I worked at Rational Software when we acquired Pure software. We sold tons of Purify+. The legend of course was the Hastings took the $ he made from selling Purify to Rational to start Netflix. So as a Rational employee, I had a contribution to Netflix's existence... Or so I like to tell myself ;).
Pure was an amazing product. For C++ development, we relied on it for my team at SAIC, and when I moved to Angel Studios (we developed games and content for Nintendo, Sega, Disney) I immediately asked the owners to purchase a company license.
I saw Reed Hastings being interviewed on YouTube last night - fascinating how he has so many personal friendships with CEOs of competing companies.
Pure products were amazing. I always found the way Quantify represented profiling to be incredibly helpful back in the ancient days. I know there’s more advanced visualizations but I always found the logarithmically scaled directed edges in quantify to speak to me better than flame charts and other related techniques, I think because it represented the full execution graph rather than individual transactional paths. Anyway huge respect for Reed as an engineer and have always been impressed with both Netflix and the quality of the performance, debugging, and other efforts that have come out from them. He clearly values excellent engineering.
I have a copy of the Pure Software Engineering Handbook which was created for internal use only. It's amazingly comprehensive and well-organized. I've never seen any kind of onboarding that comes close.
Having met him before, his clarity of thought just comes across in this paper as well. Some people are just wired with that talent that makes me so jealous. Reed is one of those people with high EQ and IQ (with the ability of handle his inner Elon diplomatically)
Back in the day Reed told me that he added the leak detection to Purify v1 towards the end of the dev cycle and was very surprised that it wound up being one of their biggest selling points
I remember using that and libefence in the 90s to find memory leaks in my MUD. Purify was better. Easier to use and found more stuff. It is 2022, leaking memory still a problem.
Recently I was thinking about how the Netflix software strategy of hiring only experienced engineers [0] (and paying them really well), is pretty beneficial for almost any tech team/company.
Things like the CS experience that Reed Hastings has, seems like the key driver here.
I hadn't realized Pure and Netflix had the same founder; Purify was an amazing tool, which we had a license for HP-UX at uni. It was the kind of software where you knew you'd ask for it to be bought by any future employer.
A major difference is that purify is a binary transformation performed before or after linking. Valgrind/memcheck is a virtual machine that jit-compiles executable code and adds its instrumentation in the process. So, with purify, your linked executable includes the checks. With valgrind, the unmodified executable can run with or without checks.
I used Purify back in the day, and while it worked well, getting it working was a royal PITA. IIRC it was necessary to recompile EVERYTHING with Purify.
That's not how it usually happens in my experience. In this specific case, I worked at Pure Atria back in the day and it was my impression that Reed had some hacker chops.
> EDIT: Wow. OK, I guess I'm the only one in the world who's ever seen that happen.
It happens regularly in larger companies. Most patents that I have also have others on them, because secondary people had to approve my applications. That's just how these things work. The only exceptions to this are those patent applications that I approved for others.
Remember, work on a patent may be more complex than the work on a corresponding invention. Also, the patent must be useful to the company in order for them to cover the bill. Taking a single employee's word for that is not enough.
It’s worth questioning but he wasn’t a big deal in the early 90s and if Wikipedia is correct he finished a Stanford CS MS in B 1988. This seems very much in character.
This is different from scientific papers, where it is poor taste to add people that did not actually contribute anything, but has no legal implications.
[+] [-] andsoitis|3 years ago|reply
He co-founded Netflix in 1997.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_Hastings
[+] [-] SanjeevSharma|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|3 years ago|reply
I saw Reed Hastings being interviewed on YouTube last night - fascinating how he has so many personal friendships with CEOs of competing companies.
[+] [-] fnordpiglet|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ww520|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivanech|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curiousDog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackernewds|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inferiorhuman|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jdp23|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geophile|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitexploder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rajnathani|3 years ago|reply
Things like the CS experience that Reed Hastings has, seems like the key driver here.
[0] https://www.teamblind.com/post/Why-Netflix-only-hires-senior...
[+] [-] jll29|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ryanmccullagh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] projektfu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wallstprog|3 years ago|reply
Anyway, I would think the gold standard these days is clang's Address Sanitizer (https://github.com/google/sanitizers/wiki/AddressSanitizer). clang/ASAN also runs on Mac in addition to Linux.
[+] [-] keepquestioning|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ryandrake|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] eschneider|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vosper|3 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33859953
[+] [-] IncRnd|3 years ago|reply
It happens regularly in larger companies. Most patents that I have also have others on them, because secondary people had to approve my applications. That's just how these things work. The only exceptions to this are those patent applications that I approved for others.
Remember, work on a patent may be more complex than the work on a corresponding invention. Also, the patent must be useful to the company in order for them to cover the bill. Taking a single employee's word for that is not enough.
[+] [-] acdha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jll29|3 years ago|reply
https://ipwatchdog.com/2020/10/21/getting-patent-devastating...
This is different from scientific papers, where it is poor taste to add people that did not actually contribute anything, but has no legal implications.