pjdesno

6 ms·

31.
by pjdesno 6mo ago
I would point out that most products are useless, and either fail or replace other products which weren't any worse. None of which prevented me from cashing my paychecks for the first half of my career when I worked in private industry
32.
by pjdesno 6mo ago
Are there any factual allegations on that page? All I could find was "the method described in the paper is not the method the authors actually used", without any elaboration. I'll add that the reaction of most of academia wil
33.
by pjdesno 6mo ago
90% of the power in our academic data center goes 13.8kV 3-phase -> 400v 3-phase, and then the machines run directly from one leg to neutral (230v). One transformer step, no UPS losses, and the server power supplies are more efficient at
34.
by pjdesno 7mo ago
I remember ordering parts from Digi-Key in 1980 or so when I was in high school. The catalog was less than 1/4 inch thick, and listed various surplus things on the back. It was cool to see them grow into a real competitor for the big d
35.
by pjdesno 7mo ago
Perhaps relevant to this - if you go to this global ranking of publications: https://traditional.leidenranking.com/ranking/2025/list and select "Mathematics and Computer Science", you'll find t
36.
by pjdesno 7mo ago
If you're writing code professionally, then you're not in college anymore and your programs aren't simple things that run from the start of main() through to the end and then exit. If you're providing a service that need
37.
by pjdesno 7mo ago
https://retractionwatch.com/2026/01/08/finance-professor-bri... I've boycotted reviewing for Elsevier for years, but it's easy for me - I'm in CS, where ACM, USENIX and IEEE offer higher-status
38.
by pjdesno 7mo ago
Given the argument tactics employed by Socrates in Plato's Dialogues, which include most of the standard catalog of fallacies, the question that arises in the mind of many readers is "why didn't they kill him sooner?"
39.
by pjdesno 8mo ago
I learned logic design in a class where we wired up 74LS TTL, a couple of years before they switched to programmable logic, so my knowledge of this sort of thing comes from looking over the shoulders of folks who actually do it, but it seem
40.
by pjdesno 8mo ago
I had a computer architecture prof (a reasonably accomplished one, too) who thought that all CS units should be binary, e.g. Gigabit Ethernet should be 931Mbit/s, not 1000MBit/s. I disagreed strongly - I think X-per-second should
41.
by pjdesno 8mo ago
In the 70s the oil companies were furious that Venezuela (if my understanding is correct) revoked their leases and forced them to abandon their equipment investments. That's basically what the administration was trying to do here, unde
42.
by pjdesno 8mo ago
Cambridge MA was rezoned in the mid-20th century to suburban standards, in a city where land in a mid-range neighborhood now costs $350-$400 per square foot. Besides putting in floor area ratio requirements that required most of the existin
43.
by pjdesno 8mo ago
Despite whatever the NRA says, governments have a near-monopoly on violence. They've got all the good weapons - Google "Neal Brennan Has a Plan to Test the 2nd Amendment" for a humorous take on this. That leaves non-violence,
44.
by pjdesno 8mo ago
Tesla finance seems legendary in this regard. A friend here in MA got hauled down to city hall because their auto excise taxes were 3 years overdue - they're the responsibility of the owner of a leased car, in this case Tesla finance.
45.
by pjdesno 8mo ago
If your review was based on features shipped, and your bosses let you send PRs with no tests, would you? And before you say "no" - would you still do that if your company used stack ranking, and you were worried about being at the
46.
by pjdesno 8mo ago
No, they got it published in ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes. That's one of the things that publication is for. The paper is a well-supported (if not well-proofread) position paper, synthesizing the author's thoughts and ot
47.
by pjdesno 9mo ago
Since no one else seems to have pointed this out - the OP seems to have misunderstood the output of the 'time' command. $ time ./wc-avx2 < bible-100.txt 82113300 real 0m0.395s user 0m0.196s sys 0m0
48.
by pjdesno 9mo ago
> was in unsafe code, and related to interop with C 1) "interop with C" is part of the fundamental requirements specification for any code running in the Linux kernel. If Rust can't handle that safely (not Rust "safe&
49.
by pjdesno 9mo ago
> "Trellis coded modulation got this rate up to 50 kilobaud by the 1990s" Not quite, and an interesting story that fits these engineering maxims better than you might think. An analog channel with the bandwidth and SNR characte
50.
by pjdesno 9mo ago
Bryan Cantrill, "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728 The specific lines about Ellison and a lawnmower start at 38:28 in the linked video; th
51.
by pjdesno 9mo ago
I've got to say, there's nothing more infuriating than standing in front of a register while everyone behind the counter is busy working on online orders that won't get picked up for quite a while, as evidenced by their repea
52.
by pjdesno 9mo ago
Yeah, you need an adapter. Search on eBay for "freeNAS" and "LSI" and you'll find a bunch listed for way under $100.
53.
by pjdesno 10mo ago
> Maybe a boot drive for some VM host? Actually that's a really common use - I've bought a half dozen or so Dell rack mount servers in the last 5 years or so, and work with folks who buy orders of magnitude more, and we all spe
54.
by pjdesno 10mo ago
No advantage over SAS here - it's the same form factor.
55.
by pjdesno 10mo ago
The storage markets I can think of, off the top of my head: 1. individual computers 2. hobbyist NAS, which may cross over at the high end into the pro audio/video market 3. cloud 4. enterprise #1 is all NVMe. It's dominated by lap
56.
by pjdesno 10mo ago
Back in the days of MapQuest there was a (usually) very good site called mapsonus.com, but it evidently had one of the ferries that crossed Boston Harbor in its map as a zero distance link. Since it was offline, the bug was obvious although
57.
by pjdesno 10mo ago
In Boston it's a very frequent occurrence to be driving in the Central Artery Tunnel and have your map software think you're on the surface, or vice versa, or to be on a highway overpass and again have it think you're on a su
58.
by pjdesno 10mo ago
This is tempting. I fairly frequently leave my phone in the office and take a clipboard full of lined paper and a ballpoint to a place where I can write without access to the internet - I've got a number of published CS papers and at l
59.
by pjdesno 10mo ago
Because (a) you have to mount a file system, so the user running the app needs permission to do that, and (b) It’s really hard to have a filesystem shared across untrusting admin domains. With S3 you just do an http request and you’re done.
60.
by pjdesno 10mo ago
Because people don’t. I’ve spent a bunch of time analyzing IBM’s publicly released Cloud Object Storage traces. Median object size is about 16K, mean is a megabyte or two. A decent number of tenants have mean object sizes under 100K. People

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