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smoodles commented on Waymo’s lawsuit against Uber is going to trial, judge rules   techcrunch.com/2017/05/11... · Posted by u/golfer
tomp · 9 years ago
Why is reverse engineering illegal (unless covered by a patent)?
smoodles · 9 years ago
My recollection is reverse engineering is legal, but it needs to be done carefully. Using staff that designed the "thing" you are trying to reverse engineer is not part of the doing it carefully bit...
smoodles commented on Waymo’s lawsuit against Uber is going to trial, judge rules   techcrunch.com/2017/05/11... · Posted by u/golfer
memmcgee · 9 years ago
It very much looks like Uber did this premeditated and that Travis and the Otto guy planned this while he was still at Google. It is VERY bad for Uber and they could get hit with much worse than just being banned from using a specific technology. The judge has already referred the case to the USA's office for possible criminal charges. Maybe we'll actually see an executive thrown in jail for once.
smoodles · 9 years ago
while I'd love to see this, I think that is highly doubtful :(
smoodles commented on Stock options are complicated   benkuhn.net/options... · Posted by u/luu
doh · 9 years ago
We do it. And I know of many startups that also followed Quora's example. Definitely not everybody does it, but also it's more than 0.
smoodles · 9 years ago
Oh I know there are more than a few these days. My point was the majority of startups I'm aware of are still very hesitant to do this. From the conversations I've had its less that the founders of these firms are morally opposed to the idea, but that their VCs really don't like the idea as a global policy.
smoodles commented on Stock options are complicated   benkuhn.net/options... · Posted by u/luu
helper · 9 years ago
AMT and the 90 day limit on exercising after leaving a company are the main things that make options painful. There has been some movement in the industry to get away from the 90 day limit (by converting from ISOs to NSOs), but has there been any recent attempts to get the AMT rules changed for ISOs? Does anyone think the current AMT rules for stock options are fair? I'm curious how this is viewed by people outside the industry.
smoodles · 9 years ago
There was an effort last year to pass a bill to fix the AMT horror show with regards to options last year.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/5719

I think ironically to the bubble many of us live in the Silicon Valley, this was proposed by a Republican and passed in the House. Never made it in the Senate. A refreshing reminder good ideas still come from all slices of our political spectrum.

smoodles commented on Stock options are complicated   benkuhn.net/options... · Posted by u/luu
richardhenry · 9 years ago
Regarding stock options expiring 3 months after leaving the company, it doesn't have to be this way and a lot of startups are moving in the direction of 10 year exercise periods.

I think Quora was the first to do this: https://dangelo.quora.com/10-Year-Exercise-Periods-Make-Sens...

smoodles · 9 years ago
I'm not sure about "a lot of startups", I'm personally only aware of a very few that are doing this. Word on the street that I hear is that maaaaybe your current employer might do this for employees they like, but not as a consistent policy. Many board members, founders, etc... feel they will take a retention hit if they were to implement something like this.

I personally think the status quo is insane, and I will never take another role with a options component of the package that does not have a policy like this.

smoodles commented on Ask HN: Is S3 down?    · Posted by u/iamdeedubs
emrekzd · 9 years ago
In December 2015 I received an e-mail with the following subject line from AWS, around 4 am in the morning:

"Amazon EC2 Instance scheduled for retirement"

When I checked the logs it was clear the hardware failed 30 mins before they scheduled it for retirement. EC2 and root device data was gone. The e-mail also said "you may have already lost data".

So I know that Amazon schedules servers for retirement after they already failed, green check doesn't surprise me.

smoodles · 9 years ago
So just as a FYI the reason that probably happened to you is that the underlying host was failing. I am assuming they wanted to give you a window to deal with it but the host croaked before then. I've been dealing w/ AWS for a long long time and I've never seen a maintenance event go early unless the physical hardware actually died...
smoodles commented on Startup Puts Everything You Need for a Two-Acre Farm in a Shipping Container   smithsonianmag.com/innova... · Posted by u/kungfudoi
cylinder · 9 years ago
My scam senses were tingling before I got to the comments. Most likely this is a routine NGO/EDU/Gov scam backed by an aggressive and shiny sales approach.
smoodles · 9 years ago
This is not a scam. This is the real deal, with years of research and testing behind it. Disclaimer: I know one of the principals directly.
smoodles commented on Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL   eng.uber.com/mysql-migrat... · Posted by u/myhrvold
jobu · 10 years ago
> It sounds like Uber is using MySQL as just a data bucket with primary keys

They have a couple posts about "Schemaless", but I still don't understand why they used MySQL as the data store instead of something like Cassandra. ( https://eng.uber.com/schemaless-part-one/ ) From that post it looks like they basically built a no-sql database on top of a relational database.

The only reason given was operational trust ( "If we get paged at 3 am when the datastore is not answering queries and takes down the business, would we have the operational knowledge to quickly fix it?" ). The project took nearly a year to roll out, and in that time the operation knowledge could surely be trained, hired, or contracted.

smoodles · 10 years ago
Operating Cassandra at the scale that Uber is going to require is going to be painful and as operationally draining as MySQL if not more.

There are really not a large number of options here anymore with the departure of FoundationDB from the market. CockroachDB might be an option in a few years, though I'm still confused why they are moving towards a SQL-ish vs key-value interface...

smoodles commented on Ask HN: Best monitoring system?    · Posted by u/mspaulding06
calvinx408 · 10 years ago
I used to use nagios and migrated to sensu for system checks. I was using graphite/seyren for time series and alerting, but doing a YoY or week over week was very slow especially if it's a lot of metrics. You should look at http://wavefront.com

You can do some nice math functions for your alerts.

smoodles · 10 years ago
+1 to this as long as you are ok with an external vendor.

A couple of caveats. If you are coming from Nagios, this is a different worldview on monitoring. Like many other solutions commented here this is all based around metrics and their associated time series, and then you need to alert on those metrics. You ask the system questions with a time series query language.

Wavefront doesn't yet have a great solution for poll-based monitoring (i.e. hitting host Xs /healthcheck endpoint) so I still use terrible 'ol Nagios for that in my environment. However the rest of my work is all done in Wavefront - I'd say easily the high 90% of all my material alerts are done in wavefront with a small subset of work done in Nagios.

The killer feature here is the query language. I don't think there is anything else on the market that has its level of sophistication. I've had ex-Googlers on my team who "grew up" with Borgmon, which is in some sense the Ur-time series monitoring system and they loved it.

All this said, there are a lot of options about there. I have a strong bias against supporting my own complicated monitoring infrastructure. I want to focus on my own product. If you don't share that opinion or are on a super duper tight cash budget (but you do have time) than disregard the above ;)

smoodles commented on After 45 years, FBI closes investigation into unsolved 'DB Cooper' hijacking   komonews.com/news/local/f... · Posted by u/Jerry2
jonathankoren · 10 years ago
Interestingly, there's evidence that the CIA knew about -- and perhaps utilized -- the Boeing 727's latent air drop capabilities as part of Air America.[0]

[0] http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-cia-proved-that-a-boein...

smoodles · 10 years ago
One small data point, I've heard the same from my Pops who was involved with Air America at the time.

u/smoodles

KarmaCake day17July 12, 2016View Original