wayfarer2s

It's very different from what the article is concluding. Knuth's outcome was a "good life", not a "great life".

Isn’t cache invalidation the hardest part of the feed? Once a user with millions of followers tweets, doesn’t that essentially invalidate millions of caches? That doesn’t sound like a trivial problem.

WhatsApp and twitter’s latency calculations are on different things.

Twitter’s latency stems from calculating what tweets should show on a given request. Even if you try to show tweets from 1 minute ago, it’s hard to cache that stuff using traditional systems because of the fan out. If an account with 50 million followers tweets, you need to update 50 million timelines. How do you do that quickly?

And you would have to define maximum latency, is it seconds, minutes, hours? because you can’t have the timelines be inconsistent for too long as that leads to some people getting news faster than others.

I think affordable was implied by "state".

> This stuff is staggeringly, mind-wreckingly expensive for people who aren't in tech, and yet functionally required because of the structures we have allowed to be built.

Society has always worked this way. Those who have rare skills get paid the most. Supply and demand and what not. Universities are gateways to advanced skills, especially in traditional occupations where equipment is often expensive (medical, chemical, mechanical, etc). The reason you go to a university is so that you can get advanced skills in order to make an advanced salary. It makes no sense to go to a university by default and come out with a degree that doesn't teach you advanced skills that get you a high wage. If the jobs that your degree are going to get you aren't going to pay for what that degree cost you then you made a poor decision by taking on that debt.

This sort of thing is why I believe basic economics should be a hard requirement in high school. You shouldn't be able to get a high school diploma without understanding the mechanisms of debt/leverage. So many people have screwed themselves over because they don't understand that the only reason to ever take on debt is to use it as leverage so that you can earn even more than the debt you took on. Any other reason is foolish.

It's really sad when you think about it, so many people would be way better off if they knew the definition of leverage. Such a simple concept, yet so powerful (it's funny how knowing about leverage gives one so much leverage in life).

> I'm graduating with my master's in CS now and still haven't been taught in class many of the things I had to figure out to make what I wanted to make.

Maybe the fact that you figured it out is an indication that it doesn't have to be taught in a CS curriculum. Most of the things that you mentioned have great documentation and tutorials outside of the classroom. The fact that so many people use them without them being taught in schools should be proof enough. I think the current situation makes sense -- Computer Science education should focus on teaching the fundamentals of algorithms, data structures, discrete math and how to think conceptually about problems without regard to implementation. By learning about data structures and the like, you indirectly learn how best to use memory, redis, MySQL, write servers and whatever else.

I'm surprised the author's takeaway from the Joyce quote was disillusionment. He's actually quite close to the secret sauce. I don't think writing more code and ending up with less code are at odds. In fact, I think you need to write more code to end up with less. You write more code in order to understand the problem space. Once you understand the problem space, you can then refactor everything that you wrote into more concise code that more accurately reflects the problem.

James Joyce wrote Ulysses at the rate of a hundred words per day if you only consider the finished product. However, I doubt every word that Joyce wrote ended up in Ulysses. I'm sure he did quite a lot of cutting and rewriting.

The takeaway from me from the two quoted stories was that quality and quantity are not at odds, but instead are the yin and yang of productivity. They reinforce each other. The more things you produce, the more patterns you are exposed to which in turn leads to higher quality since experience leads to efficiency, giving you more time to get things right.

I think I get it, but I'd suggest sticking with the same example when explaining the confrontational aspect of it. When you switch contexts it makes it hard to imagine the inverse. If you don't mind, can you explain the confrontation aspect in the context of getting onto the rollercoaster?

> Depriving people of their livelihood for expressing political views is absolutely a free speech issue.

I don't think free speech is the issue here. There's a difference between expressing your views on your own time and involving the company that you work for to adopt those views. We've all seen the disclaimers that people put on their twitter profiles and blogs distancing their personal views from the companies they work for. Such a disclaimer was not issued here. Colin involved the 49ers Franchise and the NFL in his political views. He used their broadcasts to send out his message. Not all the owners necessarily sympathized with his views, especially when it started bringing negative attention to their business. In that regard, I don't think it's all that surprising that it cost him his job.

Note also that there are plenty of current NFL players who express the same sentiments as Colin on social media and in interviews, and they still have their jobs.

Audio books help a lot. It makes reading a more passive activity that you can do while doing other things that are less taxing on the mind. If you have a long commute and you can knock off quite a few books just going back and forth to work. My commute is around 30 minutes, which means I can listen to at least 5 hours of audio each week. I also tend to listen to audio books while doing chores -- tending the yard, cleaning the garage, cleaning the house, buying groceries, etc.

Most nonfiction books tend to be around 8-9 hours so you can usually finish one book a week, maybe 2 or 3 if you listen at 1.5x. If it's scientifically backed with a lot of studies and arguments, then it's closer to 15-18 hours. Novels are all over the place, from a short 4 hours to epic 50 hours books. But since it's all passive, it becomes less about finishing because it's easy reading. You'll finish it eventually.

Audio books are also great in the sense that they save my eyes for things that I can't listen to passively, like technical or mathematical books.

> valid certificate trusted by a fake CA

I don't think that's possible. A fake CA can't issue out valid certificates because you wouldn't trust their certs to begin with -- it's all about trust and if you know they are a fake CA, then you would never trust them or anything they issue. It's like if a known counterfeiter claims to be selling legit products, you probably wouldn't trust them.

> Something that was previously complicated enough to consider a product may now be trivial enough to become a feature.

Mp3 players for example.

I was thinking the same thing about those sortBy code snippets. I use shorthand for lambdas all the time because the individual item names are implied by the collection.

> when you actually want to know when the component was put into the DOM

You can use componentDidMount for that and its semantics are still the same.

Oh that sucks..How about "yarnish"? It's available on npm, sticks to your roots, and you can play on varnish if you like. Or you can always go the thesaurus route and use fleece, wool, cotton fiber, flaxen thread...