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pmb

855 karma · joined February 20, 2008

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pmb··on Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era
At this point, when you are doing big AI you basically have to buy it from NVidia or rent it from Google. And Google can design their chips and engine and systems in a whole-datacenter context, centralizing some aspects that are impossible for chip vendors to centralize, so I suspect that when things get really big, Google's systems will always be more cost-efficient.

(disclosure: I am long GOOG, for this and a few other reasons)

pmb··on I added a Bluesky comment section to my blog
It's nice, right? I did it a while ago and I highly recommend it. https://triplepat.com/blog/2024/10/17/how-the-website-works
pmb··on Why Busy Beaver hunters fear the Antihydra
Any computable function f on one variable x has a program. That function is a program of size p. The input x also has a data size d. BB(p+d) >= f(x), by definition, for all f and x. If you think you might have a (function, input) pair (and corresponding (program, data) pair) for which this is not true, see the previous sentence.
pmb··on Why Bell Labs Worked
It was forcibly funded as part of a consent decree from the US government that allowed AT&T to continue as a monopoly as long as they invested a percent of their yearly revenue (or profit? I forget) in research. AT&T, having no interest in changing their incredibly profitable phone network, then proceeded to do fundamental research, as required as a condition of their monopoly.

Decades later, AT&T was broken up into the baby bells and the consent decree was removed at that time. Bell Labs' fate was then sealed - it no longer had a required legal minimum funding level, and the baby bells were MBA-run monstrosities that were only interested in "research" that paid dividends in the next 6 months in a predictable fashion.

The funding model is an integral part of the story.

pmb··on Tailscale has raised $160M
They are a zero-trust networking solution that also traverses IPv4 NATs. Zero-trust networking is a layer above the IP layer. In an IPv6 Internet their capital costs go down, and their product remains valuable for their paying customers. (Free accounts mostly use it for NAT traversal, businesses for the zero-trust encryption.)

Their CEO has been working with (and supporting) v6 for decades both at the executive level (now) and also as an extremely capable software engineer that I personally met with a few times while we were both engineers at Google doing network measurement.

pmb··on Google Maps in the US Will Change to Gulf of America and Mount McKinley
plonk
pmb··on Google Maps in the US Will Change to Gulf of America and Mount McKinley
Countries can tell companies what the maps of their countries should look like and what things should be called.

For example, Google shows different info about the Kashmir region depending on whether you are in Pakistan or India or external to both, because of how the Indian and Pakistani governments define the borders and names of the region. If the US government changes a thing's name, then Google will change that thing's name within the US. Google mostly doesn't choose names, it uses externally-supplied mostly-governmental name databases. Governments have the power to name their own regions.

I don't want Google to choose what things are called, so I think they are doing the right thing here, and the USG is doing the dumb thing.

pmb··on The Evolution of SRE at Google
NB: The Treynor Curve is named after Ben Treynor and his ideas. Ben Treynor's name changed to Ben Sloss a few years back, and Ben Sloss is one of the authors of this article.
pmb··on Tell HN: John Friel my father, internet pioneer and creator of QModem, has died
The Qmodem program, brought home on some random 3.5 inch floppy, allowed me to connect to local BBSes and started my journey into networking computers. Now I have a PhD in CS and I spent more than a decade deeply caring about the Internet, networks, and network research. Without the start given by those BBSes, my path could have been very different! I am very sorry for your loss, and I hope the fact that he made a random teen's life better is some comfort.
pmb··on Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals
They said it was currently worse than it used to be before the EU. That is not true.

Netflix engaging in complicated IP rights negotiations does not mean the existence of the European Union is pointless.

pmb··on Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals
> The EU single market is largely a myth from the perspective of wanting to start a successful company that can compete internationally. It's not any easier now than it was before the EU existed.

[citation needed] because I think this is extremely false.

It is easy to underestimate the pain caused by having all the pre-euro currencies and pre-EU tax laws (yes there was the Schengen zone and EEC, but the EU uniformity helps a lot) and pre-EU borders.

Source: me, who is a middle-aged American founding a tech startup in the EU and visited Europe many times before the EU existed.

pmb··on Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks
No. Satellite (except when they use lasers, but nobody is proposing space lasers) is a broadcast medium and wire is point to point. Wires will almost always be cheaper and more reliable and faster on a per-customer basis and have less interference.
pmb··on 2.7-meters Telescope mirror shot 7 times (1970)
The state motto of Texas is "Friendship".

(this is true)

pmb··on Ask HN: What is the best code base you ever worked on?
People who have never had it have no concept of how much they are missing. It's so frustrating.
pmb··on [dead]
Compared to cars and motorcycles? More e-bike usage means more e-bike accidents - that's just arithmetic. And e-bike usage soared.

This is scaremongering without those comparisons. The tell here is that somehow e-bike usage in NYC is being blamed on "Democrat" lawmakers. Historically and in most style guides, they are called "Democratic" lawmakers - dropping the "ic" is a right-wing media thing.

pmb··on Wehe – Check Your ISP for Net Neutrality Violations
It is almost precisely what "network neutrality" means in the EU. The US definition is different.
pmb··on The Myth of Code Coverage
100% is the way to be. Once you get there, then you can start having useful conversations about how to make the coverage more meaningful. But first, you have to make sure that every line is run at least once without crashing (except for the lines that are supposed to crash things - those you need to verify DO crash things).

Interestingly, once something is designed for testability it is more likely to not have bugs. But saying that therefore you don't need the tests is silly, because without the tests you wouldn't have designed for testability.

pmb··on Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?
They tried to make a better C++ and accidentally made a better Java and a better Python.
pmb··on The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014) [video]
And HN said "Yup, he basically deserved it." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2802917
pmb··on Americans are getting more nervous about what they say in public
And (truth value unknown by Snopes because proving a negative is impossible, but it corresponds with the videos) failed to wear identification or do or say anything that would allow the person being taken by unknown people into an unmarked car to distinguish those people from one of the paramilitary alt-right militias that populates Oregon.
pmb··on Americans are getting more nervous about what they say in public
Your link marks the claim as "mixed truth", which is different from the "no evidence" in your comment text.
pmb··on 62% of Americans Say They Have Political Views They’re Afraid to Share
That's definitely a clear, strong, and powerful ideology. Pretending it is a minimal one is incorrect.

More money (for whom? and by what means?) is not always better.

pmb··on Design Docs at Google
The best is to get agreement on the design is gdocs and then export it to Github so that the design and code live next to each other.
pmb··on Software Methodology: Why One Size Fits No One
"Characterizing People as First-Order, Non-Linear Components in Software Development" knew why in 1999.
pmb··on Tech Jobs, Cheaper Housing: The New Silicon Cities
It's at the southern end of the box canyon that is the Willamette Valley (the end that abuts the mountains), and to the north is Linn-Benton County "the grass seed capitol of the world" ( https://www.google.com/search?q=grass+seed+capital+of+the+wo... ). If you have grass-pollen allergies, then Eugene really sucks. For everyone else it is fine except when the farmers burn their fields (which they aren't supposed to do, but enforcement is patchy).
pmb··on A Container Is a Function Call
Type-checked container interfaces is the reason for protocol buffers.
pmb··on ISP Interconnection and its Impact on Consumer Internet Performance
It certainly could be either side of the interconnect that's causing the problem. The important insight is that no ISP is uniformly bad at either end, which means that the problem is not at either end, but in the middle. So this study has found congestion in the core (at the interconnects), precisely where it is not supposed to be, and has found that congestion to be so bad that it drives performance to sub-broadband levels.

Cogent and L3 are ISPs as well, so I think saying "ISPs are failing to provide broadband speeds" is fair. However, to add context, L3 had a blog post a while back explaining that they are standing ready to add more capacity for cheap and that the congestion is, in at least one instance (in LA), Verizon's fault. http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/verizons-accidental-mea...

pmb··on ISP Interconnection and its Impact on Consumer Internet Performance
Original title was something like: US ISPs are failing to provide broadband speeds during peak hours.

If I could make it longer, I might have said "Due to neglect of relatively cheap interconnects, US ISPs are and were measured to be providing sub-broadband connections to many portions of the Internet".

The title "ISP Interconnection and its Impact on Consumer Internet Performance" just says that there was a study and says nothing about its results, but it's the results that are interesting. It was kind of a surprise to see the title changed out from underneath me. I did not know HN titles were edited in that way.

pmb··on Matt Blaze: My life as an international arms courier (1995)
LaTeX habits.
pmb··on Recruitment Process for a Google Site Reliability Engineer
I have been a lunch "interviewer" at Google. I was never asked to provide any feedback.
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