nbouscal
Good enough for you?
Postgres has some of the best documentation of any software product I’ve ever used. If someone wants to learn about SQL or databases, I always have to restrain myself from recommending that they just read the Postgres manual front to back. It’s comprehensive, it’s well written, it’s easy to navigate, and almost every explanation comes with several clear examples. It’s hard to overstate how valuable a property that is for a product as central to your architecture as your primary transactional database.
> I was hoping that the article would explain what devops really means today and how I can jump on the devops wagon to hopefully make my job of doing all of the above easier.
1. Use AWS Fargate for all of your backend services. Keep the architecture simple enough that complicated service discovery issues etc don’t come up. If you need coordination between services, do it through Redis or similar.
2. Use RDS unless you really need to save money or use unavailable extensions.
3. Use terraform for initially provisioning the above
4. Set up CI/CD such that merges to master automatically update your services. (I like CircleCI’s aws-ecr and aws-ecs orbs for this.)
Pretty simple recipe, but it means no setting up servers, no hardening servers, no installing or optimizing software (other than by adding it to the Dockerfile), no installing or optimizing the database.
This recommendation reflects what modern devops means to me; opinions differ. To me it means:
- Infrastructure as code (terraform rather than clicking buttons in the AWS console then later forgetting which buttons you clicked)
- Immutable infrastructure (aka cattle not pets). Never SSHing into a server again.
- Automated testing and deployment cleanly integrated with existing dev workflow
Obviously there’s a scale at which you have to do something more complex, but I’d say that’s the scale at which you previously would have had an operations team.
Getting rid of the “writing server side code” and “writing front end code” parts is beyond the scope of devops, but you can skip a lot of the “writing server side code” part by using PostgREST. In exchange you may have to write an even-more-untold number of SQL queries, depending on your current practices.
Edit: Someone helpfully pointed out that I forgot to mention anything about logging or monitoring, which is a pretty glaring omission. On that front I strongly recommend Honeycomb. To set it up with Fargate you may need to run it in a sidecar container, but it’s fairly straightforward.
Programming Languages by Dan Grossman of University of Washington: https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages
Not if they're otherwise identical companies, it isn't. There may be reasons to expect a correlation between risk and cash holdings, or something to that effect, but ultimately a share in a company is a share of ownership of that company's assets. If a company didn't become $10B more valuable when given $10B in cash, where exactly did that value disappear to? Value doesn't vanish into thin air simply because it's now owned by a company.
While we may theoretically have the power to change the way law enforcement works on these issues, doing so would be dramatically more difficult than making marginal improvements within the industry itself. We shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
This is a really weird phrase. "Concentrated among consumers"? More than 80% of Americans use the internet, not exactly "concentrated".
I think people on both sides of this issue would love it if the law showed itself capable of handling sexual harassment cases. Unfortunately we have way too much evidence that that just isn't the case. The obvious example that comes to mind is Brock Turner getting three months, and that's in the best case where someone is actually convicted. Far too often it never gets to that point, not because the harassment/assault didn't occur, but because the legal system is so utterly shit at handling it. The 'outragism' that so many people decry only exists in the first place because every system that is supposed to prevent or punish these acts has failed so completely.
2. If you're that good at picking startups, become a VC.
3. Common shares are priced less than preferred because they're worth less than preferred.
4. Startups at every stage give liquidation preferences. Startups under pressure will give more significant preferences, sure, but they're relevant to basically every startup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excludability
Maybe do a quick search before implying someone is making up words.
Edit: In particular, the TOP100 subgroup.
The median expert estimate for when we'll be 10% likely to have human-level AI is ~10 years.
AI risk research didn't receive a penny of funding until the last few years, and is still funded at way lower levels than a lot of things that have dramatically less impact.
In nearly every debate on the topic I've seen (with a few exceptions), the people concerned about AI risk have carefully considered the topic, are aware of the areas where there's still a lot of uncertainty, and make clear and well-hedged arguments that acknowledge that uncertainty; meanwhile the people who scoff at it haven't read any of the arguments (not even in popular book form in Superintelligence), haven't thought about most of the considerations, and have a general air of "assuming things will probably be fine". That's not a straw man, that's just direct observation of the state of the debate. People are doing serious academic work on the topic and have thought about it very deeply; the standard HN middlebrow dismissal is both common and inappropriate.