Please elaborate. Why do you think he needs to ask more for the book? Is it because he poured so much of his time in it?
Ask more? The book is expensive. If he lowers the price, say to $10, the sales will probably increase 10x.
Readit Newstydok commented on Show HN: Coding Career Handbook learninpublic.org/?from=H... · Posted by u/swyx
tydok commented on Ask HN: How to avoid over-engineering software design for future use cases? · Posted by u/h43k3r
> How far should we go in making things generic ?
Never make things generic apriori.
tydok commented on My Job Interview at Google (2008) catonmat.net/my-job-inter... · Posted by u/kureikain
Reading that stuff always makes me feel incredibly stupid (or rather clueless). I wouldn't be able to answer most of those questions off the top of my head. Including this weird clock hand question (which is probably some trivial math that might or might not have been taught to me more than a decade ago and which I never ever actually applied since).
Then I probably have to remind myself that I'm (halfway successfully) running a SaaS platform with tens of thousands of users, so maybe I'm not that clueless after all.
Maybe Google scale isn't for me.
> which is probably some trivial math...
The clock hand problem can be solved with the Rule of Three
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-multiplication#Rule_of_T...
tydok commented on Complexity Has to Live Somewhere ferd.ca/complexity-has-to... · Posted by u/mononcqc
This is a great essay.
Along the same lines, there's a great quote from many years ago that I unfortunately can't find the exact text of, but it goes like this (paraphrasing):
"Most Microsoft Word users only use 5% of its features."
"So why don't we get rid of the other 95%, since it's so bloated and complex?"
"Because each user uses a different 5%."
Yeah, but perhaps the 90% of each 5% is common to all users.
> if we ignore client bandwidth.
The parent post explicitly took the client bandwidth into account, that's why it was 100 instead of 10.
But your point about 10 vs 9 still stands. Still, 81, and if you bucket into 3 tiers, that's still 27. Which at least scales linearly instead of quadratically.
Exactly. It scales linearly, not quadratically. I forgot to mention that since clients do the "original" encoding, the server actually does less work (regarding resolution tiers).
If you're all connecting directly to a streaming server (instead of using something p2p), the server will have 10 connections for inbound video feeds and then 10*9 open outbound video connections to send each video to each client connection.
> 100 outgoing video feeds. Not many machines can encode 100 video feeds in realtime
The server will send 9 video streams to each connection, but it has to process only 10 video streams since it will send the same video data to all clients, if we ignore client bandwidth.
You need a lot of GPU time to run a decent video conferencing system.
That's because every video feed usually needs to be realtime, low-latency transcoded to match the receivers bandwidth requirements. If some people in the meeting are on 3G while others are on fast internet, you can't send the same data to all of them! You can't send the same to all of them if different client devices have different hardware video encoders/decoders. Start doing software decoding and you'll soon end up draining users batteries like Zoom!
In a 10 person meeting, thats 10 incoming video feeds, and 100 outgoing video feeds. Not many machines can encode 100 video feeds in realtime! Obviously you can skimp on quality a bit and bucket users (ie. we'll have a high, a mid, and a low res feed, and just pick which to send).
For all the above reasons, that tends to be why self-hosted video conferencing systems are kinda laggy and gobble battery and have poor client support.
Big companies offering hosted VC solutions tend to have dedicated video encoding chips, so they can cheaply make hundreds of video streams to send to every participant.
Firstly, a client will have 10 outgoing video streams at most, not 100!
Secondly, if we consider receivers bandwidth, a client can encode 2 or 3 video streams, e.g. low, medium, and high quality video.
tydok commented on To get good, go after the metagame commoncog.com/blog/to-get... · Posted by u/shadowsun7
would you guys mind giving examples of what you are calling fundamentals?
The fundamentals are about positional elements and strategic principles.
For example: Relative value of the pieces, Control of the center, Pawn structure, Tactics, Initiative, Tempo, Opposition, Keep the position balanced, Develop multiple ideas/areas (strategy), Control open lines (files/ranks/diagonals) and crossings
tydok commented on Requirements volatility is the core problem of software engineering stackoverflow.blog/2020/0... · Posted by u/luord
It’s not a problem of software engineering, it’s a property of software engineering.
Yes, it's indeed a property, not a problem. The problem is the accidental complexity which has the tendency to increase and requires constant effort/energy from us to keep it low.