barnacled

Indeed, and as you say, sensibly speaking you are hardly likely to hit those limits in any likely (esp. home) setup. The actual meaningful limit is usually the CPU physical one as home CPUs very often have stringent memory limits (often 32 GiB or so) and of course you rely on the motherboard's limitations also.

Having said that I did write a patch to ensure that the system would boot correctly with 256 TiB of RAM [0] so perhaps I am not always a realist... or dream of the day I can own that system ;)

[0]:https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/next/linux-n...

In practice the actual available usable address space for userland is 64 TiB due to user/kernel split and the kernel maintaining a virtual mapping of the entire physical address space (minus I/O ranges) [0].

However newer incoming 5-level page intel chips [1] will allow up to 57 bits of address space, 128 PiB in theory though in practice 32 PiB of userland memory. See also [0] for discussion on practical limit for 5-page too!

[0]:https://github.com/lorenzo-stoakes/linux-mm-notes/blob/maste...

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_5-level_paging

For anybody who's interested I also wrote up a whole bunch of notes on this at https://github.com/lorenzo-stoakes/linux-vm-notes and superceded by far more recent https://github.com/lorenzo-stoakes/linux-mm-notes

I have made a few patches into the mm subsystem some simply inspired by researching for the articles.

This really seems like a kinesis advantage but split which is cool. I own an advantage 2 and it has really helped with RSI. Personally I prefer a single unit so it's ideal for me!

It makes such a difference to have everything comfortably laid out at shoulder width.

Great response - I very much agree that from the employee's point of view you are always trading off a number of factors and they are by far not all about money.

My main contention really was with the assertion that you don't see why you should get rich - as if it were about what is deserved whereas of course it is a market where the correct price is the one people are willing to pay.

I myself trade off a number of factors in my career which don't equate necessarily to salary.

I honestly think this is a completely wrong-headed way of looking at things. You are paid what you're paid not because the company is determining what is 'fair' given all of your circumstances, but rather the minimum they feel they can get away with.

Nearly all employees would accept more pay if they were offered it, nearly all employers would pay less if they could - so like any market it is always an equilibrium between the two. And frankly in some job markets the salary is negotiated better than others.

There is a sort of learned helplessness to 'I don't deserve more for this job' etc. in the eternal words of Unforgiven - deserve's got nothing to do with it.

One thing I've noticed in my career is that those who possess a certain kind of 'wow' factor are the ones who are categorised as the 'stars' and thus progress quickly through the technical ranks.

I've tended to find that these people don't write particularly good code (not usually bad, just mediocre) and tend to lack ability in software engineering - writing deeply unrobust code that falls far short of their perceived 'rockstar' qualities.

I can't tell you the number of conversations I've had with managers or even colleagues where their untouchable genius is extolled to the heavens.

Combine this with the fact that those who raise issues and foresee problems are often viewed poorly (possibly even MORE so if those problems actually end up happening).

Ultimately you end up with a situation where those who advocate for solid engineering are, while respected, never really raised above the low levels of the career ladder and those who embrace woo rise up.

yep, I literally got married on the 18th and tier 4 was brought in on the 19th. Much of the rest of the country was in tier 3 and the xmas days were rolled back from 5 to 1 with only xmas day itself permitted, only in lower tier areas and with more restrictions.

Little weird to be getting to -1 downvotes for something that's a google away...

London and the SE is where the new highly infectious strain originated from and was more or less entirely locked down. Big chunk of population here too...

>Interactive face to face help, or an open IDE they can run code on uninterrupted.

I've tried both. I've tried leaving them to it entirely, I've tried leaving them to it then if they get stuck helping both from a lesser to a greater degree.

It really makes no difference - the bad coders struggle on that and other problems, they just lack the ability to think through the problem.

And again I've seen enough anxious candidates to see the difference. I'm pretty good at gauging things well as to how and when to help.

Overall I'm not hearing many specifics more 'I am great at interviewing'.

The empirical evidence is overwhelmingly that there are many bad programmers out there with long CVs. That's also my experience WITHIN companies, though a lesser proportion.

You're just making assumptions again.

I have witnessed a huge range of anxiety levels from candidates and when you get used to interviewing it is pretty clear what comes down to anxiety and what comes down to simply not being able to program.

When a candidate struggles, I gently lead them and help move things along in a very collaborative way - I am also very tolerant of mistakes or poor starts and proactively give every opportunity for those to be discounted.

If somebody, after 10 hints as to the ordering of the if/else if/else of fizzbuzz, still cannot figure it out when you have held their hand for 30 minutes that's not because you lack interview skill.

Interviewing is inevitably vastly imperfect and many aspects that are not relevant to the job will play a role (for example - time constraints dictate that you must ask small questions that are sufficiently challenging that might not always be entirely representative of the job) - nobody who is honest could claim otherwise, but that is the nature of the task - it has to be an approximation - and you have to asssess actual ability to code and do the job.

No you're assuming that this is what happened because it contradicts your assertion. Your opinion flies in the face of my extensive experience and that of the majority of people, you may want to start considering whether it is you who is mistaken.

I don't think a candidate who I put at ease then absolutely hammered would compliment me on putting them at ease would they? Or does your theory stretch to them somehow having short-term memory loss?

Not for much of the country, including London.

Source: living in (what was at the time) a tier 4 area

The issue is the new strain, clearly. Cases were growing even during the November lockdown.

It really depends on the place and nearly always applies only to experience specifically in the exact role you are in.

I have 15yrs experience and moved sideways a few times and I am in effect treated as if I were new in my current role.

So senior doesn't so much translate to experience or even transferable working knowledge but rather 'how well you have done politically to gain position in this specific company'. Yes I am cynical :)

I am not sure whether you have an incredibly good filtering system or have got incredibly lucky.

I have interviewed similar numbers and have been repeatedly complimented on my ability to put people at ease, but have encountered exactly what the grandparent comment says. It really opened my eyes seeing so many with many years on their CV but struggling with (literal) fizzbuzz.

This experience accords with most I have read about online (starting with the semi-famous coding horror article [0]). It is your experience that differs from the norm, honestly.

[0]:https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

Some cynical lessons from 15 years in:

1. Politics is everything - how you are perceived is politics, whether you get assigned the projects you want is politics, career progression whether technical or managerial is entirely politics. You will be told various nonsenses about 'flat structures' and 'meritocracy' throughout your career but it's bollocks. Play the game badly and the flat structure is your career.

2. Most programmers don't care - as much as you might care about software engineering principles or even minimal levels of quality in your work, you will be shocked at the degree to which most of your colleagues do not. They might give lip service to it but when it comes to it most justify doing a crappy job by hand waving about being practical. If you talk even mildly about code quality expect to have it patronisingly explained to you 100 times over that you are a perfectionist and customers don't care and etc. Etc. (Of course these arguments are easily rebutted straw men but good luck getting that across).

3. Raising what's right usually hurts you - people do not like to hear uncomfortable or irritating truths. See point 1. Pointing out that something is a risk or severely broken is more likely to get you hassle and lower people's view of you and God help you if you are proven right - there is never a 'oh you were right!'. Nobody likes to be made to look bad. Again see 1.

4. Never underestimate how shit the code is in your next job - the interview very rarely gives you the slightest insight into the quality of a new employer's codebase and never be surprised at just how terrible it can be.

5. We'll fix it later means we will never fix it - technical debt is a lot like national debt - ever growing and rarely paid down. If you are fobbed off with a 'we will refactor that later' comment take that to mean 'this is shit and I am fine with that'.

6. Sideways shifts reset your career to zero - there is no such thing as treating development experience as fungable. You are only as good as your years in this particular slice of the industry and more often than not you are only as good as your years in this particular company.

7. Fuck you pay me - at any time if you are told by an employer that you are part of a family or that your pay rise couldn't happen because you are already paid highly for your title or other such nonsense, start looking for another job, you are being used.

There is a corollary to this - having a career of sideways moves and simply not progressing even in ways that are positive and to your liking because each move effectively puts you back to zero and companies taking advantage of the 'flat structure' myth to avoid having to provide career progression.

you can still get tripped up on SQL (accidentally doing a table scan etc.) but there is explicit tooling to help you analyse that - e.g. looking at the execution plan.

Haskell I can't comment on, though I can totally see that happening there, there might be better means of managing complexity and giving hints to actual implementation.

With prolog the means of expression seems capable only of posing the 'question' rather than indicating that it should be not be implemented in the most naive possible way.

As interesting and mind-bending a language as prolog is I just couldn't get past that and it has made me think it's just not a practical language to use for anything real. But I am happy to be proven wrong!

I used prolog in anger when I first started at a startup some years ago (why that was is another story) and while I found it interesting, it was really quite an ineffective experience for me.

Firstly, by being so declarative if was very easy to end up with O(a^n) algorithms by mistake and secondly I found, at least in what I was doing, that for example the ordering of declarations would change program behaviour which made it imperative in a very non-ovvoous way.

I also found it hard to debug and diagnose the code or find decent resources online for it.

Perhaps I didn't do a good job with it or was missing details on exactly how best to use it but I found it was almost too declarative to the point of the rubber never hitting the road in a controllable way.

You have repeatedly misrepresented me, spread misinformation and defended a state that organ harvests political prisoners and runs concentration camps.

You're either a troll, very naive, a patriot to the point of delusion or in the employ of the CCP. Think for yourself and think about what you're defending.

err, no? This kind of (typically self-loathing) moral equivalence really bothers me. It's so entitled to think that govts leading countries like the UK and US which are nice to live in and have so many incredible freedoms and benefits which so many seem entitled and utterly unappreciative of.

China are literally harvesting organs, disappearing political dissidents and covered up the outbreak of a pandemic (to say the least you could about that), and their govt is responsible for 10's of millions of deaths of their own people.

Some nebulous Chomsky-ish nonsense doesn't rank against that, sorry.

yeah I'm not unreasonable about the pandemic situation, and of course it's feasible it occurred through no fault of their own in the first place, however it is clear that they were WELL aware after SARS1 that wet markets/traditional Chinese medicine/etc. were major pandemic vectors and re-opened e.g. wet markets very quickly after both SARS and SARS2-CoV. This is actually insane (as in mentally unwell) levels of arrogance and negligence.

Secondly they covered up the outbreak. Had it been reported a few weeks earlier apparently up to 95% of deaths could have been prevented. That is really insane.

The lab side of it is interesting and it seems just so much of a coincidence that the lab was right next to the oubreak, of all the places in all of the huge country of China.

I don't doubt they were motivated to study bat coronaviruses, of course they were and there was in fact very big competition with the US.

The problem is China is such a corrupt country where health + safety + following protocols is something of a joke, as with most communist/totalitarian systems people always try to get away with as much as they can that I have zero trust in their BS4 lab being properly constructed and procedures followed correctly.

They also covered up the discovery of a very similar virus some years ago (they actively anonymised records around it after covid19 emerged) in a bat cave (no pun intended) which already appeared to have bat-human transmission.

It is something like 96% similar to covid19 though some scientists say it isn't feasible that it evolved into covid19 except in nature. However I wonder whether some form of natural evolution of the virus was experimented on or encouraged in the lab or whether this assumption is in fact correct.

So the lab thing is definitely up for debate, however the general attitude from much of the media and certainly China is to dismiss it as a crackpot theory. Absolutely don't think it is.

Also I personally do not believe at all that any of this was intentional. I think it's a mixture of negligence, cover-up and face saving.

Keeping in mind the next virus might not be a 0.4% case fatality rate that mostly kills the very old, it's deeply frightening.

I do find the sensitivity on that phrasing hilarious given the absolute hysteria around US/UK politics and some of the phrasing used there. I won't make specific examples to avoid partisanship but it is just mind boggling.

would "gross negligence, face-saving, cover up and delay resulting in over a million more deaths than necessary" work better for you? [0]

[0]:https://www.zmescience.com/medicine/china-coronavirus-coveru...

It's a conspiracy theory that wet markets and traditional Chinese medicine (in which raw animal parts are mixed together etc.) are huge pandemic vectors? And that re-opening the markets and putting absolutely no controls whatsoever on them for 17 years after the SARS 1 outbreak is significantly increasing the chances of a pandemic?

And that it's not impossible that the virus could have escaped from a lab (since the SARS virus did multiple times before [0]) by accident? Though there is some real debate about that so I'm not blindly advocating that theory, only saying it's not entirely implausible.

I mean I'd love to hear your arguments as to the contrary, since you accuse me of 'state level character assassination' by... providing a large number of references to incredibly evil behaviour by the CCP? Please feel free to rebut any 'specific' which you accuse me of refusing to discuss?

I am making specific criticisms none of which I see you have chosen to rebut or discuss rather you are instead trying to smear me. Am happy to hear your actual arguments...

[0]:https://www.the-scientist.com/news-analysis/sars-escaped-bei...

That's a good point to make, however it appears that the conviction rate in Japan comes down more to plea bargaining and only the most blatant cases being allowed to proceed forward [0].

I agree that kind of thing can erode the argument so thank you for pointing it out, I wasn't actually aware of that fact re: Japan and probably I'd put less emphasis on that knowing that there can be other alternative explanations.

I don't agree that it's a struggle to criticise the CCP more generally however as while they lock down as much information as they can, plenty leaks out (as always with totalitarian regimes) and there is overwhelming evidence including video, testimony, etc. as to treatment of Uighurs and Falon Gong. I intentionally added references to my original post as to avoid such criticism... for all the good it did me!

And please feel free to express yourself, I have upvoted you also :)

[0]:https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/468111?jou...

Yeah in China the education system is hugely geared up to indoctrinate. I studied at university with many Chinese people, know people who have lived there and of course have read a lot about it. It is no surprise!

Oh god... I didn't say it was deliberate!!!!

The argument is that they were profoundly negligent.

As for the lab side of things, the argument is that it was an accidental release (as happened multiple times with SARS 1).

My point is whether or not it walked out of the lab (by ACCIDENT) given they knew in 2003 that certain things were major risks, they should have come down on them like a ton of bricks. The fact they re-opened wet markets and took no further steps to tackle that makes them responsible through negligence.

Yeah sure, I mean when people say 'Iran' did X or 'Venezuela' did Y those are fully representative govts that the people can overturn at any point. Oh wait.

Why aren't you saying نظام‎ instead of Iran? Why not 'Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela' instead of Venezuela?

Come on man.

I really get extremely tired of this kind of thing. Obviously I mean the CCP when I say 'China'. Why does nobody say this when people criticise other countries?

In nearly all parlance talking about countries you reference those countries directly 'the US invaded Iraq' for e.g.

It's a shorthand for 'the govt of xxx'.

The fact this fully-referenced post got insta-downvoted to -1 says it all about HN.

It is fun to see criticisms of China get insta-downvoted to hell. Mine is fully referenced and went to -1 instantly... there is definitely some real denial about what the CCP actually do.