job

If you’re ok with doing fairly non-exciting work with an ERP system in Python then write me at svenstaro@gmail.com.

I see. Well nothing beats real world experience, so thank you very much for sharing that!

For me it’s quite the opposite, I never had any issues with journald, neither in production nor in development environments.

I had this experience too, but that was because journald was hanging due to my disks being slow as molasses (I had deeper problems). I’m honestly not sure whether to blame journald for that.

If all you need is static http you don’t have to host it yourself. I host my blog in Amazon S3 (because I wanted to add SSL and GitHub didn’t support that last year) and for the last 13 months it’s costs me about $0.91 / month, and about two thirds of that is Route 53 :-)

AWS gives you free SSL certificates, which was one of the main drivers for me to go with that approach.

I use S3 / CloudFront for static HTTP content. It’s idiot proof (important for idiots like me!), highly reliable, and I spend less every year on it than I spend on a cup of coffee.

The only real security risk I worried about was that someone could DDoS the site and run up my bill, but I deployed a CloudWatch alarm tied to a Lambda to monitor this. It’s never fired. I think at my worst month I used 3% of my outbound budget :)

You’d be hard pressed to go wrong with httpd from the OpenBSD project. It’s quite stable, it’s been in OpenBSD base for a while now. It’s lack of features definitely keeps it in the simple category. :)

There is also NGINX stable branch. it’s not as simple as OpenBSD’s option, but is stable, maintained and is well hardened by being very popular.

Check out this.

He’s a fellow Arch Linux Trusted User. He seemed like a pretty ok dude in my interactions.

Daniel Micay was a prolific Rust contributor. (In fact, he is still in the top 20 even if he has been inactive since 2015.) In his Rust work, I found him to be a straight person.

I have a good impression of Daniel Micay after talking with him om IRC. He’s also an unusually knowledgeable programmer.

There’s a bunch of weird red flags here:

• No way to download the installer over HTTPS
• The installer itself isn’t signed on macOS
• Upon launching the installer, I was prompted for my email
• The 163MB (??) installer then proceeds to download Luna Studio, which is itself 1.2GB

I’m messing around with it now and it seems really cool, but there’s a lot they could do to make that setup process better and more secure.

Edit:

It also replaced the atom command on my system with one that launched Luna Studio

Source is available over HTTPS on GitHub

It’s important to note that this article refers to the Docker company being dead as opposed to the software.

The blog title is Docker, Inc is Dead, which is accurate. However, I think, OP did not do same while submitting on Lobsters. I requested a title change suggestion.

Yeah. Stuff like rubygems.org lives on sponsorship from many companies, rather than a backing company. It’ll be fine. I can’t see how Docker the company matters anymore either.

There’s no mention of what will happen with all the OSS code and docker hub. I realize this isn’t an official press release, but I wish it was still mentioned. Do the current Docker owners plan on moving all their public/oss assets into a non-profit like Mozilla and keep it community driven? Do various industries plan on funding it as an open source initiative? What does this mean for Open Container and what working group will agree on the future of docker/containers?

I’ve found the criticisms levied at the Actor Model model apply to the serverless architecture. AWS / Google’s offerings link their existing services together to feed a mailbox that your function gets invoked by.

I was curious myself since I haven’t looked at it in a while. It was kind of hard to get results since searching for its issues actually brought up more pro-serverless articles than anti-serverless. My brief Googling found a Not Ready for Primetime article in February 2016, these issues in June 2016, a Challenges of Serverless article in March 2017, a few drawbacks in May 2017, and a Quora answer with a few more gripes.

MacOS using default terminal.app using a very minimal bash setup. I use different computers too much to make relying on customizations a habit.

Yes, we still need ref. In the context of patterns, ref adds a reference, while & matches a reference.

let x = Some(42);
let Some(ref y) = x; // y is now &42
// let Some(&y) = x; <- fails to compile, because x is not a reference to anything

let value = 42;
let a = Some(&value);
let Some(ref b) = a; // b is now &&42
let Some(&c) = a; // c is now 42

(note: the above code doesn’t actually compile, because rustc assumes there’s some way that x and a might possibly become None before the following lines, but that check happens in a phase after the one that gives problems for z)

Since * is the dereference operator, you might expect * in a pattern to create a reference, but * is also the sigil for raw pointers (in the same way that & is the sigil for references) so that wouldn’t work.

I’ve noticed. I think there’s a few things, order may vary:

• herd mentality
• acceptable performance in a laptop
• simplicity, you don’t have to sync or manage your tool set and have good habits on a single machine
• convenience for inventory and allocation (you have received the standard substandard kit, please join the next standup and the Friday retrospective…)

and, way at the end of priorities:

• on-the-go work habits

What amuses me is that nearly everywhere I see that, people attach widescreen monitors or even travel with portable screens (like this https://www.asus.com/us/Monitors/MB16AC/).

I engage in this myself since my work computer is a MBP and I unless I’m traveling it’s on my desk attached to a 24” LCD, a keyboard, and ethernet (though I mostly interact with it via ssh and Synergy keyboard/mouse sharing).

I’m speaking from a different perspective here, but I think this is related: If you look at students and workers at universities and colleges, most of them (at least here) spend their day on the go and have to take their computing with them - the laptop is the obvious, classical solution, not many replace it with tablets or some hybrid device. I for one spend my entire day that way, so I’m used to the limitations, but I enjoy the benefits as well. I guess it’s a thing of habit. Most drawbacks (as usual) can be worked around, too: computationally expensive tasks can be run on a server you connect to remotely, and screen estate can be used very efficiently and with great comfort once one finds a good keyboard interface to a window manager of one’s choice. The mobility aspect can’t be recreated another way, however.

We are a dying breed. I’m the only one in my office with a workstation. I built it myself (on the company’s dime) when I joined three years ago and it has served me well.

I’ve observed that the people with laptops like to bring them and work on them everywhere they go. They clearly like the mobility. While I also have a laptop, I hate using it, especially when I’m mobile. Not only do I dislike the limited screen real estate (my workstation has three 1920x1200 24” monitors), but I psychologically hate working when I’m mobile. It’s uncomfortable and hard for me to focus. I would much rather sit quietly with my thoughts, pay attention to the other humans that are with me or read something on my phone.

By workstation, do you mean desktop computers in general, or high-end computers with Xeons et al?

You could always git pull and run the code locally if you just want pretty printed assembly.

gcc or clang. This is just taking their assembly output and showing it.

 cc -S test.c

Well you can always use a compiler’s -S output? Or do you mean something that is pretty printed like here?

Lua! Reloading a text file and dynamically recompiling your code are equally easy.

json.decode('stuff.json')
loadfile('stuff.lua')

The only caveats being the Lua file can technically do whatever it wants to global scope. On the flip side, who cares this is way easier.

(also, read the footnotes…probably the best bits of the article are scattered through there)

(also also, when he bandies about Baumol’s Effect, what he’s referring to is more aptly name Baumol’s Cost Disease. Note the different tone.)

(also also also, note that Graham was born in 1964–this helps place his subjective timeline a bit better)

To elaborate on my point, let’s look at the final paragraph or two and see what Graham’s getting at:

• A lot of people getting rich do it by creating wealth. Graham clearly wants to say all here, but knows that by wording it to metaphorically wag his eyebrows suggestively he can get away with it.
• If you get rich creating wealth, you will create increasing economic inequality. This is said so that the assumed counterposition of “Hey let’s decrease economic inequality” can be attacked (sloppily) as “Well then you can’t have people creating wealth, so that’s bad!”.
• Variation in productivity is what we really mean, and that can’t be fought with taxes and subsidies. Graham again shifts the goalposts around a little here; introducing a new term that isn’t well-defined and then making claims about its behavior makes for difficult rebuttal on its own terms.
• Fragmentation due to variation in productivity is back again and won’t leave. Graham conveniently ignores a lot of recent developments and historical examples where a breakthrough is widely adopted and evens the playing more for everybody, which I’ll touch on again.
• Graham is worried that we must accept this or doom happens. No shit, because the comfortable lifestyles and exploitative business practices of modern startups and accelerators like YC are predicated on this idea and its inherent “rightness”.
• We should not bother with policy tweaks because that’s not how we got here. Inoffensive, possibly defensible depending on which history you read.
• Instead, let’s embrace the fragmentation and figure out how to mitigate the bad parts. This is clever two ways: first, by the second-order dissociation of “economic inequality” to “variation in productivity” to “fragmentation” Graham avoids saying (while still saying) “Let’s embrace economic inequality”; second, Graham’s “mitigating consequences” reads as “help the poor” when it really means “keep our Teslas and prevent peasant uprisings.”

Make no mistake: Graham very much has an intended audience here.

There are several things I think Graham gets very incorrect.

First, some rhetorical flourishes he engages in are cute but waste time:

The bits about his childhood range from irrelevant to disingenuous. Who hasn’t in their teenage years felt like the system is rigged, that the world is flawed and disingenuous? That’s virtue signalling on his part for techies with a libertarian or faux-elitist viewpoint. “Mmm yes the common man, unaware of how fake everything is </tips fedora.>”. Playing to a crowd.

The age of recollection for him in this is 13–so, 1977. His comments about cars and tailfins? Totally wrong if you look at cars from that era you don’t see a lot of spurious chrome. He probably was thinking more of cars from the 50s. 70s cars were, if anything, mainly US companies figuring out how the hell to deal with the energy crisis.

He also makes a slick little backhand against unions in the pointing out their inability to have antitrust actions taken against them–which he then slyly references in a wink to services like Uber and other sharing-economy by suggesting that maybe they count, sorta, as unions.

Second, he outright ignores several historical events that had massive effects on the economy:

There is no mention of the Vietnam War. This was huuuuuge, and had a notable effect in both college enrollment and in civil rights. If Graham’s argument is about increasing wealth inequality being inevitable and a result of a return to the status quo, he should probably at least mention a conflict that helped fund education, incentivize education, and which massively strengthened the political (and hence economic power) of minorities.

There is no mention of the Cold War, especially of the Space Race. The amount of money flowing around for small job shops doing contracting work on military equipment was nontrivial. The entire development of APRA and the increasing access to government contracts for contractors and subcontractors is a direct counterpoint to his “only a few national companies” narrative. The entire rise of standarized parts from this political climate (MIL-STDs) made a lot of market opportunities possible that weren’t before. Silicon Valley was built on little companies, not national companies, doing semiconductor work and specializaed IC design.

There is no mention of standardized shipping containers, and the itenerant rise in global trade. It’s this exact trade that made possible both the outsourcing he mentions and also the disruption of existing national companies–and most importantly, the leveling of the playing field and reduction of variance in productivity.

There is no mention of the 70s energy crisis and resulting stagflation and high unemployment. This recession had a nontrivial effect on both the starting of new businesses and the continued existence of older national corporations in the face of newcomers.

There are a lot of other things that I too am leaving out, but hopefully my point is clear: there were waaay too many factors to support a simple narrative of “consolidation -> ww2 -> ogliopoly -> 2000s fragmentation” that Graham is trying to sell us.

Third, and perhaps most annoying to me, is that Graham discounts both small businesses and rising-all-tides phoenomena.

Apparently, all of the little contractors and job shops and mom/pop stores and restaurants didn’t exist in the 20th century–Graham kinda handwaves this by claiming that people only were told to be “executives” and not to found their own companies. I think that’s patently false, and if we were to look at the number of businesses started every year in the 20th century (excluding shell corporations, presumably) we’d see a large, long-tail of local businesses. Hell, look at the backs of old issues of Popular Mechanics or Popular Electronics or even old newspapers to see that there was a vibrant ecosystem of mail-order businesses starting up and flourishing and floundering and dieing off. People clearly were still entrepreneurs.

(And honestly? That’s my biggest problem with Graham, both here and in general. He has to push an agenda that entrepreneurship is special (at least the modern type is!), that it has never existed before (by rewriting history or selecitvely recalling it as he does here), and that only the businesses that fit the YC-style model (rapid growth and slash and burn) are real comapnies worth considering.)

Fourth, Graham does a really poor job describing wealth–which is unfortunate, because it’s kinda at the core of his ramble here. Without a clear definition, his sidelong equating of wealth creation with permanent increasing inequality can’t be considered in any rational way. We can consider wealth under many definitions–and I’ll give an incomplete listing here:

• currency (e.g., pounds fucking sterling)
• raw goods (e.g., sheep)
• processed goods (e.g., wool suits)
• production capital required to convert raw goods into processed goods (e.g., textile mills)
• intellectual capital (e.g., trade secrets on sheep maintenance)
• holdings of slots of employment (e.g., shepeard jobs at Sheeply)
• market value/pay-to-play (e.g., being the most-hyped sheep products startup and thus most saleable)

Each of the different types of wealth there are different in how they are deployed. Most people probably think in terms of currency, a slightly fewer in terms of possession of goods or perhaps tools. Fewer still figure in terms of capital required to fabricate or make those other forms of wealth. Perhaps fewest will think in terms of jobs created (for wealth redistribution).

And that last category? The “wealth” of being the most sought-after investment vehicle. Notice that out of all of the rest, this form is both the most variable and also the most rewarding (economically)–and yet, it is also the only one that can’t be shared without destroying its value.

When Graham writes this essay, he uses “wealth creators” and signals everything but that last category–when the core of his business success post-Viaweb is primarily kick-the-can startup reselling based on hype.

Don’t mistake him for supporting wealth creation in any traditional sense, because that isn’t what he’s trying to sell you on. He’s trying to say, in a hamfisted shy-libertarian way, that we should ignore economic inequality because that’s the way it’s always been, that’s the way it’s supposed to be, and that we’ll endanger new wealth if we try to fight it–while using “wealth creation” in a way that is tortured enough to be logically consistent to him while tricking people into ignoring what he’s about.

One last thing.

It should be obvious at this point why it’s funny that he should mention Baumol’s Cost Disaster (or to Graham, Baumol’s Effect):

He’s saying that the market inefficiency created by firms attempting to retain labor (e.g., raising wages to prevent firm-hopping) is actually the creation of wealth…because to somebody who’s business is literally buying and selling talent and market opporunity, it is.

For the rest of us, for small businesses trying to make payroll or employees trying to avoid getting screwed over on salary because they aren’t the anointed assets, it’s pretty obvious that it’s just a distortion that is hurting our industry.

tl,dr: don’t learn about economic history from Paul Graham, who is neither objective nor thorough.

I gave you a pull request for GLSL. :)