zachd1_618

I think AWS is early to offer a not-yet-matured product just to get it in front of customers and start gathering real usage feedback. I’d consider dynamo a fantastic tier 1 service, but it wasn’t always that way. This is inline with the Amazon philosophy in general.

As for “making something for the sake of having it”, I believe the key reason for building their own applications is that they can build it on the same multi-az incremental ledger/block store that underlies most services (first built for aurora), or a variant thereof. They have some pretty stellar underlying tech built to be reliable at cloud scale, something you won’t get from running a service on your own EC2 fleet. The new stuff built on top of it just isn’t all that mature though. That’s just my take though. If interested, the deep dive talk from reinvent last year on aurora is pretty cool.

Disclaimer: I work at Amazon, nothing to do with AWS or timestream. In fact, I’ve been excited for time stream for a while but found its initial performance lackluster for what I needed.

If it helps, I’m the same. Generally I’ll have to allocate 10-12 hours in order to get 6 or 8 of actual sleep. Always been the case.

My savior has been audiobooks. I listen a lot, but put a book I know and love on when I wake up 4x/night with a timer and that helps me focus on something new and not stressful (dreams, “I need to go to sleep” etc) while still being something that my brain is familiar with and can naturally drift away from into sleep.

Works 80% of the time. Been a life saver for me

For the sake of not sounding just like I’m complaining, and to actually look for more discussion: do you disagree with the regularity and nature of outages being a constant in our lives, and that a server farm somewhere is just another dimension to the scenario we all accept as normal?

Do you think that big tech and any iot “utility provider” should be held to a higher standard? (Probably IMO)

PS. Didn’t mean to go on an anti HN rant. Love this place. Just seems extra negative to me lately.

Care to elaborate? My assertion is just that, in the end, I’ve had roughly the same experience due to different root causes more often this year due to old school problems than IOT and connectivity bugs. Just saying that random anomalies are the norm, not something (for me at least) to get worked up about

Good point! Impacts are more widespread

Playing devils advocate here. My power goes out probably three times per year. Water stopped working in my building twice this year. I lost my physical house key last year. My WiFi has issues probably once a quarter and needs to be restarted. My brand new vehicle (automobiles generally have the highest requirements for reliability AFAIK) wont shift into 1st gear (manual transmission) once every thousand miles.

I feel like this community especially, but we in tech tend to forget that everything fails. It is inevitable. We get all riled up about “iot this” and “I never use connected devices that” but honestly I feel like our digital reliability is just as high as the “analog” tooling so many of us proudly retreat to.

Shit fails. Once a month when it happens in a manner like this the HN community gets up in arms like we are the sole arbiters of reason when it comes to technology.

Downvote away :-)

I rarely comment on articles but this resonates so strongly with me. It goes beyond the pervasive “imposter syndrome”, and I think the point here ought to be emphasized. Nobody knows what they’re doing, so throw out the perceived deference and join them with full confidence and determination.

Anecdotal self promotion: I grew up doing manual labor (digging holes) and whatnot thinking that the AP kids had their shit together. Same once I started AP thinking about college. Then grad school in Aero engineering. Then real aero engineers. Then real software engineers once I transitioned into true software in ad tech. TLDR even when surrounded by ridiculously smart people and out of your depth, I find that holding back because “they must know what they’re talking about” is an unproductive mindset. It must be universal, and I actually find that to be an encouraging fact. People aren’t predestined to their task and even as a noob to a field or discipline, you may have valid insight.

+1. I wrote some near flight software for an instrument using Ubuntu with a RT patch on modern hardware, in parallel with another team that took the traditional approach. Not to brag, but our “undeterministic” system ran far more reliably than the real time one that didn’t have the advantage of modern application libraries. Plus, even though we had that pesky operating system in the way, we ran on blazing fast modern architectures and were actually more deterministic than the slow as hell hardware we were benchmarking against.

I’ve seen the same pattern a few other times. Slow, hand built, rad hard systems CAN be more stable and demonstratively safer... but that is rarely the case and the effort required to get such a system right is orders of magnitude greater than using standard “undeterministic” systems. That engineering effort can be better spent innovating and building fundamentally more advanced solutions.

Just my experience. Just my opinion

Like most commenters here, I've found a happy medium (when I activate it). I'm no good at cold turkey and being without this amazing device is just impractical, but airplaning the phone routinely throughout the day really helps to cut down on "notification checking" and that constant background mental polling that this article talks about. I still like to have music (audiobooks actually) and navigation on hand, but knowing I have no notifications and knowing that there is just a tiny bit of effort involved in getting them seems to be my effective compromise.

Honestly I think the communal upset at the new MBP (personified by sensationalist headlines like the one here) are just blown way out of proportion. Am I floored by the new tech and software that Apple is pouring into their computer hardware? Nope (still 16 GB of RAM???). It is still the best option out there? Absolutely. Not trashing everything else out there, there is plenty to love. But the MBP still takes the cake. Here's the biggest reason why: workflow.

I have honestly never once seen a professional Windows or Linux (please gods don't think I am ragging on either) run so many programs as the professional Mac user. By 'professional' I mean people working in a professional, tech-oriented profession. I am used to keeping a dozen programs running, all the time. No matter what. Because why not? Photo editing software, Docker machines, 8 terminals/interactive programming environments, prototype ML training pipelines, local servers, MS products, various text editors and IDEs, Matlab, Mathematica, 100 Chrome tabs, some dev Safari pages, mail programs, Remote Desktop sessions, virtual machines, and whatever else I might need. Seriously. Who does that? My Windows coworkers all still have 1 to 2 things open at once, and routinely shut down their computers overnight. The startup to any task is about 100x longer than me and my always-ready MBP running coworkers. I can't remember the last time I actually turned my computer off. I also notice that my coworkers with MBPs get about 2 years more usable time out of them. Plus, my virtual machines run Windows specific software (STK, SDT, etc) faster and with less fuss than any of my coworkers' laptops.

The MBP hardware and software could be better, but the combo seems to make second nature the levels of productivity and multitasking that other users don't even know to dream of. My point isn't that the maximum capability is necessarily higher on the MBP, but that the median is leagues higher than on other machines. For that reason I don't see myself switching anytime soon.

Background: I am an Aerospace Engineer (becoming a full-on software developer), professional photographer, and generally demanding computer user.

This. 100% this.

As many others are saying, I find that this is the most comfortable way for me as an interviewee to demonstrate that I do in fact know what I'm talking about. Put me in front of a room full of people and a whiteboard and throw something at me, and I'll freeze. Freezing in that situation and being a bad engineer are wholly separate things.

Anecdotally, when I get one of these problems, I spent 20 minutes reading the prompt, looking at resources and making an outline of my code. Then I step away for the afternoon and don't think about it. Let the subconscious internalize the problem for a while and when I come back, I've got a much better mindset to approach it. Solving new problems on the spot is just a skill I don't have. I prefer to think that this is what makes you valuable as an employee and engineer, solving a problem by the end of the day. Not while under scrutiny. Personally, my resume and experience don't get me far interviewing by the big companies, but on the occasions that I get take home code assignments, I tend to get pleasantly surprised and pleased reviewers and it takes me to the final rounds (where I face the dreaded white board and actually-there-is-a-correct-answer situationals).

My two cents, this just really resonated with me. Does anybody else happen to solve problems this way?