Viewing profile — zenbowman

"Preserving privacy and anonymity online" is not an inherent good. It depends on how it is being used and what the consequences on society are. Thus far, privacy and anonymity have…

Exactly right. Also, better to be overly restrictive here given the well documented harms of social media on young minds. If the law stipulates that you must be 15 to obtain social…

100% correct. At this point the harms to children from social media use are very well documented. Like everything else in society, there are tradeoffs here, I'm much more concerned…

100%. I do this all the time, this will be very useful internally.

This was the norm about a decade ago. When I was at Hulu, we built our own analytics platform on top of Hadoop, we almost certainly wouldn't have done that today with the amount of…

Beyond that, someone as emotionally brittle and allergic to criticism as he is will inevitably create a yes-men culture, which will destroy engineering discipline & lead to declini…

I would argue that it made sense for performance-sensitive code until the maturation of Rust, so it made sense even in 2015. But not today.

I understand wanting to defend your baby, and I think C++ was VASTLY better than most other languages for performance sensitive code until maybe 5 years ago - but the combination o…

This is a great writeup, I work on batch/streaming stuff at Google and I'm very excited by some of the stuff I see in the Rust ecosystem, Arroyo included.

I wouldn't say "infinite", its still susceptible to read hotspotting; and while fine-grained locking enables generally higher write throughputs, you can still get in a situation wh…

Exactly. I used Unity starting from almost the first release, and attended Unite in 2007. Unity was seen as a hobby engine then, we used it for the web, but for desktop used Unreal…

Same. Slowing down traffic is an inherent good, whether or not you have any intention of crossing.

> Because I tend to write all my code such that a complete stranger should be able to drop in and understand it This isn't an achievable goal for most complex systems. Even very we…

Things like large functions or code duplication are not necessarily bad in the first place. A far bigger problem that I encounter regularly is the invention of extreme layers of ab…

Shipping around individual video frames between components is really an astonishingly bad idea. Microservices seem to be a decent idea with a terrible name. The idea of running ser…

Very well said. A clean data model, one aligned with business needs, and sensitive to the nature of machines, makes the best architecture. Far too many decisions are based on what …

For someone coming from India, you aren't necessarily forgoing thousands of dollars of income. My PhD years were quite relaxed, you can live frugally, you get a stipend, you work o…

That is precisely why a lot of us pursue STEM degrees - it is easier to immigrate with a STEM degree, and the job market is favorable. How is that an anti-immigrant statement? If a…

If all your RPCs take a single parameter, this isn't a problem provided you use universal defaults.

One correction: Futures are not necessarily run on a separate thread pool. If that were always true, they would offer no performance advantage over the thread-per-function or threa…

It isn't just fitness that helps, but movement. Movement and sunlight are fundamental nutrients for the human body.

Well written and understandable. The use of illustrations was particularly good.

For the most part, this is correct. It would take an exceptional company with a grand vision for me to swap 2 & 3. I could see myself doing that if I worked for Seymour Cray's comp…

Academia is far more cutthroat and stressful than programming. It is not even close. Coming to industry after being in academia was like being on permanent vacation. One thing I wo…