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tdumitrescu commented on FBI tries to unmask owner of archive.is   heise.de/en/news/Archive-... · Posted by u/Projectiboga
andai · a month ago
I've been thinking the Library of Congress should buy Archive.org

It should become part of an entity that is very difficult to kill, and will exist for a long time.

Although I guess that's a function of culture, and I think respect for libraries is rapidly declining.

tdumitrescu · a month ago
If the last 9 months have shown us anything, it's that long-running government institutions are a lot easier to kill than we thought. And the idea of archive.org being under the control an administration like the current one in the US is pretty frightening. They would have absolutely zero qualms about deleting and changing that data.
tdumitrescu commented on Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?   tonybaloney.github.io/pos... · Posted by u/willm
PaulHoule · 3 months ago
I went through a phase of writing asyncio servers for my side projects. Probably the most fun I had was writing things that were responsive in complex ways, such as a websockets server that was also listening on message queues or on a TCP connection to a Denon HEOS music player.

Eventually I wrote an "image sorter" that I found was hanging up when the browser was trying to download images in parallel, the image serving should not have been CPU bound, I was even using sendfile(), but I think other requests would hold up the CPU and would be block the tiny amount of CPU needed to set up that sendfile.

So I switched from aiohttp to the flask API and serve with either Flask or Gunicorn, I even front it with Microsoft IIS or nginx to handle the images so Python doesn't have to. It is a minor hassle because I develop on Windows so I have to run Gunicorn inside WSL2 but it works great and I don't have to think about server performance anymore.

tdumitrescu · 3 months ago
That's the main problem with evented servers in general isn't it? If any one of your workloads is cpu-intensive, it has the potential to block the serving of everything else on the same thread, so requests that should always be snappy can end up taking randomly long times in practice. Basically if you have any cpu-heavy work, it shouldn't go in that same server.
tdumitrescu commented on It's OK to hardcode feature flags   code.mendhak.com/hardcode... · Posted by u/PuddleOfSausage
simonw · 10 months ago
The single biggest value add of feature flags is that they de-risk deployment. They make it less frightening and difficult to turn features on and off, which means you'll do it more often. This means you can build more confidently and learn faster from what you build. That's worth a lot.

I think there's a reasonable middle ground-point between having feature flags in a JSON file that you have to redeploy to change and using an (often expensive) feature flags as a service platform: roll your own simple system.

A relational database lookup against primary keys in a table with a dozen records is effectively free. Heck, load the entire collection at the start of each request - through a short lived cache if your profiling says that would help.

Once you start getting more complicated (flags enabled for specific users etc) you should consider build-vs-buy more seriously, but for the most basic version you really can have no-deploy-changes at minimal cost with minimal effort.

There are probably good open source libraries you can use here too, though I haven't gone looking for any in the last five years.

tdumitrescu · 10 months ago
Seriously. This is one of those cases where rolling your own really does make sense. Flags in a DB table, flags in a json file, all super simple to build and maintain, and 100x faster and more reliable than making the critical paths of your application's request cycle depend on an external provider.
tdumitrescu commented on How shut-down Bay Area tech companies ditch their fancy gear   sfgate.com/tech/article/s... · Posted by u/Stratoscope
mihaaly · a year ago
> Startups burn through cash as they skyrocket in size and ambition, accumulating outrageous perks and office equipment along the way. Then they crash to Earth, with nothing but their private planes or massive 3D printers to pad the impact.

This does not sound healthy.

Almost sounds intentional by its common knowledge usual occurance. Taking the money of some clueless holder of money - optimistically calling themselves as investors, never as suckers for sure - and fraud away. Having a good life while doing it. Putting it proudly into the CV to repeat. Like if this is the original intent to begin with. To fail and skim the money while losing bad. Not really doing/attempting something beneficial and lasting in the end. That might sound scary - meaning they have to worry about being permanently successfull, balancing the sheet, react to adverse changing, for long, long, long. 'Starting up' (and fall) is easy, 'keep on going' is too hard?

tdumitrescu · a year ago
Nobody is going through the significant work of raising VC and then TRYING to fail. All for the sake of temporarily using some fancy office furniture.
tdumitrescu commented on Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road   bbc.co.uk/sport/cycling/a... · Posted by u/skruger
philshem · a year ago
> "The food I make is all transparent," says (chef) Blandy. "There are no rich sauces, it's all plain, simple cooking with a light amount of seasoning, light amount of oil, fresh herbs and citrus.

That’s some top-notch nominative determinism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism

tdumitrescu · a year ago
Hey if they wanna pay me for real transparent food I'll cook them up some "Emperor's New Hollandaise"
tdumitrescu commented on A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago   mbuffett.com/posts/progra... · Posted by u/marcusbuffett
Chris_Newton · a year ago
Possibly my all-time favourite XKCD, Is it worth the time?¹, demonstrates two important points. If you only do something very rarely anyway, spending time to automate it won’t have a great ROI. But for things you do moderately often that take a minute or even just a few seconds, you can afford to spend a surprisingly large amount of time optimising them and still get a big pay-off over a time frame measured in years.

I view time spent learning to use my tools efficiently and automating common tasks as a sound investment. Editors are a great example. Sure, I could fire up any of the usual suspects and write code somewhat productively. But in my fully customised editor of choice, I can insert and adapt common code patterns that would take me 10–30 seconds to type out fully in mere moments using templates and macros. I can jump to any position visible on-screen with around three keystrokes. I can see syntax highlighting for various file types that I use all the time, including some unusual ones that don’t have definitions readily available, and warnings for several different programming languages in real time as I work.

These save me a few seconds every time I use them, but how many times is that every day? The effort to set them up has probably repaid itself 100x over by now! And the lack of latency is also a qualitative improvement since it means once I’m ready to start writing, I can do so roughly as fast as I can think, instead of constantly being held back and interrupted for a moment.

¹ https://xkcd.com/1205/

tdumitrescu · a year ago
> If you only do something very rarely anyway, spending time to automate it won’t have a great ROI

For code-editing, maybe. But in general software engineering, there are tasks that I have to do maybe once a year or less that are always way more painful than they need to be because I don't remember the details, and anytime I automate even part of them (or yes, just document a little better), it turns out to be well worth it. Stuff like bootstrapping new environments, some database-related work, etc.

tdumitrescu commented on A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago   mbuffett.com/posts/progra... · Posted by u/marcusbuffett
bobajeff · a year ago
Same here. I don't spend most of my time typing but rather thinking. So getting good at vim or getting faster at typing will not make me any better. That's not to say that I'm not in favor of being good at typing. I know my keyboard well enough to touch type also I know some keyboard short cuts specific to vscode but they are intuitive and have a GUI alternative if I don't feel like using them.
tdumitrescu · a year ago
I think everyone's got a different threshold for where returns start diminishing sharply. While I'm squarely in the "don't waste time micro-tweaking your editor" camp, there are some little bits of shortcuts and tooling that made me much more fluent at code-editing with very little investment. One example that stands out is the multi-cursor support that Sublime Text popularized (and which I use all the time in vscode now). It eliminates a good 80% of repetitive typing, or symbol refactoring that would have involved clunking through menus in old IDEs, and makes experimentation that much quicker. Feels fundamental, like copy/paste shortcuts which everyone knows now.
tdumitrescu commented on Carpenter's AirTags help uncover 'massive' case of stolen tools in Maryland   washingtonpost.com/dc-md-... · Posted by u/williamsmj
bredren · 2 years ago
I just read (by audiobook) two great fiction works by Colson Whitehead that include some of these ideas, Crook Manifesto then is prequel Harlem Shuffle.

Great stuff.

tdumitrescu · 2 years ago
Nitpicking: Crook Manifesto is the sequel to Harlem Shuffle, which came out years earlier. There's a third installment planned.
tdumitrescu commented on OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?   vox.com/future-perfect/20... · Posted by u/fnbr
nurple · 2 years ago
The thing is that this is a private company, so there is no public market to provide liquidity. The company can make itself the sole source of liquidity, at its option, by placing sell restrictions on the grants. Toe the line, or you will find you never get to participate in a liquidity event.

There's more info on how SpaceX uses a scheme like this[0] to force compliance, and seeing as Musk had a hand in creating both orgs, they're bound to be similar.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/15/spacex-employee-stock-sale...

tdumitrescu · 2 years ago
Whoa. That article says that SpaceX does tender offers twice a year?! That's so much better than 99% of private companies, it makes it almost as liquid for employees as a public company.

u/tdumitrescu

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