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nemanja

171 karma · joined February 19, 2014

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nemanja··on Air Force unit suspends use of Sig Sauer pistol after shooting death of airman
Yeah, too bad. It’s actually quite an innovative and cool design. Shoots pretty good for a striker (still a far cry from CZs and 2011s). The ecosystem also started to develop around it (eg 1911 angle grips, high quality holsters, etc.) Sig optics and accessories also got quite good, too.
nemanja··on IronRDP: a Rust implementation of Microsoft's RDP protocol
Lots of tradeoffs. If you invent a new codec, it's unlikely to make it into hardware for a while (even AV1 encoders are not yet as widely supported) and therefore you will have to do encoding and even decoding in CPU, which takes away resources from the workload. h.264 is still probably the best general purpose codec for real-time desktop streaming - low bandwidth requirements, 444 support, build to lossless, low latency, moderate CPU usage if GPU is not available, and well supported in GPUs for a long time (e.g. even back to Kepler).
nemanja··on IronRDP: a Rust implementation of Microsoft's RDP protocol
Compute overhead of H.264 encoder is non-negligible for a VM host where I want all my CPU cycles to go to user VMs. Datacenter-class Intel CPUs (Xeon) don't include H.264 encoders in hardware. QuickSync circuitry is generally limited to consumer-grade CPUs. Not to mention MPEG licensing issues.

AV1 eliminates MPEG licensing issues, but encoding in hardware is even more limited. Also, AV1 is great for encode-once use cases (e.g. YouTube) since it's heavily geared towards reducing bandwidth requirements vs. encode speed. It's workable for real-time streaming in the lowest settings, but H.264 is still better overall.

nemanja··on IronRDP: a Rust implementation of Microsoft's RDP protocol
Low CPU overhead. VNC streams screen grabs with minimal (if any) compression, which results in lower CPU overhead, high bandwidth consumption and low frame rate. This is okay for the use-case of low-level VM debugging that it's used for in context of virtualization management systems, not so great for desktop remoting.

While RDP may run okay on 56k with low color mode for some use cases (e.g. simple Windows admin), it requires significantly more bandwidth and compute overhead (either CPU or GPU) for other more advanced use-cases (e.g. video editing, CAD etc.)

nemanja··on IronRDP: a Rust implementation of Microsoft's RDP protocol
RDP is aimed at a different use case than VNC. Proxmox and other virtualization managers (e.g. VMWare, Nutanix) use VNC because you get a stream directly from the hypervisor (e.g. KVM, ESX) which is very useful for low-level debugging. The VNC protocol also has very low overhead (you don't really want h264 encoding CPU overhead on your VM host). VNC is not really intended for remote desktop use cases, which require higher fidelity/frame rate, etc.

So -

* VNC: Low overhead / Low fidelity

* RDP (and other remote desktop protocols, e.g. Frame Remoting Protocol, Horizon Blast, Citrix ICA/HDX): Higher overhead / High fidelity

nemanja··on Baltimore's Key Bridge struck by cargo ship, collapses
Well if you keep rudder aligned with the engine (i.e. parallel) you are really using both, not just the engine.
nemanja··on Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud
Timing could’t be better. VMWare is actively firing and pissing off large swats of their customer base and basically Nutanix is the only serious alternative for onprem.

What is the total overhead (in terms of cores, memory) of the management layer with Oxide (incl. block storage, vmm, etc.)?

nemanja··on Google is shutting down Stadia
Really grateful for the major contribution Google made to the WebRTC over the years, driven by the Stadia effort. They relatively quickly turned it into a viable, production worthy, real-time protocol. Brought up the state of the art in browser-based streaming and reduced complexity in a big way. There were things you simply couldn't do in the browser before WebRTC (e.g. UDP streaming) and many other things were significantly more complex and browser-specific (e.g. tapping into hardware decoders). They were also very receptive to external contributions, which is really nice to see in a major corporate-driven open source project.
nemanja··on RIP Good Times (2008)
Food shortage has nearly nothing to do with climate change and nearly everything to do with sanctions against Russia, resulting in skyrocketing prices of potash, nitrogen and ultimately fertilizer. Combine that with the fact that Ukraine and Russia are also major wheat exporters. Aside from China, most of the countries are running very lean food reserves, resulting in added pressure.
nemanja··on An Engineering Argument for Basic Income
Hoping you are being ironic here rather than moronic
nemanja··on SEC Approves NYSE’s Plan for New IPO Alternative
This is pretty non-sensical. Banks are incentivized to price IPOs at the highest possible price, their comps are directly linked to the proceeds.

If IPO pop was something nefarious, how do you explain IPO pop of Goldman Sachs stock? They ran their own IPO and you can be sure as hell that partners didn't want to leave any money on the table.

In general, IPO pop is an interesting phenomenon and it's not fully explained in the literature.

nemanja··on SEC Approves NYSE’s Plan for New IPO Alternative
Counter balance is the free market - if you set the price too high, investors will not buy into it and the price will be adjusted down.
nemanja··on Stable 1.2 Gigabit/s Internet achieved in moving train in Switzerland
Switzerland in fact has significantly lower taxes in most cantons than most (all?) states in the U.S. I am afraid higher taxes would simply yield more mediocre Amtrak.
nemanja··on SimpleSSR: Server-Side Rendering at Scale
Upcoming Phoenix LiveView is actually pretty viable for SSR -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2DU0qLfPIY

nemanja··on The Startup Stock Tracker
Wouldn't quite discount the markdown as some mere accounting formality. While I agree that markdowns, in many cases, are not indicative of fundamental company performance issues, they are clearly indicative of changing market sentiment (i.e. contraction of valuation multiples). Look, these are all clearly viewed as close to IPOs (otherwise, mutual funds would have no business investing in them), and it is only natural that they dip a bit when the overall market dips a bit (NASDAQ was recently ~20% off the highs in July last year). If you look at high quality public comps (e.g. WDAY), they are still ~20% off the highs, so it makes sense that private "unicorns" are marked down just about the same amount. Basically, these mutual fund valuations are as close as you get to how public markets would value these companies, simply because these mutual funds will be the top holders and buyers when the companies hit IPO.
nemanja··on Martin Shkreli Arrested on Securities Fraud Charges
He's a sociopath. Not even a smart one, just a dumb sociopath. A mildly smart sociopath could not possibly be on record with those statements.

Referring to him as CEO of a publicly traded company (which he factually is) is quite generous. His hedge fund was apparently a pump and dump scheme (generally hard thing to prove in court, so he got away with it). He eventually lost all of investors' money, which he repaid by allegedly committing securities fraud that he's arrested for. The two companies that he started (fired from the first one for fraud, then started the second as a carbon copy) were simple sham operations where he would use the equity from public investors to buy life saving drugs and then simply jack up the prices to make it NPV positive. No real research, no science, just media hype and b/s.

Hope that his lawyers jack up the rates at least 5,000%, prosecutors do a good job and, provided charges are proven, a sensible judge puts him away for some time in a real prison, not a country club for white-collar criminals. Just think a place like Sing Sing could be an educational, growth experience for a guy who threatens one's family like that. May just show him how tough and smart he really is.

nemanja··on Fed Ends Zero-Rate Era
> ...move did nothing to assure markets that the Fed is in control, or set credible, measurable goals for future hikes

Markets respectfully disagree, see the uptick across all indices since the announcement.

As you point out, there is only so much Fed can do and they are taking a measured, responsible stance, well within expectations. The fact that Fed's actions are fully aligned with expectations is kind of the point - the last thing they want to do is spook the markets, so messaging and signaling is key.

nemanja··on Startup Stock Option Changes
generally you would have a double trigger, so as long as you stay with the acquirer you would fully vest over time, which is a fair proposition. depending on the terms of the deal and acquirer's stock you may have no optionality (all cash), some optionality (some stock, but low growth), or a lot more optionality (acquirer has a better growth story). there have been cases from the days of the 2000's bubble where gains post-acquisition were 10x. Much less likely today, but certanly possible.
nemanja··on Startup Stock Option Changes
in practice, it is set very high to cover all conversions and future capital needs and then some. however, it can be increased if needed, with a sharedholder vote.
nemanja··on Startup Stock Option Changes
That is the upper bound that is generally much higher than the fully diluted count, so not a good proxy. However, it would be a fair assumption on your part since you are not given the right level of transparency. At any rate, probably best to be firm about the ask and just walk away if you dont get it, since it is not a good sign for things to come. Unless, of course, you would be okay to work there if they dont disclose you a salary (salary? dont worry about it...)
nemanja··on Google Hires Tech Team from Homejoy, Readies Leap into Home Services
I've always been skeptical of corporate/strategic VCs for exactly this reason. At the end of the day, no matter what kind of Chinese wall you put in there, people are people and corporate agenda is a corporate agenda and it's perhaps naive to think you can separate the two.

Corporate VCs are effectively a way for cash rich corporations to buy call options on promising and/or potentially disruptive teams and technologies and keep close tabs on what is happening and how things are progressing. I can't think of a situation where corporate VC was a markedly better outcome for a startup or entrepreneur than a traditional financial VC.

nemanja··on Redux: Atomic Flux with Hot Reloading
Hey Dan,

Redux looks awesome. I am using react-dnd and hot reloader on my current project and they are great. Thank you for all the great contributions you are making to the ecosystem.

The idea of modeling the store as a reducer is clever. Complication I see is that my action creators are often not pure functions (i.e. there is generally a side effect to update the database and persist the change). However, given the focus of redux on improving the dev workflow, I suppose database updates/side effects could be mocked out. How would you handle this scenario?

What would actually be awesome to have and go hand-in-hand with redux is an immutable write-only isomorphic database (for application state persistence), where you use the same initial state/reducer for redux and the database. Database stores initial state, logs actions and computes the current state using the reducer (and caches it) - much like redux on the client. Curious to hear what people think about this or if anyone has seen anything like it.

nemanja··on React Performance
Here is a really good talk on React performance that may also be helpful - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYzlpRvWZ6c
nemanja··on React Performance
This smells like a shill piece by a Google developer advocate [1] with a horse in the race [2].

The key benefit of React is an extremely low cognitive load. There are only three simple concepts to grok (props, state and lifecycle) to get productive. The code is very easy to reason about (components are essentially pure functions of props and state) and debugging is much simpler than with vanilla JS or jQuery on a project of any meaningful size.

With respect to performance, React shines when it comes to DOM mutations (e.g. removing a div from DOM, creating a new div, inserting new div into the DOM) which is what you generally encounter with the real-world load. Here is a demo illustrating such load [3]. Benchmark offered by OP is amazingly contrived (actually it feels designed to show React in a bad light and lack of full source code is very telling). I struggle to think of a real-world scenario of append-only page with 1000+ images in the DOM, there is simply no valid reason to do that. React in turn makes it really easy and fast to implement infinite scrolling (similar to UITableView) and there are a couple of good open source components that address that.

[1] See the bottom of https://aerotwist.com/

[2] https://aerotwist.com/blog/polymer-for-the-performance-obses...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OeXsL5mr4g

nemanja··on Why PowerPoint should be banned
Putting together an effective presentation and visual aid (i.e. slide deck) is very time consuming, very iterative, requires a lot of thought and reflection, at least a few reviewers that are removed from putting it together and/or the topic, and a lot of practice. Reducing presentation to simply putting together a slide deck is a fail from the get-go. Blaming bad presentations on the tools used to put them together is shallow.

While there is really no substitute for good coaching, first hand experience, mistakes made and good feedback, here are a few quick tips that I've picked up over the years -

1. The best and most engaging presentations simply have a title that captures the key point and a nice/fun background photo that supports/illustrates the story. Audience will pay attention to the story instead of reading text off the slide.

2. To highlight a fact, keep it to one fact per slide. Make it short and direct (e.g. "3x faster" rather than "212.32% performance improvement").

3. To illustrate a quantitative point, one chart per page is okay, but it must be super simple and easy (absolutely no 3D nonsense, at most 3-4 bars/2 lines/3-4 pie slices, clearly labeled axes). Multiple charts are sometimes okay, but they must be each super simple, belong together, have the same scales and tell a clear and obvious story. Effective charts are a topic of its own, anything by Tufte is a great head start.

4. If you must have more than one point on a slide, keep it at 3 direct, concise bullets per page (if any bullet wraps with a large font, it's too wordy and unclear). No sub-bullets or additional explanations should be necessary. Two bullets is too little (i.e. condense it to one key point), four is too much.

5. No more than one simple diagram per page. Best to keep it to the title that captures they key point and a diagram. Additional explanatory text should not be necessary - if title + diagram can't stand on their own, they are not good enough. Also, if the point of the diagram is not immediately obvious to someone looking at it for the first time, the diagram sucks.

6. Avoid wall of text (e.g. that NASA slide on Columbia's tiles) at all costs. Audience will start reading the slide, completely tune out what you are saying and then get bored half a way through and give up.

7. Contrasting points or showing contradictory data/ideas requires extra care to avoid cognitive dissonance.

8. Background should be as plain as possible. White is best, black/gray could be okay. Anything else pretty much sucks. All text in one color, with great contrast to the background.

9. Timing/length of presentation is super important. Generally, it is very hard for people to stay focused for more than ~7 minutes, so it's good to cover a point in less than 7 minutes and then change it up a bit (e.g. change presenters, show a video, get to a different topic). Overall, presentations should be less than 30 minutes, 45 minutes tops. Anything longer than that is simply too long, you'll lose the audience. Here are two books on the topic I found helpful. They are easy to follow, very short and to the point - "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace" [1] and "Guide to Managerial Communication" [2].

* * *

Overall, the piece feels quite trashy - it dumps all the blame where it doesn't belong (tool vs. lack of presentation/communication skill). Those slides could have very well been made in Keynote or Reveal.JS and they wouldn't suck any less. The piece is also not constructive, it doesn't give reader any hints or tips how to make presentations better.

Finally, a great counterexample to the main point of the piece is pretty much every slide deck that comes with Apple/Steve Jobs' keynote. The best part is that no one remembers or pays particular attention to the deck, but if you analyze the presentation more closely or watch it a couple of times, it becomes clear how effective the decks are.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226899152

[2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/013297133X

nemanja··on Six Men Spent 520 Days Locked in a Room to See If We Could Live on Mars
Agreed, Mars is stark compared to the Caribbean, but there is some minimalistic beauty to it all.

There may also be some survivorship bias when it comes to the colonies. First colonies often failed and for quite a while (e.g. Roanoke nearly 100 years after Columbus), so I doubt it was all fun and paradise.

nemanja··on Six Men Spent 520 Days Locked in a Room to See If We Could Live on Mars
That is perhaps true, but only until people figure out how to terraform the planet. Americas also sucked (albeit to a lesser degree) for the first settlers, but some 500+ years later we have an economic and technological powerhouse here. Perhaps stark and cruel reality of Mars exploration can provide a similar growth engine for humanity and get the civilization to the next level in the next couple hundred years.
nemanja··on Slack was hacked
I think you are spot on - you can't apply it retroactively in this case. If you set it up as H(H(pwd, salt), pepper), you could apply pepper retroactively, but that's not what's proposed here nor in the SO question linked above. Also if you do H(H(pwd, salt), pepper), you can successively apply new peppers and make it a bit more maintainable, but I am unclear that it is secure to do so.
nemanja··on An introduction to reactive programming
Thanks for the links - Reactive Design Patterns is a great read. On the bottom of the first page, they list FP, futures & promises, CSPs, observers and observables (i.e. Rx), and actors as tools of the trade. Then in the third chapter they look at each tool and evaluate it on the basis of "reactive classification" as per the manifesto (including message passing, which is one of the tenets). In my view, it is not presented as a purely reactive/not reactive dichotomy, but more of a sliding scale - a given tool may satisfy some tenets and not the rest.

Actor model is arguably the most robust with respect to the proposed classification, but the authors also point out that it is not be-all and end-all and that specific problems or even portions of your system may call for different patterns.

nemanja··on New Jersey legalizes direct Tesla sales
As strange as it may sound - I ask them to exclude all taxes and fees to reduce variability and have more of an apples to apples comparison. Taxes & fees are well defined, but in my experience, dealers try to sneak in a decent "service fee" in there. One guy tried to sneak in as much as ~$600 I think, which I found amusing. It just helps to reduce noise and focus on a single number; they'll do all the DMV work for you for free.
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