avl999 (u/avl999) - Readit News

avl999 commented on UPI Payments: 10B transactions a month done, next stop 100B bqprime.com/business/upi-... · Posted by u/TriNetra

avl999 · 2 years ago

I was recently in India a few weeks ago for a friend's wedding. I am not an Indian national/citizen/whatever and my experience related to anything tech and money was absolute awful (esp the obsession with OTPs)

* The problems start as soon as you land at the airport. I land at the Delhi airport, my friend has sent a driver to pick me up and gave me his contact info. I try to connect to Airport wifi and bam it's asking me for an Indian number to text an OTP to connect to the public WiFi. Why is having an indian number at the Delhi INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT an expectation? What do they expect foreign travelers to do? Ridiculous. Luckily I found someone and asked to use their phone to whatsapp the driver and figure out where he was.

* Foreign credit cards are hit and miss. I have 2 credit cards, I let my bank know I would be traveling and I still could not reliably use them, they worked maybe a fraction of the time. Apparently Indian government added some "security" requirements earlier this year to "prevent fraud" that ices out a large number of foreign cards at many payment tills. This essentially makes India a cash-only economy for foreign tourists.

* If you try to use your foreign cards while shopping, many places will ask to send an OTP to your (indian) number even for relatively small amount of money involved, and again as a foreigner you are out of luck.

* Since I can't use my cards reliably, I am now forced to carry around cash. Worse... the highest denomination available is 500 rupeees, which is equivalent to about $6. This means that if you are planning on doing any type of shopping as a foreigner you have to carry a fat wad of cash on your person the entire time. I intended to do some shopping, eating out and drinking which meant I had to carry around 20,000 ruppees at all times, which was neither comfortably due to how fat that wad of cash is, not relaxing as I am constantly worried about losing it.

* I finally decided to get an Indian phone number to get around all the OTP nonsense and get some data while walking around. And bam to get an Indian sim card you need an indian ID or as a foreigner go through an application process involving a bunch of documentation (and not trivial documentation, requirements like a picture that matches the exact dimensions accepted by them) and it's not a quick process. Red tape upon red tape to get a sim card for normal usage! Thankfully, someone helped me out with a SIM card they purchased via their govt ID and gave it to me saving me the pain.

* The pain doesn't end here. After I get my sim card, I realize I need to buy a bit more data. Easy enough I think in my head... there's even an app from the provider! I pick the upgraded plan and try to buy via my credit card and boom, international credit cards are not accepted for e-transactions. I literally just want to give them the equivalent of $10 to get an additional 25 gigs of data and I can't do it online. Again, I asked someone to buy it for me and paid them in cash.

* Then I wanted to buy a friend a gift that is only available on Amazon. The red tape strikes, apparently as of this year Amazon India can no longer accept foreign credit cards as methods of payment due to "security and anti-fraud requirements" by the indian govt. Again, I have to find someone to buy it for me from Amazon using their card and pay them cash for it.

The bad is that everything is so needlessly complicated and red-tapey for foreigners. Things that should be trivial are hard.

The good is that you can always find someone to help you circumvent the red-tape by paying them cash :).

avl999 commented on Twitter Is DDOSing Itself sfba.social/@sysop408/110... · Posted by u/ZacnyLos

Tade0 · 2 years ago

But in such cases surely there's some kind of rate limiter in place?

I mean, if I'm reading that screenshot correctly this is 700+ requests a minute.

I've tripped the rate limiter with less on other sites.

avl999 · 2 years ago

> But in such cases surely there's some kind of rate limiter in place?

Not really, our team maintained a reverse-proxy that fronted all requests that came into amazon. And whenever we would have a self-ddos event, we'd get a request from the backend team whose service was getting self-ddos'd to shed traffic before it reached their service hosts to prevent it from browning out. In many case ddos's were coming from kindle devices which were not even easy to update so deploying a "fix" wasn't even always an option.

avl999 commented on Twitter Is DDOSing Itself sfba.social/@sysop408/110... · Posted by u/ZacnyLos

lamontcg · 2 years ago

I think we're about at the point where the people who predicted chaos at twitter after Elon basically fired most of the experienced engineers have been proven correct. The duct tape is all coming apart at the seams now.

It isn't quite as decisive as a submarine imploding, and ceasing to exist, but it has turned into a brightly burning tirefire.

avl999 · 2 years ago

I am not disagreeing with you but self-ddos is not entirely uncommon. When I worked at Amazon this would happen a few times a year. Not on the main amazon.com website but on supporting services often initiated by but not limited to kindle devices. Having something like this slip through the cracks of even experienced engineers isn't uncommon.

avl999 commented on Twitter Is DDOSing Itself sfba.social/@sysop408/110... · Posted by u/ZacnyLos

sgammon · 2 years ago

wow. how would one even fix this without deliberate downtime? you'd have to deploy and hope that the frontend will make it through CDNs to reduce pressure, right?

avl999 · 2 years ago

First thing I would try is seeing if the front end has a different retry strategy for a different status code (say 503). If so I'd change the status returned for throttling to be that (503).

Barring that, turning off server side throttling or atleast making it less aggressive to slow the retry storm seems the most reasonable.

avl999 commented on Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended twitter.com/zoeschiffer/s... · Posted by u/minimaxir

Ferrotin · 3 years ago

If it’s a conceptually complex system then the devs weren’t really that good in the first place. Yeah, technical debt happens, but you can’t have both that the system had good technical leadership and it can’t possibly stay up under replacement employees. (My impression is that it will stay up.)

avl999 · 3 years ago

> If it’s a conceptually complex system then the devs weren’t really that good in the first place.

Spoken like someone who has never worked on a sufficiently complex system.

avl999 commented on Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended twitter.com/zoeschiffer/s... · Posted by u/minimaxir

pschuegr · 3 years ago

I hope that the wheels stay on sufficiently to get an idea of where EM wants to take Twitter and find out what kind of value it can bring. Having said that, he really made it obvious to me as an eng that the severance is the option I would be taking. Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. But somebody who takes over the company and accrues so much social debt so quickly for no other discernible reason than looking like the smartest person in the room misses the bar for "the right people" by a pretty significant margin.

avl999 · 3 years ago

Exactly, severance was absolutely a no brainer based on that email. I have gone "hardcore" many times in my life working crazy hours but all of that has either been in exceptional circumstances or me doing it because I was having fun. If someone emailed saying that "going hardcore and crazy hours" is the baseline for acceptable performance (note, not even good performance, just acceptable performance), I'd be outta there too.

I feel bad for all those who are on visas though and may not have the flexibility to accept the severance offer.

avl999 commented on Elon Musk gives Twitter staff deadline to commit to being ‘hardcore’ theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/oneeyedpigeon

adamrezich · 3 years ago

interesting to see "cuckold" used denigratingly on this website—I thought that was taboo in current year, especially here

avl999 · 3 years ago

I didn't want to use that word but that's the only thing that comes to mind describing what you are saying.

Why in the world would you find it acceptable to work at a place where the baseline is extreme hours and where extreme hours are required for just an acceptable performance review if you have other options?

I have worked extreme hours in many jobs but that has always been because either it was an exceptional situation or I was doing it of my own accord. Other than those two situations the only other reason I would do it is either:

1 I am working at a startup (preferably it's my own or I own a lot of equity)

2 I needed the job that badly

3 There was some "higher mission" associated with the work (eg manned space travel to mars, rushing to find a vaccine)

2 doesn't apply to twitter engineers and 3 certainly doesn't apply since twitter whose "higher mission" is selling ads.

avl999 commented on Elon Musk gives Twitter staff deadline to commit to being ‘hardcore’ theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/oneeyedpigeon

adamrezich · 3 years ago

what exactly is wrong with this?

why have we been programmed to believe that putting hard work into making something great is a bad thing?

this was not the case a few short years ago.

again: what the fuck happened?

avl999 · 3 years ago

If you are willing to work significantly over normal work hours, for market value pay for a company with no greater mission beyond selling ads so that Elon can service the interest on his debt then by all means go for it. That is literally cuckold behavior but some people are into that so if that works for you good for you.

I know my value and won't work in that type of environment.

avl999 commented on Go: Redefining For Loop Variable Semantics github.com/golang/go/disc... · Posted by u/denysvitali

jstimpfle · 3 years ago

WTF. I haven't been interested in Go after looking at it briefly a decade ago. This post brings back the weird feeling about it that I had then. It looks like taking the address of a local variable (item := item; append(..., &item);) and using that outside the scope of the local variable. But apparently that is ok.

Variations of such perceived weirdness exist in many other languages with complicated "object models" as well to be fair. Delphi has some strange adressing stuff going on as well. Python has this weird "default list" thing. Most object languages don't let you take the address of something (like the Go example shows) at all, but have only object references which I find unergonomic.

avl999 · 3 years ago

`&varName` is not equivalent to C version of the superficially similar looking operation.

avl999 commented on A Discussion on Printk() lwn.net/SubscriberLink/90... · Posted by u/signa11

dzaima · 3 years ago

I think it's important to take context in mind here - this isn't how linus responds to every suboptimal patch. If you already say "this patch is bad" for many patches with average levels of bad, repeating that same thing for something which in Linus's mind is likely many magnitudes worse is gonna lose very important information!

(an alternative would be scaling back the severity of all negative speech, but then you'd drastically reduce the range of dislike showable for the much more frequent less severe cases; I do think Linus here might have gone too hard here, but don't think it's too far off what could be considered appropriate)

avl999 · 3 years ago

I reject PRs every day at work with varying level of "badness" and it works just fine. Normal people can put 20 seconds of thought and come up with a response that explains why a patch is unacceptable without resorting to name calling, even in this PR response Linus does that for the most part but in the end just can't help himself from throwing in a couple of petty jabs. There are other open source communities where this behavior would be unacceptable (for example the GoLang core team).

I am calling this out because Linus specifically said that he wants to handle himself better in public, he is aware of how he comes across and wants to change, it is not an RMS type situation where the guy has no self-awareness. Reading the rest of the thread I bet he regretted his response esp considering the response of the branch maintainer.