Oakland, CA is a strong contender if you step back. Especially for one of a Stephensonian-styled second-wave cyberpunk. It even plays a part in Neuromancer.
It has its dark parts along with strong facets of common cyberpunk themes: drastic social stratification, the social acceptance of regular drug usage, urban decay meets technocratic renewal, a renewed definition of suburbia, and a greater acceptance of non-binary genders.
I like it, especially because there's a strong artist population there, and a common theme in cyberpunk is showing what the non-techies' life is like (to contrast it to the main characters' lives), and it's quite often artists.
> How do you do that without some basic understanding of computer science-y stuff?
> How do you define "scalable", how do you measure it? How can you have some intuition about a design before we spend 3 months and many sprints building it first?
> How do I know when to cache stuff? Does it matter if I have calls to a remote cache in a tight loop? Should I be using an in-process, out-of-process, or remote cache for a particular piece of data?
You're proving the above poster's exact point. You are putting your weight in applied questions that rest upon the developer's specific experience. This method is the opposite of evaluating people for their ability to memorize a half dozen algorithms and data structures.
In my experience interviewing candidates, asking people to implement a caching algorithm is a distraction to both parties. A much better evaluation is their ability to provide box-arrow diagram and talk it through. This is much more effective towards understanding their thought processes and knowledge. It is also much, much closer to the _real_ day to day of a today's engineer: communication, advocacy, and breadth of knowledge. Code is cheap. Business should screen employees for an interest.
CS textbook questions introduce enormous amounts of bias, especially in panel interviews. It is a dangerous trap that companies use to further entrench their team cliquiness and departmental monoculture. It is ripe for Simple Sabotage. Simply put, its lazy.
In my experience, a familiarity with the command line along with the associated general systems/server exposure will elevate your career faster than anything. For those with such exposure already I'd recommend diving deeper and become an expert in the tools your existing team uses for systems, release, and deployment. These skills also open up new career paths you may opt for in the future.
While most of us are probably comfortable enough running make/grunt/gulp/etc, that comfort typically stops there. Knowing how to set up and manage your own systems will both make you more useful on your team and visible in the org. This is especially true for junior front-end folks.
> If anything, ignorance of finance is how you give your money to the bankers.
I don't think it's quite that simple. It's probably some combination of a number of factors such as:
* Inability to control one's spending
* A consumer-driven culture where status is equated with material possessions
* Availability of easy credit
* Society not recognizing compulsive spending as an addiction
Overflow over the top of a dam this size and type will almost certainly result in complete structural failure. The overflow we've seen so far is a secondary canal diverting excess water away from the main dam.
Is there an article discussing the dangers of continuing to use the main or emergency spillways? I'm not clear on why the downstream destruction is so dangerous. (And I apologize if it's completely obvious, maybe I'm just dense on this.)
California's damming of the Sierras and construction of the aquifers were primarily about flood control. Supporting the growing population came secondary (that's the easy part). An enormous effort was put into diverting melting snowpack into mountain valleys. This essentially created the northern and middle parts of the Central Valley, on top of creating sustainable year-round sources of fresh water for the developing coastal cities.
Downstream destruction is of concern because that entire region depends on flood control. The habitability and agricultural production of the corridor between Oroville and Sacramento relies upon, and was created by, the flood control of Plumas, Yolo, Butte, etc counties. There are a number of canals, diversions, and reservoirs both above and below the Oroville to further control flow the dam as it reaches our rivers. However, most of the re-routing is also man-made and thus untested for such an event.
Dirt hillsides are not designed to have 100,000 cubic feet of water rolling down them. They tend to erode extremely quickly and can quickly turn into uncontrolable discharges if the lip erodes.
For the main service spillway, the main concern is that the flow of water will cause erosion damage upstream of the existing damaged site[1]. If the damage to the concrete continues up the spillway to the top, it could render the spillway inoperable.
For the emergency spillway, the main concern is that a continued flow of water would erode the soil off the hill to the point that the hill would no longer support the spillway (the concrete lip at the top of the hill). If this happened, the spillway would fail. The effect wouldn't be as severe as if the dam failed (because there would still be a large hill in between the water and where it wants to flow), but the erosion along the path of the water would get out of control pretty quickly.
The spillway is damaged and eroding as water flows through it. As it erodes it opens up such that more water can flow, accelerating the erosion to the point where the entire hillside erodes away and the dam essentially fails.
I can understand those concepts just fine, but when I look at the dam in Google Maps, it is not clear to me how this is specifically going to occur. The main spillway is on the hillside next to the dam, and the emergency spillway is on the same hill, yet further from the dam.
The area around either spillway may continue to erode away. The main dam structure is currently not in danger. They don't want to run the main spillway at all but they also don't think they can rely on the emergency spillway.
It would still be a catastrophe, the outflow will go from inches per hour to feet per hour.
Okay, this makes more sense. The problem is that the spillways will fail in the sense that the downstream capacity cannot handle the volume of flow, so will flood those regions, as well as possibly flood areas not typically even near water as it carves its own paths.
You have to remember that the hill _is_ the dam (of the type[1]). so when water flows down that spillway, it's going to pick up dirt with it - making the hill smaller and smaller, ie. making the dam thinner and thinner.
But if it eats up the spillway upwards it engangers the little part of tho damm where the vales are. If you do not have a concrete lip like on the auxillary spillway and it just flushes over the top of the hill it will quickly carve a lot deeper, so you have more water than just what was held back by the smaller wall.
Also: the top 70 meters or something is still a lot of water!
You're drawing distinction between the 'man made' part of the dam and the 'natural' dam, which exists on paper but not in the static force analysis. If that natural portion of the dam becomes unable to support the weight of the water, there will be a collapse.
Find a niche whose sole responsibility drives the bottom line.
Advertising is a good one if you have strong networking and rich media fundamentals. One good web dev with a solid background and comfort working in advertising can produce better than an entire team of devs new to the industry. The web and app ecosystems run on ads and always will. People have been claiming the death of it for two decades now, yet ads generate more and more every year. You can apply the industry knowledge across the stack and type of company; big or small, demand side or supply side, consumer focused or SaaS.
People will also chime in and suggest fintch since its so trendy these days. But, do you really trust a banker to look out for your bottom line? Exactly.
I strongly disagree that ads will be here forever. Although the amount of money generated through ads year upon year is increasing, that's mostly due to the increase in people using the internet, and the amount of time they spend on it.
The amount of people using adblockers has increased _dramatically_. In fact, one of the top HN comments is about the rising use of Ad-blockers [0].
There will eventually be a limit where the increasing use of technology is outweighed by the amount of people using adblockers, and I'd wager it's within the next 5 years. Then the ad ecosystem will just fall and fall.
Why assume adblockers are bigger than the advertising industry? Adblocking will exist up until it's cheaper for large players to pay money to fix the problem, be that legal costs, development, or ransom to browser providers.
Particularly when the web is getting more and more closed. Sure, adblockers on browsers are becoming more common. But what about web services like snapchat where the information is transferred using an app rather than a browser? Ad blockers can't do shit if sites start to properly hide ads within content. So far they've been relying on large players not trying to, while being able to completely block content from smaller players when they try to play the 'hide the ads' game. Let's see them try that when they're faced with blocking all of facebook/google or not blocking their ads.
Internet advertising will change because of the rising use of adblockers but collapse? I don't see it.
Advertising always morphs into something different. It is a never ending business. Billboards, Newspaper ads, magazine ads, radio ads, tv ads, online, in app, facebook, snapchat and I don't what will be there in future. As long as we have eyes there will be ads.
Sometimes you'll be working for a creative agency when working with ad execs which I think are a different personality type than a typical banker who always work for banks.
I just started playing around with ffmpeg for a side project of mine. I'm sad because it's C++ (and I didn't write enough C++ in my life to be any good in it) and I was looking around for a good C# wrapper exposing a media player that I can simply use in a desktop app, but everything I found was extremely buggy and laggy.
I'm currently trying to make an exact copy of ffplay.exe (since the source code is available) in C# using an tiny SDL2-C# wrapper and a tiny ffmpeg-C# wrapper, instead of finding a library that does everything. I'm glad to hear that ffmpeg is reliable and solid, I hope I can make it work in C#! (I'll probably put everything up on github if it works)
Disagree on ffmpeg. It certainly gives you a great degree of control, which is great if you know a lot about video formats and codecs and such, but as a casual user my first step for ffmpeg is always googling "ffmpeg convert X to Y" and copy and pasting from Stack Overflow.
Absolutely ffmpeg. I guess it's not "stable" in the sense that the fast pace of development sometimes leads to changes in best practices, but damn is it excellent to use.
My full name and address are already publicly available in countless places, if you had any legitimate interest you should have been able to find them in less time than it took you to write that comment. Btw., so are yours.
Sure I don't pretend that that mine are no accessible but this is most of the time a conscious choice. I still have privacy but I just choose what information I make public.
Also for example my address is probably nowhere public because I didn't choose to publish it.
All I'm saying is, sure, privacy is comfortable and we are fond of it and we all have our insecurities, BUT... it's going away, whether we like that or not. And really, it never actually did exist. But that's okay because we should still be able to get along just fine without it (to the extent that any people on Earth ever did get along...) Moreover, I feel that we would actually be better off and able to move forward faster by giving up on concepts like privacy and security.
Not a good reflection on your actual ability to scale when a 500 word blog post makes your entire web server choke after just a few minutes on the front page.
That makes it better? This is a marketing post and should reflect your company's strengths, especially when the topic of the post is about said quality.
I always remember in moments like these that Cloudfare is something like $50-200 a month. Wait, a quick look is $0/$20/$200 with $0 or $20 probably covering it. Hmmm.
That's what I was thinking. Only need to do SQL on actual registration process. That's if you use a SQL DB for it as opposed to in-memory, key-value store that persistently writes to disk. Alternatively, doing data at app layer (eg AllegroCache-style) with a partitioning scheme distributing among a number of inexpensive nodes. Quite a few things to do before we run into SQL's problems even if it involves data processing.
I'm building a CMS in the same vein as the others (WordPress, etc.) and made static page caching a first-class feature that bypasses the autoloader completely.
Hey, while you're on, I have a quick question. I've avoided PHP in favor of more static, safe languages with small TCB's. Early on, I thought about reimplementing the runtime/libs in one or compiling it to one. Discovered Quercus PHP on Java system that claimed benefits of both. Had potential given Java gets constant bughunting and has many implementations.
What do you think of compiling PHP plus libs for app compatibility to something like Rust, Ada, or Cyclone where possible? And do you know if anyone has assessed quality/security of Quercus/Resin code in particular? Seems something like that compatible with WordPress or Airship could be quite a boost in defense of code injection at system level. Performance, too, as we saw with HipHop.
Already runs WordPress, phpBB, etc. Anyone doing this sort of thing on .NET might consider starting with contributions to it. I'm trying to avoid CLR and JVM due to runtime complexity where possible. Aside from Rust, Go is another possible target for a simple runtime.
Cool stuff. Also libsodium by default as I expected. :) You got a summary page listing the features and advantages of the CMS for those that don't do PHP? Other than probably extra attention to quality/security. As usual, I'll pass the info along to people online that might benefit from it.
Alright. Bookmarked. So, it's a basic CMS for the niche of people/companies who need more security or uptime than feature bloat. Has better update policy and works hard to make some security features more usable. Am I reading it right?
True, but the post is about scaling Passport, not really scaling Wordpress. I haven't seen the site crash, so I seems like its just taking the server a while to server up the static content.
Your dismissive tone is concerning. Because your Wordpress site doesn't load, we can't learn about your "Passport" service, so you're wasting 10,000 prospective customers.
Implementing something as simple as W3TotalCache and CloudFlare, and eliminating slow plugins via p3profiler, should mitigate any initial scaling issues assuming your server architecture is set to scale properly via dynamic scaling or horizontal if for some reason you're using on-prem, physical hardware.
It has its dark parts along with strong facets of common cyberpunk themes: drastic social stratification, the social acceptance of regular drug usage, urban decay meets technocratic renewal, a renewed definition of suburbia, and a greater acceptance of non-binary genders.