Live data from Hacker News

An Unbelievable Demo

brendangregg.com

341–350 of 478 posts

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#342

Once I worked at company X, while there I have seen a said Library for universally accessing things in OS. It was written by our senior architect. Year later I worked at another company, there was this high strung developer boasting about his own library. He even put it up on a webpage - was before GitHub. It was same library at company listed above, so I ratted to the developer who wrote that library. I usually feel…

". I usually feel queasy about ratting, for some reason I did not feel a slight bit of dissonance."

I feel it would have been ratting to the original creator to do nothing.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#343
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep. i remember asking a question on google groups about some AppEngine query early on a Saturday morning thinking, "this will never be answered". about 15 minutes later Guido van Rossum answered my question.

Also, people who say so-and-so company (usually Google) is hard to contact for support, or that they require expensive support contracts before they'll talk to you, have likely never tried sending email to the appropriate mailing list for the product. It's amazing how often doing this completely bypasses any corporate first-line-support structure in the way, and just puts the email right into the inbox of the line en…

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.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#344
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep. i remember asking a question on google groups about some AppEngine query early on a Saturday morning thinking, "this will never be answered". about 15 minutes later Guido van Rossum answered my question.

Also, people who say so-and-so company (usually Google) is hard to contact for support, or that they require expensive support contracts before they'll talk to you, have likely never tried sending email to the appropriate mailing list for the product. It's amazing how often doing this completely bypasses any corporate first-line-support structure in the way, and just puts the email right into the inbox of the line en…

It depends on your issue. We got good support emailing with the TF Lite team on a neural net bug. I think if you’re interacting with open source in a value add way google support is often quite good. If you’re looking for support for integrating for sales or classic customer support it can be terrible to non-existent.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tldr; In 2007, an academic argues with PG and others. After long exchange, academic defensively states their own achievements. Another user challenges academic with GP question, to which academic provides unexpected affirmative response.

I don't agree with that phrasing. A lot of people on that thread seemed sure cperciva was some arrogant dickhead bound for failure, but tarsnap is going a lot stronger than many of them are. Also people in the thread were amazingly rude to him, while he seemed pretty polite to me.

I think you're giving cperciva too much credit. He was just as arrogant as people thought, and he was definitely defensive.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#346
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, people who say so-and-so company (usually Google) is hard to contact for support, or that they require expensive support contracts before they'll talk to you, have likely never tried sending email to the appropriate mailing list for the product. It's amazing how often doing this completely bypasses any corporate first-line-support structure in the way, and just puts the email right into the inbox of the line en…

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 written in, that translates to being able to code a patch myself, faster than I can get someone on their end to comprehend the problem I'm having.

That applies up until the point where there's a problem surface that's just plain inaccessible to me (i.e. the inside of a proprietary mobile app or SaaS service), at which point I have to reach out to tell them that it's broken / missing something on their end. (And even then, if I have a spare hour and access to the offending binary, I'll reverse-engineer it a bit to see if I can hotpatch it while waiting for them to get back to me.)

I suppose, for people who don't think this way, there can be value in "support." But IMHO there's more value in just hiring some DevOps engineers who do think that way. Then all the easy "support" requests get handled in-house, and so you'll only ever need the kind of "support" that involves direct bug reports to the engineers from the vendor who built the thing.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with that phrasing. A lot of people on that thread seemed sure cperciva was some arrogant dickhead bound for failure, but tarsnap is going a lot stronger than many of them are. Also people in the thread were amazingly rude to him, while he seemed pretty polite to me.

I think you're giving cperciva too much credit. He was just as arrogant as people thought, and he was definitely defensive.

I wonder how many people will downvote you without looking at your username?

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#348

I had a similar, smaller scale of that happen, in a sort of reverse direction a few years ago. My director dropped a resume on my desk for someone coming from a company I had worked at ten years prior, thinking I might have met them (it was a small organization). I didn't recognize the name, but skimmed through the resume quickly, and their primary claim on their work history was something I invented just six months…

Having conducted technical interviews at FAANG companies for over 10 years, I've gotten to the point where I never believe anything anyone claims on their resumes unless I can independently verify them. I also make it a point to ask probing questions about where they got the idea of "inventing" what they did and what alternatives to "making a brand new thing" they considered at the time. However one of my favorite qu…

Your favourite question has some cultural gaps as in many countries in interview settings people downplay weaknesses and flaws. It’s why a lot of weakness questions are often ineffective. Unless you are acutely aware of when a person is doing this BECAUSE it’s an interview you’re going to get some answers that might lead you to reject good candidates.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#349
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was there a license violation if the software wasn't distributed?

Yes. Making copies internally is also copyright infringement... Performing it to Brendan might also have been (but not sure on that one).

> Yes. Making copies internally is also copyright infringement...

No, GPL FAQ specifically addresses internal distribution: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistributi...

> Is making and using multiple copies within one organization or company “distribution”?

> No, in that case the organization is just making the copies for itself. As a consequence, a company or other organization can develop a modified version and install that version through its own facilities, without giving the staff permission to release that modified version to outsiders.

> However, when the organization transfers copies to other organizations or individuals, that is distribution. In particular, providing copies to contractors for use off-site is distribution.

Please consult sources before making a strong statement.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#350
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR: DTrace uses a minimalistic C dialect called D to write it's probes, hence the name. In order to trace arbitrary code, it has to inject these into the code site that you want inspected. If you could just inject arbitrary C, you'd get the issue of potentially adding probes which change the behaviour of your code under test to a degree where new bugs/behaviours are introduced or old bugs/behaviours are masked. DT…

>DTrace uses a minimalistic C dialect called D Which is completely unrelated to the other language called D, also known as DLang. (which was released 4 years earlier than DTrace by the way)

Should've called it C--.
Post reply on HN