> Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership making it rain [...]
Epic's employees reaped the gains while it rained in the form of paychecks. While it sucks that people are losing their jobs, those individuals received (much of) the upside of this investment and their jobs never would have existed in the first place had the investment not been made. Their paychecks are not being clawed back. Shareholders (including executives who are largely paid via out-of-the money options) are bearing the costs. Consumers also benefit from increased competitive pressure on Valve and subsidized game prices.
Would it be "better" if Epic had not invested in the Epic Game Store and paid a dividend or conducted a share buyback?
For what it’s worth, Epic is a private company and employee upside has been capped in the sense that compensation has been mostly cash (and not Netflix tier cash). Exposure to equity may been a better way to share in upside and ensure some buy-in.
IMO investing in a marketplace was fine, but hemorrhaging money for 7 years on non-performant software + free game bundles is probably not defensible from an executive standpoint.
In my experience the buy-in you get from employee stock programs scales inversely with the head count. I worked for a huge company that gave out stock options. Nobody was really motivated by the stocks, because the company was so large your individual contribution meant exactly nothing unless you were at least a VP. A vesting bonus of some kind would have done just as much.
This is all good advice but it's not what I would traditionally think of as "logging" - it's something more like what the industry calls APM or tracing.
> For a web service, that usually means one log event at the end of every request.
The point of a log, as I have seen it used, is to understand what's going on during a request. Yes, some of that is timing / success / failure information, but you also need:
- Logical tracing - at a high level, what decisions did we make (authz, business logic) when serving this request
- Partial failures or warnings - the request may have succeeded, but we may have failed or timed out a call to a dependent service and delivered a partially degraded response as a result
- Tracepoints to support active development - how often do we hit a certain codepath (to help developers roll out or deprecate features)
It's useful to distinguish between "context" (things we know about a request), timing, success, and plain old logging (using human language to describe to an operator what the system is doing). Context should be included with every line - I strongly agree with OP's proposal of wide events, don't make operators ever JOIN if you can avoid it - but it won't always be the same because we learn things about the request as we process it. Yes, if you wait until the end of a request, you will have maximal context, but at the loss of fine-grained detail during processing.
I don't believe this should replace traditional logging but rather complement it. It transforms breadcrumbs into unified records that are easier to query during an incident.
I completely agree with your plain-old logging list. I would add canonical log lines in addition to the normal log traces. They serve as the summary at the end.
I’ve worked at a company where all we had were large, unified, post-request logs and honestly those logs were orders of magnitude easier to work with than having to coallate lots of logs into a single concept. ELK liked those giant logs more, too.
It does help that the system was built from the ground up to use the big logs.
I think the best feature was that we would extract and build a ton of keys into the full-size log, so you could find all transactions related to X really, really easily, where X was a wide variety of things.
Every place I’ve been elsewhere the logs have always been way harder to parse, process or even just find. It would always take several disparate queries to get everything.
E.g. “oh, we need to find something related to X? Well okay, that gives us 50 different separate calls, now let’s do another search on each of those calls’ unique transaction id and review each whole transaction individually” vs “I need X. Cool, here’s all 50, complete calls.”
Edit: to be clear, throughout the code it was just “context.info()”, over and over again, like regular logging, it was just shoved into a big object at the end of all non-application-crashing exceptions. And the application was built to not fully crash, like, ever. (And this worked)
That's a cloudflare anycast address; your traffic won't be routed through Texas unless you're in or near Texas. Cookiebot would appear to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usercentrics
Unfortunately, the US and many other countries have chosen the other path (sporadic enforcement with severe punishment) largely because it's easier to implement. There's a lot of momentum to change this but it's politically difficult at least in America.
You can tell because some of the failed bombings (like the shoe bomber) failed because their plans were stupid to get around security, and if security wasn't there they would probably have used a normal bomb and succeeded
I have no idea if it has worked or not but you got to count deterrence too. If you have a lock and alarm in your house it might deter someone from even trying to break in. Of course you could never know if the deterrence worked (only attempts would be noticeable)
If your comment is referring to the bending spoons business model, it's worth pointing out they are not VC, they are private equity.
If your comment is referring to the software company's exiting to provide a return to shareholders, that happens all the time whether it's venture-backed or privately owned. The owners of privately held bootstrapped companies still want an exit one day too.
As an open source software engineer who is now a venture capital investor, respectfully, I think your beef is with capitalism, not with the institutional investors.
Not in the startup world beyond what I pick up on HN, but this distinction was helpful. My mental model going forward:
- If a company is still validating the business model and optimizing for rapid growth, it’s typically a Venture Capitalist (VC) fit.
- If a company is already established and the play is to improve operations, scale, or restructure (often involving a change of control), it’s typically a Private Equity (PE) fit.
Reminder that restructure often means a company working just fine, but whose assets outstrip what PE can buy it for, so they strip it to the bones. Or they leverage it with debt against assets then pay that money to themselves for consulting, account/hr services that they force the company to outsource to other PE companies. Nothing is 'created' through this process, no value created/added, nor it is healthy capitalism as the company could have continued fine without this added leveraged debt that was purely used to profit PE.
The Bending Spoons business model is right out of the private equity playbook. Buy a business with good revenue, cut cost to turn this into a consistent revenue stream, generate annual returns.
This is not like making a small 20 person self funded company.
Comments like the above one refer to community vibes, the types of comments that will get you lots of praise/upvotes.
So while individuals have different beliefs, the "average expected top comment" for communities like HN is usually pretty predictable, and hence the cognitive dissonance of the community on the whole can be called out.
There are now more private equity funds in the USA than McDonalds. The maximum wealth extraction of every single thing in people's lives is not viable for a continuing healthy society.
“I only pirate because evil corporations make it too hard to pay for my favorite content” is a multi-decade ever-shifting goalpost. Some people just like to steal shit and will justify it to themselves on the thinnest of pretenses.
It is factually true though, music piracy DID drop once ad supported music streaming became available, the opposite is also true, video/movie piracy is now on the rise due to the amount of streaming subscriptions one has to juggle and their rising prices. Ofcourse there will always be those who yearn for the pirates life, but the vast majority just do it for convenience.
I don't even know the last time I pirated music. Gotta be at least 10 years.
Meanwhile, I pirate movies/TV on a regular basis for the reasons you gave. At one point, I was subbed to 5 services, and decided enough was enough. Cancelled all but Netflix and went back to torrenting anything they didn't have.
I've used spotify for a decade. But the other day I opened one of my playlists and noticed that almost all the songs were greyed out as "unavailable" despite a quick search showing those songs still existed.
Spotify rotted my playlists because it didn't feel like updating a database row somewhere when some licensing agreement got updated. Apple will do the opposite: Rot your music collection by replacing songs with "identical" songs that aren't at all.
And Netflix’s profits have been on the rise for over a decade. I retired my plex server over six years ago. It just wasn’t worth the hassle of finding decent quality torrents. Everything ends up on streaming anyway.
I understand that sentiment but I think its arbitrary. People buy lots of products that don't have a useful life exceeding two years. For example, every pet toy ever sold. Some will have higher impact for manufacturing and disposal than this ring.
1. Arbitrary it may be. You have to start somewhere. In that sense, anything we do is “arbitrary“. Straw man. (see also: ban of plastic straws)
2. I would expect pet toys to be regulated as well and to contain less environmental toxins and hard to recycle elements than batteries, so I doubt the claim about impact per item sold.
As long as their batteries are replaceable, that’s fine, and if not, they will not be legally allowed to be sold in Europe. What point is it that you’re trying to make?
> So people should make their own choices about the products they buy?
A little, yeah. Buy and don't use: your problem. Buy and can't use because I can't change the battery: subject to regulation. We can't stop anyone from making dumb monetary decisions, but we can stop products not being repairable.
And an endless stream of devices in the form of toys running full software stacks which never receive updates. Great, some products are as shitty. Perhaps we oppose those as well?
Good idea, and actually partly implemented as well in the EU. Security updates must be provided for a certain period of time for a certain class of devices, which is the reason why mobiles now receive updates for many years.
Epic's employees reaped the gains while it rained in the form of paychecks. While it sucks that people are losing their jobs, those individuals received (much of) the upside of this investment and their jobs never would have existed in the first place had the investment not been made. Their paychecks are not being clawed back. Shareholders (including executives who are largely paid via out-of-the money options) are bearing the costs. Consumers also benefit from increased competitive pressure on Valve and subsidized game prices.
Would it be "better" if Epic had not invested in the Epic Game Store and paid a dividend or conducted a share buyback?