Viewing profile — vii

Even worse, it normalizes being a vindictive egotist. People need to be grown up about feedback especially if they're in powerful positions. Not ok to be offended.

After having interviewed hundreds of engineers, I agree with the premise that elite TopCoder competition programmers are great not just at brainteasers. It takes a lot of disciplin…

Some of this advice is great, like getting out of the way, guiding people with how to think about trade-offs and doing daily coding. But it doesn't feel like 'Principal' level advi…

Is that a false claim? The expectation that an SSD or even SD-card is infinitely rewriteable (practically speaking) is implicit in the marketing. The idea that a drive can't be rew…

Being considered the go-to person means you are first in line to make small tweaks (and config changes in code). This increases the change count. If there is a review process where…

Rob Pike wrote this about handling errors https://blog.golang.org/errors-are-values This is like an option type but manually built. Go is painful if you don't want to write high-qu…

well that's the subject of the Linux kernel thread as the original patch was just to remove a warning from the use of the Intel MSR https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200907094843.1949…

This write up covers a lot of ground from specific issues around language and protocol transport layer choice to general advice that organisational change without a strong senior s…

Coming up with the idea of a portable personal computing device is easy. It's even possible to manufacture it (e.g. the Apple Newton). However it won't affect people's lives until …

There were plenty of platform specific problems with Flash. Steve Jobs famously ranted about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash That said, cross platform compatibil…

For the recursive functor application example on a tree, normal meta-programming would be a macro taking the type as an argument, and then generating the resulting case by case app…

This paper is surprisingly accessibly written given the complexities involved and depth of expertise of the author, DJB, who has made great contributions to many fields. Unfortunat…

The power of the Apple brand is so extreme that the fact that many users experience near weekly or daily crashes from this bug (or series of bugs) does not convince them to buy oth…

Setting a good objective function is pretty hard. In this context of consumer goods, it is at the intersection of three difficult problems: - equivalent to incentivising salespeopl…

There are many alternatives for distributed tracing like Lightstep, Jaeger and so on but the ambitious level of integration with log searching (like ELK) and payload tracking is li…

The title is a little confusing as DNS over HTTPS is the technology that comes to mind for DNS privacy. That hides the DNS queries in an HTTPS tunnel, which means fewer actors can …

The recommendation algorithm generally tries to avoid showing directly similar content. It's surprising it is all cats especially if you ever swipe. Perhaps this is an A-B test and…

Same for the Nintendo Switch. Older firmware has exploits, which allow installing Ubuntu, etc. To prevent exploiting, old firmware refuses to boot if the new firmware has ever boot…

It's not surprising that a simple theorem doesn't deal with practical trade-offs. In my experience if you feel you are running up against the CAP theorem you need to take a moment …

From the underlying paper there are several interesting snippets https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.01694.pdf > while maintainers are aware of that they sometimes intentionally bypass the …

Well it might blow up some software not expecting these tiny tick sizes but there is an economic motive for larger tick sizes. Traders can compete on - price - queue position Small…