Reddit’s crappy ultimatum to remote workers and offices
Reddit forces all remote workers (about half the workforce, in SLC and NYC) to move to SF, provoking a shitstorm:
In a tweet confirming the move, Reddit’s CEO justified his treatment of non-San Francisco workers with a push for Optimal Teamwork to drive the New And $50M Improved Reddit forward. I shit you not. That was the actual term! (I added the New & Improved fan fiction here). So let’s leave aside the debate over whether working remotely is as efficient as being in the same office all the time. Let’s just focus on the size of the middle finger given to the people who work at Reddit outside the Bay Area, given the choice of forced, express relocation or a pink slip. How optimal do you think these employees will feel about leadership and the rest of the team going forward? Do you think they’ll just show up at the new, apparently-not-even-in-San-Francisco-proper office with a smile from ear to ear, ready to begin in earnest on Optimal Teamwork, left-behind former colleagues be damned?
(tags: telecommuting reddit working remote-working ceos optimal-teamwork teamwork relocation)
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‘I designed this jacket as a tribute to the continuing legacy of American spaceflight. I wanted it to embody everything I loved about the space program, and to eventually serve as an actual flight jacket for present-day astronauts on missions to the ISS (International Space Station). There are other “replica” flight jackets made for space enthusiasts, but I decided to come up with something boldly different, yet also completely wearable and well-suited for space.’
How did Twitter become the hate speech wing of the free speech party?
Kevin Marks has a pretty good point here:
Your tweet could win the fame lottery, and everyone on the Internet who thinks you are wrong could tell you about it. Or one of the “verified” could call you out to be the tribute for your community and fight in their Hunger Games. Say something about feminism, or race, or sea lions and you’d find yourself inundated by the same trite responses from multitudes. Complain about it, and they turn nasty, abusing you, calling in their friends to join in. Your phone becomes useless under the weight of notifications; you can’t see your friends support amongst the flood. The limited tools available – blocking, muting, going private – do not match well with these floods. Twitter’s abuse reporting form takes far longer than a tweet, and is explicitly ignored if friends try to help.
(tags: harassment twitter 4chan abuse feminism hate-speech gamergate sea-lions filtering social-media kevin-marks)
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A common “trick” is to claim: ‘We assume network partitions can’t happen. Therefore, our system is CA according to the CAP theorem.’ This is a nice little twist. By asserting network partitions cannot happen, you just made your system into one which is not distributed. Hence the CAP theorem doesn’t even apply to your case and anything can happen. Your system may be linearizable. Your system might have good availability. But the CAP theorem doesn’t apply. […] In fact, any well-behaved system will be “CA” as long as there are no partitions. This makes the statement of a system being “CA” very weak, because it doesn’t put honesty first. I tries to avoid the hard question, which is how the system operates under failure. By assuming no network partitions, you assume perfect information knowledge in a distributed system. This isn’t the physical reality.
(tags: cap erlang mnesia databases storage distcomp reliability ca postgres partitions)
Integrating Kafka and Spark Streaming: Code Examples and State of the Game
Spark Streaming has been getting some attention lately as a real-time data processing tool, often mentioned alongside Apache Storm. […] I added an example Spark Streaming application to kafka-storm-starter that demonstrates how to read from Kafka and write to Kafka, using Avro as the data format and Twitter Bijection for handling the data serialization. In this post I will explain this Spark Streaming example in further detail and also shed some light on the current state of Kafka integration in Spark Streaming. All this with the disclaimer that this happens to be my first experiment with Spark Streaming.
(tags: spark kafka realtime architecture queues avro bijection batch-processing)
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‘a system for allowing servers with encrypted root file systems to reboot unattended and/or remotely.’ (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf mandos encryption security server ops sysadmin linux)
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‘a set of command line tools for managing Route53 DNS for an AWS infrastructure. It intelligently uses tags and other metadata to automatically create the associated DNS records.’
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‘The work, Inspeqtor which is hosted at GitHub, is far from a “clean-room” implementation. This is basically a rewrite of Monit in Go, even using the same configuration language that is used in Monit, verbatim. a. [private] himself admits that Inspeqtor is “heavily influenced“ by Monit https://github.com/mperham/inspeqtor/wiki/Other-Solutions. b. This tweet by [private] demonstrate intent. https://twitter.com/mperham/status/452160352940064768 “OSS nerds: redesign and build monit in Go. Sell it commercially. Make $$$$. I will be your first customer.”’ IANAL, but using the same config language does not demonstrate copyright infringement…
(tags: copyright dmca tildeslash monit inspeqtor github ops oss agpl)
YOU AND YOUR DAMNED GAMES, JON STONE — Why bother with #gamergate?
So what is #gamergate? #gamergate is a mob with torches aloft, hunting for any combustible dwelling and calling it a monster’s lair. #gamergate is a rage train, and everyone with an axe to grind wants a ride. Its fuel is a sour mash of entitlement, insecurity, arrogance and alienation. #gamergate is a vindication quest for political intolerance. #gamergate is revenge for every imagined slight. #gamergate is Viz’s Meddlesome Ratbag.