SBArbeit
Joined 13 years ago
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245
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101
Member since
Feb 2
Recent submissions
Comment · 12 days ago
Part of setting up a new Windows or Linux machine for me is installing the latest PowerShell 7+.
My $PROFILE has custom modules that comprise ~9,000 lines of PowerShell. Anything "script-y" that I think I'll do more than a few times becomes a new function in one of those modules.
On Windows, I haven't used `cmd.exe` in at least a decade.
And part of my root `AGENTS.md` is "Please use PowerShell when generating scripts, unless I specifically ask for a different language."
Works a treat.
Once you get used to passing objects between commands - not just text - the thought of using a Unix-y shell feels like visiting the past.
Comment · 2 months ago
Ex-Microsoft, ex-GitHub, laid off nine months ago, not going to violate any agreements, but I will give some context. A lot of this applies to any large engineering org, really. Hilarious that this entire thread is people speculating on things they have no idea about.
If it sounds like I'm defending GitHub a bit, yeah, I am. I can't think of a comparable situation that any other web site has been through. This isn't "oops, we didn't plan for the Black Friday sale", this is a once-in-a-generation event focused on one, important web property that no one would have handled perfectly. (Even us all-knowing commenters here on HN.)
You know that old trope in every submarine movie, where the captain tells the driver to dive lower than they've ever gone, and someone says "I don't know if the boat can take it!" and then they switch the camera to some engineering room where the boat is groaning under the pressure and a bolt comes loose and water starts spraying everywhere but someone runs up with a giant wrench and tightens it and looks around at everyone else in the room like, "whoa, that was close..."?
Or Scotty and Star Trek, "It canna take much more, Captain!"
That's what GitHub has been going through. It's had problems, but it's still here, and usually working well.
- Let me start with: GitHub is ~3,000 talented and really nice people trying to do the right thing, with a great culture. That's the most important thing I want to communicate. While I'm sure no one at GitHub is happy about their uptime, believe me when I tell you that GitHub Engineering is exceptional. They have great leadership, depth at all levels (Distinguished / Principal / Staff / Senior / earlier-in-career) and if you ever get a chance to hire someone from GitHub, you should. I hope all of you get to work with engineers as good as GitHub's.
- GitHub has been improving all aspects of its infrastructure steadily for many years now. The GitHub Engineering blog https://github.blog/engineering/ has been documenting this the entire time. Go point your favorite LLM at it and ask for a summary of all of the major system improvements since 2020. If that work hadn't already been done, GitHub would be a smoking pile of servers at this point. There's a lot I could list, I'm not sure which are already public, but improvements on the order of using thousands fewer CPU's to serve even more traffic than before have been made, and still are, I'm sure.
- GitHub was already serving billions of requests/day before agentic coding hit. Their challenge wasn't scaling a fresh new system with a few users an order of magnitude; it was taking one of the busiest and most important sites on the Internet, and getting hit with 14x traffic in a year, and having to plan for 100x. If you think your systems and infrastructure would have survived that, if you think you would have been able to politically navigate and succeed in getting projects green-lit at a large company to prepare for 100x scaling before it hit, to get those resources for "we might have scaling problems in a year or two" instead of getting them to ramp up on AI coding and other features that were crucial to growth right now, you don't understand large organizational dynamics. That's not a complaint about GitHub or Microsoft; it's an observation about capitalism and how any mature management group prioritizes things in software. I'd expect everyone in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley Reality Distortion Field to understand that.
- We talk in terms of "14x commits" to Git but that's only part of the story. GitHub Actions, webhooks, github.com itself, and other parts of GitHub, have all been under pressure. It's the totality of it, the seams that have been exposed at scale that couldn't have been exposed without that scale, that have caused the instability. That's why architecture gets overhauled.
- Yeah, GitHub has had less consistent uptime since the 2018 Microsoft acquisition. The GitHub that existed before that had much less functionality, an order of magnitude fewer users, and had received very little improvement in the few years before. Microsoft invested and enabled GitHub to grow into something much bigger than it ever could have without them.
- Be grateful that Microsoft - with a 50-year history of shipping developer tools, and more experience operating enterprise software than any other company on the planet - acquired GitHub instead of Google, which was the other major player in contention. Spend a minute or two thinking about the product journey GitHub would have taken under Google, and then think about how many non-search, non-advertising products have succeeded there. Which amazing developer tools from Google do you use regularly? Yeah, I thought so. On behalf of Microsoft, you're welcome.
- Did you notice that GitHub swapped out one of its data centers last year for one 3x larger? No? Maybe that's because they executed it flawlessly, with no downtime. If you've ever done that on a massive web site with as much scrutiny as GitHub receives, you get a gold star.
- Did you notice that over 50% of GitHub read traffic is now being served from Azure instead of GitHub's own data centers, and growing, and that all GitHub Monolith traffic is scheduled to be served from Azure instead of GitHub's data centers by the end of CY26? This massive migration is taking place while traffic is going insane. From https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-availa...: "GitHub can now serve a larger share of customer requests from independent Azure capacity, reducing reliance on any single datacenter while preserving performance. Monolith read traffic served from Azure Central US peaked at 52.75% on July 28—the first time we consistently remained above the halfway line. Git traffic in Azure reached 47%, up from 43% in June, and 29% of all repositories now have a second replica in Central US, making failover less disruptive when a region degrades."
- OpenAI and Anthropic obviously have significant scaling challenges as well, but there's a huge separation between the GPU-based inference part, and the CPU-based front-end systems. Their CPU-based systems are significantly simpler and newer than GitHub's, so I'm not surprised they have fewer outages, but it's still non-zero.
- Ruby on Rails is not the problem (and, for the record, I don't even like Ruby or Rails). Most of the performance-critical systems that were built on Ruby have been migrated to Go or some other language that takes full advantage of multithreading. The web endpoints still served by Ruby are fine.
- Spare me the "Azure sucks" comments. Please. Microsoft Azure is the second-largest computing system on the planet - only AWS is larger in terms of hardware but not in terms of the number of products they ship - and Microsoft's first-party systems that run on it, all at the same time, are among the largest, busiest, most important systems on the planet. Entra ID, Azure SQL, Service Bus, Event Hubs, Office 365, Cosmos DB, OneDrive, etc. all in the tens-to-hundreds-of-billions requests/day. I'm not even counting the massive customer-owned systems that run on it, including almost the entire Fortune 500. Nothing is perfect, everyone has downtime, we all always want more and better features, I want improvements from Azure, too, but, please, grow up. I have opinions, too, I've been programming since the Apple ][+, there are popular technologies that I don't like, but I know that's subjective. "Your favorite technology sucks, mine is better" is not an objective statement about anything.
Anyway, if you haven't shipped at GitHub's scale, in this dynamic of a world of feature churn, and one-of, if not the largest, traffic spikes in the history of the web, have fun saying whatever you're going to say. I've never worked at Google or Amazon, I have opinions about their product design and culture, but there's nothing I can say about their infrastructure and systems because I have no idea about them, and what we all do in this crazy world of programming is harder than it looks.
For some, this won't be the answer to "what's going on?" because I'm not pointing fingers at any one thing. To me, the real answer is: an unprecedented scaling event on what was already one of the busiest sites on the web exposed seams in their systems, including the need to move from their own data centers to a much more scalable cloud provider - that are being addressed as quickly as possible.
I'm not telling you not to look for alternatives, I'm not telling you what to do about it, I'm not saying that all of their problems will magically be solved soon, I have no idea. I'm even launching a new version control system myself very soon to compete with them. But I do know that the thought "GitHub doesn't know what they're doing" is wrong and unhelpful.
Comment · 2 months ago
I can name lots of things I can't stand about MacOS and iOS and Apple hardware, but that wasn't the point of the comment. Some of the things I can't stand about Apple are things that people used to Apple's stuff don't mind. Cool for you. But I'm still not moving to The Villages, ever.
Comment · 2 months ago
Easy workaround for this:
1. Install uBlock Origin in Edge.
2. Start Edge, browse to MSN Weather.
3. Click the "Add an Application" button in the address bar to get a Start Menu icon for the page.
4. Delete the in-box Weather app icon.
Now you get the same Weather app in about 130MB of RAM, with no ads. It's not as nice as a native app, of course, but it's 1000% better than the useless ads and MSN feed that you can't block from the built-in Weather icon.
(Also, go into Widget settings and turn off "Discover / Microsoft Start feed". Same crap, different surface. Get rid of it.)
Comment · 2 months ago
Super interesting; it's been exactly the opposite in my experience. MacOS/iOS users put up with whatever Apple is telling them they should love - Liquid Glass, right? App Store restrictions, right? Lousy AI, right? - whether it's true or not. Linux users are willing to put up with any amount of work - i.e. bullshit - to make their installations work just to get a UX that's almost as good as Windows from 20 years ago.
As for Windows, I like living in cities. If you live in a city long enough - at least through a couple of major macroeconomic cycles - you'll see it improve in some ways and some neighborhoods, get worse in some ways and some neighborhoods, then improve again, etc. Cycles. Windows found itself in a downturn the last few years, primarily due to the org structure that took Windows shell away from people who could really look after it, and, yes some of those execs have earned my permanent scorn, like a bad local politician would. Now there's a focused team making that neighborhood better. I'm here for the whole ride.
I'll use Linux on computers I don't have to log into very much, so I don't have that UX problem (case-sensitive command lines? Seriously? The 1970's called...). I'll never move to MacOS City; it's like wanting to live in The Villages. Manicured lawns with no soul.
So I live in Windows Town, it's not perfect, no city is, but it's always changing, always moving, going through ups and downs, and now it has a new "city council" that's making changes for the better. And I'm expert enough to make it great for me, and avoid the "neighborhoods" that suck.
This article highlights a problem that Windows has right now, and one which I agree with, which is shipping web apps instead of native. For now, I have a workaround for it:
1. Install uBlock Origin in Edge. 2. Start Edge, browse to MSN Weather. 3. Click the "Add an Application" button in the address bar so I have a Start Menu icon for the page. 4. Delete the in-box Weather app icon.
Now I have the same weather site, no ads, running in about 130MB of RAM.
Enjoy your choice of operating system. Live where you want. Sometimes your city has problems. Move if you want, but don't think you've permanently solved your UX issues if you do, you've just swapped them for different ones.
Comment · 8 months ago
This SDK is widely trusted, but it carries significant technical debt:
Performance risks
Memory leaks
Design flaws
Maintainability issues
Comment · 1 year ago
Avalonia. https://avaloniaui.net/platforms
Comment · 1 year ago
I know that OpenAI has made computing deals with other companies, and as time goes on, the percentage of inference that they run their models on will shift, but I doubt that much, if any, of that has moved from Microsoft Azure data centers yet, so that's not a reason for difference in model performance.
With that said, Microsoft has a different level of responsibility, both to its customers and to its stakeholders, to provide safety than OpenAI or any other frontier provider. That's not a criticism of OpenAI or Anthropic or anyone else, who I believe are all trying their best to provide safe usage. (Well, other than xAI and Grok, for which the lack of safety is a feature, not a bug.)
The risk to Microsoft of getting this wrong is simply higher than it is for other companies, and what's why they have a strong focus on Responsible AI (RAI) [1]. I don't know the details, but I have to assume there's a layer of RAI processing on models through Azure OpenAI that's not there for just using OpenAI models directly through the OpenAI API. That layer is valuable for the companies who choose to run their inference through Azure, who also want to maximize safety.
I wonder if that's where some of the observed changes are coming from. I hope the commenter posts their proof for further inspection. It would help everyone.
Comment · 1 year ago
Everything about the title of this article is frightening.
Comment · 2 years ago
You can see it deployed as a web site at https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/.
Comment · 2 years ago
This is brilliant. Thanks for building it.
Comment · 2 years ago
The fact that most of your Git commands are local-only is an artifact of how Git works, but I expect that ~100% of the time, you have an internet connection, so the fact that Grace needs to be connected to the cloud just isn't a thing I worry about.
I'm not writing a new VCS based on the 0.00000001% "but I'm on an airplane without WiFi" case.
There's ~0% reason in 2024 to build software for offline use cases, and even less reason in 2026 and 2028. I'm happy to cede that to Git if you really need it.
As an industry, we fetishize offline for version control only because Git sort-of does that. Again, it doesn't really... you still have to push to do real work with your team, but we need to stop pretending that's a hard requirement. It's totally not, it's just a "feature" of Git that gets in our way today more than it helps us.
> Also I once had a case of working on an air-gapped network.
Coming from Microsoft, and being familiar with the air-gapped Azure instances for government, I designed Grace to be able to run on those Azure clouds. In other words, all of the PaaS services that Grace would use on Azure are present in those clouds.
Even the air-gapped world isn't "offline", it's totally networked, just on a network that's not connected to the Internet.
I haven't specifically looked at similar AWS instances, but I have to believe it's possible there, too.
Statically-typed languages > dynamically-typed languages, for all tasks > ten lines of code.