macksd

Except here's the thing: I do know how GPU drivers work internally so assuming I don't when someone wants to know isn't helpful, and I did end up getting referred to a helpful answer by one of the medical friends who had a connection and could make an introduction. I can't believe this is being dismissed as a moronic approach when it actually worked and I just asked in casual conversation with friends - all of whom were actually intrigued by the question as well and wanted to know the answer when I eventually learnt it.

If most of the whole world came to a screeching halt for the better part of a year and the solution turned out to be GPU drivers, I as a software engineer would become intensely interested in understanding them and would not at all be surprised if my less technical friends asked me for some pointers.

In the end, my point was that people who aren't even software engineers were telling me to stop trying to understand GPU drivers because GPU drivers are a solved problem and I should just trust NVIDIA.

I didn't take it to mean something that they didn't know answer. But as relative experts in the medical field, they considered it a good and valuable question.

I was contrasting this with keyboard experts who berated me for asking but know even less. The former are pro-science. They have studied. They didn't know. They valud the question.

Others knew less and didn't even see why it was a valid thing to wonder about. Instead of any scientific answer, they regurgitated garbage.

In the end, I got my answer because somebody in the medical field made personal introductions until I got an actual expert working in the field. So clearly it's not such a moronic approach.

True. Perhaps dissent is a poor choice of words here, because I was never against the vaccine - I would default to supporting a vaccine. More - I didn't get why everyone was so optimistic about them and asked to know more. Even that was blasphemy to a few people - but ironically not to the people who are medical experts in SOME way.

I just happen to know a lot of anesthesiologists and they went to all of med school - I didn't. They were easy to ask and know more than me. The first nurse, again, more medical education than me to begin with, was very interested in the science beyond his work and was obviously briefed on the situation at work as it changed. I just figured it might have been more common knowledge than it turned out to be.

My point is more that these people have far more medical education than the average person I interact with on social media, and didn't look down on my question but also wanted to know. People who knew less than them and knew even less than me were mad that I would dare even ask.

Absolutely agree with everything Linus says here. But I'm almost equally concerned that there's an awful lot of people on the pro-science bandwagon who don't actually support science, but simply don't tolerate dissent or questioning, and that's unscientific and potentially harmful too.

I scanned most of the Pfizer trial and was wondering why we expected the immunity after the vaccine to last longer than natural immunity. A typical infection can last for several weeks, so your immune system is presumably exposed to the virus for a similar period of time. And after a natural infection I hear 6 months being thrown around as a typical window of immunity. But I was hearing claims of vaccines lasting for years, when they were only in the trials for less than 6 months. Why is this?

Fortunately I know a lot of people in the medical field. I asked a nurse who had been in a COVID ICU ward since this began. No idea, he said. Good question. I asked a few others: same answer. I asked several anesthesiologist friends: they did more med-school after all. Mostly no idea. One suggested that the vaccine might be more targeted and get a more potent response, maybe?

I tried casting a wider net on Facebook, and got a few nastygrams about how I was spreading uneducated FUD. I asked if they knew the answer but I was told to listen to the experts and read the science, whatever that means to these people. One friend did send me a link to a quote by the Moderna CEO that implied they have machines that can count antibody concentrations and they tracked it over time - I had no idea about that, so that was cool.

Eventually someone referred me to their cousin in nursing school who referred me to their brother-in-law who is actually an epidemiologist, and he told me it was a good question and explained all sorts of things about the various types of cells involved in the immune response and how the vaccine delivery invokes a very specific response that is, as one of the doctors suspected, much more targeted at something less likely to change, and how those immune cell types produce longer-lasting immunity. Now I was satisfied and learned something.

But those people in the middle think of themselves as being pro-science but they're really not. And the more they engage with anti-vaxxers the more ammunition anti-vaxxers will think they have and the more they'll dig into their beliefs. It's not good.

Everyone may suffer from some kind of mental illness or depression at some point in their lives. We should probably care deeply about the kinds of things that might push those people over the edge.

Might be, indeed - but it's definitely not unusual or incredible for a large organization to have misaligned incentives, ignorant executives making some of them up, and then being reluctant to admit they weren't as good of an idea as they thought.

That's not even the only way it defeats the business goal: you're now intentionally paying people that you have no intention of getting a long-term return on, or that you know aren't worth what you're paying them.

To say nothing of the damage it artificially does to a person's self esteem and future career prospects with an obvious PIP-like tenure at Amazon on their resume.

Yeah I would have loved to see HDFS get really scalable metadata management. I remember hearing about LinkedIn's intentions to really do some significant work there are the last community event I attended, but from their blog post this week it doesn't sound like that's happened since the read-from-standby work [1].

Kerberos (quite popular on big enterprise clusters) is really what makes it hard to get data in / out IMO. I see generic Hadoop connectors in A LOT of third party tools.

[1] https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2021/the-exabyte-club-...

This is actually a topic I love to talk about because I spent a lot of my time on S3A and the cloud FileSystem implementations. Fast metadata queries were actually a huge deal for query planning, and of course with performance there were a lot of potential surprises on S3. HBase was (unsurprisingly) heavily dependent on semantics that HDFS has but that are hard to get right on object storage, and required a couple of layers to be able to work properly on S3 (and even then - write-ahead logs were still on a small HDFS cluster last I heard). My biggest complaint about S3 was always eventual consistency (for which Hadoop developed a work-around - it originally employed a lot of worst-practices on S3 and suffered from eventual consistent A LOT) but now that S3 has much better consistency guarantees, I agree: it's incredibly hard to beat something that cheap.

Worked at Cloudera pre- and post-merger. I thought of on-premises CDH clusters (and similarly HDP clusters) as trying to be the majority of your data infrastructure, but open so that it can integrate with other stuff. It's not just about having big data, but one place to store all of that data regardless of schema: massive database tables, logs, etc. all on shared hardware. AND frameworks to process it different ways in-place: SQL queries, Spark jobs, Search, etc. Data gravity was very important to the business model.

As more people moved to the cloud, Hadoop-style storage was extremely expensive (naively moving your Hadoop cluster to 3x replication on EBS volumes would result in a nasty case of sticker shock) so the data would move to S3 / ADLS / GCP. And now you've lost your data gravity.

Post-merger Cloudera focused less on on-premises clusters and tried to offer those same diverse workloads as a multi-cloud SaaS, with more focus on elasticity. This is hard because (a) there's a massive amount of surface area if you want enterprise customers to bring their own accounts, run all these managed open-source services in those accounts, and be multi-cloud, and (b) you're just competing more directly with the cloud vendors, on their turf as both a customer, partner and competitor.

To be fair, I do find it infuriating when the news is basically outraged that someone did something offensive in the media, and then keep displaying shots and samples of it so you know what they're talking about.

I remember a talk show host on Fox News going on and on about Janet Jackson's alleged wardrobe malfunction at the superbowl this way. I actually missed the incident during the superbowl, but boy did the people who were most outraged about it make sure it was shoved in my face.

Rocky Linux seems to have made a bigger deal of getting and advertising sponsors than I remember from CentOS. CentOS had a subtle link to donate, but that was it. Right off the bat, Rocky Linux had a nicer looking landing page and BIG sponsor logos. And I would absolutely have thrown $100 at CentOS to keep existing, it just never occurred to me that it was needed or would make a difference.

It's not the I just want something for nothing. I'll pay for good tools, but my time is money too and if I feel myself going down a high-touch sales process with stuff that feels like lock-in and DRM, I'm gonna check out and go for an alternative pretty quick. I used CentOS all the time because I was in the position of trying to support people running my software on Red Hat. And I never had to worry about talking to a sales person, or making sure my keys for the repository were everywhere they needed to be. I would have still used it, even if I had to enter my personal credit card to get an official ISO. Even once my company had a proper agreement and partnership with Red Hat, it was still a pain for me to get a system up and running without talking to IT, etc.

Red Hat seems to have lighter-weight licensing for such use cases now, so we'll see. But at this point I've already switched over to Ubuntu and I doubt Red Hat or Red Hat clones will ever fully recover to their former glory.

This really illustrates to me how important the artificially colored overlays are. As river names change, I assume the river I'm tracking is merging with a larger river. And yet even when I know it's coming, I'm really struggling to spot the other river before we merge.

There are multiple places where the divide forks and then joins back together, and even then there are other exceptions. If you live near it, I wouldn't visualize it as a single point, but as a general shift in overall trends.

I disagree with this. Take the Apache Software Foundation, for instance. One of their mantras is "community over code". I love to keep unnecessary drama, ulterior motives and contention out of technical open-source projects, and the emphasis on healthy communication, decision making processes and consensus over purely technical concerns is nice. But let's imagine someone started a thread on an Apache mailing list and in good faith asked "would the community be better served by changing our infrastructure and governance?"

If members of the Apache board came in and shut that down, I would take that as a clear signal that they valued their own brand / power / whatever over the community. It would be understandable from a human nature, but it would destroy a lot of the respect I have for them and their principles.

Well I don't even know what "de-opping ops" means, so I'll err on the side of believing commenters on Hacker News (and I know that sounds sarcastic but that really is the better source to tip the scales here, IMO). Especially comments in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27287750.

The recent resignation letters indicate they have become aware of how much technical control the owner has and intends to exercise.

Edit: that said, I was unaware of the statements from Lee that are linked to by an arstechnica article linked elsewhere in the comments. Honestly really not sure who to believe. For all I know (which is nothing first hand) this could be another group sabotaging things to boost their own new network over personal disagreement. Which I'm not suggesting is the case, but as someone not personally involved, all I see is conflicting hearsay.

>> And before you assume that's bad, don't forget that evolution makes organisms that do that

I'm not exactly a highly qualified expert on evolution, but I hear this step in lines of thinking a lot and it strikes me as being a logical fallacy. As a more extreme example, I often hear "these climate changes activists make no sense because they're also the ones pushing evolution: why would a species evolve and then destroy the planet it evolved on"? It's also circular logic. Sometimes evolution results in weaker things dying off. But that doesn't mean that weaker things dying off is inherently a good thing and that because we have evolved we probably do it at the optimal rate.

What you're seeing as the result of evolution is everything that survived SO FAR. It wasn't intentionally planned to keep surviving. It's just that those two things tend to go together. We could annihilate every living thing on the planet with an all-out nuclear war later this afternoon, and it wouldn't be inconsistent with the theory of evolution.

Especially when using a country TLD, suffixes like .co.za are appended to the name of the actual ISP or email provider.

I thought white pepper was more common in the British empire - it's what I grew up having on the table. I still keep a bottle around - I feel like it's sweeter and spicier.

I'm a little confused by all this controversy. I'm no stranger to people trying to exert secret influence in open-source projects, and put themselves in positions of power to satisfy egos, etc. and I certainly don't like that kind of thing.

But what was actually done on Freenode? I've read several of the volunteer resignations and it seems to just be that they're obviously now in control and people don't like that. Is there something more concrete they've done that points to a particular ulterior motive or the negative impact of their ownership? Am I just missing some historical baggage?

Yeah I noticed several cases were there to do's drop dramatically. I wondered if that was because that was a module that had a lot of to-dos that was also low quality, and the subject of a complete rewrite or replacement at some point. Golang was also interesting because of a huge increase followed by an almost equally huge decrease a short time later, both of them seemingly vertical. I wonder if something got reverted, or if they actually went back and addressed a bunch of to-dos.

I mean it feels almost cliche to post this at this point: https://xkcd.com/538/

I will now be reading "AF" as "as fabulous".

And this part I'm less confident in, but my understanding is the protein spike is unlikely to mutate because it's exactly what allows the virus to bind where it does. If that mutated and that mutation was still somehow successful, I believe it likely wouldn't be as bad a virus.

I had this exact question and asked around before finding out a friend's brother specializes in immunology. Apparently two separate exposures triggers a much longer lasting immune response, and because of the nature of the vaccine it's much more targeted to one specific aspect of the virus, and consequently more potent in a way. Moderna also made a statement that they expected their vaccine to last for 2 years based on their ability to measure the number of antibodies and its decline over time [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-modern...

Didn't one of the early statements from the investigation say that they knew that no one was in the driver's seat at the time of the accident? I don't know on what basis they would make that statement and of course it could be erroneous, but all the more reason to remember we all know so little we probably can't reason about it well enough for conjecture to be much better than random guessing.

edit: Indeed [https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/19/business/tesla-fatal-crash-no...]

I'm pretty sure I had one of Sierra's King Quest games on a series of 12 disks (though they might have been 5.25" 512kb floppies). You'd walk from one screen to another and be met with "Please insert disk 8 of 12".