HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

This is great that you can do that. An experimental environment must be of the same size.

Ideally, absolutely the same physically, to keep the same physical layout as on prod – bloat, etc – though, sometimes it's not allowed.

Another problem here is that for each experiment, you might need a new environment. Plus, in larger teams, many people might want to do this work at the same time – so you end up combining efforts, synchronizing them, sharing environments. It slows you down. Or increases your cloud spending a lot.

This is a kind of problem Steve Jobs described in his famous 1980 speech [1] about Apple: if we give each person their own computer, something special happens compared to the case when 10 persons share a single computer. Here it is the same: if we can give each engineer their own full-size DB copy for experiments, something special happens. They start moving much, much faster. SQL quality improves. DB changes (DDL, massive DML) stop failing. Finally, engineers start learning SQL, it's an eye-opener – they now can see how it works on large volumes (because they didn't have good environments for experiments before!)

This is what we (Postgres.ai) have learned over the last couple of years developing Database Lab Engine [2]. It's an open-source tool for superfast cloning of Postgres databases of any size, based on copy-on-write provided by ZFS or LVM. On a single machine, you can have dozens of full-size clones up and running, conduct a lot of experiments at the same time, and still be paying only for 1 machine. And clone provisioning takes only a few seconds, it feels like magic. But the main magic is how engineering processes change.

One of great use cases is how GitLab uses it for Postgres query optimization and change control [3].

[1] https://youtu.be/0lvMgMrNDlg?t=586

[2] https://github.com/postgres-ai/database-lab-engine

[3] https://postgres.ai/resources/case-studies/gitlab

⬐ Bucephalus355

He begins the talk "I was driving here at 90 mph...".

I find this interesting. As I recall Bill Gates had a pension for speeding too, accumulating many tickets in his Porsche in both New Mexico and later Washington State.

I just ran across this talk where Jobs basically makes that claim:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvMgMrNDlg

He says it was also because he liked apples, and it was ahead of Atari in the phone book.

"Am I an affective programmer?"

    Does my code make people feel good?
    Does it automate some user task?
    Does it make some user task easier?
    Does it amplify users' powers?
    Does it create value, by my definition of "valuable"?

Of course, these are outcomes/benefits, not the technical role of programming within an organization. But apt if you see yourself, fellow programmers and company members as "users" also.

> I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts. https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-... https://youtube.com/watch?v=0lvMgMrNDlg

> ... There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself. https://wikiquote.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

The thing that amazes me about Jobs is how he could present in such a way that it seemed so off-the-cuff and at the same time so polished. Anyone who has had to do presentations like these can learn a lot from watching him at work.

In the NeXT video, for example, he's very good at tying everything together into a cohesive whole, and speaking to his audience in terms they'll understand. He uses practically no filler words ("uh", "um", "basically", etc.).

Here's another presentation he did in 1980 that shows he had these skills almost from the very beginning:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvMgMrNDlg

⬐ Edmond

I think an advantage he had was time. Bill Gates does similarly well on his presentations from that era.

Unfortunately we don't have the chance to do 35 minutes presentations anymore. Now everyone has to squeeze their pitch into 30 seconds information-free commercials :)

How do you get meaningful ideas across if no one has the time to listen? Only the most superficial ideas can be put across in an elevator pitch.

What makes you think people understand URI bars? Often times they become fairly unintelligible as the number of resources go up. Even if we slugify titles into the URI, there are almost always other path hierarchies and parameters to handle paging, sorting states, or otherwise. The user has already clicked through, he can easily see the title in the tab; the rest of the URI is probably meaningless or not worth understanding for the 99%. 99% of the time, it is probably even a waste for the other 1%; it's not that URIs are going away.

I'm not even sure what you mean by a "Web 3.0" revolution. The following is the future?

* Youtube link off my Youtube homepage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvMgMrNDlg&feature=g-all...

* Twitter status link: https://twitter.com/#!/snookca/status/164424086309715968 -- though I'd wager a majority of users simply hit retweet and never see the resource URI

* Facebook photo off my wall: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=343550758997176&...

⬐ bilban

I wouldn't agree that you can easily see a title in a tab! I'd rather a meta key that would bring up the info about the page easily - which listed the URI etc. But the title should remain at the forefront.

on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvMgMrNDlg

⬐ yeggeyegge

Thanks this link works on iOS