KGIII

I'm always happy to help. I get a great deal from HN, lots of things to learn and smart people to answer questions. It makes me happy when I'm able to give a return contribution.

If, for some reason, you have further questions, uninvolved@outlook.com is the email address that I hand out in public. I tend to write long posts and replies, so you have been officially warned.

Then again, the language is 'Go.' I am not sure that was the best naming choice and I've heard complaints that it was initially difficult to search for it. My understanding is that 'golang' has helped as a query. So, I guess the situation has improved but I understand it was problematic at first.

To be clear, I've never used the language. I actually dislike programming, though I've decided to get back into it because I have a couple of projects I want to poke at. I'm now deciding between Java and Python.

Maybe I should do an 'ask HN' submission.

So very, very true. This is not the right forum for telling my story of the garbage purloining skunk who got his head stuck in a peanut butter jar.

You know the adage about how a skunk won't spray in an enclosed area, so that you can throw a blanket over a skunk and not worry about being sprayed? It's a lie. Mr. Skunk does not care.

Some of the comments from people whom I infer are significantly younger than I, seem aghast at the idea of having enjoyed the non-connected life as a youth. They are similarly quizzical when they learn that I seldom carry a cell phone and still maintain a landline.

That was the reasoning for my pointing out that it may sound strange.

Even as a well-grown adult, I still go outside and play, sans any compute devices at all. I often hike, snowmobile, ski, snowshoe, ride an ATV, etc and don't even bother with a GPS unit or bring a cell phone. Mentioning this sometimes nets some responses expressing everything from curiosity to suggesting that I'm recklessly endangering myself and others.

Yes, yes I have had (online) people tell me that my doing so is actively endangering others who may need to come rescue me. I'm never quite sure how to respond politely to those types of comments. I guess it is difficult for some people to understand that life existed before the ubiquity of communication devices and always-on networks. They sometimes express more dismay when I point out that, in some locations, not even cellular service is available.

Ah well... But, yeah, it sounds strange to some folks - given the responses I've had to similar commentary.

When you say the results weren't even close, and if you have time and don't mind, could you share some numbers/elaborate on that?

My experience with HPC is fairly limited, compared to what I think you're discussing. In my case, it was things like blade servers which was a cost decision. We also didn't have the kind of connectivity and speeds that you have available today.

(I modeled traffic at rather deep/precise levels.)

So, if you have some experience numbers AND you have the free time, I'd love to learn more about the differences in the results? Were the benefits strictly time? If so, how much time are we talking about? If you had to personally pay the difference, which one would you select?

Thanks for giving me some of your time. I absolutely appreciate it.

Yup. I agree. I even find the experience fantastic on the original iPad, as well as a brand new one. I find it just fine on my phone, which isn't nearly as large a screen.

I am guessing it is an individual taste thing. That makes some sense.

I wonder if that's a personal thing? Over the past year, I've been trying to join the mobile revolution - sort of. The majority of my browsing is now done on a tablet.

I read quite a few PDFs and don't actually have any complaints. I am not personally seeing any readability issues and don't mind consuming PDFs at all.

That said, I think I now understand your complaint. Thanks! I just don't personally have any trouble with it. I use multiple tablets, of varied sizes, and I've had good experiences with all of the devices. While some PDFs are horribly formatted, I find that the device choice doesn't help that and it's a design choice from the author.

But, again, thanks for helping me understand.

Not really, look at the myriad rendering issues between the most popular browsers. PDF should result in pixel-for-pixel reproducibility, browsers don't do that in practice.

That's why we still test pages in different browsers and end up using browser specific code to ensure proper rendering - which often only reaches the 'close enough' format.

FWIW, PDF is an open standard. There exist both open and proprietary readers and creators. It has been an open standard for nearly a decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format

Have you seen pandoc? That should be able to do that and the comments about results are usually positive.

https://pandoc.org/epub.html

One final thing, and wildly off topic, is that when you do your defense, remember that you probably know more about the specifics of the subject than anyone else in the room. Many folks stress over it, but you're almost certainly going to be the actual expert in the room. Good luck!

I'm not sure I understand. Well, I understand what you're doing but I'm not sure why you'd dislike PDF.

PDF has the great benefit of rendering the same on every system. With very few exceptions, PDF will look exactly the same on every system and will print the same on every system.

HTML doesn't really have that same benefit.

Don't get me wrong, I think your service is a great idea for those who would like HTML formatted results, but I'm not understanding the complaint about PDF.

Could you expand on why you don't like PDF?

Ah! This is even better. It led me to finding this:

http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc/hpcc_results_lat_band.cgi

I do believe I get it. Now to find out what kind of applications are greatly benefited from this.

Thanks HN! You always make me dig in and learn new things!

Edit: It was "MPI latency" that led me to that result, by the way.

That makes some sense, so I'll just post my thanks in this one reply so I don't have to thank everyone individually.

Much appreciated.

It does lead me to one additional question - is the need for additional speed great enough to justify this? I don't know how much faster it would be and I tried Google and they are not even remotely helpful. I may just be using the wrong query phrases.

> dna = ''.join(random.choices('atgc', weights=[30.9, 29.4, 19.9, 19.8], k=3_234_830_000))

On a tablet, I highlight and pull down. It grabs it all and I can then read it. It is a very awful workaround that impacts the site's usability.

With distributed computing and cloud hosting allowing for thousands of instances, with huge amounts of resources such as obscene terabytes of RAM, is there still a need for supercomputers? They are, effectively, the same thing, right?

I am guessing that I'm not understanding something fully. I don't really see the benefit anymore, now that you can lease thousands of cores, petabytes of disk, and multiple terabytes of RAM.

What's the benefit? What am I missing? Google is none too helpful.

You may be interested in George Price. There are a few documentaries that cover his life and work. He was very interested in altruism and his efforts to figure that out are believed to be why he killed himself. Basically, it drove him insane to think about altruism and if it was actually possible to be altruistic.

Here is a starting point:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._Price

You might be surprised about that.

To use a blunted instrument as a descriptor, you cause an accident and it results in complete stoppage of traffic.

However, much smaller things can actually impact the flow of traffic in a significant manner. Brake late and hard and you can watch the ripple effect for many cars behind you. It can actually cause a ripple that goes back for miles and has effects lasting for much longer than you might think - on the order of minutes to as long as a half hour in extreme situations.

All that from just braking late and hard under the right circumstances...

If you want to improve the flow of traffic, as a single individual, leave space between you and the car in front of you, allow people to merge, and strive to maintain a constant speed. You may actually reach your destination faster, though it isn't intuitive.

Edited to add: I modeled traffic. That is what my business did. I started with vehicular traffic and would later expand to model pedestrian traffic. Traffic is a fascinating subject that is chaotic in nature.

This may sound strange, but I'm sometimes grateful that, when I was a wee lad, Internet wasn't invented and computers took up whole rooms. I think I'd have wasted even more time than I did.

It means I read a lot of great books, for example. I used to read them and then write about them. I'd spend almost as much time writing and thinking as I did reading the books. I'd make notes, quotes, and tie things in with other literary works.

If I'd had computers and the Internet, I'd have spent that time watching porn and posting fart jokes.

Thanks for the correction. I had originally typed 'meta data' but thought headers were the same thing. Thanks!

Refresh the thread. They are working on something they call Bridge. They have an employee here, in the thread, posting links and answering questions.

Proton has a free tier, if that helps make it more clear. Though I'm not sure that free vs. paid is such a distinguishing characteristic that makes it impossible to compare.

If I give you some blueberries and you buy some from the store, you're still able to compare and contrast the two and the paid blueberries may actually be inferior to the free berries.

To add to the above post, the headers have to be unencrypted, else they'd have no method to actually send the email. If it were encrypted, they'd have no idea what the address was, or who to bounce it to if the address doesn't exist.

Email headers contain a lot of information. It has the various email addresses, servers involved, ip addresses, time stamps, subject, priority, and things like that.

The body of the email is the only part that gets encrypted when encryption is in use.

Given their vast amounts of information about mail, might their spam filter work by only examining the header? That is, of course, still 'reading' mail - though it may be an acceptable trade off for privacy minded people.

And, if it's being interpreted by a machine, does that really count as reading?

I don't do much climbing anymore, but I figured it'd be nice to send them a few bucks. So, that's done.

If anyone else wants to help keep people safe while they climb, even if you're not a climber, here is the donation link:

http://www.safeclimbing.org/help.htm

They even give you stuff, if you donate more than $25. Somehow, donations sometimes 'feel' more meaningful when you know you're not really going to benefit from it.

Raccoons, black bears, and skunks are all smarter than many people seem to think. They can find their way into most anything in common use. There have been cars broken into by bears, for example.

I've never had one. At least not one of the ones people consider social media. HN and Slashdot are both social media, but nobody seems to call them that. So, no Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc... G+ may have made me a profile. The others may have data about me, but they aren't my accounts.

I never saw a need for one. If people want me, they know where to find me. It's not some secretive thing. It's just more inertia. I can't be bothered to make accounts and they'd just take away more of my time. I am not even all that private, people know who I am. I've had many, many Internet friends in my home. One stayed for about five years, as she and I decided to date. Similarly, I haven't ever used online dating sites. That just kind of happened.

I have not. I will ponder the implications. I kind of want to see what it does without my prompting it.

If it helps, I don't have Spotify.

The link in another response to me has a link to a clarification video from Musk. I didn't watch it, as the text was adequate. It looks like no licensing is required and that they've been legally dumped into the public domain in a binding fashion - maybe. That's not actually ever been ruled on in a court, from what I can find via Google.

That post suggests no company legal team would allow it. The article thinks Apple might use it, as an example of a user.

I am no expert, so I'll defer to others.

Your link seems to indicate otherwise? Notably, that it will enable Apple and others. They also seem to think it is a legally binding statement, if a little vague.

That was my takeaway, actually.