keypusher

Not sure what kind of applications you work on, but most web apps are IO bound (waiting on network calls).

Not all operations are CPU bound. For anything that is IO bound, such as reading a file, db access, network calls, etc, CPython threads work just fine.

Not sure, but I recently came across a book called Blue Tide: The Search for Soma by Mike Jay that you might find interesting if you want to learn more about the subject. Its on my list but I havent got to it yet.

I think everything you mention here is actually related to the JVM and not Java specifically, and while I agree the work is impressive, it’s also true that languages such as Kotlin and Scala benefit from that work while also offering some very nice modern improvements.

Caving is a great adventure, there are unique challenges from many disciplines including bouldering, fixed rope ascending/descending, logistics, navigation, cartography, first aid/rescue, communication, psychology, leadership, etc. You tend to spend a lot of time in cold, dirty, cramped spaces, but the rush of exploration and gravity of danger make it quite exciting and rewarding too. I found the camaraderie to be fantastic, there’s local clubs all around the world and the community is pretty small and tight knit, it tends to draw a somewhat unusual group of individuals. Perhaps how rock climbing or scuba diving felt in the earlier days, pushing your limits doing something that most people find pointless and/or terrifying.

Purism makes very nice Linux laptops with Intel graphics chips.

I would argue it's more dangerous to pretend they are so different. It leads many prescription users to believe what they are taking is a safe and harmless concentration aid, while the media paints meth users as monsters under the spell of a scourge on society. In reality, the drugs are not so different. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled study, regular users showed similar effects and very little preference [0]. Specifically

> methamphetamine and d-amphetamine produced similar effects on the majority of physiological and behavioral measures. Both drugs enhanced ratings of euphoria and mood, increased cardiovascular activity, and improved psychomotor performance. Methamphetamine did, however, engender greater effects on some measures (e.g., heart rate and ratings of ‘high’).

and

> methamphetamine and d-amphetamine (50 mg/70 kg) similarly increased drug self-administration; regardless of amphetamine, participants chose approximately 47–50% drug. This is consistent with results from the preclinical literature indicating that rats and rhesus monkeys self-administer both amphetamines at equivalent rates

Furthermore, your science is not quite correct. Amphetamines are a synthetic derivative of phenylethylamine (found in chocolate, cheese, and wine) that adds a methyl group, which allows it to persist in the bloodstream and therefore cross the blood-brain barrier. Methamphetamine adds another methyl group [1][2], which allows it to survive in the blood longer, cross the BBB more easily, and also makes it significantly more neurotoxic [3] because it even harder for the body to break down. Are there differences? Yes. Are they significant? As someone that has experimented with both substances, I found them far more similar than the media would have you believe.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3475187/

[1] https://methoide.fcm.arizona.edu/infocenter/index.cfm?stid=1...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229653571_Speed_Ecs...

[3] https://www.quora.com/What-role-does-the-methyl-group-in-met...

There's plenty of good reasons to bash Microsoft, but 'lack of backwards compatibility' just isn't one of them. If anything, I think their obsession with backwards compatibility drove a lot of compromised design decisions at that company.

How do you sync the passwords between devices (including mobile & non-linux) and keep them backed up?

> "The actual concern I have is that the JavaScript package manager and language commons are in the hands of a VC-funded company

I'm not primarily a JS developer, but I guess I just assumed NPM was run by a non-profit foundation like the Python Software Foundation runs PyPi. So I started looking into the governance of other significant library repos. Homebrew actually sets a good example[0], with a clear governance structure. On the other hand I have no idea who owns RubyGems.org, perhaps a loose collection of GitHub users called the RubyGems Team [1]. Maven Central (Java) is owned+operated by Sonatype [2], Packagist (PHP) is owned+operated by Private Packagist[3], Nuget (C#) is unsurprisingly owned+operated by Microsoft, and CPAN seems to be governed by the Perl Foundation. According to modulecounts.com, NPM has more hosted packages than any of the others. It's also the only one where the registry source code does not seem to be publicly available, and there are very few full mirrors that don't just proxy upstream to npmjs.org. Yikes.

[0] https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-Governance

[1] https://rubygems.org/pages/about

[2] https://central.sonatype.org/

[3] https://packagist.org/

[4] http://www.modulecounts.com/

You might be interested in the work of Erik Verlinde and so called "emergent gravity". While there are still significant problems that the theory needs to explain, it is certainly an interesting perspective to consider.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/02/28/is-d...

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2018/05/the-case-against-dark-...

Please stop using HN to spam your own site.

Airbnb, Kickstarter, Twitch, GoodReads, Bloomberg, there is quite a list of companies who still run a significant amount of their site through Rails. Over time I imagine that particular bottlenecks and performance critical pieces have been pulled out into other languages and services as necessary, but I certainly wouldn't feel bad about it if I was developing or maintaing a Rails site today. It's significantly better than PHP, and a hell of a lot of sites are still run on that. The reality is that if you really need to scale, your primary bottleneck will probably be the datastore, not the frontend.

That's a problematic title, considering this Gutenberg bible is neither the oldest nor the most expensive book on the planet.

The Mormon Church spent $35 million on a printer's manuscript of The Book Of Mormon in 2017. [1]

Bill Gates spent ~$30 million on Da Vinci's Codex Leicester in 1994, which would be around $54 million today.

Even talking about printed works, The Bay Psalm Book was sold for $14.2 million in 2013.

Depending on your definition of "book", the oldest known books are things like The Etruscan Gold Book, The Nag Hammadi codices, the St Cuthbert Gospel, etc.

[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mormon-church-drops-35-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Leicester

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-25115524

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7842037

Put a load balancer between your reverse proxy and your backends. Problem solved.

Majority of Americans have less than $1000 in savings, I don't think "paying for the entire house in cash" is what's going to disrupt the housing market.

> some researchers have suggested that excessive deforestation in the Maya lowlands, which was once home to some 10-15 million people

I just can't quite get over this stat they dropped in here. 15 million people in ~250 AD puts it in the same neighborhood as ancient Greece at their peak a few hundred years earlier.

I am fascinated by all the 3-legged furniture in the painting. The design guarantees stability due to all legs being on the same plane, solving the wobbling/instability problem so common in 4-legged tables and chairs. However, quadripedal tables and chairs are nearly universal in the modern day, with tripedal pieces being mostly reserved for eccentric art. I wonder at what point the trend changed, did it have to do with manufacturing techniques or simply aesthetics?

NPEs literally The Billion Dollar Mistake, and you don't think they are a big deal?

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Bill...

Was the full thread archived anywhere?

Chlorine reacts with pretty much any organic compound (hair, sweat, skin, urine) to produce chloramine. And yes, while this is the thing that irritates your eyes, it's not to say that chlorine is harmless either. There is evidence for respiratory and organ damage from extended exposure to chlorinated pools.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4351252/

No, the tragedy is that you didn't watch the video, because the author isn't complaining or insisting that it's awful. Instead, he (a well-known FreeBSD developer) goes through the history of init systems and offers some justifications for why systemd is the way that it is, and what challenges might need to be overcome to make a "better" init.

Is this not a solved problem? You have the load balancer stop sending new connections to the host. You send sigterm to the process. You wait until timeout, then you sigkill the process. This is how it's done in Kubernetes, ECS, and other systems I've worked with. Trying to engineer the entire lifecycle from within the webserver has a wide array of problems that the author is bending over backwards to end up only partially solving.

How is the WAL stored? If there is a problem with the storage, networking, or DC, you will not be able to get the WAL in order to bring up the DB in a new region. Also, the process of replaying WAL since last backup can take a very long time for a high traffic DB, during which time it is going to be completely unavailable.

At startups and even medium sized tech companies, these decisions are often driven by engineering/ops teams and not by executives. I was on a team trying to decide between staying with AWS and moving to GCP about a year ago, at a company that spends well over $1M/year on infrastructure. The fact that Google has a track record of abandoning products with active users and has repeatedly shown they do not know how to deal with customers was absolutely part of the reason we decided to stay with AWS. I respect the engineering at Google immensely, and I would be willing to reconsider in a few years, but they need to prove their commitment first. They literally just killed another product today (Android Things)!

Oracle is not even in contention. Not only do they lack the expertise, they have a terrible reputation and offer nothing unique. Alibaba is a different story. China is a huge market that western companies typically stuggle in, and many of the large businesses there do not have the infrastructure debt of older US companies. Alibaba has massive infrastructure, strong technical expertise and their cloud offering has been expanding rapidly, I would definitely watch out for them.

I'm looking forward to future installments of this series, such 'An Update on Gmail' and 'An Update on Google Cloud'.

Emmy Noether was also recently the subject of In Our Time, a fantastic BBC roundtable discussion program. She seems to have had a remarkable skill for invariants and finding symmetries in complex math, perhaps even some kind of intuition that allowed her to make incredible leaps in different academic areas around the topic. She played a crucial part in helping Einstein and Hilbert lay the groundwork for the theory of general relativity, as well as making significant advances in abstract algebra. The scope of her contributions is only recently starting to be truly appreciated and I would highly recommend listening to the show.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00025bw

> Any child from birth to 5 — before they head off to kindergarten — is eligible.

Her original goal was to improve literacy rates. Targeting children under 5 seems like a strange way to approach this. Reading to your kids is great, and there is some evidence it might help, but if you want kids to read then getting great books into hands of 5-10 year olds seem like it would help more.

Despite coming from a very well-read family, and having been read to at an early age, I resisted reading at a young age. I just wasn't interested in it, and preferred doing other things. It wasn't until 4th grade where I found a copy of 'A Book Dragon' somewhere and fell in love with it. Despite probably being above my reading level at the time, I struggled through it and then went on to devour just about every fantasy book I could get my hands on, becoming an avid general reader in the process. The right book can really make all the difference.