Recent submissions

Comment · 4 months ago
I think I've seen all of the Redis/Valkey issues the author mentioned in production.

* Outages where Valkey had no memory policy, ate all the memory, and then caused write errors to its append-only file. Bonus points for another one where the disk itself was full, and AOF writes failed.

* 500s where Redis was fully expected to be live, running, and populated with data for every user, and no fallback to a slower path.

* Creative uses of sorted sets and other data structures which depended on the sets never being evicted.

Despite the observations from the field, I think it's still hard to recommend memcache ahead of Redis. It can be difficult to architect an app to have a memcache-friendly cache layout.

I'd almost guarantee a large enough team using memcache will find a way to need Redis. And then we're maintaining 2 cache technologies.

Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 4 years ago
Are those numbers reversed?

Should it be a $750k house at 3% is a $500k house at 6%?

Comment · 4 years ago
In your hypothetical, why did you choose to have the African kid raising siblings, the Asian kid have a Tiger mom, and the white kid be on honor roll with no external factors?
Comment · 10 years ago
It cannot be about removing the DAC, there's still one for the internal speakers.
Comment · 12 years ago
Comment · 12 years ago
> By creating anti-diverse groups like [Women Who Code, PyLadies, Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code], people are literally saying “This group of people are different than the majority, so we need to do special things for them. Treat them differently. They’re special.”

Though this was a small part of the post, I believe this is one of the most flawed concepts he has. Having founded a group for black programmers in NYC, I can tell you, we're not asking for special things, nor have any of the women I've encountered from the other groups.

My group, the Black Techies, was founded so that we could have a place free of crap like cultural biases, or people asking "why are the black people sitting together at lunch", or sexist and racist posts that devalue our worth.

The author's version of "true diversity" is one where anyone who is not a white male assimilates into a white male culture of software development.

His vision is one where white males don't have to change; where acceptable groups are blessed; where we can't do anything about the adults in the field, we need to focus on the children and in 20 years, __maybe__ we will look up and see that it worked.

This vision is one that perpetuates the status quo.

For myself, and I would posit the other founders of similar groups, the status quo is unacceptable. And we actively fight, on our own terms, for our own interests about the best way forward. Who knows best about how to hire more "diverse" programmers than those same "diverse" programmers?

Is a "1:1" speaker ratio the right thing? Is it going to produce results? Is it sustainable?

Who knows.

But, it is an active and bold idea. It's taking a stand. It's does a hell of a lot more for the conversation than silently removing a "no girls allowed" sign from the boys club.

Comment · 12 years ago
I don't like anecdotes like this because they back the assertion Stop and Frisk does societal good.

It implies that police are able to discern the difference between "good people" and "bad people", and that "stopping the bad ones" doesn't harm society at large because "the good ones" don't get stopped.

This is hurtful to those who have experienced it first hand, and to those who are seeking equality of all people under the law.

Comment · 15 years ago
Cars to computers always seems to be a poor analogy. But you can replace the ECU with one of your choice. In fact, there is an industry designed specifically for getting better performance from your car by customizing the ECU.

Isn't this the same thing as the Cyanogen mod?

Comment · 15 years ago
I fail to see how anyone can recommend homebrew as a viable solution to package management on OS X. You have to compile everything.

Coming from apt-get or yum makes brew, port, and fink look like a joke.

Comment · 15 years ago
This is anecdotal evidence from them coming to speak at my college, but... Walmart controls almost all of it's logistics. Whereas its competitors use other shipping companies, and have inventory sit in 3rd party warehouses, Walmart builds huge distribution centers that service multiple Walmart stores.

The distribution centers mean they can purchase huge levels of inventory at discounted terms. Running their own logistics means that they can break up pallets into smaller shipments appropriate for each store. So stores need less space to carry inventory, and they can purchase and store huge amounts at lower cost per sq. ft.

The other thing the logistics does is gives them an advantage in transportation cost. Although (I've heard) the margins in ground transport are slim, running your own ground transport saves money, allowing for lower prices to the consumer.

Walmart's size also contributes to their "efficiency". They can buy in larger quantities than their competitors and try to exert downward pressure on suppliers' prices. They can also nab exclusives and put them on the shelves for less than competitors.

Comment · 15 years ago
So I would argue that the matching problem with many different styles of socks is O(n^2), since we first must select one sock appropriate for the occasion, then rummage through all the other socks to select its match. This does have the problem that your algorithm may never finish if your laundry eats socks like mine does.

And that with all identical pairs, I assert the solution is O(n), since there is a chance that you will have to iterate through all of your socks to find one with no holes/is clean. However, I think the latter case is Omega(1). Not quite so sure about the first one.

Comment · 15 years ago
Clearly, Facebook is in a different PHP area than your bog-standard $3/month crowd. Facebook has an advanced PHP tool chain that compiles PHP down to C++ (hip-hop)and they reap performance gains from that. They also built PHP repl (phpsh) because `php -a` sucks.
Comment · 15 years ago
This is the second comment I've come across in this thread. At first I would tend to agree, but let's consider that the "suits" probably have jobs. And if they were at YCNYC they obviously have more interest in startup culture than the million or so suits who did not come.

Part of hacker culture is judging someone by ideas, which is why we're known for the t-shirt and shorts attire. But I don't think it's fair nor helpful to judge someone by their attire at a post-work event.

We know gobs and gobs of NYC's tech talent works in the financial services industry. I'm happy to see the diversity, even if I got a few pitches from folks looking for a l33t technical co-founder.

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