HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

mtanski

982 karma · joined September 29, 2009

submissionscomments
mtanski··on Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe
I know all of the wrist watches experience this issue, but this was extreme like drop from 145->80 for like 60+ min then rapidly shopt back up. Not like a small couple min blip.

This was a near the top end model at the time, and after complaining Garmin support owned up that this was a firmware bug impact all sensors of that generation and it would take 2+ months to fix (took like 5).

But they did send me a HRM for free and I've been using that. So I am grateful that and using it since. But for short rides (like 90 min or less) I don't always remember to think to bring the HRM.

Prior to that I had two lower end Garmin watches, and despite having theoretically lower end HR sensors they did not experience such bugs or drop outs (an unexpected blip every once in a while).

But I think the main point still stands, their software/firmware/UX has not moved in relation with the hardware. Next time I'm in the market I will be consider all the options. Feels like Coros and others have come a long way.

Prob the biggest thing keeping me in their ecosystem is multi sport (variations of bike riding types -- I do all), hiking, strength training, erg, winter sports. But even there the list of strength exercises has not been updated in like a decade.

mtanski··on Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe
Cane to say the same.

I have a Garmin "smart" watch (with every app notification etc disabled) and I love the fact that I can do almost two weeks of exercises (ride, walk, gym) without needing to charge it. The bike computers are also solid. But sadly the UX of the software on these leaves a bunch to be desired, and I've been bitten by many software and firmware bugs in the last years... Including months for which HRM would randomly and persistently drop it's value from say whatever the real value (say 145 for argument sake) to 80.

mtanski··on McLaren invented new carbon fiber tape to build even more complex parts
Pre tariffs you could get a whole Carbon bike frame from CN (including stem, handlebar, fork) for $500.

And while I'll give that there was variety between vendors, some of them were doing sophisticated layups with multiple grades of wave that withstood a torture tests far beyond the ANSI bike tests.

In fact you could argue they were overbuilt compared to Western brands (at a cost of 100 - 150g) since they didn't want to deal with warranty claims.

Truly amazing, cheap, good quality mass market carbon products.

mtanski··on Benchmarking Intel, AMD and Graviton Using Erasure Coding Workloads
My knowledge here is rather dated, and I'm unfamiliar with the minio code base... But ~ a decade ago Intel invested a fair amount of effort into optimizing the oss Erasure Coding libraries for Intel CPUs.

Back then CPUs had less cores, RS coding was relatively more expensive and certainly CPU bound on then new NVMe flash devices

It's possible, even likely this is the result of that

mtanski··on Elon Musk moves to Texas
Politicians are not in step with the general electorate, they are instep with party elites and primary votes. The primaries tend to select most "ideologically" aligned candidates and by the time you're in the general election the politicians on both sides are far away from the median voter.
mtanski··on HPE Drive fail at 32,768 hours without firmware update
Oh boy. We had somerhing like 5 our of 8 drives fail all at the same time. All of them were affected models bought at begining of summer and failed a couple months later.

It was a pretty maddening thing to debug and figure out where the issue was (servers, rack, drives, RAID do controllers). 2 different machines 2 and 3 drives. Week later we found the Intel bulletin about the issue.

Thank God for pgbackrest backups.

mtanski··on Why Index Funds Are Like Subprime CDOs
New large generation (Millenials) coming to the housing market. Low interest rates driving folks to refinance. New housing is flat YoY if you look at "House Starts" statistics.
mtanski··on Manufacturers want to quit China for Vietnam, but find it impossible
Who is starting, building these factories in Vietnam? Who is lending for capital projects and providing industrial expertise to local enterprises.

I'll give you one hint, the name of that country starts with a C.

mtanski··on Mortgage Market Reopens to Risky Borrowers
FICO score for mortgages is not the same score as the modern FIDO score. The mortgage score is often what's called FICO v2 and the modern one is something like v10. They've even branded their different old versions as Insurance score, Auto score, Mortgage score and those industries kind of stick with it.

To illustrate why this matters. My modern FICO score is something like high 700s, low 800s (depending on credit data vendor). My V2 score is like 690.

How did that happen? Turns out when I moved out from my last house (5 years ago) and canceled my internet with Time Warner they failed to charge me $31 which was always set to auto-play. I actually settled 5 months after the move when TW sent me to collections. The shady collection agency promised to remove it off the record if I paid (they didn't). Instead, it shows up as a 5 year old, $31 late payment, paid in full.

How did I find out, while looking to refinance at these current rates. I'm getting this sorted out now. Both TransUnion and Experian got it fixed in a few business day.... fucking Equifax cannot get their shit together 3 weeks later.

For me it's a hassle, annoyance and wasted time. But as you can see it can impact real people and the score methodology is pretty dumb.

It's insane that a 5 year old, paid in full debt for $31, that's not even my fault drags my credit score down ~100 points (that's what it is once corrected) and prevents from getting a refi. Doesn't matter that all my other credit cards are always paid in full, no late payments on mortgage, car, insurance ... which all add up to several magnitudes more then $31 over the 5 years.

mtanski··on As German Bund Yields Head to Zero, They Still Beat U.S. Treasuries
So with EUR/USD hedge the assumption is that USD is going to drop or become more unstable in the future?

I don't think anyone assumes the opposite, that the EUR will rise as a result of strong economics performance.

mtanski··on Slack Taps Goldman Sachs to Lead IPO
Except for the fact that very few large companies are willing to give Facebook their data. That is any kind of data besides their social ad campaigns.
mtanski··on Amazon Plans to Split HQ2 in Two Locations: NY and VA
Not a terrible idea to build two campuses along the Accela line. There probably are other opportunities like this for bigger metro areas along the Accela corridor.
mtanski··on Intel 9th Gen Review
It's pretty annoying... but in lot of Intel marketing and spec sheets you'll find small print language that TDP is measured at base clock speed. The base clock has fallen from the 6700k where it was 4.0Ghz.

In the end, it seams to me like the intent is to deceive.

mtanski··on Distributed Filesystems for Deep Learning
Sadly there is no way to downvote stories. This post is factually incorrect at best... And, the author shows up and just shills harder.
mtanski··on 450 Amazon employees tell Bezos to kick Palantir off AWS
Not a happy place to be...

But if politicians choose their constituents and thus stack representation in such a way they need not to be responsible to the population... I don't blame for folks trying to find another way around.

mtanski··on How Manhattan Became a Rich Ghost Town
There's tons of towns within towns in NYC. I will not name them here. Everyone please go visit Manhattan.
mtanski··on Intel’s High-End Cascade Lake CPUs to Support 3.84 TB of Memory per Socket
Yeah, depends if you want 2 memory channels or 4 memory channels.
mtanski··on Recursive Common Table Expressions in Postgres
http://www.try-alf.org/
mtanski··on A Look at MyRocks Performance
That's somewhat inherent to LSM tree.
mtanski··on FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services
The term third world is often used incorrectly. It was created during the cold war to refer to countries that we're not in alliance with one of the dominant super powers (USA, USSR). [1]

People often use when they want to say "backwards" countries.

The correct term is developing world, which just means rapidly improving and doesn't cloudy the convo with connotations about the cold war.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World

mtanski··on FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services
Netflix ISP CDN in space. Now that'd be something seriously cool.
mtanski··on Dow plunges 1000 points
>If salaries rise, the expectation is that people will spend more and push inflation higher.

Sure sucks to be a worker. When your salary rises your real gains will be inflated away.

mtanski··on Europe’s central banks are starting to replace dollar reserves with the yuan
The favorite method of centrist leadership in the recent past has been exporting neoliberalization economic policies and the neoliberalizm of trade deals (think NAFTA).

That's one of the component that's given the US a lot of influence and power dealing with the world. This was aided by how inward the competing powers were.

There's been a backlash against those ideas as foreign policy both inside and outside the US. As evidenced by the current president.

It's my hunch that in the long run the US will miss the privilege and benefits that have come from that asymmetric relationship. 4 or 8 years can be a long time and a lot can happen when were standing still.

Just look at England, they've never fully come to grips that the sun has set on the English empire.

mtanski··on Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”
On another forum somebody suggested laywer / legal reasons. That if default performance takes too big of a dive the case for lawsuits is stronger. They already have a class action filed against them. A benchmark performance dive would be one angle to use in court.
mtanski··on CMU 15-721 Advanced Database Systems [video]
On a related note. I personally was never able to find a resource for databases analogous to lambda the ultimate for programming languages. So I started a community dedicated to DBMS systems (building, papers, etc) on reddit. So if you're interested in this topic, please contribute.

Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/dbms/

mtanski··on Penn Station Could Get Worse
We pay more into the state then we get back. And upstate/albany often times sabotages us (like the MTA subsidizing some politically ski slopes).

Same at the federal level. That's more complex since the region gets bunch of money back due to "security".

mtanski··on Intel Issues Updates to Protect Systems from Security Exploits
Stop trying to make the analogy fit. It's not a good analogy.
mtanski··on CPU hardware vulnerable to side-channel attacks
Spectre impacts current iterations of: x86, ARM and Power. It's most likely impacts other archs that have variants of CPUs with out-of-order execution.
mtanski··on CPU hardware vulnerable to side-channel attacks
In the good old days everybody just used HTTP, FTP and telnet and NIS. Old archs also has other bugs we forgot about / never discovered.
mtanski··on Reading privileged memory with a side-channel
This rant/thread is a good reading as well: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/1/3/797

It's possible to key the cache in the kernel on CPL so at least there should be no user / kernel space scooping of cache lines.

It's possible we can never fully prevent all attacks in same address space. So certain types of applications (JIT and sandboxes) might forever be a cat and mouse game since we're unlikely to give up on branch prediction.

Page 1 of 14Next →