Hacker News Reader

_benedicton Swiss BMW Driver Slammed with $116,000 Tailgating Fine Because He's Rich

But the point of the fine in this case is clearly not restitution, but disincentive. Justice in this case is ensuring everyone is equally incentivised to follow a law that society thinks everyone should follow.

If the goal were only to ascribe economic harms to certain actions and reclaim those costs, it would be called a tax or a fee, not a fine.

_benedicton 20% more powerful perovskite solar panels enter commercial use

[1] is a press release from the original result that has been developed, and specifically refers to replacing lead with tin, with the purported reason to produce a lead-free cell for easier commercialisation (due to the concerns over lead). I chose to share the other link originally because it was newer.

[1] https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-05-01-lead-out-tin-cheap-sola...

_benedicton 20% more powerful perovskite solar panels enter commercial use

These apparently use tin instead of lead.

https://www.internationaltin.org/oxford-pv-moving-toward-nex...

_benedicton A primer on why microbiome research is hard

“Git” is a pejorative. The GP was suggesting that this microbe deserved being called a “git” for its deleterious effects.

_benedicton CockroachDB license change

The ASF requires a CLA for all regular contributors or large contributions, so I don’t think this is a particularly good barometer.

_benedicton Linearizability: A correctness condition for concurrent objects

The linked article doesn’t discuss causal consistency or MongoDB.

_benedicton What Cannot be Skipped About the Skiplist

Garbage collectors are really nice for concurrent data structures, making lock-free algorithms very practical. Java's skip list does not require any locks for write, and requires essentially no synchronisation at all for reads (just suitable platform-dependent memory barriers). I believe reads are also wait free.

There is a locality penalty for lookups, although I don't think this is core to skip-lists, just an impracticality of the Java language and how you can use its standard libraries. The variable size of the nodes is not a problem for the Java heap, due to how compacting garbage collectors work.

_benedicton I worked 80 hour weeks to deliver a platform for a hedge fund,then they fired me

That’s not true. There’s basically no employment protections in the UK for your first two years of employment. There are pretty good norms in the UK including finance about this, but your statutory protections are pretty weak even after the two years are up.

_benedicton Almost no one pays a 6% real-estate commission except Americans

Those websites usually include (or at least offer) professional photography, and some also offer various levels of agent assistance for viewings, negotiations etc. an a la carte offering of sorts. A for sale sign is often included as it’s free advertising for them.

_benedicton JDK 21 Release Notes

Cassandra has a deterministic testing framework in this vein that will support Loom before too long. Loom is more of an efficiency enhancement, however, permitting you to run a simulation with a single operating system thread, avoiding the overhead of managing which thread the OS is permitted to run. The framework already intercepts all of these operations and ensures they are executed deterministically.

_benedicton The Raft Consensus Algorithm (2015)

Leaderless protocols exist in the literature (EPaxos, Caesar, Tempo, ...). These systems usually have a "leader" per transaction, but the leader role is uncontested in normal operation, as it is self-declared by the coordinator of the transaction, so an election only takes place if the coordinator of that transaction fails for whatever reason. Multiple leaders may exist concurrently for any given datum/key the operation involves.

Cassandra is currently developing a leaderless protocol in this vein called Accord. In fact, Cassandra is already using a leaderless protocol for its LWTs; an optimised variant of classic (single-decree) Paxos, but this has significant overheads when competing transactions are declared for the same key at the same time.

_benedicton US study shows electric cars have more tech glitches than petrol cars

https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-us-init...

Looks like Tesla is only 33% worse than the industry average.

_benedicton The dangers of conditional consistency guarantees

It’s not possible to read a new value at quorum and to then later read the old value at quorum in Cassandra. This is enforced by “read repair” that ensures the quorum agrees on the reply, by propagating the newer values if they are missing on any of the quorum, before replying.

That’s not to say failures in distributed systems aren’t messy; they definitely are.

_benedicton The Ugly Truth Behind “We Buy Ugly Houses”

There’s a general problem with low friction transactions being used to exploit people with diminished capacity, particularly when intermediaries are involved (another common one in UK is signing them up for multiple phone contracts) and there may be some regulatory innovation possible in this area. Punishment after the fact is not sufficient if it doesn’t adequately prevent this population being exploited.

_benedicton RedisRaft

They will be partitioned by a different key. You may in fact have to touch two extra quorums - one to delete the old entry and one to insert the new entry.

This depends on the specifics of how your database works, of course. I’m not sure this would involve multiple consensus quorums in FDB for instance, given that I believe it instead relies on a centralised timestamp service.

_benedicton The retaliation: Pranking my roommate with targeted Facebook ads (2014)

Or that their career was better served by undermining those within the party that were less aligned with them, to open up more posts in future for themselves and ensure positions of authority were staffed with those most likely to retain their services.

_benedicton Age-stratified infection fatality rate of Covid-19 in the non-elderly population

Ioannidis published very suspect studies with misleading design and motivated reasoning during the pandemic. His credibility is low on this topic.

_benedicton Insulation: First the body, then the home (2011)

The original comment referenced the U.K., where it is definitely not required, but is becoming more common.

I am surprised at the idea that MVHRs have been required anywhere for as much as 20 years.

_benedicton Insulation: First the body, then the home (2011)

“Standard” is a bit strong, maybe? I think the majority of new homes still use trickle ventilation because it’s much cheaper, and not many homes have them retrofitted?

They are certainly common, but I think far from standard.

_benedicton SQL should be the default choice for data transformation logic

Cassandra isn't columnar, it's row-oriented. The original authors coined a new term "column family" which is just a nonsense (and confusing) term, meant to describe its original relatively unstructured API, which has unfortunately stuck in all descriptions of the database, and leads to confusion like this.

Cassandra is also not an analytics database, it is intended for "OLTP"-like workloads.

_benedicton The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-source

No, you brought up Cheerios, and I brought up a counterexample to your claim that such invented terms occupy some special status where they don’t or shouldn’t change meaning.

I then mentioned loss of trademark protection to further evidence that such words change meaning.

_benedicton The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-source

Open source isn’t trademarked, and probably isn’t possible to trademark. So trademark status isn’t relevant here, only the change in usage.

_benedicton The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-source

That’s another assumption. It might be widely accepted within your circle, but most people using the word I would bet don’t even know it exists. So for them it isn’t an authority. A dictionary might be.

I certainly do not recognise any charity’s right to define a word, so it is not official to me - or, apparently, to the OED or Wikipedia, and I would bet most other dictionaries and people.

_benedicton The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-source

Official? In what sense?

_benedicton The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-source

I don’t see anything there on the use of the term open source, just lots of open source related disputes?

_benedicton The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-source

That’s an empirical claim, and I’m not sure what you’re basing it on?

There’s literal dictionaries that disagree with you, so plenty of credibility to the alternative meanings.

_benedicton The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-source

Firstly, the Oxford English Dictionary uses a different definition, as does Wikipedia. It’s far from clear why we would prefer OSD, and by these other definitions you’re the one using the word incorrectly.

Secondly, good luck convincing everyone they “need to think about how they use words”

Thirdly, “legal redress”!?

_benedicton The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-source

I disagree that everyone broadly understands the same thing as you from the phrase “open source”

_benedicton The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-source

But nobody’s doing that? I think a bunch of people basically never agreed with you on the definition, it just never mattered much as the distinction didn’t matter yet. Most people don’t think much about how they use words, they just use them.

To use your example, it might be that murder evolved from meaning “a crime has been committed” to meaning a specific crime. Which, um, is exactly what happened.

_benedicton The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-source

I’m a member of the open source community, so “the” community isn’t telling them anything.

But, no, I’ve quite clearly stated you can argue they shouldn’t use that definition. But you cannot credibly say that their usage is wrong if they are successfully communicating with others using that definition.

The word will change usage, or it won’t, and neither of us will probably have any say over it.