Amazon's policy on not taking returns for food items can be very frustrating, especially combined with leaving packages on the doorstep without informing you.
I've had food items in broken glass jars left on my doorstep, and Amazon refuse to do anything about it. They also follow that pattern of making it hard to reach an actual customer service person, instead trying to send you in an endless loop of FAQ pages.
Needless to say, I no longer use Amazon for food items.
Interesting - I've actually had the opposite experience (granted, this was in Canada)
Ordered a fancy honey twice, and both times it arrived in a broken glass jar. When I asked for a refund with the reason "item arrived damaged", it instantly went through both times without question.
Maybe a regional thing? Or perhaps more lenience for long time customers/Prime members?
If you order a household's worth of food constantly, some items are bound to be damaged.
Usually, it's energy drinks that get partially crushed during transit. Not a big deal, and I'd still rather order online and return every now and then, than have to drive to the store.
Once I ordered a case full of fresh organic juice. It was packaged in 32oz glass bottles. I believe that for that order, I went direct to the grocery vendor. So it probably came from a fairly local warehouse. It was delivered to the local USPS station. Rather than deliver it to my residence, the "letter carrier" left a slip for me to go fetch it from the station. When I approached the counter, the clerk said "Oh no, it broke apart and spilled all over our floor. It's a huge mess."
Now what I should've said is, "I'll take the sticky gooey remainder" because I 100% guarantee you that after I refused delivery and abandoned the package, they opened up the intact bottles and had a party with the remainder of the cargo! How often do they get to enjoy a pirate's booty like that?
Me neither. I only ordered Pesto once, and it arrived in two broken glasses. As a personal anecdote, that was sufficient for me to never try ordering food items from Amazon again.
As far as I can tell there have been similar rulings in other countries and it hasn't caused issues. Germany and Spain have fleets who take the responsibility (Cabify in Spain if you want to look it up). I assume a similar model will pop up in London, they definitely won't want to pull out of the market.
I've used Java and C++ in a few low latency applications and I do prefer Java in certain scenarios. The whole ecosystem around Java makes rapid development easier meaning we could make safe changes quicker which is a big benefit in trading systems where you need to react to unpredictable market conditions.
The article focuses quite heavily on Zing vs Hotspot but it'd be interesting to see an analysis of a variety of the standard JVMs GC methods (namely Shenandoah).
For anyone interested in low latency Java I'd recommend watching some of Martin Thompson's talks on building LMAX and his blog Mechanical Sympathy is a great start too.
>The article focuses quite heavily on Zing vs Hotspot but it'd be interesting to see an analysis of a variety of the standard JVMs GC methods (namely Shenandoah).
Also, ZGC, which is considered production-ready in JDK 15.
LMAX Disruptor is a really powerful abstraction if you are trying to build something with consistently-low latency. I've been using a variant in .NET Core for purposes of processing UI events.
It was very interesting, I ported it to C++. However, I lost interest when the whole thing could lock up if the RingBuffer size was very small yet still a power of two.
It also uses sun.misc.Unsafe to do the latency critical aspects, so yes it's Java, but most certainly not vanilla Java.
I come from a place that used Java as the main language for its strategies, and the developers' overall sentiment was very close to yours.
I saw people comment on the "fast<->smart" continuum, and in this context, I believe they mean smart=computationally intensive. (An extreme example is a stat arb shop running its portfolio optimizer.) But there's another way to gain an edge, which is to iterate quickly on your "fast" algorithms and develop them so they take advantage of opportunities that are only partially exploited by competitors. Java seemed pretty good for that purpose for about a decade. Things like JVM warmup, GC, individual ultra-low-latency responses whenever necessary, were all dealt with after the fact.
If you want something that's as fast as C++, but safer to work with, then there's this new language, has been on HN frontpage once or twice.. I can't remember the name, but I think it had something to do with oxidation of metals.. Something about shellfish as well..
The person you're replying to is almost certainly not using the word "safe" in the same sense you are. In particular: safety in trading has to do with risk management, strategy correlation, side effects, and correctness.
Software security matters, in the abstract, but trading firms don't care about it nearly as much as tech companies do. The other thing is that being as fast as C++ is not compelling enough a reason to replace C++ for their use cases. If anything, Rust's dependency management story would be the thing to highlight (this is part of what's compelling about the JVM).
I think the responder's version of 'safety' really boils down to 'null pointer safety' - not 'software security'.
And even then, people keep talking about it like it's 'the thing'.
Java has null 'references' as do most languages frankly and it's just 'a thing' almost never 'the thing' to be concerned about.
'What devs want' is basically something kind of like Java, but that compiles, predictable/controllable performance and memory management i.e. no GC. That's it. It will probably end up being Rust, but that's because Rust will eventually provide all the nice, clean, modern package management, idioms, libraries etc., not specifically because of the 'safety'.
Granted I don't want to diminish that in the attempt to create 'proper memory management' you probably end up writing better software anyhow.
That's fair. Instead of saying "software security" I should have been more specific in talking about memory and pointer issues. In that sense, yes Rust does offer some safety guarantees beyond preventing memory corruption vulnerabilities.
Why would you think that? Rust's major selling point for safety guarantees is the borrow checker. It does not provide most of OCaml's type and functional semantics.
That being said: Jane Street is pretty avant garde in this respect. I expect there already is, or soon will be, a successful trading firm which likewise builds its tech brand on Rust and alternatives to Rust standard library primitives. But overall adoption will probably continue to be anemic.
It has immutability, no null pointers, and error types. It has escape hatches available for everything, but unnecessary use of these should be caught in code review, so I don't think it's a big deal. Not sure what correctness features OCaml could add beyond those, but then again I've never programmed in OCaml, only Scala, so I might be wrong.
This is perhaps the most "blub" comment ever written. There are whole classes of bugs that can be caught with more advanced type systems that the Rust type system + borrow checker will never catch. No null pointers and immutability is the bare minimum.
Does OCaml have dependent types? I thought that was a Coq and Idris (and Haskell, to a lesser extent) thing.
I am aware that dependent types exist, but quite frankly I've yet to see a popular/ergonomic language implement them. As much as we'd like absence of null pointers, error types, and immutability to be the norm it is not and it will take decades until it is.
If I said Rust is rarely used in trading I'd be still overstating its adoption. There is approximately no Rust code in buy side finance. It exists in the sense that you could find something written in it somewhere, even it it's just an infra tool used by one of the software engineers. But I would be very surprised to hear of any trading firm that uses it in the hot path.
Should we sink to their level though? I'm not sure tit for tat fighting is going to fix anything, it just drags us all down. I'm not saying I have a solution, but I feel there's got to be a better one than the direction we're going.
Isn't Bytedance selling Tiktok to Microsoft the solution? As far as concrete worries are concerned, doesn't that solve everything? But I'm not seeing anybody paying any attention to that.
Have you got a source on that? Not questioning that it does sound like an EU thing, but it could come in handy at my current company if there's legislation on that and I can't seem to find any.
It is different country by country. In some countries if it wasn't done on a company equipment regarding your assignments the company cannot do anything about it and they cannot limit you to work on opensource/unpaid projects.
They would turn down the amount of encoding they do during peak streaming. They use their existing servers instead of paying for more servers to encode their Netflix Originals, but encoding isn't time sensitive so can just run on a "spot instance" when their reserved instances are under-utilised.
They'll need 4K, 1080p, 720p etc encoded versions ready for the release of the series, but they might have copies of some of the episodes ready for encoding a few months before the release, so can slowly encode them on their spare resources.
I worked there so I'm well aware of how it works. My point was sometimes they need to do a massive encode during peak, and having the cloud allows them to do that when necessary.
I agree 100%. The cloud is basically the only way to do massive parallel processing in a very short time window without the up front costs. But if this event is uncommon, you can do your massive encode on the cloud, and shut off the cloud resources after peak and go back to bare metal.
I think bare metal is simpler, and that simpler often means better, but there are limits to bare metal. Those limits are where the cloud can come in. You can (and many people do) use both.
I used to buy the paper copy of 2600 every quarter until Borders in the UK vanished and I couldn't find it anywhere. A Kindle version fixes all of my problems though.
Does anyone know if the publisher gets any money off me for buying previous editions of 2600 off the Kindle store? I've obviously subscribed now but I'd like to read some of the issues I missed.
I looked at Clevo's site a while ago and was kinda put off by their obscure model numbering. Can you recommend a friendlier site to look at, and where I could potentially buy one?
Never mind, I found rjtech.com. The designs don't look spectacular, but that's just from the pictures. What does look great, though, is the "No OS" option.
I've had food items in broken glass jars left on my doorstep, and Amazon refuse to do anything about it. They also follow that pattern of making it hard to reach an actual customer service person, instead trying to send you in an endless loop of FAQ pages.
Needless to say, I no longer use Amazon for food items.