News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

CptCodeMonkey

I used VNC a few times to connect to a Mac build box ( I only used Linux professionally ) and ran into a lot of problems with artifacting ( even on a dedicated Gigabit LAN ) or more annoying the remote service would crash and the only way back in was to SSH into the Mac box, kill the remote service, kill all user sessions, and restart.
Re:Migrating from MongoDB to Cassandra on Friday February 14, 2014 @07:31AM (#7238147)
Just as a historical note, I meant to type C Star ( C\* ) but HN's formatting changed c\* into C. C\* is shorthand for Cassandra.
Re:Migrating from MongoDB to Cassandra on Thursday February 13, 2014 @08:54PM (#7236344)
Knowing some of the FC people first hand, MongoDB did actually serve them fairly well for a substantial amount of time. Until they started hitting max limits, it didn't really make sense to move to c.

Going straight to C or something like it would have been almost cargo-cultish ( eg If we build industrial strength, we will get industrial levels of traffic ).

Re:Taking PHP Seriously on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @02:51AM (#7055910)
I am starting to hope for a PyPy 2.8 or a PyPy 3000 that removes the GIL. Will have to wait and see how STM plays out.
Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2014) on Saturday January 04, 2014 @09:05AM (#7011055)
You guys have been hiring consecutively for the last 3 months and the rejection letter for two of those months is the same formulaic response. Perhaps you need to refine what exactly you're looking for?
Re:Ask HN: Who is Co-founding? (December 2013) on Tuesday December 03, 2013 @05:52PM (#6843781)
Just separated from a company over some employment contract issues. Taking it easy for the month and working on my own stuff, still I would be open with working on any cool idea's for equity or better money.

Quick background on me: prefer backend/data mongering ( high tides in my career was ~1-1.2 Billion pageviews/month and 300GB of data collected/day ) but I do have an understanding of CSS 2&3 ( done a few contracts for Conde Nast's clients ). Primary work in Python but worked professionally with Java, PHP, and Ruby ( no more Rails ).

Currently working on a CherryPy like overlay to twisted web ( similar object graph to endpoints but with all of Twisted's strengths & capabilities ) and a ZMQ mobile/web/desktop notification system ( QT4 & Sencha Touch 2 for other systems).

Re:How to Keep a Job Search Going Through the Holidays on Friday November 29, 2013 @02:47PM (#6820738)
This is nice to hear, I suppose. I just separated from a company due to failure to pay/contract term violations and been thinking the odds of me finding gainful employment would be pretty low or non-existent until late Jan.

Still seems like its going to be an upward climb as my normal places to look for python and or backend dev are somewhat sparse right now.

Re:ThePirateBay is down on Friday November 22, 2013 @06:09AM (#6780191)
Tend to agree, but to be fair whenever a major site/service ( Reddit, github, netflix etc ) goes down, it is inevitably posted.
Re:FizzBuzz solved using only bit twiddling on Monday October 28, 2013 @05:21PM (#6629905)
This is perhaps the most elaborate "fuck you" to asnine interview questions. Fizzbuzz was a great acid test but now a days people who can't solve `a = 1+2; a == ?` know fizzbuz somehow.
Re:VirtualBox 4.3 released on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @09:17PM (#6557432)
Vbox's "api" is kind of an abomination. Vagrant succeeds because it parses sometimes non-machine friendly command line executable output.
Re:PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M on Thursday September 26, 2013 @11:56AM (#6451605)
That's too bad.
Issue is wget.

>U.S. prosecutors pointed out that wget was not on the list of “approved” programs for use in facility where Manning worked.

I know it sounds trivial but it was an unauthorized tool run on a system that was supposed to be secure as that system was talking to SIPRNET. Above all the other things PFC Manning has shown the world, he's also shown that security standards & procedures around some of the most damning secrets the DOD & State department could stupidly put on one fileshare was unprotected. Ironically this stuff might have shown up in foreign intelligence circles even without the PFC's actions.

Taking a page from something I learned from MySQL replication tricks, have you thought about trying a master -> inner slaves -> slaves out peers? Where there's one inner slave per datacenter/region.

I know atleast with 1.2.6 a slave can be a slave of a slave but I never measured the latency of a write at master, through the inner peers, out to the fan out slaves. Admittedly a more complicated topology but it would circumvent the stampede's against a master instance and also makes it easier to spin up larger numbers of slaves without wiping out the entire platform.

Re:Shuttle - A simple SSH shortcut menu for OS X on Thursday July 11, 2013 @02:13PM (#6027912)
I have a widget like this for AWS+Virtualbox, it sorts all instances across all regions into tag name groups, by ip, by region, and by instance type. Unfortunately I know it only works for Windows and linux at the moment and my company hasn't given me a green flag to release it.

Still this project is a lot prettier and appears to have been more refined while mine was hobbled together in a hour or two and fit in one Python file ( reasonably, its not 10 files in one ).

Ask HN: Very reliable uuid1 collisions in Python 2.7.3?

Since friday I've been arguing with a project owner about the use of uuid1 in their project as I can rapidly and reliably cause uuid1 collisions in a single process in under 1 second of testing.I wrote a test script here https://gist.github.com/devdave/5892749 that always fails in .05 to .09ths of a second.I originally discovered this was happening when testing out cqlengine ( an ORM like...

( Read More... | no comments | 2 points | on HN )
Re:Containers, Not Virtual Machines, Are the Future Cloud on Tuesday June 18, 2013 @11:11AM (#5899654)
Just got a client off a container based provider and it wasn't too great an experience ( dramatically slow networking, unreliable file I/O ). Granted I could, and can continue to, say the same thing about virtualization but virtualization is here and reliable enough that it seems like a hard sell to want to try something that is even less performant.
Re:An encrypted message to Edward Snowden on Friday June 14, 2013 @07:00PM (#5883036)
Let's see, carry the N, divide by P and "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine"
Re:Minimize use of CxO titles at early company stages on Tuesday June 04, 2013 @11:41AM (#5820084)
Funny memory, at a startup weekend in a team as the only technical resource. Had my headset on but wasn't listening to music... was somewhat amusing as everyone passed out C letter titles for an idea that wasn't even implemented. Took my headset off when someone claimed CTO "CTO huh? What am I doing right now?... Oh you don't actually know? You want to be the CTO but you don't know what your only engineer is doing?" Walked off after that.
I am not in anyway affiliated with GS/Escape and have 0 influence on their operations, but given what I know of them and that it only replicates what several other API libs provide, this DMCA seems really odd or a mistake?

From someone elses comment, looked at the google cache of your github repo,

> groovr.getSongFile songs[0].SongID, (err, file) ->

might have been the part they have a problem with?

What did your API provide ( downloads or just search?)
Re:SendGrid Fires Company Evangelist After Twitter Fracas on Thursday March 21, 2013 @03:11PM (#5418010)
But everyone else seems to like a good pitchfork witch hunt!

Ask HN: How do blind people code and work with terminals?

In the space of half a day, vision in my right eye deteriorated to the point that I can't even see an eye exam chart with it. I've already gone to the hospital and going back tomorrow for another round of tests. It's not a tumor, no signs of MS, no signs of infection.<p>I know they're are people considered legally blind that still write code, so how do they do it? Is there an OS that's...

( Read More... | 21 comments | 52 points | on HN )
Re:Are We Suffering From Mobile App Burnout? on Sunday February 17, 2013 @03:41PM (#5236649)
Just in context of the subject, I bet there is an app to measure how burned out you are on apps.
Re:Ask HN: What is your dumbest project on Github? on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @02:59PM (#5178441)
I've seen a bash migration thing in a production environment before but yours is a lot cleaner and well organized.
I've been thinking of switching from being a software engineer to DevOps, would this be a good association in doing that?

While I enjoy coding, I've found that most really challenging backend positions are few & far between. DevOp's seems like a guarantee of finding more challenging work experience.

Re:Ask HN: How can I outsource DevOps? on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @04:54PM (#5173518)
OpDemand or perhaps putting your time momentarily into Chef might pay off? I am still skeptical about the first but it might be cheaper to start with while Chef does a fairly good job of automating provision, configuration, and integration. Problem seems to be initial setup and if you have an unconventional platform.
Re:Fujitsu Not Pleased With Windows 8 Demand, Either on Thursday January 03, 2013 @06:01PM (#5005254)
A decade earlier I was into DIY car performance. I had a Nissan 180sx that was at ~220WHP and slowly tuned/modified it until it was at 380-400WHP. The car could easily kill it's driver if they weren't careful because it was really damn fast. At that point, there were no more easy modifications and gains were in the variable/dubious 10-15WHP that would only be noticeable if I ran the car on a timed trial or a dyno.

How this correlates to my HDD to SSD experience is that my workstation is already fairly optimized ( not overclocked mind you ), so biggest improvement was possibly in random seek and since I don't run MySQL or any other server system on the computer that does thousands of file op's/second the improvement was relatively marginal.

One point in my life I worked for a third tier search engine provider with 160-210 million unqualified identities.

Basic search term aggregation was illuminating. If Ray K. can go another step beyond statistical analysis, the results could be fascinating... or it could just be "People aren't wearing enough hats" of a let down.

edit: identities, not impressions

> none of these are particularly impressive from a technology point of view

It's the "first" part that somewhat matters more and then it become's a question of whether he's more Edison or Tesla ( crazy marketing or crazy smart).

Also he's been put into a Director role, so his technical merits come second to his ability to find, understand, and cultivate the smart people needed for his department's goals.

Older »