A dream of mine was that in order to get a PhD, you would not have to publish original research, but instead you would have to _reproduce existing research_. This would bring the PhD student to the state of the art in a different way, and it would create a natural replication process for current research. Your thesis would be about your replication efforts, what was reproducible and what was not, etc.
And then, once you got your PhD, only then you would be expected to publish new, original research.
That used to be the function of undergraduate and Masters theses at the Ivy League universities. "For the undergraduate thesis, fix someone else's mistake. For the Master's thesis, find someone else's mistake. For the PhD thesis, make your own mistake."
I am not very familiar with Triplebyte but I really appreciated this (seemingly) candid yet lucid writeup about how it was all went down from the inside.
These kind of insider perspectives, even if they come with their own biases, are very interesting nevertheless.
I wish I would see these types of articles more often.
Alongside a link to Google's explanation of why they do it, that's a very reasonable and helpful reply. "Changing the queuing method from the standard first-in, first-out (FIFO) to last-in, first-out (LIFO) [...] can reduce load by removing requests that are unlikely to be worth processing"
> Most services process queues in FIFO (first-in first-out) order. During periods of high queuing, however, the first-in request has often been sitting around for so long that the user may have aborted the action that generated the request. Processing the
first-in request first expends resources on a request that is less likely to benefit a user than a request that has just arrived. Our services process requests using adaptive LIFO. During normal operating conditions, requests are processed in FIFO order, but when a queue is starting to form, the server switches to LIFO mode. Adaptive LIFO and CoDel play nicely together, as shown in figure 2. CoDel sets short timeouts, preventing long queues from building up, and adaptive LIFO places new requests at the front of the queue, maximizing the chance that they will meet the deadline set by CoDel. HHVM3, Facebook’s PHP runtime, includes an implementation of the Adaptive LIFO algorithm.
For instance, a bunch of clients all make a request to a server at the same time, briefly saturating the server. If all the clients have the same timeout without jitter, they will all try again together at the same time once the timeout expires, saturating the server again and again. Jitter helps by « spreading » those clients in time, thus « diluting » the server load. The server can then process these requests without saturating.
The basic idea behind that is also used in all sorts of networks where you have multiple stations sharing the same medium with everyone being able to freely send stuff. To solve this, if a "collision" is detected, stations then use a random timeout before they send again in the hope that the next time there won't be another collision.
I highly recommend going through the make documentation at least once in your career. Per the lindy effect, as it has been around for 40 years, it has a decent chance of sticking around for another 40.
To me, a good cover letter is about being actually motivated to apply to a specific job and then simply explaining why.
AI doesn’t help because if you can articulate your genuine motivation as a prompt for an AI, you should just use the prompt as the cover letter which will be a lot more effective than using the AI-generated letter, as the AI will muddy your authentic motivation and diminish its impact.
> To me, a good cover letter is about being actually motivated to apply to a specific job and then simply explaining why.
Money. I want money. That's the reason I am applying to your job offer. I found a job offer that meets my skillset and I applied to it because I want an income.
But this isn't what you expect me to write, is it? You want something more, so I'm going to bullshit you so I can get the job that will allow me to get money
Ok. If you can explain in a little more detail how you get the job done and what qualifies your assessment of the relative efficiency, then you probably have the basis of a decent cover letter.
Did anyone ever get hired by answering the question of "Why do you want to work for us?" with "Because I need a pay check"?
Because that's realistically like 80% of the motivation for most job/candidate pairings. In my case the remainder is usually like 15% "and it doesn't require selling my immortal soul to the devil" and 5% "your tech/problem is vaguely interesting".
Given the above, I feel like a typical cover letter is really an exercise in spin.
A cover letter is also supposed to explain why the company should want you to work for them. But this question isn't usually posed explicitly, which I guess is confusing for some people.
Also, almost no-one is motivated so purely by money that they are equally interested in all jobs that pay the same. You can probably think of some reason why you would want to work at company X as opposed to any other number of other companies that may be offering similarly-paying roles.
I don’t think the reason of “I already applied to all the better sounding ones, but they all ghosted me” is gonna win too many points either.
It really depends on the market. Sometimes there are great looking companies that you really would like to support because they somehow seem awesome to you. But you don’t always have that luxury.
> A cover letter is also supposed to explain why the company should want you to work for them.
For the generic cover letter that’s a reasonable thing to focus on. I’ve seen plenty of application forms that specifically ask the “why do you want to work for us” question (or even worse: “why do you want to work for us rather than our competitors?” which is even harder to answer, especially if it’s a tiny startup you’ve first heard of by reading their job post on LinkedIn).
>I don’t think the reason of “I already applied to all the better sounding ones, but they all ghosted me” is gonna win too many points either.
Not if you word it like that.
>I’ve seen plenty of application forms that specifically ask the “why do you want to work for us” question
That's what I'm saying. That's the formal question posed, but you can easily answer it by explaining why you'd be good at the role. "I want to work at X because I believe that I could make a significant contribution to Y given my Z skills".
Absolutely. While in an ideal world, everyone would love to land a job that perfectly aligns with their personal values and interests, the reality is different. The current market conditions are dictating a lot of our job search and choices in companies. A vast number of talented engineers are out of work due to circumstances beyond their control and applying for multiple jobs becomes less about passion and more about survival. While a personalized cover letter sounds great in theory, when you're trying to send out dozens of applications to ensure you can keep the lights on the idealism takes a backseat to practicality.
> I’ve never heard of a family being divided because its members dance different styles, but I am in one divided by political and religious opinions.
Being a dancer (lindy hop) with a large number of dancers in my social circle, dancing is actually a frequent source of tension among many couples around me.
Couples splitting up because one is heavily more invested in dancing than the other is a common occurence.
And don’t get me started on lindy hop vs west coast swing.
> And don’t get me started on lindy hop vs west coast swing.
The sad thing is that (for the most part) I don't think the westies really hate on the lindy hoppers much. You can see, admittedly older, clips[1] of dancers throwing in a bit of lindy, balboa, and shag in top level comps. Of course, this is Sylvia Sykes, so maybe that's an exception.
> Couples splitting up because one is heavily more invested in dancing than the other is a common occurence.
This unnerves me. My partner could and would dance all day, anywhere, any scenario. I have to be unbelievably drunk to come close to anything resembling dancing. Any event we go to together that involves dancing is intensely emotionally debilitating to me for that reason, and sometimes I worry that it's a basal insurmountable incompatibility between us.
> And don’t get me started on lindy hop vs west coast swing.
I'm puzzled where this comes from, since they're entirely different scenes. On a social dance night, or say, a festival, one may find Blue/Balboa/Lindy Hop (and possibly Shag), but hardly Lindy Hop and West Coast Swing, since the music is different.
Edit: Actually, the message that the article sends is exactly what happens - dancers try other dances, then they share how they've integrated them into their dance, or how interesting is anyway to try something different - as opposed to intellectual condescension.
> Couples splitting up because one is heavily more invested in dancing than the other is a common occurence.
There surely are occurrences of this, but I wouldn't describe the phenomenon as common. It implies that a romantic relationship is based entirely on dancing, which I don't think is frequent; also, the vast majority of the dancers leave the scene within 3/4 years.
I've personally lived the "mismatch of interest", but it ended up like any other separate hobby in the context of a couple.
I’d add also that this is really only an issue for some women. Most men I’ve met end up leaving the dance scene once they have a partner - if said partner doesn’t dance.
It’s reflected by polling the crowd. There are way more women in relationships out dancing than there are men out dancing in relationships. Single men dominate the numbers when it comes to dancing.
This is why I don’t really recommend it to most men as a way to meet women. It’s lopsided numbers and it’s hard to stand out in a good way as a beginner - in most dance scenes anyway. That said, if you have a lot of time to kill and are big on learning new skills… it can pan out but it’s a multi-year endeavor that often doesn’t go anywhere.
To me, Internet's permanentness should be treated according to Murphy's law: you should plan for everything you wish would go down to stay up indefinitely and everything you wish would stay up to go down at some point.
Vim is basically the only editor you can safely assume to be available on any machine you’ll ever interact with. In my opinion, this fact makes it a requirement for virtually any developer to be able to confidently use vim during a production incident to, say, fix a broken config file while being connected to the machine through (multiple hops of) SSH, without any ability to use your editor of choice.
Once this basic-but-crucial skill level is mastered, using vim more proficientely as a daily driver is entirely a matter of taste. Personally I prefer using a fully-fledged IDE for anything that goes beyond a simple script.
Back in 2014 I was doing music production semi-professionaly for almost a decade. I tried out a brand new pair of headphones, and after an evening of listening to loud music with them, I put them down and heard a continuous blip.
I got (probably lifelong) tinnitus and hyperacusis that day and it never went fully away.
I basically stopped a passion I had since being a teenager because of this injury.
To me this can be done with a simple collision attack (assuming you can fiddle with some bytes inside the manifet file while freezing everything else in advance), which can be found under a second for MD5 with a laptop, and a few hundred thousands dollars of cloud resources for SHA1.
No, that takes a preimage attack, which doesn't exist (yet? I'm not too optimistic, personally).
It could maaaaaaaybe be done using multiple collisions that exploit the structure of a DEFLATE-compressed stream, so that you can control the extracted zip contents on a byte-by-byte basis - but I haven't figured that out just yet. Watch this space!
I don’t understand how this is a pre-image attack, as the manifest file only references itself (and not the zip file) and you can fiddle with the manifest file to your liking. To me this is the same theoretical problem as this self-referencing PNG file.
This is indeed a preimage attack if the manifest content (besides its own self-referenced hash) is fixed. However this is not the case in practice: to pull off this trick you could just append some random bytes at the end of the manifest, disguised as ASCII art or something like that. The manifest would still be human readable and correct, but this would become a collision attack.
Again, to me this is the exact same problem as this self-referential PNG file, which is a very cool trick but which can be (demonstrably) computed with limited compute resources.
One last comment though: I didn’t realize you were the author of the post (great work!!). This let me think you know your stuff, and you know something that I don’t and I need to think of all of that more carefully. So it is very probable you are right and I am wrong. Thanks for the discussion!
Again, the idea is not to find a specific hash value, but any $hash for which the property md5($manifest_content, $hash, $random_bytes) = $hash is true. You don’t need to match a specific hash value.
And you never answered how this manifest is somehow different than the self-referential png.
It seems we do not understand each other (unfortunately HN comments are not the best avenue for deep discussions) so this will be my last post on this thread as we both have better things to do than talking past each other.
And then, once you got your PhD, only then you would be expected to publish new, original research.