6 ms·

:-) Feel free to ask any questions...

by phkamp 5y ago

Y_Y 5y ago
Sorry if this is a bit grim. On http://varnish-cache.org/docs/6.6/phk/lucky.html http://varnish-cache.org/docs/6.6/phk/lucky.html you say > The Internet is not there yet, people on the Internet have only just started dying, and there are not yet any automatic routines or generally perceived procedures for informing the people and communities who should know, or for tying up the loose ends, accounts, repositories and memberships on the Internet. Has anything improved since then? How should the internet deal with death?
- nreilly 5y ago
  There will be quite a large number of companies with processes along the lines of ‘reporting the death of an account holder’.
  - phkamp 5y ago
    Yes, but this comes with its own risks of abuse and harassement. That's why countries have spent centuries refining how to properly document and dispose of cases of death. But somebody needs to know where to send the official certificate of death to in the first place. In my childhood, the death-notices in the local newspaper did the job, that's no longer the case.
    - elric 5y ago
      I have customers in several countries. If one of them died and I was sent, say, a Danish death certificate, I wouldn't know how to verify/authenticate it. With ~200 countries and almost as many languages, that becomes a non-trivial issue. How do $megacorps deal with this? Is there anything a small business can learn from them in that regard?
- phkamp 5y ago
  I think that is seeing things from the wrong end, the question can ever only be "how should people deal with death?" If you are anything like me, you probably attended less than a handful of funerals until your fourties, and then, as part of growing "really" up, making sure the dark respectful clothes are always ready became a thing. The problem is we built the internet before we turned 40, so we never thought about how deaths figured into it. I still think the two most important aspects are A) Ensure access. (ie: write down crucial passwords) and B) Making sure the news gets round. Failing A) may leave practical and economical heart-burn. Failing B) will make the people you leave behind much more uncomfortable and sad than you would want. And, of course: Make sure to tell people how much you appreciate them, while both you and they still are.
vogon_laureate 5y ago
Hi Poul, Still stand by your antisemitic remarks? Did you ever receive any disciplinary action by the FreeBSD team? https://twitter.com/adammaanit/status/1126254013408796672?s=20 https://twitter.com/adammaanit/status/1126254013408796672?s=...
- vogon_laureate 5y ago
  And this: https://twitter.com/adammaanit/status/1126420311216459776?s=20 https://twitter.com/adammaanit/status/1126420311216459776?s=...
  - 1_player 5y ago
    Being against modern Israeli policies is not anti-semitism. Calling it anti-semitism is an hypocrite and perfidious way of silencing all opposition by playing the victim card against millions of people that have died because of actual anti-semitism. It's disgusting.
    - vogon_laureate 5y ago
      Please enlighten me how holding Jews "collectively in contempt" and "I thought anti-semitism was unfounded hatred of Jews? If you hate them because they did something awful, like implement apartheid, it is not anti-semitism, but perfectly justified critique of people who in particular should know better than that" is {checks notes} "being against modern Israeli policies not antisemitism"?
      - 1_player 5y ago
        2 out of 3 quotes in your comment are not mine and it's not my place to justify them, but please don't mix them with my own personal position, thank you. I agree that a small part of phk's comment would benefit from more cautious wording, but I stand by the fact that trying to cause a flame war by playing the antisemitism card is disgusting and I suspect you're doing it in bad faith.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
erk__ 5y ago
Maybe a bit unrelated to the post, but I have been wanting to ask the question of why you still choose C as you language for new projects. Is it because that is what you have always used and what you know best or do you not think modern languages like go, rust, nim etc. are sufficiently better? ps. I really hope that you can get a nerd talk about your eso project accepted, it sounds like a really interesting project.
- phkamp 5y ago
  I agree that choice of language is important, but you cannot just consider the language in isolation. I have spent almost four decades becoming better at writing C and I write much better programs in C than I do in any other language because of it, and if you asked me to write something very important today, I would trust the result more, if I wrote it in C, even if that were, on some objective scale, not the best language for the task. With that said, a lot of my recent projects, I have chosen python3, which I am now, after some years of "toy-projects", starting to feel quite comfortable with.
eternalban 5y ago
Sure thing. So did you ever issue a mea culpa regarding your statements in ACM Queue [1]: "The past 30 or 40 years of hardware and operating-systems development seems to have only marginally impinged on the agenda in CS departments' algorithmic analysis sections, and as far as my anecdotal evidence, it has totally failed to register in the education they provide." Cache-Oblivious Algorithms and Data Structures - Erik Demaine http://erikdemaine.org/papers/BRICS2002/paper.pdf http://erikdemaine.org/papers/BRICS2002/paper.pdf Abstract: A recent direction in the design of cache-efficient and disk- efficient algorithms and data structures is the notion of cache obliviousness, introduced by Frigo, Leiserson, Prokop, and Ramachandran in 1999. Cache-oblivious algorithms perform well on a multilevel memory hierarchy without knowing any parameters of the hierarchy, only knowing the existence of a hierarchy. Equivalently, a single cache-oblivious algorithm is efficient on all memory hierarchies simultaneously. While such results might seem impossible, a recent body of work has developed cache-oblivious algorithms and data structures that perform as well or nearly as well as standard external-memory structures which require knowledge of the cache/memory size and block transfer size. Here we describe several of these results with the intent of elucidating the techniques behind their design. Perhaps the most exciting of these results are the data structures, which form general building blocks immediately leading to several algorithmic results. - Cache-Oblivious Algorithms - Thesis - Harald Prokop - 1999 http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/Prokop99.pdf http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/Prokop99.pdf [1]: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327
- phkamp 5y ago
  No, and I dont think I owe anybody an apology for that. My main objection was that some of the algorithms praised in theoretical CS have near pessimal behaviour on actual hardware, and have had so for a quarter of a century, yet these "details of implementation" were deemed a waste of educational bandwidth. I've had a fair bit of communication with people in boths ends of CS education about that piece, and I think by and large most agree that I have a valid point there. But nobody wants "Algoritms %03d" to turn into "Optimizing your code for $CORPS microarchitecture %03d", and modern architectures are horribly complicated, in particular from a performance point of view, so sifting out the most representative and relevant phenomena and finding a way of presenting them in education is not easy. On CS TA told me that they hand out my article mid-semester, and ask the students to identify algorithms in their textbook which are robust or vulnerable to actual hardware performance. I'm torn between being flattered and thinking it is a bit of a cop-out. As far as cache-oblivious algorithms go: I'll consider them when they prove they are worth their often formidable complexity. Yes, it would be nice to never have to think about about page-sizes or cache-line widths and all that again, but if only people with a phd in those exact algorithms (many of which are patented) can debug programs which use them, the cost/benefit tilts.
fullstop 5y ago
Hi! I don't have a question but wanted to thank you for varnish cache -- I've used it from the very beginning and have had good experiences with it.

:-) Feel free to ask any questions...

by phkamp 5y ago

:-) Feel free to ask any questions...

Y_Y 5y ago

Sorry if this is a bit grim. On http://varnish-cache.org/docs/6.6/phk/lucky.html http://varnish-cache.org/docs/6.6/phk/lucky.html you say > The Internet is not there yet, people on the Internet have only just started dying, and there are not yet any automatic routines or generally perceived procedures for informing the people and communities who should know, or for tying up the loose ends, accounts, repositories and memberships on the Internet. Has anything improved since then? How should the internet deal with death?

nreilly 5y ago
There will be quite a large number of companies with processes along the lines of ‘reporting the death of an account holder’.
- phkamp 5y ago
  Yes, but this comes with its own risks of abuse and harassement. That's why countries have spent centuries refining how to properly document and dispose of cases of death. But somebody needs to know where to send the official certificate of death to in the first place. In my childhood, the death-notices in the local newspaper did the job, that's no longer the case.
  - elric 5y ago
    I have customers in several countries. If one of them died and I was sent, say, a Danish death certificate, I wouldn't know how to verify/authenticate it. With ~200 countries and almost as many languages, that becomes a non-trivial issue. How do $megacorps deal with this? Is there anything a small business can learn from them in that regard?
phkamp 5y ago
I think that is seeing things from the wrong end, the question can ever only be "how should people deal with death?" If you are anything like me, you probably attended less than a handful of funerals until your fourties, and then, as part of growing "really" up, making sure the dark respectful clothes are always ready became a thing. The problem is we built the internet before we turned 40, so we never thought about how deaths figured into it. I still think the two most important aspects are A) Ensure access. (ie: write down crucial passwords) and B) Making sure the news gets round. Failing A) may leave practical and economical heart-burn. Failing B) will make the people you leave behind much more uncomfortable and sad than you would want. And, of course: Make sure to tell people how much you appreciate them, while both you and they still are.

vogon_laureate 5y ago

Hi Poul, Still stand by your antisemitic remarks? Did you ever receive any disciplinary action by the FreeBSD team? https://twitter.com/adammaanit/status/1126254013408796672?s=20 https://twitter.com/adammaanit/status/1126254013408796672?s=...

vogon_laureate 5y ago
And this: https://twitter.com/adammaanit/status/1126420311216459776?s=20 https://twitter.com/adammaanit/status/1126420311216459776?s=...
- 1_player 5y ago
  Being against modern Israeli policies is not anti-semitism. Calling it anti-semitism is an hypocrite and perfidious way of silencing all opposition by playing the victim card against millions of people that have died because of actual anti-semitism. It's disgusting.
  - vogon_laureate 5y ago
    Please enlighten me how holding Jews "collectively in contempt" and "I thought anti-semitism was unfounded hatred of Jews? If you hate them because they did something awful, like implement apartheid, it is not anti-semitism, but perfectly justified critique of people who in particular should know better than that" is {checks notes} "being against modern Israeli policies not antisemitism"?
    - 1_player 5y ago
      2 out of 3 quotes in your comment are not mine and it's not my place to justify them, but please don't mix them with my own personal position, thank you. I agree that a small part of phk's comment would benefit from more cautious wording, but I stand by the fact that trying to cause a flame war by playing the antisemitism card is disgusting and I suspect you're doing it in bad faith.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

erk__ 5y ago

Maybe a bit unrelated to the post, but I have been wanting to ask the question of why you still choose C as you language for new projects. Is it because that is what you have always used and what you know best or do you not think modern languages like go, rust, nim etc. are sufficiently better? ps. I really hope that you can get a nerd talk about your eso project accepted, it sounds like a really interesting project.

phkamp 5y ago
I agree that choice of language is important, but you cannot just consider the language in isolation. I have spent almost four decades becoming better at writing C and I write much better programs in C than I do in any other language because of it, and if you asked me to write something very important today, I would trust the result more, if I wrote it in C, even if that were, on some objective scale, not the best language for the task. With that said, a lot of my recent projects, I have chosen python3, which I am now, after some years of "toy-projects", starting to feel quite comfortable with.

eternalban 5y ago

Sure thing. So did you ever issue a mea culpa regarding your statements in ACM Queue [1]: "The past 30 or 40 years of hardware and operating-systems development seems to have only marginally impinged on the agenda in CS departments' algorithmic analysis sections, and as far as my anecdotal evidence, it has totally failed to register in the education they provide." Cache-Oblivious Algorithms and Data Structures - Erik Demaine http://erikdemaine.org/papers/BRICS2002/paper.pdf http://erikdemaine.org/papers/BRICS2002/paper.pdf Abstract: A recent direction in the design of cache-efficient and disk- efficient algorithms and data structures is the notion of cache obliviousness, introduced by Frigo, Leiserson, Prokop, and Ramachandran in 1999. Cache-oblivious algorithms perform well on a multilevel memory hierarchy without knowing any parameters of the hierarchy, only knowing the existence of a hierarchy. Equivalently, a single cache-oblivious algorithm is efficient on all memory hierarchies simultaneously. While such results might seem impossible, a recent body of work has developed cache-oblivious algorithms and data structures that perform as well or nearly as well as standard external-memory structures which require knowledge of the cache/memory size and block transfer size. Here we describe several of these results with the intent of elucidating the techniques behind their design. Perhaps the most exciting of these results are the data structures, which form general building blocks immediately leading to several algorithmic results. - Cache-Oblivious Algorithms - Thesis - Harald Prokop - 1999 http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/Prokop99.pdf http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/Prokop99.pdf [1]: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327

phkamp 5y ago
No, and I dont think I owe anybody an apology for that. My main objection was that some of the algorithms praised in theoretical CS have near pessimal behaviour on actual hardware, and have had so for a quarter of a century, yet these "details of implementation" were deemed a waste of educational bandwidth. I've had a fair bit of communication with people in boths ends of CS education about that piece, and I think by and large most agree that I have a valid point there. But nobody wants "Algoritms %03d" to turn into "Optimizing your code for $CORPS microarchitecture %03d", and modern architectures are horribly complicated, in particular from a performance point of view, so sifting out the most representative and relevant phenomena and finding a way of presenting them in education is not easy. On CS TA told me that they hand out my article mid-semester, and ask the students to identify algorithms in their textbook which are robust or vulnerable to actual hardware performance. I'm torn between being flattered and thinking it is a bit of a cop-out. As far as cache-oblivious algorithms go: I'll consider them when they prove they are worth their often formidable complexity. Yes, it would be nice to never have to think about about page-sizes or cache-line widths and all that again, but if only people with a phd in those exact algorithms (many of which are patented) can debug programs which use them, the cost/benefit tilts.

fullstop 5y ago

Hi! I don't have a question but wanted to thank you for varnish cache -- I've used it from the very beginning and have had good experiences with it.