Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

rachelbythebay.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 151 posts

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#121

Post by nailer »

nwallin wrote: post #116
jcrites wrote: post #91

I agree with the author's overall premise, which is that other people who don't own and who are not responsible for your system should not have authority over how you build and operate it. One of the things that I like about the current company where I work is that owners always have the final say about their systems, not any external technical authority. There is no such authority who could say no where I work (with…

> generally no swap in production. This is a bad policy. The problem is that it breaks Linux's overcommit logic. Many applications allocate huge chunks of virtual memory far in excess of what they actually use. Due to the magic of virtual memory, this doesn't get mapped to physical memory until it's actually used. The trouble is that there's no mechanism in any programming language I'm aware of that allows the OS to…

> So if you allocate too much, and you have swap disabled, the oom killer has to step in and kill something even if you're only using half your ram.

You can allocate all the memory you want, the OOM killer only steps in when you actually use all the the memory.

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#122

Post by zzo38computer »

lr4444lr wrote: post #112
rbavocadotree wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are examples of bs in the javascript standard?

String (capital "S") class.

I think that it is good. These functions for primitives (String, Number, etc) are good, one thing sometimes to call it, and also because of the prototype. Also, there is such thing as String.prototype.constructor and Number.prototype.constructor and so on, which I have used for parsing command-line arguments (to replace the default values with the user values, converted to the correct type).

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#123

Post by wincy »

daotoad wrote: post #81
freehunter wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an unofficial board of advisors for my small company, and one of them is a "No Man". I knew that when I asked him to join. Every time the company has an idea, this guy will shut it down immediately. He forces us to defend every single decision. Do we always listen to him? No. Does he always win? No. Is he always right? Absolutely not. But I keep him around because he forces everyone in the company to defend ev…

Every company really, really, really....really needs someone like that. Imagine how much better the Star Wars prequels could have been if only Lucasfilm had a strong No Person to stop them from doing stupid shit.

George Lucas’ ex-wife was the no-woman on the original trilogy. She was his editor!

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#124

Post by sitkack »

School-Cotton wrote: post #94
sitkack wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait what? How do machines running K8s exec processes when they are near their physical memory limit? Swap does more than just provide a place for pages to get evicted to, it also increases the virtual address space.

I don't think that's true, at least on Linux. This program uses 1 TiB of virtual address space, and runs fine on a machine with no swap (and much less than 1 TiB of physical RAM). #include #include int main() { size_t const len = 1024 * 1024 * 1024; // 1 GB for (int i = 0; i The space won't be associated with any physical object (whether RAM or swap) until you actually touch it.

Thanks for the repro case!

I wasn't precise enough. The case where we needed swap not to error out was in a big mapreduce process, consuming maybe 44GB out of a 48GB host. When we didn't have swap on the box, the big process would exec a small command line process and the exec would fail, there wasn't 88GB of address space available during the brief period between the call to fork and the overlay. Adding a swap device fixed our problem even though it was _hardly_ ever used (MB to single GB).

At least that was my analysis from 10 years ago. I never went full science on it, but I did read plenty of documentation on overcommit and virtual address space.

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#126

Post by [deleted] »

shados wrote: post #8

I definitely felt this decades ago when I started in the industry. It's 2019 now though. only 8 years later, but a lot of things changed. The industry is growing fast, faster than knowledge can be shared even with all the power of the internet. It's very bottom up, with newer engineers severely outnumbering those that have been around. People are making fat salaries and companies are catering to their whims. They/we'…

[deleted]

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#127

Post by School-Cotton »

sitkack wrote: post #124
School-Cotton wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's true, at least on Linux. This program uses 1 TiB of virtual address space, and runs fine on a machine with no swap (and much less than 1 TiB of physical RAM). #include #include int main() { size_t const len = 1024 * 1024 * 1024; // 1 GB for (int i = 0; i The space won't be associated with any physical object (whether RAM or swap) until you actually touch it.

Thanks for the repro case! I wasn't precise enough. The case where we needed swap not to error out was in a big mapreduce process, consuming maybe 44GB out of a 48GB host. When we didn't have swap on the box, the big process would exec a small command line process and the exec would fail, there wasn't 88GB of address space available during the brief period between the call to fork and the overlay. Adding a swap devic…

I'm a bit out of my depth here, but maybe you could solve this by:

    echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory
According to documentation, 0 (the default) means usually allow overcommits according to some heuristic (which was probably failing in your case), 1 means always allow, and 2 means don't allow.

Edit: It appears from https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... that things will go wrong if you try to allocate more VM space in one call than the total free RAM+swap available to the system.

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#128

Post by zik »

wincy wrote: post #123
daotoad wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every company really, really, really....really needs someone like that. Imagine how much better the Star Wars prequels could have been if only Lucasfilm had a strong No Person to stop them from doing stupid shit.

George Lucas’ ex-wife was the no-woman on the original trilogy. She was his editor!

He needs to remarry her.

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#129

Post by drunkpotato »

icxa wrote: post #115
shados wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works for things you want to DO, but is hard for things you DON'T want to do. As I mentioned in another post, as your org grows, there's going to be an infinite amount of things people push, and pushing back is hard. If you have to stop and write a consensus document for every single one, you'll be doing nothing else.

How hard is it to say "these are the types of things we want to do. anything must look like these types of things in terms of (insert x y and z criteria: size, scale, opportunity, profitability, growth, etc) spoiler alert: it isn't hard and this is what we do at my startup that is currently experiencing hyper growth and is on multiple "unicorn" lists

Ahh hahahahahahaha!

Sorry. I had a more substantive comment but it drowned in ignorance and inexperience.

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#130

Post by shados »

icxa wrote: post #115
shados wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works for things you want to DO, but is hard for things you DON'T want to do. As I mentioned in another post, as your org grows, there's going to be an infinite amount of things people push, and pushing back is hard. If you have to stop and write a consensus document for every single one, you'll be doing nothing else.

How hard is it to say "these are the types of things we want to do. anything must look like these types of things in terms of (insert x y and z criteria: size, scale, opportunity, profitability, growth, etc) spoiler alert: it isn't hard and this is what we do at my startup that is currently experiencing hyper growth and is on multiple "unicorn" lists

I can't even tell if it's satire. But if it's not: I haven't see it be done easily over several hundred engineers. If you have that kind of charisma, hat off to you!
Post reply on HN