CuriousNinja's comments

The type of questions you are mentioning are basically saying different people would need different configuration options and come up every time you design any complex technical feature that is going to be used by millions of people. These are mostly product and UX questions, and NOT engineering ones. The only engineering problem I can think of is the latency in getting real time billing information.

The way you usually solve this is by having sane defaults, and giving users different mechanisms for configuration based on how complex their configuration needs are. This can take a tiered approach.

As an example, simpler and straight forward things (such as disable egress traffic from S3 if the bill exceeds X) can be in the UI itself. Then, for customers who need more control, an option to configure via json or yaml similar to cloud formation. For anyone who needs even more giving an option to call a customer defined lambda function would give them the ability to at any metrics and take appropriate action.

I don't use tiktok myself, but from what I've seen their core user group is (mostly young) people doing irresponsible and silly things to get views on the platform. I don't think showing how irresponsible you are is the best way to convince an employer to hire you. Maybe this will work for certain positions like "social media manager" that some companies have, but as a general job board it will conflict with the main use of tiktok.

Thanks for the link, I didn't know that was a thing.

Having said that, this sounds like "Hey guess what? We are gonna snoop on you, and profile the hell out of you and leak all of your sensitive data all over the place (filenames can be) all because you are a paying customer"

That's about the worst way to disrespect a paying customer. Is there a way to easily identify companies that does this, I can avoid them?

It's scary to think that a company that seem to have a decent policy on privacy / data collection practices at one moment is just one step away from some marketing manager or MBA changing that. It's really hard to gain customer trust once you loose it, and in BackBlaze's case it seem to be for marginal if any monetary benefit. I think part of the reason is that most of these companies don't value customer trust.

> Most enrollees will finish in six months or less

I am not convinced that you can learn the skills and knowledge necessary to be an effective software engineer in six months. However I think it will be an awesome avenue to improve your skills if you already have some background.

This is because the US labor laws are messed up. In other countries, you get paid overtime even if you are salaried.

How fair is this valuation?

If I invest $1300 to buy 0.026% of your house, does that mean it's worth $5 million now?

One of the examples on invalidating cache on write has the following code, which is buggy. If the DB call fails, then cache cache would have data that was never actually committed. Cache coherency is hard.

  def update_something_slow(thing_id, new_thing):
    my_cache.set_by_str(thing_id, new_thing)
    set_thing_in_a_database_layer(new_thing)

Are there any guidelines on how to prevent such incidents in the future where management overrules engineers /subject matter experts because of deadlines / profit etc ?

Can we learn from other professions such as doctors on how to handle these better? I believe it's very rare for a hospital administrator to over rule a doctors decision when it comes to patients health.

Does IMAP clients handle Gmail labels well? Last time I tried to use an IMAP client it treated all the labels as separate folders.

In an ideal world the latter would be best. However in practice systems tend to get complicated over time as they evolve and more features etc.. are added. I think one way to look at it is that as a business to outsourcing the non-differentiated heavy lifting to another entity that has more expertise in it would let you focus on your core products. In this specific example why is using a cloud email provider any different from deciding to use power from the power grid instead of generating your own electricity.

Wow, didn't expect them to spend so much money on marketing. Given that they are now registered as a public benefit corporation wouldn't this money be better spent as "scholarships" or something for their courses for students who can't afford the fees. I would assume that if they are actually providing a worthwhile public service, then word of mouth should bring in enough users rather than having to spend most of their opex on marketing.

This article is just marketing material for one of their products, TiDB.

> never actually read the ISO 8601 spec ... because it's not free

I was very surprised to discover this. Why are they charging money for the specification of a date format? I would expect standards like these to be published in public domain.

I am not an economist, but as an engineer 356% doesn't mean much without knowing what the breaking point is. What is the upper limit on the debt/GDP ratio? What system parameters would go into calculating such a limit? Is this a situation where we won't know the limit until it breaks because the system is too complex?

> Don’t confuse money with wealth, which is a separate concept that underpins this system.

How would you differentiate between the two?

Not sure why parent is being down-voted as I believe this is an important point. In my opinion this would be applying the unix philosophy of having small tools that does one thing and does it well to code libraries.

How do they plan to load/unload cargo containers from this ship? At most of the worlds ports cargo containers are loaded and unloaded from the above the ship using dock craines, but the wind sails and the (roof?) on this seem prevent that.

>but I've never experienced the similar problem.

How do you know for sure that you didn't? One of the main takeaways from the original article is that these errors are invisible from server side (your own stack) because it's the traffic is being throttled before it gets to your own servers. Unless you have very good and consistent client side availability metrics you probably wouldn't notice the 2%-3% drop.

Any thoughts on getting your own domain and then still using gmail for receive email on that domain?