bitminer

Paul Graham has the insight granted by hindsight of 3 weeks to 6 weeks of facts and evidence. The video cited shows clips from January, February, March, only one as late as March 15.

And he uses the undefined and unusual phrase "false predictions". What, please, is a true prediction?

The purpose of these commentators is not news, it is entertainment. The fact they are talking through their ass is part of their attraction. It is all bullshit and viewers know it. As does Paul Graham:

> Instead they just continued to use their ordinary m.o., which, as the epidemic has made clear, is to talk confidently about things they don't understand.

Paul Grahams' analysis is also subject to the same critique:

> let's remember what we saw, because this is the most accurate test of credibility we're ever likely to have.

Computer: "Please enter the decontamination chamber and be sterilized".

Dr Leavitt: "I'd rather be decontaminated!"

(Dr Leavitt played by the late great Kate Reid.)

This scene doesn't appear in the DVD, so I suspect it's the "airline" version of the movie. In-air movies were a big hit and airlines didn't want anything remotely objectionable to hurt their image. They appeared on a big screen in the front of the cabin and so everyone aboard saw the movie, even if they weren't listening.

This is the classic "make or buy" decision. You can rent by the minute, or own your own.

What the Amazon website doesn't cover is:

- download guarantee. They rent you the antenna, they don't commit to a successful reception (and consequent refund if it fails)

- link status report (needed for a positive confirmation of successful reception.) This is basically a series of SNR measurements

- competition with other users of the same antenna: first-come first served? Maybe your spacecraft needs more storage to save the downlink data if the Amazon antenna is busy.

And of course they don't talk about the competition.

Monitor their home? No. Imagery from space is only on a 90 minute interval and clouds get in the way. See digitalglobe.com for pricing. It's about $5k per square km iirc.

(With more satellites you can get more frequent coverage of course.)

Radar of course is weatherproof but again the cost is ridiculous unless you are a government or Exxon.

Watch Brad Chamberlain's video. His definition of productivity by seasoned HPC people:

...I was born to suffer...

How true.

The logic.co first reported this afaik and now reporting details of the"walk back".

(What a strange term for admitting a lie.)

And shockingly, only one comment on HN, plus this one.

It is a call to action. Will we act?

The PCG website is peer review. There are explanations and analyses of numerous algorithms.

O'Neill also uses the same methods to study PCG.

This is a useful and interesting contribution from Google.

However, like a lot of current software and web-scale systems research, almost no attention is paid to contributions from other industries, or even current practice in automotive, aerospace, consumer or finance, to name a few.

The earliest reference in the paper is 1986, with most post-2001. A definition of availability is attributed to Toeroe and Tam 2012. It was most definitely in use decades before!

The authors and interested others would benefit from reviewing current systems engineering practice (see INCOSE.org organization). Texts such as

Blanchard and Blyler, Systems Engineering Management

Blanchard and Fabrycky, Systems Engineering Analysis

NASA, Systems Engineering Handbook (and accompanying management handbook)

and others would open a few eyes, I expect.

The biggest issue with the term "availability" for a single-instance system is well identified by Google. The term was originated, however, for many thousands-instances systems, such as procurement of combat aircraft, operating vehicle fleets and so on. Substituting another measure (and term) is a benefit.

However, one issue I didn't see addressed in the paper: how to measure success for the purpose of an SLA. Contracts would need a simple comparison to a single number.

The "cost of ownership" is often approximately 33%/33%/33% for capital cost (annually), support (annually) and users& operations. Of course being government they probably don't account for the costs on an accrual basis.

Two machines, 5 years apart, and 66% non-hardware for ten years is, what, 250 or 300 millions for the pair of them?

At least she was convicted.

Up here in the monarchy of Canada unconvicted persons can lose millions

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-administr...

It is common for the civil forfeiture office to attack accused persons prior to trial, denying them access to their own funds for paying a defence attorney. They can remain in pre-trial custody without legal representation for years.

They are currently litigating for seizure of three hells angels clubhouses on the theory they could be used in the future to engage in unlawful activity. 2019 BCSC 1421.

FRBs are chirps. Something like a "signal". Much more signally than the hiss from stars and galaxies.

"Computational Psychiatry"

> This hasn't been dependably true on x86 for almost two decades. SSE2 does double-precision computation at native width, not in the extended 80-bit format. Some 32b compilers still use 80-bit x87, but almost no 64b compilers do so.

My experience has been different -- forcing SSE instructions gives me a different result on some math calculations. Core2 cpu, boost odeint calculations. Clang or gcc.

Do you have a reference for why it's rare?

Cray built a massively parallel machine out of a bunch of Alphas. (Cray Research Inc, iirc, not Seymour Cray). The T3 I think.

DEC had bragged about the features of the cpu useful for parallelization. Cray engineering complained about the features missing for parallelization. It was all described in a glossy Cray monthly magazine description of the new machine but I've been unable to locate a copy.

I disliked the Alpha floating point, it was always signalling exceptions for underflow. Otherwise a fine set of machines.

The VAX was, I think, co-designed alongside VMS. The two together were an innovative design, distinguishing architecture from implementation, a comprehensive isa, a roadmap for the future, etc etc. VAXcluster was amazing integration of both.

I believe the design was influenced by Djikstra's Structured Programming book but have no evidence.

My epiphany on the issues with the isa came when I discovered that the checksum calculation used by the VMS backup utility was faster when done in a short instruction loop over the microcoded instruction. MicroVAX II. Microcodes were a huge barrier between the speed potential of the electronics and the actual visible isa. Duh!

Cray knew this, but he didn't build product lines, just single point products. Sun built product lines with RISC and ate Digital Equipment's lunch.

700 celsius.

A better ref is the description of "black body radiation" in Wikipedia.

The rule refers to products, not freely available source code.

Companies don't sell stuff from GitHub, they sell proprietary stuff. It may well be based on open source code, but they own it to sell (license) it.

There's lots of examples of products in the geospatial domain that are not "AI" yet are restricted or even classified.

For example, ship detection from space-based radar. There are numerous public papers on the topic yet any software that purports to do this is subject to ITAR rules in the US and CGP rules in Canada.

Just because you may know how to do something doesn't prevent a government from restricting you from selling it, or talking about it. Even if it is "public". Machine guns are an old tech and yet are restricted. As they should be.

The Post Office has successfully framed the (perception of the) case using completely ambiguous terms.

The Court has fallen for the strategy and wasted many hours splitting hairs on the meaning of the word "robust".

A better choice would have been "verifiably correct", since that requires a verification process and a definitive set of statements defining correctness.

A competent system engineer of 6 months experience could have pointed that out in a heartbeat. But, lawyers being lawyers....

My system engineering experience avoided "must" as insufficiently specific.

We used "shall" and avoided "not". Because testing: how do you prove a "not"?

Source: 35 years of SE

Japan's high-speed trains are very impressive, departing some stations on a 12-minute interval, going 275 km/h and stopping only occasionally. Kyoto to Tokyo is what, 3 hours and there are 4 stops iirc.

But the trains go in all directions and are back-stopped by many local trains including express trains with inter-city service as well.

By contrast, a single dual-track system with only cars or nothing as a back-stop is not going to be reliable enough. What happens when a few days of repairs are needed on tunnels or bridges?

The other issue is political: does anyone think that Washington State is going to spend $50 billion on a transportation system in Boeing's back yard that is not made of airplanes?

Much can be done just with awk.

My pet peeve is the "grep | awk" idiom. No, just use awk.

Awk does map/reduce, relational joins, associative memory, table lookup, and so on. Just use awk arrays, begin block, and end block.

My experience in corporate and government is the opposite. They require functional scanning. Always.

But they also required expensive functional scammer/scanner subscriptions. I see this basic tool plus some scraping of changelogs (included in suse and redhat binary rpms) for cve numbers should substantially reduce the false positives. For the price of another 50 lines of python.

Don't know what other distros or the BSDs have available.

I would simplify this to: understand the principle of portfolios. And the benefits of them.

Too many people buy just one investment, not understanding they can reduce their financial risks buying several unrelated things. For example, only owning a house. And refusing to buy stocks because of risks.

What's old is new again.

Your thoughts on the benefits of language slightly higher level than assembler are interesting. Others have trod this path before.

Bliss32 was the systems language for vax/vms back in the 1980s through 2000s. Most of vms was written in it. It was heavily influenced by PL/360 from the days when IBM 360 or 370 mainframes were mostly programmed in assembler.

Both languages emitted very predictable assembler from their higher level constructs. They had no optimizations. But their objectives seemed to be focused on readability and predictable output, like your system.

The source code for 99% of vms was published on microfiche and distributed with the binary tapes. Worth finding a copy and the accompanying text on vms internals and data structures. An excellent intro to nonTorvalds operating system architecture.

It's about time.

A recent astronomy picture of the day shows the visible impact of Earth orbit spacecraft on astronomical imagery.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap191013.html

Astronomers will need precise orbital parameters of all s/c in their telescopes' field of view, so they can avoid deceptive data from known s/c. The data and processing issues will be significant. Obstructive? Destructive? Career limiting? TBD.

The article mentions only high-profile large telescopes. In fact there's hundreds that have scientific significance. Helping hundreds or thousands of observers eliminate local Earth orbiting s/c interference in their observations is hard. And, currently, unsupported by these companies.

They use the public resource, outer space, for their own good. And pollute it for others.

In retrospect, many of the observations are good, even foresightfull.

I believe that VAX/VMS was based on some of these experiences plus careful reading of Structured Programming by Djikstra.

Unfortunately, DEC didn't grok the performance issue of microcoded CISC and Sun Sparc ate their lunch.

Lessons DEC learned:

. Combining engineering of hardware and software at the same time . Networking as a medium of exchange including for storage (cluster interconnect, C I) . Diverse software support, from C, PL/I, Cobol, etc . VAXcluster as a means to converge management, storage, scalability, and so on

Novel tech:

. Software-supported coding, such as language-sensitive editing, w/o emacs . A basic data architecture, based on Rdb. Weak, but sort of functional

Oopses: . RISC. Eventually they made Alpha but FP sucked, even architecturally

Will-it-scale has a dependency on hwloc which is not supported on OpenBSD.

Do you have a better synthetic benchmark to suggest?

And "speed" does depend on expectations. Compute tasks should be approximately equivalent, right? And os-limited tasks with many syscalls less so. You don't specifically state your expectations. Just that you are disappointed.

They offering a very wide range of core counts but only a narrow range of watts per socket.

Question: for single threaded performance (*n where threads are independent) do I want higher watts per core or higher number of cores? By "performance" I mean throughput.

No, it really begs the question of "how many Canadians were involved in designing this stamp?"

Subject-matter experts are always required.