pjdesno

18 ms·

181.
by pjdesno 2y ago
I found the textbook example interesting, where the co-author with experience thought it would take 7+ years, and everyone else thought it would take about 2. That makes a lot of sense to me, because I wrote a textbook in about 2 years. But
182.
by pjdesno 2y ago
I love the mention of Mobius - I remember seeing a few caseless ones on folks’ desks when I was there in ‘88-‘90, and worked a bit with the OS designed for it, but there’s little concrete info about it on the web.
183.
by pjdesno 2y ago
My favorite is 98.6F - your whole perspective changes when you realize that it's actually 37C.
184.
by pjdesno 2y ago
For a modern and very transparent version of this, look for the term "coffee badging", which seems to have been invented sometime in mid-2023. Based on quotes in the (very similar) first articles mentioning the term, I think it ca
185.
by pjdesno 2y ago
Interesting that neither the original article nor any of the comments so far mention MATLAB's Communications Toolbox, which is probably one of the most widely used visual programming languages.
186.
by pjdesno 2y ago
Unfortunately this post skips over the "atomicity" part of a write-ahead log. Assume you start with data on disk AAAAAAAA, read it into memory, and update it to BBBBBBBB, then write it back. If you crash in the middle, you might e
187.
by pjdesno 2y ago
Exactly. MacOS (really BSD) grep sucks, 5-10x slower than GNU Grep for simple searches on the same hardware, but MacOS/BSD wc is fast.
188.
by pjdesno 2y ago
Actually, I think what a lot of real systems do is equivalent to pre-computing a "random" table that has suitable balancing properties, and then use the hash to index into it. e.g. Ceph used to have a big problem with overloaded p
189.
by pjdesno 2y ago
I wonder if the 411 and 911 calls were due to pulse dialing triggering on an intermittent connection. There are probably a few other folks of my age who remember discovering that you could dial a phone by tapping the hook at the right speed
190.
by pjdesno 2y ago
One significant event not mentioned was the failure of AMD’s Barcelona server architecture in 2008 or so. Opteron had been deep g Intel on its toes, and Barcelona with nested page tables (hardware memory virtualization) would have continued
191.
by pjdesno 2y ago
There are all sorts of good ways to avoid these biases. I use the same practice described above for paper exams, and grading order for eg question 2 may be affected by score on question 1, but it won’t be affected by name or ID number. If y
192.
by pjdesno 2y ago
I worked at a tiny self-funded startup once where we required new hires to update the documentation and processes to fix the problems they encountered during onboarding. That worked great with 12-15 people; not sure how it scales.
193.
by pjdesno 2y ago
I'm a member of a local artisan's workshop, where a whole bunch of talented folks share shop space for woodworking, metalworking, and various other stuff. All the saws are SawStop - the difference in price just isn't worth it
194.
by pjdesno 2y ago
$150 is the cost of a really good table saw blade - a decent one would be half that. If you're using the saw at home, $150 is only 2-3x more than the shop vac you'll need to clean up after anything. At a job site, it's a lot
195.
by pjdesno 3y ago
Started my career on ATM. Good way to develop an enduring cynicism about industry hype.
196.
by pjdesno 3y ago
To be flip about it, I'd like a pony, too. More seriously, merely because someone wants ownership of an LLC to be private doesn't mean it ought to be.
197.
by pjdesno 3y ago
Privacy is a human right. An LLC is not a human - granting it privacy rights is a choice which a government may make for practical reasons, not a moral issue. One of those practical reasons would be the use you put it to; that reason might
198.
by pjdesno 3y ago
There were lots of projects at Apple that never made it off the ground. When I was there in '88-'90 I remember seeing a few prototypes of their Mobius computer - an ARM-based system that emulated an Apple II much faster, and was (
199.
by pjdesno 3y ago
Note that the fast_read option on erasure-coded Ceph pools uses the same technique. I'm not sure which release it was in, but I see commits referencing it from 2015.
200.
by pjdesno 3y ago
If you only care about throughput, just fetch the data and read should be the same speed as triple replicated. For writing, triple-rep has to write 2x as much data or more, so it's going to be slower unless your CPUs are horribly slow
201.
by pjdesno 3y ago
There are new Intel instructions (GFNI) which accelerate things a lot, as well as various hacks to make it go fast. See https://www.reddit.com/r/ceph/comments/17z1w08/but_is_my_cpu... for some quick and
202.
by pjdesno 3y ago
The most recent data I could find, from 2019, shows that 17% of CVEs are in PHP code, 12% in Java, and 11% in JavaScript - all memory-safe languages. Memory safety bugs are only one class of security vulnerabilities, and there's nothin
203.
by pjdesno 3y ago
One thing missing from this discussion is the cost of DRAM. It hit $4/GB in 2011, and hasn’t changed all that much since then. In contrast if you go back another 13 years, memory cost $1/MB in 1998. Laptops have adapted to constan
204.
by pjdesno 3y ago
The root problem is not that I'm receiving spam emails, but that people are sending them . Symantec etc. have no business interest in getting people to stop sending spam emails. In the case of the pharma/counterfeit emails that w
205.
by pjdesno 3y ago
Spam email is another example. There's a paper from Stefan Savage's group a while back where they were able to estimate overall revenue of a few big spam-generating pharma/counterfeit product networks, and it looks like the a
206.
by pjdesno 3y ago
Unless circumstances never change, there's always value to a population in having a spectrum for any trait. It's also likely that the specific characteristics that best position individuals for success as modern white collar worke
207.
by pjdesno 3y ago
See RFC 970, "On Packet Switches With Infinite Storage" by John Nagle: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc970 Back then (I was studying networking as an undergrad at the time, and interned with the
208.
by pjdesno 3y ago
The best way to get rid of these would be for someone to counterfeit them and distribute the copies widely - they could change them, but they'd have to hand out new ones. Then repeat, etc.
209.
by pjdesno 3y ago
GCC was originally written by Stallman, and greatly improved through the late 80s and early 90s, in part IIRC by a number of hardware vendors who thought it was a better way to get a high quality compiler than paying Whitesmiths, MetaWare e
210.
by pjdesno 3y ago
There are some places (e.g. https://heet.org/geo/ ) that are looking at neighborhood "geothermal" - basically using ground temperature as a heat reservoir for heat pumps. They're getting buy-in from natur

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