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What I do these days:
- I look for the manual online.
- Is it open source/have open source reference implementation
- CAD schematics
- Anecdotal discussions about thing
- Hacking related to object
If you get a few of those, then the ecosystem will grow and take off. If not, when the thing dies, nobody will care. Cars suck with this, but even some cars have obtainable service manuals (torrents, piracy, cause fuck them seriously).
It does mean I dont buy the newest blingiest hardware, and especially not cloud-only shit. But things I do have work now, work 5 years from now, and will work 10 years from now when I have to fix things.
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Pretty sure the more recent anti-if articles was over branchless processing. That then cuts out branch prediction leakage, branch bugs(spectre and meltdown), branch cache misses, and more.
Pretty sure switch statements, adding bool’s, and such are just variants of “if”, which then has all the problems associated with branching.
Article going further indepth: https://hbfs.wordpress.com/2008/08/05/branchless-equivalents-of-simple-functions/
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Sigh. That’s because you’re not using the product (LinkedIn), but you ARE the product for LinkedIn.
Facebook’s doing the same, with fake notifications and false injection of “things” to keep people engaged.
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jwconway
1 year ago
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Do people write insane code with multiple overlapping side effects with a straight face?
Indeed.. And I’ve also seen plenty of other really dumb things.. Recently at my place I found the following around line 300 in a perl script of 1200 lines..
database_server = database_port = 3306; database_login = root; database_password = ;
All I could say is FACEPALM. First, these should be in a config file. Second, this file was committed to SVN for over 7 years. Third, the RPM package contained these creds.
Tl;Dr. DevOps engineer looking for work with a more modern codebase, with even a minimal amount of code review…
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jtolds
edited
1 year ago
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Counterintuitive problem: Everyone in a room keeps giving dollars to random others
This reminds me of the problem Mitzenmacher’s “power of two choices” load balancing scheme solves [1]. The problem is that basically, if you throw n balls into n bins completely at random, some bins will have no balls while some bins will have more than one. Ultimately, the difference between the bin with the least amount of balls and the bin with the most goes up with log(n)/log(log(n)). This can actually become a pretty significant effect with large n.
So, yeah, if you simply distribute money randomly, the difference between the people with the most money and the people with the least money won’t be very well load balanced. What’s more, in the case of this thought experiment, there’s an additional effect which is that some rounds, some players are out of money and can’t redistribute, which reduces the overall flow of money that round.
Mitzenmacher’s power of two choices load balancing scheme is to randomly choose two bins, then place the next ball into the bin with the lesser amount of existing balls. With this strategy, the maximum skew is more like log(log(n))/log(2), which is way better distributed.
I have no idea on how that load balancing observation could be used to create better wealth inequality policy.
[1] https://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/mythesis.pdf
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I have no idea on how that load balancing observation could be used to create better wealth inequality policy.
Well, it would seem that a random distribution creates clumps and hidden money (all money past 1$ is “hidden”).
So, a system where everyone gets the money would be a better way. Like UBI. The payment of goods and services may still be skewed, but UBI would not lock people out of it. The other half would be a progressive tax to lower overall effectiveness of higher end and rebalance the monetary system.
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friendlysock
1 year ago
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How Facebook Is Making Membership a Prerequisite to Everyday Existence
All of this probably because some jackass decided to use OAuth+FB instead of putting on their big kid pants and deciding to own their own user system.
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That seems like a naive view. Minimizing sign-up friction helps get people on your platform faster, which can be helpful for a company. I’m not saying it’s good for the world but using FB for signups can be a very rational intelligent decision if you’re optimizing for your own financial longevity.
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One way that seems to side-step this, is to allow FB login. Once this is done, use the data scraped from FB to auto-populate another account that’s unique to the website in question.
It also means, if Facebook ever deletes/suspends the user, the user can still login via existing credentials. In effect, using Facebook to jump-start your own website.
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Well, if they’re tying their success to dependence on someone else, then I guess it’s for their own longevity up to the point where they can get bought, at least. Which makes sense from a purely short-(maybe medium-)term self-interest perspective. But … does literally no-one, anywhere, ever, try to balance their own financial longevity against what’s good for the world, even if only from the perspective of enlightened long-term self-interest?
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You’re saying slightly conflicting things, I think. Talking about long-term but there is no reason a company couldn’t add non-facebook signup in the long-term. In the short-term, making it possible for 2 billion people to easily sign up for your product could help quite a bit. Limited time/person power/etc.
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Fair point, maybe not conflicting, but perhaps inconclusive. Although having 2 billion people sign up for your product straight away might cause more problems than a young company could handle ;-)
My point though, really, is just that it seems a shame that more people don’t try to accommodate or balance with what’s good for the world at any stage - and I think the reality is that if they don’t do it from the get-go, then the likelihood they’ll try to start later down the line, once they’re already invested in systems that don’t, seems even lower.
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Minimizing sign-up friction helps get people on your platform faster, which can be helpful for a company.
Sure, but remember that according to the article, they already owned their own user system. The acquirer decided to break that.
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I have a strong proposal for a tutorial in creating, developing, and maintaining a secure IoT cloud network. Primarily, it revolves around the usage of Tor, configuration options that allow seamless handling of .onion addresses on Linux, and Node.Js (Node-Red) production of said code.
I already have a write-up over on Hackaday.io , with how to do all the hardware dev side.
https://hackaday.io/project/12985-multisite-homeofficehackerspace-automation
Since you said you have connections with the committee, can you ask if this the kind of material they are interested in?
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Since you said you have connections with the committee, can you ask if this the kind of material they are interested in?
Sorry. To clarify, I stated my connection to committee members in case people wanted to judge this post as an ad/spam. I didn’t want to look like I was hiding some ulterior motive besides informing the community of the conference (it’s new, this will only be the second time being held).
I was not implying that I had any pull or could help in any way to get access to the conference. All the information I know, is on the web site. Your best bet is to contact the conference directly using the specified means (submission is still TBD, but there is an email address for questions).
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Oh, I didn’t think of anything ominous or underhanded. I’ve just never did any sort of conference like the caliber of the IEEE. Ive given speeches and discussions for small groups before.
I was looking for some pointers if you thought this might be a good fit. Frankly, I’d rather not embarrass myself with something I think works, but ends up woefully inadequate.
Sincerely, Josh
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Sigh. I’ve seen this basic schematic for containers, HTML, Javascript, and many others. It adds nothing to the discourse, other than sarcastic diatribe.
The best way to learn, is to find a small project and dig in. Make it manageable. Make it fill something you need done. And do it! And then document it, including how you failed and all that.
The same advice goes for anyone for any type of project and area. But you know snarkiness is great at mocking at someone who doesn’t keep up with the Joneses (with regards to libraries).
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I disagree a bit.
I think it’s always useful to have people making fun of questionable trends in an ecosystem, lest people just kinda one day decide that it is “normal” and even “acceptable”.
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I haven’t exactly changed my mind, but I think this is a great reminder that the framework treadmill is spinning a lot faster than one may guess. There was a time, not so long ago, when I considered using ember. I think it’s telling that this article didn’t even mention ember as either new hotness or old hotness. Seeing a list of all the has beens helps inform my decision when looking for a stable platform.
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For me, I’ve always tended to embark on greenfield projects. Sometimes, I’ve been told that it can’t be done. Or I shouldn’t. Or I should be using $xyz stack. Or $abc stack with $pqr technology. There’s alphabet soup for every minute of the day in our field.
My solution is: research what people are doing right now, and why we got to that point (relatively quickly, I’m not a historian). And then determine copy/paste code I can jumpstart my way. If that doesn’t exist, I start making my own.
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HN reminds me that the original (I think) exemplar of this genre was http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431
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The linked interview with José Valim talking about how Elixir came about is really good! Alas no transcript but oh well.
I can’t install pocketsphinx on the system I’m typing this on, but this should work. Well, it may not be perfectly accurate, but its a transcript :D
wget https://cdn.changelog.com/uploads/podcast/194/the-changelog-194.mp3 -O /tmp/file.mp3 && ffmpeg -i /tmp/file.mp3 -ar 16000 -ac 1 /tmp/file.wav && pocketsphinx_continuous -infile /tmp/file.wav 2> pocketsphinx.log > ~/result.txt
And then just read ~/result.txt for the transcript.