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1) You may more than pay for that labor in cloud costs, but you can also pretty easily operate rented dedicated hardware with a 3-man team if they know how to do it, the tools to scale are there they're just different.

2) I don't know what your setup looks like, but renting a dedicated server off of Hetzner takes a few minutes, maybe hours at most.

My personal opinion is that most workloads that have a load balancer anyways would be best suited to a mix of dedicated/owned infrastructure for baseline operation and dynamic scaling to a cloud for burst. The downsides to that approach are it requires all of skillset A (systems administration, devops) and some amount of skillset B (public cloud), and the networking constraints can be challenging depending on how state is managed.


Just to clarify, AWS lets you provision bare-metal too if your goal is to just rent hardware someone else is maintaining. And things like trivially distributing load and storage across multiple datacenters/regions is another big bonus for us.

Hetzner has all of that. And cloud. Its just that their dedicated server offerings are SO attractive that people keep mentioning that. Otherwise its not like their cloud offering is also very attractive.

Correct, but most of your cost in public clouds is in bandwidth, not server rental. To my knowledge, AWS also charges a hefty premium for their dedicated servers compared to competitors.

With 3 people it’s basically impossible to build a ha storage solution that can scale to a certain amount - it’s also impossible to keep that maintained.

Can you give a ballpark figure of what scale you have in mind?

Some distributed databases and file systems are notoriously finicky to operate; Ceph comes to mind in particular. Choice of technology and architecture matters here a lot. Content addressed storage using something like Minio with erasure codes should scale pretty easily and could be maintained by a small ops team. I personally know a couple of people that were effectively solo operations for 100PB Elasticsearch clusters, but I'd say they're more than a bit above average skill level and they actively despised Elasticsearch (and Java) coming out of it.

Location: Madison, WI

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes, but you'll have to buy me out of my mortgage and I'm picky where

Technologies: Linux, Unix, systems programming, Rust, networking, distributed systems, embedded applications, Golang, Python, Clojure, Scheme.

Resume: https://resume.packetlost.dev/

Email: jobs@packetlost.dev

SYSTEMS SOFTWARE ENGINEER

=========================

I'm currently a technical lead for control systems at a leading quantum atomics company developing the control system for their atomic clocks product. I've been using Rust almost exclusively for awhile now, but can dip into C if necessary. Previously I worked on quantum computing doing large-scale hard real-time control systems with Python (which is insane, btw, don't do this). I'm an extreme programming language polyglot and can pick up most anything quickly, but am happiest right above a kernel. I excel at high performance software on resource constrained systems. I'm used to wearing many hats and could easily be a sysadmin or "devops" engineer (assuming you aren't doing weird things in public clouds).


YouTube link for video if it's broken for others and not just me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olH-9b3VJfs

Something I learned recently is that the Bourne shell (and by extension, bash and POSIX's sh) have syntax inspired by Algol 68 (source [0]), which explains some of the funkyness. One thing I've been doing recently is writing scripts in rc, the default shell for plan9. It's a bit saner syntax-wise IMO. Versions linked against readline have file-based completion, but it's otherwise not quite robust enough for me to switch away from fish as my default, but it has some things I prefer over both bash and fish.

I encourage people to give rc and awk a shot, they're both small and learnable in an afternoon!

[0]: https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/rc


The Bourne shell was hilariously written in horribly deformed C resembling ALGOL by way of macros:

https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/sh...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22191790


That's amazing

Influence of Algol 68 doesn't even really explains requirement of semicolons (or equivalently, new lines) in weird places.

    while false do echo 1 done
    if false then echo 1 fi
argubaly should just work, the presence of do/then/done/fi keywords makes semicolons quite superfluous yet the correct forms are

    while false ; do echo 1 ; done
    if false ; then echo 1 ; fi
Which is strange, because Algol's grammar actually prohibits ; before ELSE, FI, and OD keywords yet the Bourne shell requires them!

Well, to be fair, the use of semicolons in the shell has nothing to do with their use in other languages, here they are simply line separators.

> One thing I've been doing recently is writing scripts in rc, the default shell for plan9. It's a bit saner syntax-wise IMO

I'll stand on the point that if you're gonna forego (ba)sh compatibility, 95/100 times you might as well write Python scripts. Shell syntax generally sucks, and the only reason we still roll with it is legacy code, universal compatibility, and pipes.


As someone who worked with Python professionally for like 8 years, I wholeheartedly disagree with this. Python is an ok scripting language but it's an awful command script language. The extra ceremony to just invoke another command is a complete non-starter IMO. Ruby handles the cases where a shell script makes sense way better than Python does and I still wouldn't pick Ruby. Rc's syntax is better than ba(sh), which is the point: you get things like pipes and easy commands without some of the cruft.

As someone who also has written my fair share of Python, I completely agree. Piping and subprocess handling are my two main complaints as well.

Managing concurrent processes is arguably also easier in shell scripts, in that you can just append “&” to run stuff in the background and “wait” to sync.


"bUt thE nEiGhbOrHoOd'S cHarAcTeR"

Every business I've ever been at had a "strike team" of the 2x+ engineers (in the M sense) that didn't typically do maintenance work, they unfucked messes or rescued projects. It seemed pretty effective from my standpoint.

They reworked the pen and chassis it looks like. The community update they had a couple of weeks ago (on their blog) has a good amount more detail on the state of things.

It's not really possible to avoid bootstrapping on a centralized authority in general, and DNS seems like a mostly reasonable backstop for that. As others have said, you can make your own DNS network and people have.

> Ethics are pretty universal

Anyone who has taken a basic philosophy or ethics class or read more than the summary page of their history books knows this is not even remotely true


Counterpoint: But surely you must not understand my ethics.

> What matters is it meets functional and non functional requirements.

Good luck expressing novel requirements in complex operating environments in plain English.

> Then he learned to code properly fascinated by the experience. But the fact remains, he shipped an application that did something for someone while many never did even though they had a degree and a black belt in pointless leet code quizzes.

It's good in the sense that it raises the floor, but it doesn't really make a meaningful impact on the things that are actually challenging in software engineering.

> Then he learned to code properly fascinated by the experience. But the fact remains, he shipped an application that did something for someone while many never did even though they had a degree and a black belt in pointless leet code quizzes.

This is cool!

> I'm fully convinced that very soon big tech or a startup will come up with a programming language meant to sit at the intersection between humans and LLMs, and it will be quickly better, faster and cheaper at 90% of the mundane programming tasks than your 200k/year dev writing forms, tables and apis in SF.

I am sure there will be attempts, but if you know anything about how these systems work you would know why there's 0% chance it will work out: programming languages are necessarily not fuzzy, they express precise logic and GPTs necessarily require tons of data points to train on to produce useful output. There's a reason they do noticeably better on Python vs less common languages like, I dunno, Clojure.


> Good luck expressing novel requirements in complex operating environments in plain English.

That's the hard engineering part that gets skipped and resisted in favour of iterative trial and error approaches.


It still applies to expressing specific intent iteratively.


Public university labs are generally public as they're state property (in this particular case, UW Madison is a public state University). Further, recording video or pictures of people in public places is broadly legal in the US. There are only "presumption of privacy" restrictions which apply to places such as bathrooms and private property that is not visible from a public location (ex. a sidewalk).

Obv. IANAL and this is not legal advice.


By this logic the dorm room bathrooms at public universities are also public and I should be able to setup cameras /s


just for the sake of conversation…

if you did, where would you have set them up at anyway? Asking for a friend


[flagged]


And thus they'd fall under the legal definition of public: "Under the authority of the government or belonging and available to the people."

or

"of or relating to a government"


what do you think public mean, they have to belong to Mr. P. Ublic?


This reasoning makes sense. Roads and parks aren’t public, as they are city property. “Public” is only when something has no legal owner, like the moon and stars, or love.


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