gmantom (u/gmantom) - Readit News

gmantom commented on F# Not just for finance fsharp.tv/gazettes/f-the-... · Posted by u/markfsharp

cm3 · 9 years ago

What concurrency models do you employ to saturate all cores, and how's GC behavior?

gmantom · 9 years ago

F# has fantastic concurrency support. Great support for Asynchronous operations and Multi Threading. Being a functional first language and immutable by default means most of the micro services are stateless and this means we can take advantage of concurrency like crazy and not worry too much about race conditions. I think functional languages in general make concurrency much easier not just F#.

GC on the other hand is very aggressive with all of the immutable data structures F# creates. GC in F# is very good, though, I think without good garbage collection you have a tough time in a functional world. Microsoft is especially interested in GC performance for .NET and they have explored memory dumps to improve GC so it performs well even under load and when used with F#.

gmantom commented on F# Not just for finance fsharp.tv/gazettes/f-the-... · Posted by u/markfsharp

louthy · 9 years ago

> Over 4 million customers already on jet and over 2200 cores

That sounds like a lot of cores for such a small data-set. Are you able to expand a little more on why you need so much computing resource?

gmantom · 9 years ago

Have you ever used Jet? Try it, add a few things to your cart then add a few more and see what happens to the prices of the previous items. There are millions of permutations being computed behind the scenes.

The system is computing prices all of the time based on many factors. Plus we have built everything in house from our warehouse management system and supply chain tools to order management and everything else.

That amount of compute encompasses QA, Dev environments and any experimental and R&D work we are doing.

Plus jet.com is trying to compete with Amazon so that means the system has to be ready for many million more users than there are currently shopping with us.

gmantom commented on F# Not just for finance fsharp.tv/gazettes/f-the-... · Posted by u/markfsharp

gmantom · 9 years ago

While I think F# is a great programming language. The article missed some good uses of it.

Specifically the article missed one of largest F# deployment, in production, in the world at this point. We use F# at Jet.com and it powers every part of our core business from our dynamic pricing algorithm to search and analytics.

Over 4 million customers already on jet and over 2200 cores on azure all running F# code.

gmantom commented on DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine code.facebook.com/posts/1... · Posted by u/adwmayer

gmantom · 9 years ago

So I mean this is great but are they open sourcing it?

Is there a way for us to play with it? Or are they just bragging?

gmantom commented on Who Was Ramanujan? backchannel.com/who-was-r... · Posted by u/thepoet

gnufied · 9 years ago

See I neither agree or disagree with your opinions about wolfram.

But by discussing wolfram's character in this thread you have managed to steer entire discussion on wolfram rather than mathematics of Ramanujan. Unfortunately this happens too often in any online discourse, where subject matter is entirely ignored but most of the discussion focuses on tangential stuff. It is especially true when commenting on actual subject matter requires some solid background or research, but somehow many people feel obligated to comment anyways. It is classic low hanging fruit vs contributing something real to the discussion.

gmantom · 9 years ago

This is a good point but aren't you doing the same thing? sorry that was a cheeky response.

One thing I will say on your point is that this sort of "side" discourse sometimes brings about real good discussion. Maybe the actual article itself dosent spawn anything new or maybe it is too complex for most folks. However, sometimes the comments lead to new articles to explore a "side" idea that came out from the online comments.

So many articles I've read lately start with "There was a great discussion on hacker news on this topic I felt obligated to write about it, you can find it here".

I think this is healthy.

gmantom commented on Got a Hot Seller on Amazon? Prepare for Amazon to Make One Too bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/petethomas

gmantom · 9 years ago

Amazon is a lot like China.

You go make your stuff in China it's cheap, they have the factories, the facilities. You do well.

Once they, in China and at Amazon, notice that what you're doing is selling quite well they make the same thing and cut you out.

Edit: Spelling.

gmantom commented on Deadly animal prion disease appears in Europe nature.com/news/deadly-an... · Posted by u/etiam

matthewmcg · 9 years ago

Right--as I understand it, it's not that different than Google's "Meeting Room Hardware Virus":

"I imagine it started with all of the adapters which were thrown around in every meeting room. Everyone with a Macbook of some flavor needed a DVI to VGA adaptor in order to use the projectors, so they were plentiful. Somehow, someone probably damaged one of them and smooshed a couple of pins into places where they should not have gone.

"Then, someone else forced this into their Mac. Perhaps two pins tried to go into just the one socket. At any rate, it would now break the socket and get it all out of whack. That socket, used with another adapter in another room, would then break that adapter. This new broken adapter would then go on to break even more Macbook DVI connectors.

Thus, we had a hardware virus." [1]

[1] https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/09/24/dvi/

gmantom · 9 years ago

Sounds like AIDS.

What with the sockets and everything.

gmantom commented on Congratulations You’ve Been Fired mobile.nytimes.com/2016/0... · Posted by u/dcschelt

pascalo · 9 years ago

Would you say companies the size of Amazon, Netflix and HubSpot still fall into that bucket?

To me they are large tech companies that have kept some sort of startup canon in place, and not in a good way.

gmantom · 9 years ago

That's very fair. I can't speak about Amazon, because I've never worked there. You're right that some companies are hanging not on to that startup canon, at least from the outside it seems that way, even after they are large and it's not just Amazon but Amazon is probably the biggest.

My comment generally holds true though that startups have tradeoffs to large corporations. If large corps are trying to take advantage of that then we, as top talent, need to stay away from them so they fail and this trend can go away.

gmantom commented on Congratulations You’ve Been Fired mobile.nytimes.com/2016/0... · Posted by u/dcschelt

gmantom · 9 years ago

Look startups aren't perfect. You will most certainly work harder than at a large established firm. Your life balance will be no where near as good as at a large firm.

But why are you electing to work at a startup?

1) You are getting some options and have the possibility of a big upside which does not exist at a large firm.

2) You want more responsibility and you will certainly get it in the form of wearing many hats, but you will work harder.

3) If things are working out you will be promoted faster and move your career forward much quicker than most established firms.

4) There are many other points I could make here but arguably the most IMPORTANT reason to work at a startup is to LEARN, and learn you will.

There are tradeoffs with working at a startup, startups aren't perfect. To say that they are much worse than large corps who are scared of key man risk and keep you at an arms length so they can fire and lay off thousands at a time is disingenuous.

Corporations are generally only after profits big or small. You as an employee have a responsibility to make the right decisions for you.

Edit: some spelling mistakes.

gmantom commented on Effeckt.css – Performant CSS transitions and animations h5bp.github.io/Effeckt.cs... · Posted by u/Ideabile

gmantom · 9 years ago

This is really slick. I am amazed at what people are doing with CSS these days.

HTML 5 + JS + CSS is slowly becoming the best way to build UIs native or otherwise.