jstrong

if masks work so well, why didn't they work? how did omicron get around the world in like two weeks flat when everyone was wearing masks on planes? at what point does covid making an utter mockery of our mitigation efforts start to dent your faith in them?

in rust code, I like using `debug_assert!` to represent numerical expectations/assumptions of the implementation. later if I have a problem, I can turn on debug assertions and I will get a bunch of additional checks. but I can also turn them off and not pay for them all the time.

> I feel absolutely no sympathy

luna is way down, but there's still a luna/usd market.

the one of those most likely to be humming along fine is redis in my experience. once ssh'd to the redis box (ec2), which was hugely critical to business: 1 core, instance had been up for 853 days, just chilling and handling things like a boss.

the reaction I had was, don't speak to your Dad with the same tone you would use in a HN thread.

compressed storage would bring huge performance and size-on-disk wins. I suspect the issue is the difficulty and resources needed to add compression on top of the existing design rather than a decision that the tradeoffs are not worth it.

sorry - you'll have to pry my model m from my cold, dead fingers

are there any examples of this technique used in open source projects? I'd be interested to look at the code and see what you mean in greater detail.

I am a very avid proponent of rust. however, here are a few places I have had difficulty in working on custom storage engines in rust:

- uninitialized memory: it is tricky to get the semantics of uninitialized memory right. the ergonomics of the `MaybeUninit` api are frankly terrible.

- memory alignment: for O_DIRECT and other cases where memory alignment is important, it is difficult to ensure that the backing memory of Vec and other datatypes is correctly aligned, which ends up pushing you towards raw pointers.

- mmap: after considerable research, it is unclear to me whether there is a safe rust api to mmap.

- hostility to unsafe: in general, rust is easy to learn (relative to C++). however, the hostility in the community to unsafe (there are some good reasons for this, not criticizing it in general), makes it more difficult for someone without a background in C/C++ to learn how to use unsafe correctly. feels like if you ask a question about how to do unsafe you get 100 people telling you what a terrible idea that is, but for database code there is very significant performance at stake.

I read the article and could not believe that was their takeaway. sometimes people are determined to vindicate their technology choices, no matter what.

agree with your read on the article but not on your conclusion. in general, I don't think fudging the truth for strategic reasons ever turns out well in the long run, mostly because, we're not smart enough to anticipate what the long run impact of our strategic lying will be. secondly, the strategy itself, going out of our way, up to and including hiding the causes of a global pandemic, in order to avoid ever hurting china's feelings, just does not seem viable to me at all.

what is the special hardware/setup that achieves mid-single digit number of microseconds latency for deep learning inference you referred to?

influxql is limited, yes, but much less verbose for time-based aggregation than the equivalent sql queries, which is why I like using it for adhoc visualization and inspectibility. (I don't like flux). to me it's great for a limited purpose. writing the equivalent sql queries would drive me up the wall.

> The Performance P270 slots in as the lower-performance eight-stage, dual-issue, in-order processor that supports RISC-V Vector Extension v1.0, which SiFive says makes it an ideal candidate to replace SIMD architectures.

I did not understand this part. "lower-performance" and "in-order" suggest this is a simpler processor, but it could replace SIMD? is SIMD used in embedded contexts?

(asking for clarification, not trying to suggest the article is wrong.)

this article is pretty thin gruel.

slightly unrelated, I used to open nytimes.com articles with a new private browswer session to avoid paywall, but this no longer works. any other ways to avoid registering/paywall to read their articles?

it's often not particularly crucial for timeseries data, though, and the performance tradeoffs of syncing every insert to disk are significant.

the design you propose is to write 10sec chunks of data to an append-only log, which will contain chunks from multiple tables/series? if so, then reading larger ranges than 10sec requires scattered reads of a bunch of small chunks interspersed in the log file. that doesn't sound like it will be fast? the other big tradeoff is compression ratio, which writing data in 10sec chunks (as its final form) would be terrible for.

I have stored a wide manner of arbitrary data in UUIDs, and had great success with that technique.

> The point is that if you only need to join and aggregate data it's easier and more efficient to do it directly in SQL

citation needed? I've seen plenty of cases where it would have taken the db ages to do something that pandas does fast, and I don't consider pandas to be particularly fast.

I've been coding predominantly in rust since 2018 and have never encountered a build time > 10min.

> There is nothing more convenient than SQLite for analyzing and transforming JSON.

the example query given:

    select
      json_extract(value, '$.iso.code') as code,
      json_extract(value, '$.iso.number') as num,
      json_extract(value, '$.name') as name,
      json_extract(value, '$.units.major.name') as unit
    from
      json_each(readfile('currency.sample.json'))
    ;

that sure looks fun to type into a repl!

nothing against sqlite, which I like and use, just found the idea of that query being convenient for one-off analysis to be off.

> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

also a long-time rust user, and I buy this. one of the things it took me longest to realize when writing rust is to reach for traits carefully/reluctantly. they can be amazing (e.g. serde), but I've wasted tons of time trying to make some elegant trait system work when I could have solved the problem much more quickly otherwise.

rust has avoided many pitfalls that python fell into. one example is the way that rust 2015 edition code works seamlessly with rust 2018 edition code, unlike the python2 -> python3 debacle. another is cargo vs pip/poetry/this month's python package manager. so, using python as an example isn't very convincing to me.

I've been primarily coding in rust since 2018. I never cared for async/await, and I've never used it. (at some point, coding event loops became very natural/comfortable for me, and I have no trouble writing "manual" epoll code with mio/mio_httpc).

one nice thing about rust's async/await is, you don't have to use it, and if you don't, you don't pay for it in any way. sure, I run into crates that expect me to bring in a giant runtime to make a http request or two (e.g. rusoto), but for the most part I have not had any issues productively using sans-async rust during the last few years.

so, if you don't like async/await, just don't use it! it doesn't change anything about the rest of rust.

I disagree their judgement was right - I think it was catastrophically wrong. there are some things that you can treat this way (let it blow over), but a reporter saying the n word to a group of high school kids is not one of them. the fact that it was only said in a question to clarify what someone meant, rather than than as a slur, is also wholly exculpatory - making the real story a complete non-issue. also, think about how it actually turned out -- their strategy completely backfired, insofar as it was actually intended to limit the pr damage of the story.

external services don't always have a test API, and it's not always as cut and dry as processing user payments. sometimes it's less important than that, and testing it would require replicating an external server to be able to test it. in those cases the tradeoff of time spent vs. value isn't as clear.

usdt/usd market at kraken holding at ~$1 https://cryptowat.ch/charts/KRAKEN:USDT-USD