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An Unbelievable Demo

brendangregg.com

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Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#401

Post by filoleg »

derefr wrote: post #387
deanCommie wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a great concept in theory, but in practice...find me the email list for Google Photos. Or Google Keep. These are two Google products that I use daily (including paying for one!)

Well, yeah, there does have to be a public mailing list. My point was that there are often public mailing lists, where engineers with real engineering problems could discuss those problems with the engineers responsible for the product/service; and yet the engineer with the problem nevertheless doesn't even think of using the mailing list to reach out, but instead decides to go through regular customer-service suppor…

>Well, yeah, there does have to be a public mailing list.

Imo, this is not scalable or sustainable, and mailing lists are not a replacement for adequate customer support.

The only reason sending emails directly to mailing lists for specific Google products works is precisely because those mailing lists are not public and not flooded with bajillions of emails from the general public. So those who send the emails are already somewhat pre-screened in a way, because if you know that mailing list email address in the first place, you are very unlikely to send something like "my cousin couldn't remember password to their google photos account, can you fix this please". That's why everything there ends up being read and addressed. If those mailing lists were public, then they would be just as useless and ineffective as the current customer support routes currently are for Google.

Tl;dr: mailing lists for specific products are a nifty workaround for the time being, but they aren't a good sustainable solution for shitty customer support. Making those mailing lists public will not only not help solving the problem, it will just make those mailing lists as ineffective as the current customer support. There is no "one weird trick" to solve the customer support adequacy issues with Google,it has to be an actual customer solution that won't be easy and will take time.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#402

Post by vipulved »

A very similar thing happened to me when I was pitching Gmail on anti-spam and realized they were running a forked version of Vipul’s Razor and claiming it was their own. They never contributed anything back... it’s unfortunately not uncommon.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#403

Post by rantwasp »

derefr wrote: post #346
rantwasp wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no. there is a big difference between having support and having someone that is passionate about something helping you out. support should be there and should be available from the simplest issues to the most complicated things about A PRODUCT. you will not get much traction if you ask the same things to the people expert person on a mailing list.

I guess I've never needed "support" in that sense. I almost always solve problems with the products/services we use myself — up to and including forking the vendor's codebase to fix their shit for them — because it's almost always the fastest way to do things. I've already been working with their product for a while, and I already know exactly what my own problem is. Provided I also know the language their code is wr…

you are by definition a power user. if your product is for power users that’s fine.

if your product is targeted to everyone but only power users can figure it out when there is an issue... well you have a problem.

also, being able to figure something out != you should figure it out. your time is limited and the complexity of remembering all those things that you figured out (even if you have the time) will quickly overwhelm you. unless it’s literally your job to support the product you should care about the interface of the product and what guarantees it makes

re: hiring devops engineers. i’m sorry, what? if my email suddenly does not work I’m supposed to hire a devops engineer now?

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#404

Post by ksec »

The only great thing I get from the story, at least a multi Billion dollar company thought your tools were so amazing it deserve paying their own VIP going on World Tour.

And no wonder why Sun failed to compete. A Cultural and management failure.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#405

Post by jakub_g »

Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #189
purpleidea wrote: post #18

I was fortunate enough to happen to be live at LISA13 where AFAIK, Brendan gave his first public flamegraphs demo. I'm glad I saw it. I love learning about areas (performance engineering) where I'm weaker. Great demos! I've tried to keep my personal live demos at a high quality too. Can't wait to see what he comes up with next!

Flame graphs completely blew my mind, but most people I talk to about them just don't seem to get it. I'm a generalist, but I've been thinking lately if performance engineering is something I should be specialising in. I'd love to hear any advice from those in the field.

Specializing in anything is good if you have 5+ years of exp IMO. It's always good to stand out from the crowd of generic developers.

The other plus is, if you frame yourself as a specialist in X, it might be easier to explain not knowing Y. You can't simply know everything, especially if you invest heavily in specializing in other things.

Personally I've been a web performance (i.e. mostly JavaScript/HTML) guy lately and it's been fun. There's a million of React devs in the world, but only a few dozen web perf guys with web presence (Twitter / blogs), and I almost know all of them by name at this point.

Of course it depends what you want to do. Typically it's big corps who look for specialists. Small companies prefer generalists.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#406

Post by ksec »

mishraprince wrote: post #283
grupthink wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but did you win the Putnam?

That one reply in that flame war is still hilarious so many years later. To anyone who didn't get the reference of Putnam https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

Interesting this reply and one above are from accounts that is rather new.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#407

Post by ryandrake »

I'd love to hear stories from the other side. Behind each of these "someone else taking credit" war stories is the engineer or product owner at the other company who decided this was an ethical course of action. How did you justify this to yourself and to your boss, and what was the plan if/when you got caught? Doesn't your company have an internal process for vetting the licenses of software you use? It seems like these cases are failures at multiple levels in the company. It would make an interesting post-mortem. Use a throwaway account if you like!

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#408

Post by marcan_42 »

derefr wrote: post #382
marcan_42 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XOR+RLE is almost useless for binaries, because almost any change will cause instructions to be added or deleted, offsetting the entire binary after the first change, making the xor fail to converge. On top of that, these changes cause changes in addresses in the first part of the binary, so you end up with a zillion similar-looking xor deltas in the first part of the file that won't compress well with RLE. In fact,…

Pedantic point: it's not "almost useless for binaries." It's almost useless for compiled, PIC binaries in modern executable formats like PE or ELF that allow for lots of load-time address-space rearrangement. XOR-and-RLE works well for binaries from non-HLL languages (assembler, mostly) where — due mostly to early assemblers' lack of support for forward-referencing subroutine labels from the data section — subroutine…

Yes, if we're talking about 8-bit era games, certainly things were different back then and things rarely moved around in memory between versions :-)

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#409

Post by irrational »

eppsilon wrote: post #352
irrational wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m trying to understand what you mean here. How does one pronounce and with 2 syllables?

"AY-und" Edit: another example: "door" => "DOH-ur"

Interesting. I don't pronounce either of those that way. I wonder what region of the country uses these pronunciations?

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#410

Post by lurkerasdfh8 »

Twirrim wrote: post #89

Years ago, I interviewed a candidate for a role on my team. As usual, one of the ways I break the ice with candidates is to get them to talk "war stories". The team he'd worked on had produced a tool that was only ever intended to be used by the team to solve a particular problem they had. It contained proprietary code. Unknown to the team, word had spread about the tool, and others had started to use it, including s…

> one of the core libraries it used was GPLv3 licensed

it's still untested in the real world if gplv3 "taints" derivative work that broadly.

Would they had to open source the entire solution? or just changes made to the library? nobody knows, and there's a lot of FUD to promote BSD licenses instead of sitting down and properly defining the limits in a practical way.

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