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CountSessine

3,538 karma · joined May 15, 2010

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submissionscomments
CountSessine··on China plans to ban exports of rare earth magnet tech
Certainty.

The CCP has (right or wrong) declared that Taiwan is an inviolable part of China and a rogue province. That means that if Taiwan were to declare independence and succeed, it would be a signal failure for the CCP - a gross loss of face. The party's legitimacy (always a complicated thing for an authoritarian state) would be threatened by the demonstration of weakness.

Taiwanese independence is the CCP's soft and fleshy underbelly. Bringing Taiwan under Beijing's control eliminates the uncertainty that comes from that political vulnerability.

CountSessine··on Bob Lee, former CTO of Square, has died after being stabbed in San Francisco
As a non-USian, SF actually makes a lot of sense to me now.
CountSessine··on Intel Thunder Bay is officially canceled, Linux driver code to be removed
Ah - I see. Yeah, raw performance was (and is) really an enabling feature with gfx chips.
CountSessine··on Why construction projects always go over budget
My mate says that “if they built bridges like we built IT infrastructure a lot more people would die”.

If people regularly died because of IT infrastructure, we'd be regulated and licensed like civil engineers and we certainly wouldn't be writing software in C/C++/nodejs. We'd all be coding in stuff like Ada and Erlang and most of our day wouldn't involve writing logic at all - it would involve filling out documentation and forms around the occasional bit of logic that would get written, probably by someone else.

CountSessine··on Intel Thunder Bay is officially canceled, Linux driver code to be removed
You sent it triangles with aRGB color, and it interpolated and rasterized them. Dat's it. Total dud compared to Voodoo 3DFx or ATI Rage3D

I don't get it - that was what all gfx chips were before shaders came along. That's not unlike how the PS2's GS chip worked too. Texturing and triangles was everything. What feature did the Voodoo have that the 740 didn't?

CountSessine··on Xiaomi has been in violation of GPL for years
- Are you willing to hire lawyers or approach lawyers?

  - Yes:

    - Xiaomi sells products outside of China, both through their own website and through Amazon and Walmart. Sue retailers who carry Xiaomi products and sell them in the US and Europe.
    - In theory, this is what the US International Trade Commission can do - block imports of products that violate US  laws. EU probably has similar
    - You can't do anything about Xiaomi with China's kangaroo courts within China's borders, but Xiaomi wants US dollars and Euros too so eventually they'll play ball if you're willing to take this far enough

  - No: 

    - There is exactly nothing you can do so you should learn to take it and like it.
CountSessine··on Meta plans to lay off 10k employees
I'd bet that this is the difference between having good middle managers and not. If you have confidence in your directors and middle managers, you can target the C players. If not, then you can't and you'll wind up shedding B players anyways.
CountSessine··on Meta plans to lay off 10k employees
I could see a scenario where voluntary attrition helps them get reduce size more organically and with lower cost than a layoff

This is a terrible idea, though. It's always the desirable employees that have options that leave an environment like this, and it's always the less competent employees that hold on for dear life and stay.

I've seen this so many times in my career. The A players will stay because they're attached to the things they've created, but the B players will leave and you're left with lots of C players.

In the long run its cheaper to lay off people.

CountSessine··on Google, Meta hired talent to do 'fake work'
This is consistent with my bias that FAANG salaries are where they are to discourage developers from accepting equity stakes at start-ups that could eventually disrupt the FAANG companies - that these salaries exist to starve the start-up ecosystem.

I have no evidence of this, and I have no reason for my priors to be set like this, but I do love bias confirmation.

CountSessine··on Why CMake sucks (2021)
One thing to understand about CMake is that it's a bit like C++ - it had a terrible beginning (C, C++98), improved a lot in later versions, but can never really leave it's troubled past behind.

CMake 2.x and earlier weren't really that compelling - it was sort of a version of Make except with a macro-ish syntax and the ability to write your build rules for you. CMake 3 was a huge change in that it introduced build target properties - that's what all that `target_include_` and `target_link_` stuff is. Being able to attach build properties to target objects rather than having them sitting around in file scope made a huge difference in CMake's organizational power.

Also, as far as I know it's still the only build system that really integrates well with most IDE's. That's important if you're on a team of Windows devs but you're trying to add non-Windows builds.

CountSessine··on 95% of Bay Area Cities Lost Zoning Authority
Give companies a subsidy

So we give existing house owners a subsidy by creating artificial housing scarcity, and then we give companies a subsidy to fix the house owner subsidy by starting new towns?

Who pays for this? Productive young people earning income? Again?

CountSessine··on Is it time to replace TCP in data centers?
…and Microsoft and Apple if your endpoints include Windows, IOS or MacOS. All of those have 3rd party drivers but I don’t think any of them come with SCTP support out of the box.
CountSessine··on Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money? (2021)
What it really means is that they like using it when it’s free and that the cost of switching away from Babel to an alternative is less than the cost of supporting Babel.
CountSessine··on Do not taunt happy fun branch predictor
Yes. An NaN in IEEE754 has all 1’s in the exponent, and then the high bit of the mantissa determines whether it’s quiet or signalling, but then rest of the mantissa is/can be a “payload”.
CountSessine··on Rust vs. C++ Formatting
That’s neat - Borland C had the same thing with the `emit()` pseudo-function with their C89 compiler. I guess Borland’s compiler writers wanted it more than gcc’s?
CountSessine··on Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe
Yes - especially if they can do this in a way that still makes them money but is expensive and burdensome to comply with. That would keep them in the game but seal the market off to potential competitors.
CountSessine··on Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable
In theory this could be handled by stuffing the extra 96 bits in an IP extension header. But this solves nothing because then any switch that isn’t IPv4+ aware will route packets incorrectly. Literally every single switch on the internet needs to be updated/replaced before you could start generating IPv4+ traffic otherwise the one outlier will send your IPv4+ packets off to Uzbekistan.

OR

Maybe you don’t use those 96 bits for routing. But then it becomes nothing but a sort of subnet address and you haven’t fixed the routing table size problem. And actually every endpoint needs to upgrade too because endpoints that don’t recognize the header extension will generate crazy responses and confuse TCP packets from different computers as coming from the same machine.

There’s no useful and backward compatible way of extending IPv4.

CountSessine··on Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired
What metric would you use? Daily impressions? Those seem to be up. Posts? Also up. Impressions, posts, and status codes are the measure of success (status codes of course being a proxy for earnings as well as operations given that if they go out of business they won't be returning status codes at all).
CountSessine··on Wells are running dry in Southwest as foreign-owned farms feed cattle overseas
Yes exactly - and the US dollar plunged afterward and sank most of those investments. Trading goods for capital investment isn’t the one-sided trade it appears to be.
CountSessine··on Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun
What is it then? That seems like the best description to me.
CountSessine··on Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun
522368 excess deaths in the US in 2020 suggests otherwise.
CountSessine··on “Deeply depressing to watch Twitter employees”
Again - is the pay really all that great, when the job market for devs is actually really quite good? When you could get a new job in really short order? Why would anyone put up with this nonsense?

Or are we talking about the non-devs here?

CountSessine··on Lua, a Misunderstood Language (2021)
This is perhaps an unintentionally ironic comment because the only languages that have any business at all being 1-based are MATLAB, Fortran, and Julia because they’re used to directly translate math notation which for series, sequences, and matrices is 1-based.

Lua’s one big niche is interfacing with 0-based C code in plugins and this horribly and completely unnecessarily painful because of its 1-based array design flaw.

CountSessine··on Biogen agrees to pay $900M to settle drug kickbacks allegations
Ask and ye shall receive: Biogen annual net income for the year ending...

2010-June-30: $1094M

2011-June-30: $1076M

2012-June-30: $1342M

2013-June-30: $1608M

2014-June-30: $2140M

2015-June-30: $3490M

Also, because someone asked, edgar has a bar chart breakdown of Biogen's product revenue. The lawsuit was about Biogen's drugs Avonex, Tysabri and Tecfidera. The bar chart (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/875045/0000875045150...) seems to indicate that these three were responsible for about 80-83% of Biogen's revenues (and presumably net income?) in 2014.

I guess what we don't know is what their sales would have been like without the kickbacks? Less, presumably? But 0? Probably not.

CountSessine··on Biogen agrees to pay $900M to settle drug kickbacks allegations
Their net income for 2021 was $1058M on about $10B of revenue, so this mostly wipes out 1 year of profits.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

CountSessine··on Playstation 2 Architecture
The Emotion Engine was very much the CPU+VPU of the PS2, not the GPU. The GPU was referred to as the GS or Graphics Synthesizer.

I still had all the tech manuals for the PS2 lying around on my bookshelf until a couple of years ago. Can’t hold on to old stuff forever!

CountSessine··on The South Asian Polycrisis
Thanks for this. My first suspicion was that it had something to do with crypto.
CountSessine··on Rust 2024 the Year of Everywhere?
I think any language that has the concept of storage classes will be complicated because you have to deal with copy versus move vs borrow semantics. Other languages get around this by just saying that primitives are on the frame and everything else is on the heap.

Efficiency has its price.

CountSessine··on Plastic might be making us obese
Diet is an HN magnet for bike-shedding and anecdotes.
CountSessine··on What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
This is the very definition of enterprise software - the people who buy it are not the same people who use it.
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