henningpeters's comments

henningpeters | 6 months ago | on: Protobuffers Are Wrong (2018)

> why on earth would you waste precious bytes on schema every time

cbor doesn't prescribe sending schema, in fact there is no schema, like json.

i just switched from protobuf to cbor because i needed better streaming support and find use it quite delightful. losing protobuf schema hurts a bit, but the amount of boilerplate code is actually less than what i had before with nanopb (embedded context). on top of it, i am saving approx. 20% in message size compared to protobuf bc i am using mostly arrays with fixed position parameters.

henningpeters | 7 months ago | on: Lessons learned from building a sync-engine and reactivity system with SQLite

Nice write-up! Would love to read more about practical experience on sync engines. I am also currently building one for a niche use case: a CRDT based smart home system w/o central component: syncing config and state across several embedded/MCU + mobile via CAN bus and BLE, no Internet. It features a simple ORM and persistence and for dev/debug it runs on macos/Linux. Written in C++ and Dart. Due to memory and other platform constraints I chose to build most of it from scratch. Thought about open sourcing or writing about it, but wondered whether anybody cares given the relative obscure tech stack.

henningpeters | 4 years ago | on: My Many Girlfriends

Reminds me of a Sten I hired many years ago. He requested (and of course got) an hilariously exotic work setup and spent a ridiculous amount of time on its configuration. Right from the start he expressed his unhappiness with seemingly random office stuff: Every day, sometimes multiple times per day, he would would come to my desk and tell me what was wrong, implying I should fix it right now even though it wasn’t obvious that there was a problem in the first place. He also heavily criticized the code base while the same time wasn’t able to produce anything meaningful. For a couple of weeks we hoped his genius to appear and that we just have to give him more support and time to adjust.

Eventually, a group of female coworkers came forward and complained that he would make them feel uneasy. He would stand behind them watching silently what they were doing.

I don’t remember whether we gave him feedback for this or room to adapt, we’ve let him go the next day.

henningpeters | 8 years ago | on: Scaling Kubernetes to 2,500 Nodes

RiseML provides a higher-level abstraction than Kubeflow that is more similar to Google Cloud ML. I would love to get your feedback on our solution: https://riseml.com

Btw: we are currently preparing an open-source release

Disclaimer: I am co-founder at RiseML

henningpeters | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2017)

RiseML | Frontend/Backend/Distributed Systems | ONSITE Berlin | Fulltime | https://riseml.com/jobs

We build software for GPU-based deep learning clusters, on top of Kubernetes and DC/OS. Join our early-stage startup team in Berlin (VC-funded) and help us develop our command-line app (golang), web app (JS/react), API services (Python) and/or contribute to Kubernetes/Mesos open source projects.

Keywords: Python, golang, JavaScript/react, Kubernetes, Mesos

Email us at [email protected]

henningpeters | 9 years ago | on: Difficulties accessing medical services as an EU immigrant in Germany

Having lived abroad for some time I can sympathize with the problems mindflayer and his girlfriend have. Health insurance is often a pain as a foreigner and immigrant, Germany doesn't seem to be an exception.

I looked a bit around and it seems that the OP didn't research all options (language barrier and bureaucracy is often a problem here).

@Mindflayer: I suggest you find an expert that can guide you through this jungle.

But what I found in my quick research is that there is a european health insurance card (apparently one can get it from one's EU health insurance in one's home country, it's called EHIC). It allows a German doctor to book services against your Italian health insurance. Unfortunately, it only covers emergencies.

For other medical services you are right, it's probably easiest if you have a job or are married. But it seems that there is another option: your girlfriend registers as unemployed/job seeking. Job seekers from EU countries are treated similarly as employees and hence are entitled to public health insurance.

Source: https://www.krankenkassen.de/meine-krankenkasse/krankenversi... (German)

henningpeters | 10 years ago | on: Launching RemoteMeetup.com

Great idea! This would be particularly useful for niche topics that don't have good meetup groups in all big cities. All the effort the organizers spend on finding high-quality speakers and attracting the right crowd could be multiplied. We have been thinking about running our Berlin NLP meetup (http://www.meetup.com/de-DE/Berlin-Language-Technology) more remotely, but the only thing we've done so far is posting videos of the talks online.

Meetup.com has been really great for us in getting attention for our _local_ meetup, but it isn't the right tool if you are running it non-locally/remotely. Sth. like meetup.com in terms of discoverability + a standardized tech infrastructure (sth. that "just works") for remote meetups is desperately needed.

henningpeters | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Sense2vec model trained on all 2015 Reddit comments

Maybe it wasn't clear, but we open-sourced everything, including the trained model. See here:

https://github.com/spacy-io/sense2vec

For installation:

$ pip install -e git+git://github.com/spacy-io/sense2vec.git#egg=sense2vec

$ python -m sense2vec.download

This downloads and installs the sense2vec package and model we used in the demo.

We are currently working on finishing the PyPI package. Meanwhile only Linux is supported and the docs are pretty much non-existing. Also, please make sure you have a recent Blas/Atlas package installed (RedHat: atlas, atlas-devel)

Direct link to the model file (~600MB):

https://index.spacy.io/models/reddit_vectors-1.0.1/archive.g...

henningpeters | 10 years ago | on: BigchainDB: A scalable blockchain database

This is pretty impressive work, hats off! Their extensive whitepaper is absolutely worth reading: https://www.bigchaindb.com/whitepaper/bigchaindb-whitepaper.... - its full of details of their solution and also has a good collection of background reading material.

What is important to note is that they don't address the Sybil attack on a technological level:

> Deploying BigchainDB in a federation with a high barrier of entry based on trust and reputation discourages the participants from performing an attack of the clones. The DNS system, for example, is living proof of an Internet-scale distributed federation. Appendix C describes how the DNS has successfully run a decentralized Internetscale database for decades.

As far as I understand with spending only little time on this matter that's the main tradeoff they took compared to fully decentralized databases such as the Bitcoin's public ledger and which allow them to scale the performance.

henningpeters | 10 years ago | on: Your phone number is becoming the online identifier of choice

> Hacking someone’s phone number is almost impossible to do, as someone would need to steal the physical SIM card or clone it at least. An almost impossible venture for the majority of fraudsters.

Wiretapping/redirecting SMS is actually surprisingly easy and doesn't require stealing/cloning SIM cards. Not sure how it compares to wiretapping unencrypted IP networks, but based on a demo I saw today I would guess it's easier.

henningpeters | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Goofys – a faster s3fs written in Go

Not surprising that s3fs is slower, it's implementation quality is not very high. Goofys looks much better on first sight. It would be nice if anybody could do a benchmark between goofys and riofs (without cache). But honestly, if you have some proper request handling there is not that much to tune. The biggest performance gains can be achieved from a good cache implementation and make such a system useful in a production environment, that's what riofs was written for.

Disclaimer: I initiated and supervised riofs.

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