rbranson

28 ms·

271.
by rbranson 14y ago
I'm no fan of MongoDB, but this same advice goes for any NoSQL data store. I am an Apache Cassandra contributor and community MVP, but my advice stays the same: it's best just to start with a SQL database and go from there. Read some books
272.
by rbranson 14y ago
Maybe I'm not understanding something, but there seems to be an implicit assumption that the message broker (RabbitMQ) is more reliable than the database. This seems to be a common fallacy.
273.
by rbranson 14y ago
We use ZeroCater at Instagram and at least what we get has been consistently fresh and at least SEEMS healthy. They also make sure to take into consideration some of the vegetarians we have on staff. I'm not involved in the ordering process
274.
by rbranson 14y ago
We need independent time & geo searches as well. The indexes are vastly smaller in Solr. We use PostgreSQL extensively and prefer it, so it's not a matter of simply wanting to use something different.
275.
by rbranson 14y ago
The reason we use Solr for this specific task is because PostgreSQL cannot efficiently and quickly merge two index queries (time & space). It can do this to a limited degree, but both of these dimensions potentially match 10s of million
276.
by rbranson 14y ago
Instagram infrastructure engineer here. Our infrastructure is far from simple. However, I confirm that it does, indeed, handle a fairly large workload.
277.
by rbranson 14y ago
Not likely. The second hand market, which you will be sustaining, is part of why Apple can demand higher prices and make higher margins.
278.
by rbranson 14y ago
This is correct; probability works against you if you spread your instances over multiple zones without also compensating with some very solid failover. If you are not willing to put the effort into truly going fully active/active/active ac
279.
by rbranson 14y ago
Those types of regulations exist in every city. The problem isn't housing, it's transportation. Without the necessary transit infrastructure, it's pointless to just build buildings. It seems as if it was up to the author of this piece, the
280.
by rbranson 14y ago
I'm curious: What metric are you using to measure these dimensions of stability and well understoodness?
281.
by rbranson 15y ago
What I mean is that typically these types of companies drive to support all platforms (including web), diluting their ability to execute. Instagram focused on excellent execution for a narrower user base and won over a large number of users
282.
by rbranson 15y ago
Instagram is an exceptional product built with significant restraint and focus. It took them over a year and a half to release an Android app, because they were focused on what matters. This is exceedingly rare, as most teams would end up s
283.
by rbranson 15y ago
I have built one of these map rendering systems on EC2. We decided to go with a 100% on-the-fly + two caching layers (one HTTP on top and one application-specific in between [TileCache]). There were dozens of layers (now there are thousands
284.
by rbranson 15y ago
Google pre-renders tiles. They have publicly stated that they use MapReduce for this.
285.
by rbranson 15y ago
The difference being that the burn rate of these companies is minuscule compared to what was going on the late 90s. They built a 30 million user social network with 5 engineers. This changes the dynamic tremendously.
286.
by rbranson 15y ago
This isn't always true because time isn't the only multiplexing strategy used. For instance, modern cable modems use code-division multiplexing, and fiber optic communications typically uses a variant of wavelength-division multiplexing. In
287.
HN Comment Generator(ancomment.com)
12 points by rbranson 15y ago|8 comments
288.
by rbranson 15y ago
I think the main reason why there is such a large difference in the modern software industry is that unlike almost every other industry, individual developers wholly own the means of production and distribution. This is why software compani
289.
by rbranson 15y ago
How does NAP deal with property rights? Pretty much all the property in the entire world was gained through aggression.
290.
by rbranson 15y ago
All VM JITs compile to statically-typed machine code, so it's doubtful that building a VM from the ground up for dynamic code is going to yield major performance improvements. There are some enhancements that give VM-level visibility into d
291.
by rbranson 15y ago
There is no CA. You cannot guarantee consistency and availability simultaneously in the face of network partitions. Once the line of communications is cut or overloaded (slow enough = a partition), you have to pick one or the other. It's ba
292.
by rbranson 15y ago
BDB isn't really designed for scalable performance. It's for good performance and support for concurrent, ACID transactions. Tens of thousands of reads per second is reasonable for the vast majority of embedded applications, which often liv
293.
by rbranson 15y ago
NoSQL is a time period characterized by a set of ideas, not a category. The data stores that came out of NoSQL were about using more specialized tools and rejecting the dogma that all data persistence should be built on an RDBMS. Besides it
294.
by rbranson 15y ago
I think that for medium sized (250+) tech companies with solid funding it starts to just become difficult to NOT be recruiting in the Bay Area simply because there are so many engineers constantly churning and the statistics start to work a
295.
by rbranson 15y ago
I'm sure Google can justify Chrome development purely on cost savings from the ad rev sharing they do with Mozilla.
296.
by rbranson 15y ago
The account balance is calculated as a function of adding all the debits and credits together. Bank accounts are not stored as some kind of balance value that gets mutated over time. The balance is simply the result of some operation that i
297.
by rbranson 15y ago
You do realize the entire banking system is not built with the idea of ACID/transactional databases in mind? You only really need durability guarantees to implement banking properly. Bank accounts are eventually consistent logs of immutable
298.
by rbranson 15y ago
Often these problems are solved through complexity. ICEs have very limited ranges of torque efficiency, so we work around them using a complex transmission. Other complexity eliminated by an electric vehicle: induction & emissions syste
299.
by rbranson 15y ago
Transmission? There is no transmission -- electric motors have flat torque curves, so there's no need. It has a "gearbox," but it's basically just a differential. The transmission is one of the most expensive and arguably the most complex p
300.
by rbranson 15y ago
I agree with you on other counts, but Riak is a far cry from the spartan implementation of Dynamo outlined in the paper.

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