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

Is something bugging you?

antithesis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 438 posts

Re: Is something bugging you?

#181

Post by jwr »

mcmoor wrote: post #63
jwr wrote: post #53

FoundationDB is an impressive achievement, quite possibly the only distributed database out there that lives up to its strict serializability claims (see https://jepsen.io/consistency/models/strict-serializable for a good definition). The way they wrote it is indeed very interesting and a tool that does this for other systems is immediately worth looking at.

Is it that good? I've been tasked to deploy it for sometime and it always bit me in the ass for one reason or another. And I'm not the one who use it so I don't know if it's actually good. For now I much prefer redis.

It depends how you define "good". I care mostly about my distributed database being correct, living up to its consistency claims, and providing strict serializability.

(see also https://aphyr.com/posts/283-jepsen-redis)

I care much less about how easy it is to use or deploy, but "good" is a subjective term, so other people might see things differently.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#182

Post by terpimost »

dkyc wrote: post #85

On mobile, the "Let's talk" button in the top right corner is cut off by the carousel menu overlay. Seems like CSS is still out of scope of the bug fixing magic for now. On a more serious note, it's an interesting blog post, but it comes off as veeery confident about what is clearly an incredibly broad and complex topic. Curious to see how it will work in production.

Designer here, sorry, it is intentional. I thought horizontally scrollable menu is more straightforward than full screen expander.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#183

Post by QuercusMax »

mettamage wrote: post #173
jimbokun wrote: post #35

> The biggest effect was that it gave our tiny engineering team the productivity of a team 50x its size. I feel like the idea of the legendary "10x" developer has been bastardized to just mean workers who work 15 hours a day 6.5 days a week to get something out the door until they burn out. But here's your real 10x (or 50x) productivity. People who implement something very few people even considered or understood to…

When I was in college, I've met a few people that coded _a lot_ faster than me. Typically, they started since they were 12 instead of 21 (like me). That's how 10x engineers exist, by the time they are 30, they have roughly 20 years of programming experience behind their belt instead of 10. Also, their professional experience is much greater. Sure, their initial jobs at 15 are the occassional weird gig for the uncle/a…

Yup, that's been my experience as someone who asked for a C++ compiler for my 12th birthday, worked on a bunch of random websites and webapps for friends of the family, and spent some time at age 16-17 running a Beowulf cluster and attempting to help postdocs port their code to run on MPI (with mixed success). All thru my CS education I was writing tons of toy programs, contributing (as much as I could) toward OSS, reading lots of stuff on best practices, and leaning on my much older (12 years) brother who was working in the industry. He pointed me to Java and IntelliJ, told me to read Design Patterns (Gang of Four) and Refactoring (Fowler). I read Joel on Software religiously, even though he was a Microsoft guy and I was a hardcore Linux-head.

By the time I joined my first real company at age 21, I was ready to start putting a lot of this stuff into place. I joined a small med device software company which had a great product but really no strong software engineering culture: zero unit tests, using CVS with no branches, release builds were done manually on the COO's workstation, etc.

As literally the most junior person in the company I worked through all these things and convinced my much more senior colleagues that we should start using release branches instead of "hey everybody, please don't check in any new code until we get this release out the door". I wrote automated build scripts mostly for my own benefit, until the COO realized that he didn't have to worry about keeping a dev environment on his machine, now that he didn't code any more. I wrote a junit-inspired unit testing framework for the language we were using (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDL_(programming_language) - like Matlab but weirder).

Without my work as a "10x junior engineer", the company would have been unable to scale to more than 3 or 4 developers. I got involved in hiring and made sure we were hiring people who were on board with writing tests. We finally turned into a "real" software company 2 or 3 years after I joined.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#184

Post by jakewins »

binarymax wrote: post #171

I got really excited about this, and I spent a little time looking through the documentation, but I can't figure out how this is different than randomizing unit tests? It seems if I have a unit test suite already, then that's 99% of the work? Am I misunderstanding? I am drawing my conclusions from reading the Getting Started series of the docs, especially the Workloads section: https://antithesis.com/docs/getting_sta…

This is that, and the exact same vibe, except: it promises to keep being that simple even after you add threads, and locks, and network calls, and disk accesses and..

With this, if you write a test for a function that makes a network call and writes the result to disk, your test will fail if your code does not handle the network call failing or stalling indefinitely, or the disk running out of space, or the power going out just before you close the file, or..

So it’s; yes, but it expands the space where testing is as easy as unit testing to cover much more interesting levels of complexity

Re: Is something bugging you?

#185

Post by crashabr »

rkangel wrote: post #115
adamauckland wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider a "bug" to be "it was supposed to do something and failed". Issues around business logic are not failures of the system, the system worked to spec, the spec was not comprehensive enough and now we iterate.

Systems Engineering has terminology for this distinction. Verification is "does this thing do what I asked it to do". Validation is "did I ask it to do the right thing".

Tangentially related, but I've recently started distinguishing verification and validation in my data cleaning work:

verification refers to "is this dataset clean?" or the more precise "does this dataset confirm my assumptions about what a what a correct dataset should be given its focus"

validation refers to "can it answer my questions?" or the more rigorous "can I test my hypotheses against this dataset?"

So I find this interesting (but in hindsight unsurprising) that similar definitions are used in other fields. Would you have a source for your defintions?

Re: Is something bugging you?

#186

Post by lukan »

tranceylc wrote: post #77
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, an engineer who speeds up a build or test suite by an order of magnitude is easily a 10x engineer in most organizations, in terms of man hours saved. Yeah but this isn't something scalable that can happen regularly as part of your job description. Like most jobs/companies don't have so many low hanging fruits to pick that someone can speed of build by orders of magnitude on a weekly basis. It's usually…

Does anyone else feel like people follow these sort of industry pop-culture terms a bit too intensely? What I mean is that the existence of the term tends to bring out people trying to figure who that might be, as if it has to be 100% true. I personally think that some people can provide “10x” (arbitrary) the value on occasion, like the low hanging fruit you said. I also believe some people are slightly more skilled…

"Does anyone else feel like people follow these sort of industry pop-culture terms a bit too intensely? "

Agreed, there is too much effort going into the "superstars" theme, but there are definitely people who get 10x done in the same time as others.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#187

Post by nlavezzo »

binarymax wrote: post #171

I got really excited about this, and I spent a little time looking through the documentation, but I can't figure out how this is different than randomizing unit tests? It seems if I have a unit test suite already, then that's 99% of the work? Am I misunderstanding? I am drawing my conclusions from reading the Getting Started series of the docs, especially the Workloads section: https://antithesis.com/docs/getting_sta…

Antithesis here - curious what part of the Getting Started doc gave you that impression? If you take a look at our How Antithesis Works page, it might help answer you question as to how Antithesis is different from just bundling your unit tests.

https://antithesis.com/docs/introduction/how_antithesis_work...

In short though, unit tests can help to inform a workload, but we don't require them. We autonomously explore software system execution paths by introducing different inputs, faults, etc., which discovers behaviors that may have been unforeseen by anyone writing unit tests.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#188

Post by cperciva »

wwilson wrote: post #175
kodablah wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has any thought been given to repurposing this deterministic computer for more than just autonomous testing/fuzzing? For example, given an ability to record/snapshot the state, resumable software (i.e. durable execution)?

Somebody once suggested to me that this could be very hand for the reproducible builds folks. I'm sure that now that we're out in the open, lots of people will suggest great applications for it. Disclosure: Antithesis co-founder.

My favourite application for "deterministic computer" is creating a cluster in order to have a virtual machine which is resilient to hardware failure. Potentially even "this VM will keep running even if an entire AWS region goes down" (although that would add significant latency).

Re: Is something bugging you?

#189

Post by mettamage »

QuercusMax wrote: post #183
mettamage wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in college, I've met a few people that coded _a lot_ faster than me. Typically, they started since they were 12 instead of 21 (like me). That's how 10x engineers exist, by the time they are 30, they have roughly 20 years of programming experience behind their belt instead of 10. Also, their professional experience is much greater. Sure, their initial jobs at 15 are the occassional weird gig for the uncle/a…

Yup, that's been my experience as someone who asked for a C++ compiler for my 12th birthday, worked on a bunch of random websites and webapps for friends of the family, and spent some time at age 16-17 running a Beowulf cluster and attempting to help postdocs port their code to run on MPI (with mixed success). All thru my CS education I was writing tons of toy programs, contributing (as much as I could) toward OSS, r…

This sounds similar to the best programmer I personally know and he was an intern working at LLVM at the time. It's funny how companies treat that part of his life as "no experience". Then suddenly he goes into the HFT space and within a couple of years he has a similar rank that people have that are twice his age.

10x engineers exist. To be fair, it does depend which software engineer you see as "the standard software engineer", but if I take myself as a standard (as an employed software engineer with 5 years of experience), then 10x software engineers exist.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#190

Post by JimDabell »

randomdata wrote: post #176
JimDabell wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m explaining what the terms “10x” and “1x” mean, not asserting that the original observation is correct under all circumstances.

Except you haven't explained it at all. Sackman, Erickson, and Grant found that some developers were able to complete what was effectively a programming contest in a 10th of the time of the slowest participants. This is the origin of the 10x developer idea. You, on the other hand, are claiming that 10x engineers are 10 times more productive than the worst engineers. Completing a programming challenge in a 10th of the…

That was designed as a repeatable experiment, which seems entirely reasonable when you want to conduct a study. Why are you characterising that as “a programming contest”? That seems like an uncharitably distorted way of describing a study.

That study also does not exist in isolation:

https://www.construx.com/blog/the-origins-of-10x-how-valid-i...

Post reply on HN