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I find it interesting that everybody in this thread seems to take exception to the comparison to "farmers". I mean, farming is brutal hard work but it also does not require a high degree of thinking, so I can see his point even if he has made it in an offensive way. Personally, I'm much happier sitting in a warm comfortable place thinking hard about code instead of being out in a cold field 20 hours a day, but meh.

Much more offensive (to me) is this gem from later on:

> Designing clever, binary and minimally repetitive protocols saves enormous amounts of CPU-time otherwise lost to compression.

Well yes, but also, and more importantly no. This is technically true - not compressing the data is more efficient in terms of computation per bit on the wire. But it is also wrong in a much more subtle way.

The advantage of using JSON (or an equivalent) and then compressing it down is that we inject a large amount of redundancy into the format. The CPU is taking that redundancy back out for us to save bandwidth, but we get to exploit it in much more valuable ways. The encoder/decoder are generic, simple and highly optimized. We can use them everywhere and trust them to work. This has value in itself, and it means that we can spend our limited budget of programmer time in optimizing other code where the payoff is higher. It means less time tracking down bugs in "super 10x programmer's one-off encoder that was only written for this specific application". And lastly, but my favourite - it means that when something goes wrong we have a hope of repairing the damage to the data. Because redundancy gives us options for error checking and recovery, while optimizing the binary format generally does not.

Also, if you want the format to really be optimal it should not be designed as byte streams (as low-level binary formats generally are) and instead should be a stream of variable-sized tokens that are fed through an arithmetic encoder.

The first half of this week I spent repairing data corruption caused by some of my code. Luckily there is a lot of redundancy in how I encoded the data (in a structure that is described in JSON inside the records) so I could write a tool that repaired the damage. I guess I'm lucky that I'm just a "farmer" :)

This is a valid choice. I doubt that the developer will lose any sleep over it.

I didn't use it. From the comments it seems that most people are happy to give up their personal information. I assume that the poster now has a reasonably noiseless database of IPs and hn/reddit profiles. This is obviously highly valuable for marketing as it can be fused with existing profiles and then datamined across a large number of posts.

Try https://www.cookielaw.org/the-cookie-law/

Ignore the response that says it is a protest against GDPR, they are two completely separate things.

Five digit years are annoying difficult to parse. Adding leading zeros is redundant and wrong. Once you move away from the treating the non-zero leading digits as significant it raise awkward questions like: why five digits instead of six?

I have the original (from 2014?) and it is still in use every day. I bought it for sketching but never really used it for that too much. For note taking (with a pen) it has been in use every day. I used to go through stacks of notepads and it was nice to replace them with a digital tool as it makes storage and retrieval much easier. It was an extravagant purchase at the time, but $1100 has started to look relatively after 8(?) years of use.

I don't think that Microsoft can claim to be blameless here "because it is too hard".

If we have 32 000 copies of the same code in a large database with a linking structure betwen the records then we should be able to discern which are the high provenance sources in the network, and which are the low provenance copies. The problem is after all, remarkedly similar to building a search engine.

What kind of latency would this introduce on packet processing? A context switch used to be measured in microseconds. I don't have a linux system here to run lmbench on, and I wonder what the level of latency would be on a modern system.

The rising cost of software in the design process is startling. I wonder what opportunity there is for new entrants to reduce that cost.

Just think how much more he could have created with vi ;)

This should be carved into stone somewhere. It is the most accurate description of modern software development that I've come across.

For compiler research LLVM has a good external API and it is easy to add in new passes without having to fight the rest of the code-base.

It's a Shatner-Comma, in the, wild.

I don't have the fastest internet connection but downloads from steam sit happily at 30MB/s so in an hour I can download 108GB of data.

The earliest cdroms that I remember were 1x drives - so it took an hour to read that 700MB. Obviously drive speeds increased tremendously over the lifespan of cdrom (did it reach 48x?), but compared to the earliest generation it is about the same.

They burned through an ungodly amount of money. There was a headset that they released four years ago - it was a flop. Similar deal to the hololens, first generaion aimed at developers. Recently they've pivoted and there is a second generation headset announced that is aimed at business users.

Sweet summer child

This applies to comments about single statements in the code, unless they have an esoteric side-effect or there is a particular why that needs to be explained.

But comments that describe a paragraph/block of code have a separate value. Being able to skim code faster because of a series of well chosen sentences is an aide beyond clear code. As the OP described it is a good way to design before the code is written.

Gamers Nexus is breaking the news that EVGA is suspending its relationship with Nvidia. They will stop producing videocards entirely, claiming that Nvidia are unreasonable to work with.

Quoting from the page that you have posted:

Why are people aged under 50 not to be re-vaccinated? The purpose of the vaccination programme is to prevent severe illness, hospitalisation and death. Therefore, people at the highest risk of becoming severely ill will be offered booster vaccination. The purpose of vaccination is not to prevent infection with covid-19, and people aged under 50 are therefore currently not being offered booster vaccination.

Reading the definitions those two words do capture exactly what is being described, while plain english would be much more verbose to do the same. I had not encountered them before but they seem like useful words in this context.

Having read the essay the title is a pun on two different meanings of the word. Work - what people do, is actually just work - the theoretical capacity of a distributed system. This is roughly the point of his essay - treat the organisation of people as you would to optimise a distributed system.

On an unrelated note I see that inflation is hitting $5 words particularly hard :)

  The most obvious solution to high power prices is a 
  negotiated settlement in Ukraine and a lifting of sanctions
  on Russia - regardless of whether you like that or not for
  geopolitical or ideological reasons, that would bring power
  prices crashing down overnight.

This would be a "solution" only in the short-term, as those geopolitical and ideological reasons include not giving Russia a strategic stranglehold over European politics via its control of the energy markets. Giving Russia the ability to control energy prices (via supply restrictions) is not a medium- or long-term solution to the problem.

edit: formatting

Speeches and foreign-policy by Putin. Asking for a source is clearly not acting in good faith to pursue a discussion.

The key claim is that it has been specialized against the target architecture to tune each parameter optimally. But, yeah that was done 20 years ago and it is not clear how much the costs have shifted on modern architectures.

Your certificate is broken, clicked on the click but decided not to bother after the five warnings from Safari and the need to unlock the system security settings to set an exception.

The relevant part was at the timecode the OP linked to: authenticity is overrated, to succeed as an entrepreneur you need to be able to put a positive face on events.

Fair enough, I can see where I've violated that. Will keep it in mind going forward.

Your post history is public and people can judge for themselves if your account is pushing this single issue. I'll be popping up whenever I see you post to remind people that you don't want to say where you work in the display industry. Again, people can make their own judgements about that.

Have a nice day.

Indeed, a review of your post history shows that your account is only used to push that single issue. So which display company do you work for?

I did not. You replied to another poster who made that claim, and I challenged your response.

Your communication style was abrasive enough to make me stop and respond to you.