zenbowman

10 ms·

1.
by zenbowman 7mo ago
"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 been used to get children addicted to garbage, di
2.
by zenbowman 7mo ago
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 media access, and most people don't get their IDs unti
3.
by zenbowman 7mo ago
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 with the damage done to children's developing bra
4.
by zenbowman 2y ago
100%. I do this all the time, this will be very useful internally.
5.
The Beginning of Software (Engineering)(docs.google.com)
1 points by zenbowman 2y ago|0 comments
6.
by zenbowman 2y ago
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 off-the-shelf stuff available. Even things like protob
7.
by zenbowman 2y ago
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 declining quality. No way around it. The one thing you absolute
8.
by zenbowman 2y ago
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.
9.
by zenbowman 2y ago
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 of memory safety and thread safety that Rust offers means tha
10.
by zenbowman 2y ago
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.
11.
by zenbowman 3y ago
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 where interconnected updates end up being prett
12.
by zenbowman 3y ago
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. Godot today is way ahead of where Unity was in 2007ish.
13.
by zenbowman 3y ago
Same. Slowing down traffic is an inherent good, whether or not you have any intention of crossing.
14.
by zenbowman 3y ago
> 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 well written and documented code bases (for e.g. tcmal
15.
by zenbowman 3y ago
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 abstraction to avoid a small amount of copy-pasting + edit in
16.
by zenbowman 3y ago
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 services that are small enough that they can be managed by a si
17.
by zenbowman 11y ago
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 is trendy and fashionable rather than what is right for the
18.
by zenbowman 11y ago
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 on interesting projects, and at the end of the day you h
19.
by zenbowman 11y ago
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 anything, it indicates that many immigrants are deeply pragma
20.
by zenbowman 11y ago
If all your RPCs take a single parameter, this isn't a problem provided you use universal defaults.
21.
by zenbowman 11y ago
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 thread-per-request model, and would burden us with more complex
22.
by zenbowman 11y ago
It isn't just fitness that helps, but movement. Movement and sunlight are fundamental nutrients for the human body.
23.
by zenbowman 11y ago
Well written and understandable. The use of illustrations was particularly good.
24.
by zenbowman 11y ago
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 companies in the 60s and 70s, or Bell Labs in its heyda
25.
by zenbowman 11y ago
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 would recommend: Try a programming job outside the Valley, pre
26.
by zenbowman 11y ago
Having gone to college is not evidence that your opinion is any more important than anyone else's. What matters is: what does the data say about GMO safety? Are your views informed by the consensus of scientific studies? If not, then t
27.
by zenbowman 11y ago
I know what they do, not what you do. If you know something I don't, then I have no way of using it to form an opinion until you tell me about it.
28.
by zenbowman 11y ago
If that were true, I'd be proud to work there. Food innovation is of critical importance for mankind, in the same realm as space exploration or improved information accessibility. Certainly a lot more important selling ads, or providin
29.
by zenbowman 11y ago
It's a hot topic, yes, but an important one. We are in an age where policy is decided by a scientifically illiterate public, with potentially devastating consequences for people outside the developed world. That needs to be confronted
30.
by zenbowman 11y ago
Of course there are other aspects to agricultural science and technology. However, there is nothing in this company that indicates they are advancing technology in any sense. This is not to say they are not providing a worthwhile service. E

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