single-product repositories. You need some form of discipline for how code is organized (is it by Java package? by product? etc). You need to decide how ownership works. You need to decide on
176.
by pianoben 4y ago
I mean, Putin's an expansionistic genocidal gangster all on his own, but it's incontrovertible that Bush Jr. reneged on a very important anti-ballistic missile treaty with Russia and tried to position anti-missile systems in for
177.
by pianoben 4y ago
I was a very happy user of sccache - it took some big CI builds from ~10 to 1.5 minutes on average. We had to add an Azure backend to it, but the code is very well-organized and it was pretty easy to hack on. I don't work in native la
178.
Instacart (YC S12) files confidentially for US IPO(seekingalpha.com)
5 points by pianoben 4y ago|0 comments
179.
by pianoben 4y ago
One of the favorite tricks tricks I've ever seen is how Twilio uses human-readable prefixes[0] on their various identifiers - you will never mistake a device (HSxxxxxxx) for an account (ACxxxxxxxx). It's prevented us (Twilio cust
180.
by pianoben 4y ago
I'm not certain how that bears on what I wrote, and won't comment on it except to say that the American "pro-slavery camp" is not merely a synonym for "racially bigoted" - there's a whole world-view there

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