jonstokes

A friend told me that if you use the Ring then 7 days later all your files will be deleted.

Well well... TIL

If I thought we'd all still be here in 2038 I'd have something new to worry about :-/

This page answers a question I was thinking about in the shower this morning: what is the latest date (as a UNIX timestamp) you can store in a regular postgres integer column, which has a max value of 2147483647 per the postgres docs. It turns out that the answer is January 19 2038 03:14:07 GMT.

I'm working on a project that involves sync, and we're keeping track of action numbers by incrementing the last action number, but for various reasons I was thinking, "what if we replaced the action_number field with the corresponding timestamp integer?"

Then I began to ponder which integer format to use -- if I could get a way with just postgres integer, or if I needed to stop up to bigint. It turns out I should probably step up to bigint if I do this :-)

Anyway, I could've just done this in ruby, but by the time I saw this I had forgotten I was thinking about it, and this reminded me.

Heh, I actually had the same thought. Then I had the following thought: "I relish the thought of one day talking to the SEC even less than I do talking to the IRS, and if this were successful I'd probably end up talking to both at some point."

It's not clear to me from this reply that you know very much about authors, advances, and the like. Maybe I'm wrong.

Anyway, writing a book is an actual job for some people, and not a hobby, a passion project, a speculative endeavor, a side gig, or a way to boost your leverage in compensation negotiations with potential employers. Seeing as how it's an actual job that entails a bunch of really hard work that I don't have to do and, frankly, don't particularly enjoy more than N number of other things I'm doing right now and that I'm good at, I'm not interested in doing it unless it can replace some subset of the paid work I'm currently doing that I enjoy (and learn from).

Heh, my guess all along has been that the crpytocurrency story right now is about capital flight from China and India (i.e. the recent cash ban there), and possibly from some other destabilized regions like MENA.

I think the cryptocurrency story is real, just like the internet story was real in 1999, but these ICOs show that the market is getting way ahead of the tech, regulations, business models, etc. I have a longer rant about it, here:

https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/880806655067291649

(Sadly, twitter's threading model is now so broken that you have to do lots of clicking to get to the good back-and-forth dialogue in there.)

Anyway, I'm sort of toying with the idea of doing a kickstarter for a big explainer book on blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and DLT in general, which would basically be like my CPU architecture book ("Inside the Machine"), but for this topic. (I'm spending all my spare mental bandwidth right now on understanding this tech, mostly so I can think through shorting this space eventually, but I'm not convinced it's worth my time to try to explain it to the general public... a kickstarter would help me price that. I dunno though, I've never even backed anything on kickstarter so I'd have to spend a bunch of time figuring out how to set up a successful campaign, first.)

But to sum up, people I've talked to in this space think the ICO thing is a frothy mess, but it's also set to get worse as the general public gets more opportunities to buy in. A lot of these ICOs are built on top of ETH, and the path to USD liquidity is through ETH, so despite the platform's issues it seems likely that ETH is going to get much of the benefit of this bubble (and much of the negative impact when the bubble pops).

I'm keeping an eye on the upcoming ETH exchange-traded trust, and I think there will be an ETH ETF that will eventually launch and get bid up.

"“There can be no set price for a book,” he says. “It depends on the book, the person, and the author—when you put a price on something, you change the relationship between person and book. You say ‘this is 10 dinars, this is 20 dinars’ and then the person thinks one is better than the other. But how can I know how much somebody needs a particular book in a certain moment? Which book is the best for that person?”"

This dude and Amazon agree on something important, it looks like :-p

Oh for pete's sake, the die size cost for supporting the legacy x86 instructions is a fraction of a percent on a modern multicore CPU. This is because the translation hardware stays relatively fixed (in terms of size and complexity and transistor count), while Moore's Law keeps adding more hardware to each core and more cache, etc..

Take a look at this annotated die shot of an old Pentium 4:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/QK4gm.jpg

Up at the top is the microcode memory and microcode sequencer. That's the hardware that's responsible for translating all those old, large legacy instructions. It's not really much space on the P4, and the P4 Northwood is a 55-million transistor CPU.

Nowadays, depending on if you're talking about a mobile part or a higher-end desktop or server part, the CPUs have between ~1.5 billion to 2 billion transistors.

Again, that microcode ROM just doesn't grow very much as you add instructions, even a ton of instructions. And this is, well, one reason why Intel just keeps adding instructions. It's practically free.

Again, it has been over 20 years since ISA has mattered for performance in a head-to-head matchup between comparable CPUs. Moore's Law has thoroughly done away with it as a factor in performance. Relative code size (and cache/memory space + bus bandwidth) of RISC vs CISC, "x86 tax" of translating into micro-ps as a percentage of the die area, register file size, load/store, and everything else you can think of have all fallen away as real performance factors as transistor counts have soared and compilers have improved.

There are so many things that matter for performance now, and ARM vs. x86 ISA just isn't anywhere on that list, and hasn't been on it for a very long time.

Nope, I'm not assuming that in the slightest. In fact, I'm assuming exactly what you're assuming -- some fraction of time way less than 50% spent running emulated code. I'm also coming to the same conclusion you are -- that emulation of legacy x86 code with Good Enough performance could be used as a bridge off of x86. Reread the post.

But let me address this specifically:

"It's the 20% case, and if that 20% uses as much (or even more) power as a native Intel device, that's perfectly acceptable."

There's no need to speculate, here: the emulated code either will use significantly more power, or it will perform significantly worse.

In fact, as for the native ARM code on the ARM chip, it also will either use more power or perform worse than comparable x86 code running natively on an Intel chip within the same power envelope, because Intel has thrown a massive amount of engineering at their microarchitectures and manufacturing process, they have vertical integration that they can use to their advantage, and their stuff is just very good.

Again, there are no magical ARM performance elves lurking under the hood -- the ARM ISA by itself doesn't confer any real advantages in performance (and hence performance/watt) in the billion+ transistor regime. I truly don't understand why this is so hard for people to accept, but I blame Apple for spreading years of FUD about x86 (before bailing on "RISC" for it, of course).

Back to the topic of the emulated code, though: I can't say is whether "significantly worse" or "significantly more power" will still be Good Enough, but I'm assuming it will for most apps people care about.

I would try to engage with this but you don't seem to have even a basic grasp of sleep modes, background processes, idle power, power efficiency measurements, or pretty much anything that I wrote about in my comment. You haven't given me much to work with, here.

Alright, I'll come out of retirement to hit this dead horse another lick.

"if WinARM can run Wintel software but still offer lower prices, better battery life, lower weight, or similar, Intel's dominance of the laptop space is no longer assured."

Peter. My man. I laughed. I cried.

For the millionth time, the ARM ISA does not magically confer any sort of performance or efficiency advantage, at least not that matters in the billion+ transistor SoC regime. (I will include some relevant links to ancient articles of mine about magical ARM performance elves later.) ARM processors are more power efficient because they do less work per unit time. Once they're as performant as x86, they'll be operating in roughly the same power envelope. (Spare the Geekbench scores... I can't even. I have ancient published rants about that, too).

Anyway, given that all of this is the case, it is preposterous to imagine that an ARM processor that's running emulated(!!!) x86 code will be at anything but a serious performance/watt disadvantage over a comparable x86 part.

This brings me to another point: Transmeta didn't die because of patents. Transmeta died because "let's run x86 in emulation" is not a long-term business plan, for anybody. It sucks. I have ancient published rants on this topic, too, but the nutshell is that when you run code in emulation, you have to take up a bunch of cache space and bus bandwidth with the translated code, and those two things are extremely important for performance. You just can't be translating code and then stashing it in valuable close-to-the-decoder memory and/or shuffling it around the memory hierarchy without taking a major hit.

So to recap, x86 emulation on ARM is not a threat to Intel's performance/watt proposition -- not even a little teensy bit in any universe where the present laws of physics apply. To think otherwise is to believe untrue and magical things about ISAs.

HOWEVER, x86-on-ARM via emulation could still be a threat to Intel in a world where, despite its disadvantages, it's still Good Enough to be worth doing for systems integrators who would love to stop propping up Intel's fat fat fat margins and jump over to the much cheaper (i.e. non-monopoly) ARM world. Microsoft, Apple, and pretty much anybody who's sick of paying Intel's markup on CPUs (by which I mean, they'd rather charge the same price and pocket that money themselves) would like to be able to say sayonara to x86.

The ARM smart device world looks mighty good, because there are a bunch of places where you can buy ARM parts, and prices (and ARM vendor margins) are low. It's paradise compared to x86 land, from a unit cost perspective.

Finally, I'll end on a political note. It has been an eternity since there was a real anti-trust action taken against a major industry. Look at the amount of consolidation across various industries that has gone totally uncontested in the past 20 years. In our present political environment, an anti-trust action over x86 lock-in just isn't a realistic possibility, no matter how egregious the situation gets.

So Intel is very much in a position to fight as dirty as they need to in order to prevent systems integrators from moving to ARM and using emulation as a bridge. I read this blog post of theirs in that light -- they're putting everyone on notice that the old days of antitrust fears are long gone (for airlines, pharma, telecom... everybody, really), so they're going to move to protect their business accordingly.

Edit: forgot the links. In previous comments on exactly this issue I've included multiple, but here's a good one and I'll leave it at that: https://arstechnica.com/business/2011/02/nvidia-30-and-the-r...

This is exactly right. Most major (and many regional and local) newspapers had an Everyman tech columnist. Mossberg just happened to be that guy for the WSJ.

The other thing I maybe should've mentioned, though, was that Mossberg was a very early and emphatic booster of the Jobs 2.0-era Apple products. Back when Jobs had just returned after the Next acquisition, Mossberg got on that bandwagon immediately and began talking up their products.

So in its initial stages, the Jobs/Mossberg love-fest was a bit of a symbiosis. Recall that this was in a bygone era when the powerhouse WSJ at least as big of a deal as the struggling Apple Computer company. In later years, when Apple was the giant we now know and Jobs had ascended to the pantheon of industrial greats, the relationship probably did a lot more for Mossberg than it did for Jobs.

(It's hard to recall, but there was once a time when Apple was a niche, struggling little tech company with a minuscule market share, and big newspapers were still a Big Deal. The Jobs/Mossberg relationship had its roots in that era.)

Mossberg did a lot of good work, but so did a lot of other columnists who didn't attain nearly the status he did.

Mossberg mostly has one guy to thank for the unique place he occupied in the tech media scene: Steve Jobs. For whatever reason, Jobs decided that Mossberg's take on Apple products really mattered, a lot. Mossberg was Jobs's stand-in for Mr. Everyman, and Jobs seemed to believe that if Mossberg couldn't connect with a product, then it needed to be re-thought.

His status as anointed deliverer of the final verdict on Apple's product line gave Mossberg a massive amount of influence in the tech world all by itself, but added to this was the fact that, as with so many other things, the rest of the tech industry slavishly followed Apple's lead -- at least, the rest of the tech industry's PR departments followed it. For a corporate PR flack, having Jobs's own personal oracle say nice things about your product was the ultimate win. It was the fat Harvard admissions envelope, by which I mean something like, "this achievement, while important, has a way outsized significance to a certain segment of the population who compete for it because they've all decided that getting this particular thing means You Won and have a higher status than all of your peers who haven't gotten it."

Interestingly enough, the passing of Jobs was followed by the passing of the positive Mossberg review as the ultimate prize in the PR world, and Mossberg's departure from the WSJ didn't help.

Am I ripping on Mossberg? Not really, more like I'm ripping corporate PR, but Mossberg certainly cultivated this situation (who wouldn't, though). I will say that it was a source of eternal frustration (and envy) among the rest of the tech punditry that Mossberg's reviews had this bizarre status with the PR departments of the companies we covered, sort of like "Harvard as the agreed upon brass ring that all yuppie parents have decided to compete for" no doubt occasions much eye-rolling at Stanford, Brown, Yale, and everywhere else. Nobody is sad to see that era pass.

As for Mossberg himself, Godspeed, dude. May your amulet never tickle.

Thanks for the heads-up and backstory. I didn't know this article had this kind of history here on HN.

From the article:

"A few students—all of them white guys, Wu remembers—would hang around to ask about the research and to probe for flaws in its design. Wu still didn’t believe in ESP, but she found herself defending the experiments to these mansplaining guinea pigs. "

Was this race- and gender-related jab really necessary? (Honest, non-rhetorical question.)

Heh, you've picked the one counter-example that I was going to toss in there, but didn't. Amazon built its cloud business during the lean times after the dotcom bust, when there wasn't a ton of money chasing risk in the tech sector. So they were able to focus on the long-term and on building an entirely new kind of business.

They could do it because they had the resources thanks to their core business and, more importantly, they could retain the engineering talent in a world where rockstars couldn't just quit and raise VC megabucks to pursue "Uber for Cats" or some adtech play.

So it has turned out that AMZN is an anomaly, judged by its P/E ratio as you point out, in that investors will let it bleed for a long time and still value it highly.

There are a few companies like that, that can afford to fail and that the market will have patience on a fairly long time horizon. In those places you can get a little taste of what it was like to work at a government-funded blue-sky research lab with no pressure to productize in a commercial timeframe.

Not what I said. I realize that it's asking a lot to click through to the underlying links (said without irony, since I rarely do that myself anymore :), but I'm talking just as much about the massive network of labs that was funded by tax dollars in the cold war, only a portion of which were in universities.

I don't think it does, though. "Innovation" isn't solely a function of the number of failed attempts, despite the fact that this particular way of looking at it has become trendy of late. Take a look at that last link, and specifically at how I unpack the lightbulb analogy that you used above and that's so popular with the "fast failure" set:

https://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2015/09/24/the-righ...

"Yeah, I know, I’m a jerk, because a startup is the hardest and most punishing thing you can do, and it’s considered rude to suggest that anyone’s success at it is largely attributable to luck and not “innovation”. And I’m sure you’re also thinking of Thomas Edison, and how he famously tried 1,000 different filaments before inventing the light bulb and then boom, innovation! Isn’t Airbnb just like that? No, it isn’t, because that story is bunk.

As Thomas Parke Hughes describes in his magisterial Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930, Edison and his team at Menlo Park built an entire, low-cost electrical distribution network, of which the light bulb was one of a number of critical new components. It wasn’t like the electrical grid was just sitting there with empty sockets, waiting for Edison to diddle his way through the solution space until he stumbled into just the right filament so that he could staff up and scale; he had to invent, finance, manufacture, and deploy the entire grid in order to take on the entrenched gaslight industry."

Hate on this guy all you want, but there's a lot right with this article. I covered this same set of issues at Ars way back in the day:

https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/07/7340/

https://arstechnica.com/security/2008/03/paying-for-secrets-...

What passes for "innovation" nowadays, especially in the world of software startups that HN tends to venerate, is typically nothing of the sort. It's actually just gambling.

https://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2015/09/24/the-righ...

To do real innovation of the kind that got us where we are, today, you need to fund lots and lots of basic research on multi-decade time horizons. (Here's a rule-of-thumb test: if you and about 20 hotshot engineers could clone the product in a year, then it's not innovation, at least not in any worthwhile sense of the term that the generation that gave us the Internet and the transistor would recognize.)

The stock market's quarterly focus, which incentivizes base hits and accounting tricks and punishes real risk-taking, makes the public sector a terrible place to do this kind of long-term, blue-sky work.

Anyway, this is one of those sad, stupid stories like electronic voting -- a few people who are paying close attention write about it for a decade and bang the drum, and nobody really listens, and then when it's way too late people start to wake up to the problem.

If you hated this article and came here to bash it, you'll have plenty more opportunities to trash this same argument, because it's one that way more people will be making as this freak-show drags on. That's because it's basically right.

This may be the most Hacker News comment I've ever seen.

There are some sectors of the magazine industry, maybe science isn't one of them, that are actually doing really well. I've been on three different junkets with outdoors magazine editors in the past 6 months, and many large brands that advertise to the Duck Dynasty crowd are abandoning digital and going back to print.

Digital, it turns out, is mostly a scam. I've written in other places about why this is, but the nutshell version is bad ROI metrics and, even worse, the incentives on all sides are so perverted that the bad metrics and rampant fraud are a fundamental structural/business problem that no amount of tech can solve.

At any rate, the jig is, increasingly, up on digital (FB and Google excepted, because they run genuine performance advertising platforms at a scale that nobody else can match), and advertisers are actually going back to print, TV, radio -- venues where the ROI metrics are old, established, widely agreed upon, and fairly reliable.

Anyway, this situation is very complex and very very very different from what the typical HN "dead tree is expensive and for losers, the future is digital!" commenter thinks. If anything is in real trouble right now for deep structural reasons, it's digital, not print.

You probably find all this hard to believe -- I did at first until I heard it confirmed by the sixth or seventh person. I know that what I just said sounds like "up is down, and black is white", but this is how it is in 2017.

Why be obtuse? My point was obviously about suspension of 4A and Miranda rights.

"More recently I was made to wonder: Does the 4th Amendment apply to Muslim citizens at LAX?"

Well, no actually, it does not. Nor does it apply to non-Muslim citizens, or white citizens, or any other types of citizens.

And excuse me, but you were just "recently" made to wonder about this? Only recently?!?

We apparently decided after 9/11 that airports and any place within 100 miles of the border were going to be Constitution-free zones, where the laws around search and seizure just do not apply to anyone.

The following happened to me, for instance, in an airport in 2006:

https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/05/6767-2/

This is one of those things that kills me -- those of us whining about all this, especially under Obama, were "shrill" civil libertarians. But then Trump came to power.

Now that this crap is happening under Trump, and it's happening to ACLU lawyers and doctors and newspaper journos and so on (cue the scary music), it's suddenly a crisis, and people's hair is on fire.

It was a crisis over a decade ago, when we just abandoned the Constitution in airports and at borders. And the warning that civil libertarians gave, which was roundly ignored, was "wait until the wrong person gets hold of this power."

I don't know what Searles is smoking (ok, actually, I do -- it's a strong mix called "Remember When..."), but big, battleship "trusted" brands cheat at digital in ways that are every bit as sleazy as adtech. The big guys game the system and rip off sponsors by buying fake traffic and fake engagements to inflate their campaign metrics and suck more money from advertisers.

So yeah, everything that he says about how bad adtech is is true, but the idea that if everyone would just go back to doing big branding-oriented media buys on "trusted sites" then the fraud would magically disappear -- that's nonsense on stilts.

I beat you by 7 years :)

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1109206

I disagree. I don't know about the specifics that Dalio lays out, but as a media person who has been on both sides this issue, his detailed account of the WaPo's alleged journalistic malpractice rings very true.

In other words, what he describes may or may not have actually happened in this case, but boy does it look exactly like the kind of thing that used to be very routine at every level of the old-line print media, from local papers to big magazines.

Journos (or, in many cases, their editors) have a sensational story they want to tell, and they're going to tell that story regardless of how the actual reporting goes and what facts it turns up. This happens again and again and again. In fact, it used to just be the way things were done, with any positive deviation from that coming about by happy accident. Recent incidents that come to mind are the big Asian nail salon expose that had a ton of problems, or the infamous Rolling Stone rape piece. The list goes on, tho.

So this post is a really good look at how "fake news" has operated for at least the past six or so decades.

Based solely on seeing this title scroll by on HN, I was so hoping this was going to be a piece about Roswell...

I think there is a thread above this one that nails the discrepancy: the target market here isn't poor Ethiopian villages. Rather, the target market is NGOs and governments who have funding to buy overpriced but cool stuff that looks like it will Make A Difference.

So you make something that's ostensibly targeted at poor rural villagers, and sell it to some deep-pocketed do-gooder entity at a huge markup.

"I would bet click bait has a far higher bounce rate than accurate headlines" -- It does, but it can still be monetized with junk ads that do pay a tiny bit. So you go all-out for volume, and you end up with the situation we're in now.