orbifold

At least according to this incident report https://csirt.egi.eu/academic-data-centers-abused-for-crypto..., one of the two attacks had "unknown purpose". In particular it was not tied to crypto mining.

Facts:

1 - one of the two incidences reported (#EGI2020512) targeted academic data centers "for unknown purposes" (https://csirt.egi.eu/academic-data-centers-abused-for-crypto...) and not necessarily crypto currency mining.

2 - IP addresses associated with that second attack were all assigned to a Chinese University (Shanghai Jiaotong University), CSTNET and one Polish host known to be compromised by someone from China.

Well this is clearly a hostile act during a time in which several European countries have declared medical emergencies. They were not just "attacked" but have been completely offline for almost two weeks now (https://www.hpcwire.com/2020/05/18/hacking-streak-forces-eur...).

In Germany it is (incident was 15.05) - NEMO (Freiburg) - bwUniCluster 2.0 and ForHLR II (Karlsruhe) - Hawk (Stuttgart) - Leibniz Supercomputing Center (Munich) - JURECA, JUWELS und JUDAC (FZ Jülich) - Taurus (Dresden)

Switzerland shutdown access to all of CSCS (16.05).

Just for additional context several super computing sites in Europe were attacked a few weeks ago and are still down, among them PizDaint at CSCS, which ranks 6th in the world, several super computing sites in Germany (FZ Juelich) and so on. I think no-one wishes this to turn into a kinetic war, but for all we know besides the economic warfare that has been going on for quite some time, this feels like we are in an all out conflict with China.

Haskell, OCaml

Even in the context of bioinformatics my comment applies. With modern C++ libraries you are able to replicate the numpy user experience almost line by line. A baseline FASTQ parser in modern C++ would look nothing like the fastq.h C parser the author presented. Naive versions of sequence alignment algorithms like Needleman-Wunsch are easily implemented in C++ aswell and you can even do most of your development in a Jupyter notebook with cling/xeus.

Personally I think numerical code should still mostly be written in C++, right now it still has by far the widest choice of options for doing so. It is also relatively easy to interface with python. For example both xtensor, libtorch/ATen, arrayfire have straightforward python interoperability via pybind11.

Finally no other language except for maybe FORTRAN has seamless parallelisation support and first class low level numerical primitives developed by vendors. Sometimes you will get a massive performance increase by #pragma omp parallel for.

Even for visualization some python libraries will suddenly fall off a cliff (Altair) once you reach a moderately large number of datapoints.

Science is inherently a low stakes game. Most scientists are competing for budgets of no more than a few million a year, if they are really successful. There is little reward for producing excellent code, but a lot of reward for producing atrocious code to publish in prestigious journals.

If you want to be truly horrified look into the practices surrounding NEURON, a simulation tool that has been used to publish simulations since the 80s. You have to write code in a domain specific language called Hoc, that code is typically littered with hard coded constants. Code is copied over from one paper to the next, etc. Code is a means to an end, not something that is held in high regard. Moreover improving someone else's code style or quality won't earn you a degree or praise. Starting a competing "higher quality" project is bound to annoy or anger the establish players. It will be hard to get funding for it, because those players will likely review your proposal. In any case there is typically a 10-20 year gap between the people doing any decisions and the people actually doing any practical work.

Finally in some cases code is a competitive advantage, I'm sure that Neil Ferguson has churned out quite a few papers with the same framework by simply tweaking some things here and there. In that case you are ill advised to share the code with anyone.

I used to think the internet was this great place resistant to censorship and government intervention. Instead you now have to tip-toe around and every comment ist tied to your real identity forever. At least I‘m using Apple, so pissing off Google won’t mean I can’t use electronic payments.

Prussia had a three tiered voting system, which allotted electors by dividing the tax income per district in three parts and awarding equal numbers of electors to each of the subpopulations (4.7%, 12.7%, 82.6% of the population in 1849). That it was applied per district had the interesting consequence that even wealthy people could easily be in the lowest of these three brackets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_three-class_franchise)

Well three of my friends are still hanging in there with a non-zero chance of success because they did their PhD in the right group. But yeah if you aren’t well connected or your advisor doesn’t like you this is a dead end.

More likely than not the next collider will be build in China, quite a few particle physicist luminaries have already made their case there. I for one am glad that I stayed clear of the siren call to join the 3000+ grad student workforce at CERN. Sifting through the heap of data that was assigned to you is about as fun as it sounds I think. You get to look for the J/Psi, Pomeron, Dark Matter how exciting! In reality most of the detectors are barely functional, Alice for example doesn’t produce useful data for most of the runs.

Well you also can’t eat money. So at a certain point there just will not be any stuff to buy if the shutdown continues and people just get checks in the mail. That is magical thinking.

The ratio of cranks to valuable outside contributions is probably 10^{-6} if not smaller. At our theoretical physics institute, they have a wall with the most amusing crank theories. It is also extreme arrogance that makes someone think they could contribute something without investing 5+ years of their life. The total time is probably more than 10+ years before you can perform adequately and independently.

Pick one or two ETF and set up a monthly amount to invest into them. You don’t need to invest everything at once and the monthly commitment averages out short term effects. If you want to be more active with a part of your money, you can also commit to buy a couple of stocks monthly. If you get rid of poorly performing stocks regularly and rebalance the portfolio you can declare them as capital losses that will count towards any future capital gains.

I think LLVM and its Tablegen mechanism is a good example that large C++ projects almost inevitably will contain some code generation facilities. In that case this mechanism is rather poorly documented and is used to generate 10+ different targets.

I believe the facilities provided by circle would make most of the Tablegen infrastructure redundant.

There is no separate C++ layer and the nice thing is that you can just use exceptions at compile time to signal errors. So the errors are actually much nicer than with template meta programming.

There is basically no way to modify clang or GCC to support executing arbitrary C++ code at compile time. Something like that would be a fork that wouldn’t get accepted upstream. According to the author the compiler front end is ~100kLoc which is an order of magnitude less than what clang is.

I think the author mentioned that he plans to support C++-modules as is. He already supports concepts.

See also https://github.com/seanbaxter/circle for an up to date list of features, the compiler now also supports match expressions, list comprehensions and more.

This is perhaps one of the few places where software developers could learn something from hardware development: In hardware description languages everything happens in parallel by default. A large chip project has many components that communicate typically fully asynchronously over some network / bus. Tools for debugging these systems are

- A GUI that allows one to trace all state changes down to the single bit level.

- Assertions based on linear temporal logic to verify invariants.

- Conventions around how to model transactions at various levels of abstraction, as well on how to monitor and extract these transaction from the "wire protocol".

Well the alternative would probably be empty food shelves like you had in planned economies like the DDR and Soviet Union. Just in time food production just doesn't work for things that have to start production ~2-6 months before they are delivered and have a shelf life of ~1-2 weeks. Fresh bread delivered to bakeries regularly sells out here and this is expected, same with Meat and some vegetables. But there is no way to achieve empty vegetable and Meat shelves without pissing people off.

Personally I won't upgrade until NVIDIA releases their next CUDA version officially for 20.04. Past experience leads me to believe that otherwise I can run into a few unpleasant surprises.

I imagine reading this article to a uranium mine worker in Namibia.

That is not censorship but removal of illegal content (with the exception of non-child porn)

I had to google the ratio of patients to nurses in various countries, because 2:1 seemed very low. In Germany it is 13:1 under normal circumstances and according to a German newspaper it is 5.3 : 1 on average in the US. So something very unusual is going on at your wives hospital or the number of ICU nurses per patient is just higher than in normal stations.

I remember reading about growing these mushrooms online at some point. The article strongly cautionend against it unless you know very well what you are doing. Growing any kind of mushroom has the potential to also grow nasty and very unhealthy molds and bacteria. You can easily kill yourself by ingesting those, if you are not very careful to avoid contamination. This is absolutely not taken to be lightly and proper lab procedures would for example require you to perform the inoculation in a glove box.

There was a post here a while ago, where someone made money from creating preview videos for podcasts, which contained a FFT like visualisation.

Both C++ and Java are pretty obvious choices aren't they? Both have probably billion lines of code or more investments into them and are the backbone of a huge number of very successful companies.

I think you underestimate how things can go from apathetic to extremely violent in a short period of time. There have been lots of violent (and non-violent) mass protests in several countries of Europe, for far smaller reasons, during last few years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_England_riots, France has the yellow west movement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_-W2_X5yS8 (this is happening despite the shutdown), Spain violently shut down Catalan independence last year, Italy is governed by a protest party, Germany had the Pegida and Friday's for Future Protests).