Viewing profile — mabbo

Many years ago, as an undergrad, I had a conversation with a grad student friend about the Selection algorithm (which will find the kth largest item in an unsorted list in O(n) tim…

Not all time spent interacting with a screen is "screen time". The problematic thing is kids spending endless hours just absorbing rather than playing or interacting or doing stuff…

I got a sleep study at the age of 24 because my then-girlfriend (now wife) said "I got used to the snoring, but that thing where you stop breathing really freaks me out". The what …

I learned about the median-of-medians quickselect algorithm when I was an undergrad and was really impressed by it. I implemented it, and it was terribly slow. It's runtime grew li…

Sorry Dang. I hadn't realized it was coming off that way, but I'll be my best to check myself in the future. I can see how what I said would be construed that way.

I'm not disagreeing with you. This was a very bad idea. But I was a few hours away from becoming a parent, hadn't slept much in days, and was not thinking very well. Sub-optimal de…

What I find interesting when comparing the US the Canada on topics like these is that in Canada, there is self-interest in demanding workers be protected. Like beyond the fact that…

> My guess is the industry just isn’t educating workers about the risks. My guess is that the companies that did were undercut by the ones that didn't.

When my wife was super pregnant and overdue, friends were consistently asking for updates. I made a website called "is stillpregnant.com" and put a very very minimal website there.…

At $110/h, 70 h/week, that's $7,700/week, so $23k for 3 weeks of hell. That's about 1/3 of the median US household income in 3 weeks. If I didn't have a family, had the skills, and…

It worked, FYI. Thanks!

There is a need for runtime configurations, yes, but it's important to put them behind an interface intended for that, and not one intended for something else.

> Make feature flags short-lived. Do not confuse flags with application configuration. This is my current battle. I introduced feature flags to the team as a means to separate depl…

No no don't tell me this. I had things I wanted to get done this weekend!

I saw a cool looking indie game the other day on steam and excitedly bought it. Then realized it doesn't support Linux. I can't install it. I was shocked. And then I realized how c…

Many years ago when I was a junior dev at Amazon, there was a massive project internally to split up every internal system into regional versions with limited gateways allowing cal…

The moment that generative AI became something crazy for me was when I said "holy shit, maybe Blake Lemoine was right". Lemoine was the Google engineer who made a big fuss saying t…

Ontario built highway 407 in the early 2000s (late 90s?) with tolls that use license plate readers - no slowing down or stopping at all. Still a bit controversial, that, and especi…

I think the above means (if I do get the point) that databases scale in terms of both requests per second and number of active connections. Having 1000 connections doing 1 request …

No, they both matter. The database can handle X shops per partition, and the rails host can handle Y shops per partition. If rails were half as fast, you'd need twice as many rails…

This is secretly about Types and misuse of values. "NV" is a valid value for a plate. The officers were using that value to indicate an error, thus the chaos of error handling for …

That's not on a per-host basis. Shopify's design is, quite fortunately, one that partitions really well, as each store is completely independent of each other. Each store can be as…

Really, Khadr? The guy was brainwashed as a child by his lunatic father and dragged to Afghanistan to resist American's invasion. There was some kind of firefight, he nearly died, …

Hardeep Singh Nijjar was 7 years old at the time of that attack. Are you suggesting that he was involved? Or are you suggesting that all Sikhs who believe in an independent nation …

And I think they're just as wrong for it. But if you'll consult a world map and look just above the United States, you'll notice that Canada is, in fact, a separate country.