Yeah, that's definitely true. I find that I'll often be excited about an idea and immediately start putting in the time to build a rough prototype. Once I realize the true scale of the effort involved I second-guess my commitment to the idea - is this really something I want to spend the next year+ working on? I think having that clear vision and enough conviction that the results will be worthwhile is very important and definitely something I struggle with.
Nice to see that they're just using EC2 + S3 instead of a whole suite of niche cloud offerings that we see these days. Maybe this is mentioned in the linked presentation (https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Pinterest/) but are they using managed databases? Or just running their own on EC2 instances as well?
Not really related to the article but something I've been wondering...
In recent years the housing market has been so competitive that escalation clauses are often written into offers. They typically include a base offer of $X and then an agreement to escalate that value by increments (maybe $1-5k at a time) up to some cap. All the offers are collected by a certain date and then an auction is run behind the scenes by the realtors involved.
What's to stop a seller from having one of their friends enter into one of these escalations? Submit a non-serious offer with a high escalation and include a minimal deposit which would be forfeited if that fake offer happens to win but otherwise hope it comes in 2nd to push everyone else's escalation up.
Very little. When I was younger growing up in Australia, auctions were very common, and it was very much the "traditional" model, everyone stands around in front of the property and puts up their hand to bid.
Regularly auctioneers would get caught taking bids from trees or vehicles to push prices up. They'd get caught when their fake bid was the highest. It became so common it was almost expected, and reforms to the process had to be introduced.
There are also a lot of shenanigans realtors could be pulling.
Example:
Few years ago, we wanted to buy a house, we made a bid for 2.6, the realtor said they would not accept anything less than 2.8 as this was their competing offer. We said no, the house sold for 2.4. I suspected the realtor might have been double dipping, or bluffing, i don't know. But what I do know is they did not present the offer to the seller.
(numbers are not exactly precise, but directionally and somewhat magnitude wise, it should be similar).
I had a similar issue. A put a full price cash offer on a place for 1.9. The seller said they had a competing offer that was higher and asked me to submit a new offer at 2.1. I declined, and said they are welcome to provide a written counter offer at 2.1. The reason they won't counter is that a new higher offer from any buyer (me) will trigger escalation clauses for other buyers offers. Dirty trick that screws over buyers, because sellers can see all offer details.
> But what I do know is they did not present the offer to the buyer.
I believe in most states a real estate agent (I despise 'Realtor(TM)') is obliged to present an offer (at least by the Realtor's Code of Conduct/Membership Agreement).
Edited to add: I'm not sure if this refers to seller agents (who cannot hold back an offer from their client), or to buyer agents, presenting that to the seller side, or both. I think at least the first.
> I believe in most states a real estate agent (I despise 'Realtor(TM)') is obliged to present an offer
Sure. But enforcement is the soul of the law.
And it's pretty tough to catch stuff like that. Most people who put in offers and don't "win" aren't sitting around monitoring how much the winning bid ended up being.
Maybe there was something else unattractive about your offer and the 2.8 fell through? Happens all the time.
When I sold a house recently I took the second highest offer, because the highest offer came from someone out of state who had never set foot in the house
Yes, the issue was increased risk of the buyer backing out. In which case I would get a few grand in earnest money and have to relist (or hope the other potential buyers haven’t found something else in the meantime and still want to go through with their offer).
The house had some warts, and the second highest bidders were locals who had toured the house and had it inspected. Closing was pretty much a lock.
1) If your bid wins then you're on the hook to buy the house. Part of the offer your make includes "earnest money" which is that deposit you're talking about (which you forfeit if you don't actually buy the house). The seller sees all the offers so presumably you putting down $500 earnest money on a $300K house would look suspicious enough to get you ignored by the buyer.
2) However, you've got a bigger issue: it's a secret auction. You put in your bid/offer, and so does everyone else, but _nobody_knows_about_anyone_else's_bid_. Heck, you don't even know how many other people are bidding. You _may_ be able to ask your realtor to nicely ask the seller's realtor for a general description of how hot the listing is (which works in the realtors' favor - the hotter the listing, the more you'll anticipate needing to bid), but beyond that you don't know about the other bids. And you for sure don't know about the specific, bogus bid that the realtor's friend put in to influence all the people that don't know about the bogus bid :)
I might be wrong (realtor's friend puts in a bogus bid so the seller's realtor can lie and say the listing is hot, after your realtor asks them about it), but I don't think this is a strategy that will work in general.
> putting down $500 earnest money on a $300K house would look suspicious enough to get you ignored by the buyer
Assuming you mean the seller here? If I were the seller I too would ignore that kind of offer but first I'd let it push all the other escalation clauses up ;)
I had an escalation clause in my offer, but I adjusted it so it said something to the effect that the clause would only be in effect for comparable offers. Then I defined comparable offers to be offers that were for the same type of loan with a minimum down payment and deposit amount. I wanted to protect against the buyers getting a higher offer that they were likely to reject on some other basis, but using that higher offer to make me pay more for the house. The downside was that I could be beat out by other legitimate buyers whose escalation clause didn't consider the quality of the offer they were beating. I cared more about not feeling like I was being swindled though. I got the house after about a $10k escalation, and the seller's agent presented the competing offer so I could verify it met the conditions of my escalation clause.
This happened to me in 2019. I went into escrow and they didn't give me the offer for about 5 days. When I finally got it, it was lower than it should have been. It rubbed me the wrong way and I bailed out of the deal.
How did you bail without losing your deposit? I would have thought if you were the highest bidder you'd either be on the hook for the full purchase or lose your deposit.
Do you see the deposit amount and all the details of the escalation from the triggering offer in that case?
Say I saw that the triggering offer had a measly deposit and I suspected it of being fake. Would I be on the hook to prove it? Technically if I rescind my offer at this point I lose my own deposit, right?
Yes but they can drag their feet in giving it to you, since they can just sign your offer immediately. However, you can just cancel your offer after with a follow up document.
I think a lot of the escalations involve more than just one other person bidding, so you'd really need to be running a good game to get three or four people involved to run up a price in something like this.
Additionally, in a competitive market, with multiple offers, people aren't doing a bare minimum deposit. More like 30 - 50K is involved based on my experience, but it varies dependending on state.... I'm currently looking in a new market, and we were told our offers should have about 10 to 30K on them between Due Dilligence and Ernest money....
Besides, it's just easier for the seller/buyer agent to have a conversation on which buyer wants it the most.
It doesn't seem unethical, just weird. The seller can just require a higher starting bid, the result would be equivalent. Of course the risk would be that no one would buy the property if the price is too high.
Yeah, this is exactly what I do as well. I'd be curious to hear more about your deployment process, specifically how you get your Docker image onto the VPS. Do you just push to a registry like DockerHub and then pull it down on the VPS?
Yes, I use GH actions to push it to a registry and then manually pull it on the VPS. I’m sure there are better ways to automate this but I’m too lazy at this point to implement them.
Does this use the battery? Not clear to me if the Kindle program is running continuously or if it just periodically starts up, refreshes the screen and then powers back down.
I've set up my own DIY version of this. It pulls a new image via a cron job and repaints the screen with it. I've not invested time looking into it but by default if the device sleeps, which it does very quickly after loosing wall power, the cron job will no longer run and the display gets stuck. You need to poke the power button to get it to wake again.
Instead of using a cronjob you can put the device into sleep and use the RTC to schedule the next wakeup (see [1]). This takes only very little power, as the device is only turned on for mere seconds and sleeps the remaining time.
I presume it does, but would only need charging once every couple of months. If it's going to be in a fixed position, e.g., on a desk, then it could just be left plugged in.
Is there something about the actual profiler that differs from existing tools like pyinstrument [1] or py-spy [2]? I know pyinstrument has various output options and I wonder if it could potentially output something readable by the Firefox Profiler tool.
It uses FEE (function entry/exit) tracing so it generates a full execution trace of all functions called during your run like “History” [1], the C/C++ tracing profiler it was based on.
You can then post-process that trivially to get low resolution aggregate information like normal statistical/sampling profilers generate.
compare to pyspy, which is out of process and reads process memory to reconstruct stack frames as a sampler, which means marginal overhead for the program, re safer to use in prod. it would be interesting to see a function entry/exit on linux via epbf attached to USDT.
They claim tracing overhead is <10%. This is very believable, and actually frankly seems kind of high. You can do a full execution trace of a C program for a similar low double digit percent overhead and Python is usually on the order of 10x slower, so naively you would assume like 1% overhead.
I assume the hooks Python makes available are probably just kind of bad for this use case and they do not have access to a proper high speed log.
Yeah, it tends to be low single digit percents, but you can get some pessimal behavior if you have enough tiny functions because the overhead of what Cpython exposes starts becoming large. Our "benchmark" where the 10% comes from is tensorflow, which is overwhelmingly tiny functions and no sustained io/individual functions.
Evan's hella nice. Some folks just really really don't like being told "No."
(There are comments upthread calling the Elm community "happy cult" because they said "no" so nicely!)
The complaints you hear about Elm are pretty much all of the "Evan said no" ilk.
What you don't hear is are actual bug reports, eh? People aren't kvetching about how their Elm apps broke, eh? That silence is deafening, once you listen for it. Elm works. It may be the Easy-Bake Oven of web dev, but the things it cooks are perfectly edible!
(Following that metaphor, most JS frameworks, etc. produce muffins with bits of broken glass in them.)
So, is that a claim you're seriously making about Evan?
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Not to be arch, but this whole line of discussion is uninteresting to me. I'm glad to discuss Elm, but I don't want to hear unfounded character assassination of a kid who's only guilty of being willing to say "no" to people who want to change his language in ways that he's not into.
From my POV Elm stands as a serious challenge to the entire JS ecosystem. I keep asking, "What's the business value argument for not using Elm?" and no one has a good answer.
The crucial point is exactly what you're referencing ("his language"). The way that contributions, feedback, and issues were treated was very much not in line with a tool that people depend on for their work. It was in line with a personal hobby project, but the marketing and promotion did not set those expectations. They strongly promoted the project as a tool for use in industry. So your defense is not convincing to me as someone who did try to use this tool in a professional setting where I was accountable to a larger organization for delivering on technical requirements.
People weren't asking to compromise or control the design of the language. They wanted to be able to contribute to the project (usually just first-party packages) in order to have their problems solved in a timely manner or have their issues addressed in some other way. This was usually after having invested hundreds of hours in the language, because the basic golden path was very polished in Elm.
I can only speculate on the reasons why there was this disparity between marketing and reality. Certainly the language gained a lot more interest and community investment than a Show HN hobby project, and some people did benefit from that. I'm not making any specific claims about Evan. The "nice" aspect is relevant because while following the Elm community closely, I witnessed many harsh interactions on the part of Evan and Richard Feldman that were simply wrapped in gentle verbiage.
So what I'm not hearing is that Elm didn't work. It worked, right?
Evan and co. just wouldn't agree to let you contribute to solve your problems and issues in the way you would have preferred?
(In re: the "harsh" comment you linked to, I don't know what to tell you. It doesn't read as "harsh" to me, if anything it shows admirable restraint. In any event, I'm not interested in "tone policing" Richard Feldman. I know nothing about him.)
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I'm one of those people who are like, if you don't like what Evan's doing just write your own, eh?
Meaning no disrespect to Evan and co. and what they've achieved, it's not that hard. It just isn't. Elm-style languages are pretty easy to implement (that's kind of the whole point, yeah?)
It divides the complainers into two groups: those who can write their own but instead prefer to leverage Elm devs via what amounts to various forms of emotional and reputational blackmail; and those who can't but still want to leverage Elm devs via what amounts to various forms of emotional and reputational blackmail. Either way, I personally feel comfortable dismissing their complaints without further consideration.
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Do you have any technical complaints about Elm? Did it ever break in production? What was the most interesting bug you encountered using Elm? That's the discussion I'd like to have.
Why are you interested in having a discussion on any of this when you can just talk to yourself (i.e., write your own)? It’s really not that hard.
Yes, Elm and its core packages had bugs and critical omissions that were outstanding for years, many of which affected our app. It was a running joke on our team to try to guess the vintage of the extant GitHub issue whenever we ran into a problem. I consciously fled the ecosystem and community many years ago so I don’t remember specifics anymore. And the repos were scrubbed of all past issues when 0.19 was released so we can’t go check either.
If you appreciate implied threats for creating a package which gives people some (unauthorized!) control over their own destiny, then I can see why this comment wouldn’t trouble you. Have fun in the sandbox.
> Why are you interested in having a discussion on any of this...
I'm interested in systems which permit bug-free programming. Elm seems like a step in the right direction, bringing semi-obscure ideas closer to the mainstream. Lot of JS programmers got some exposure to Elm-like FP.
> you can just talk to yourself
I mostly do. (I'm a recluse, this account on HN is my primary channel of communication to the outside world.)
> (i.e., write your own)? It’s really not that hard.
I am writing my own system, and it's really not that hard.
> Yes, Elm and its core packages had bugs and critical omissions that were outstanding for years, many of which affected our app.
That sucks. But really, without any details your vague memories aren't much to go on.
> appreciate implied threats
I'm not sure what you mean, maybe I misread the message. It didn't sound to me like anyone was threatening anyone.
This is starting to sound unhinged. You're identifying strongly with Evan but you're also denying how deeply he matters to you. That seems mentally unhealthy.
I think anyone can see something is wrong upstairs, man. If that sounds like trolling, I'm sorry. It sucks that HN is your only contact with the real world and I hope you can find something to worship besides Elm/Evan.
> What's the business value argument for not using Elm?
The time and energy investment into using any JS code in Elm for things not currently sorted out is severely disproportional to the value provided by Elm. The ROI is just not there. If you compare it to the FFI layer of PureScript, there is no question that it's nice to have validation, etc., but it's just not worth it.
The very restrictive view of packages (where to get them, what you can upload and use, etc.) is also a very obvious deal breaker.
I would be surprised that you find these two things that everyone keeps bringing up not to be good answers to your question, but then I remember how being in the Elm community felt like: "Everything Evan says or thinks we all think". It's the same culty feel that Elixir has a lighter version of.
> "What's the business value argument for not using Elm?"
The ecosystem of Javascript is vast, in comparison to Elm, which can save time and money (especially now that apparently Elm doesn't allow JS code). JS devs are likely also cheaper than Elm devs due to the high supply. Just two reasons why I as a business owner would still write in Javascript/TypeScript over Elm.
My personal philosophy includes a strong vein of deep ecology, with a political view influenced by mutualist anarchism. I wanted to be part of a humanity which got its act together, tore down its oppressive hierarchies, adapted to its limits, and learned to respect not only each other, but the whole of the ecosystem we live within. That can no longer happen; we've already gone so far (with CO2 emissions especially) that everything, everywhere, has been or will be disrupted and damaged by human industry.
