socmag

I really find it difficult as well, and I think it is a lot to do with the nomenclature that surrounds the field. Sometimes I feel it's almost kept obtuse on purpose.

The way I think about is to think of it is if "Design Patterns" helped show how to "engineer" software at the medium scale, category theory is a tool for helping us learn how to compose systems, and not just software.

I wish it were a little more approachable, but it seems like we are getting there.

There are people like Bartosz out there who really want to make it second nature.

https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/11/04/category-the-essence-...

I mean just think, it wasn't that long ago nobody knew what the heck a lambda was ;)

We'll get there...

According to Sir Googalot....

Europe includes 51 independent states. Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey are the transcontinental countries, partially located in both Europe and Asia. Armenia and Cyprus politically are considered European countries, though geographically they are located in the West Asia territory.

Also, there are 28 member states in the European Union: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden ...

Granted, five eyes is more like fifteen these days, but still, doesn't make it right or just because everyone is doing it we should just tow the line, doff our caps and cry for more. Some of us have been fans of Dickens and Kafka far too long to know that.

[Edit] - Going to try and update this post here because I'm not allowed by HN to post very often currently...

--- snip ---

First of all I don't see any comments here that say that the US are the only country that spies. I mention this since it seems to be a straw man that is stuck on repeat.

Secondly, surveillance done right takes a heck of a lot of resources and infrastructure; and even though all countries and humans partake, some have rather more resources and connections to accomplish these goals than others.

It's kind of like the 1% - there's nothing wrong "technically" with 1% having half the cash (given that it is ultimately reinvested), the problem is abuse of power that comes with it and lack of oversight.

Ultimately, we have seen stories repeatedly regarding US and Western technologies for surveillance, not Palestinian, Iranian or Luxembourgian... and this is another one.

How many is that this week/month/year/decade?

My family has been in and around SIGINT/COMINT for decades so I'm hardly surprised, although it is a bit surprising how comedic it is seeing people comparing the capabilities of the NSA to that of nations with less GDP than Luxembourg.

I think it is good to "Have the conversation", whether it be right or wrong to infiltrate SWIFT et al.

Fantastic job, congrats and Happy Easter, it was very nice following along. A lot of people were rooting for you.

Someone get this man a chocolate egg, he deserves it!

I upvoted.

Looks like you genuinely felt it is out of the scope of a lot of novices (which it well might be at least for a weekend project), and you genuinely were looking for tips.

Just look for projects that would make yourself or others happy. Doesn't matter how small or large, whether it would take an hour or a decade, the hardest part is getting past line zero. Once you have that the next hardest part is getting to line one; wash, rinse repeat.

The good news is everything is relative and everyone has different skill sets - what's hard for everyone else might be a cinch for you due to your childhood fascination blending fishing line with champagne corks - who knows? ;)

Try not to be discouraged, just stick with it and be infinitely inquisitive, throw caution to the wind and dive right in.

Good luck and happy sailing!

Looking forward to that, it will be a very nice data set

I like what you are doing a lot. It doesn't matter that it isn't a one to one comparison, the point is you are taking on the challenge and enjoying it. Probably actually you are learning some stuff along the way as well.

It would be kind of neat if the place experiment could become something of a micro-benchmark for online customer facing distributed platforms.

Keep up the good work man, it's looking good.

Don't forget to hydrate and consume pizza.

Yes I agree that a lot of stack space goes unused right now, that is for sure, but the nice thing about the stack it is definitely thread/core local, and if you did have fast-stack capability we would definitely use it.

What I was thinking about was a separate bus to a per thread stack space with no competitors. That seems interesting, and I don't think it would be that hard to add.

I really like your ideas there, especially number 1, that's very smart.

Number 2 is clever as well.

> Who knows etc..

ORLY? Good to know.

/s? FTFY

Maybe you weren't joking. That's the even more scary thing.

Personally I like to hop on my bicycle and meet real people in the real world.

I don't even know what to think about VR at this point. :/

One thing I'd love to see is to have enough L1 data cache per core for a modest amount of stack space.

Not so critical on GPU's but would make a huge difference for CPU's and languages that can take benefit.

Give me a meg or two to play with. Would make a huge difference for data heavy workloads.

You could even go as far as having a separate cache just for stack.

I mean, by its very definition it is isolated. It's the "register file" of CISC machines

Oh nice articles

> Not if your application is dragging two and a half invasive runtimes around.

Cheers to that :/

Really great article and comments :)

Just as a point of reference, I currently see around 1.25 - 1.5 op/cycle on carefully crafted highly parallel lock-free, stall-free code... say running on 8 threads. Code that has 0.01% branch misprediction.

Unfortunately in my case as others mention, access to the I/O ports and memory latency, is a real limiting factor. The CPU is just... waiting

Getting to the Holy Grail that Ryg talks about of 3 instructions per cycle is really hard with non-vectorizable workloads - like screwing around with hash tables that have no chance of fitting in L1/L3, and not being able to really make much use of SIMD, even if you are paying attention to cache-lines.

Most apps barely scrape by at 0.5 instructions/cycle or worse and spend most of the time bouncing on the kernel for stupid stuff. Not good.

Absolutely <3 performance freaks!

Early in my career in the 90's I worked for BZW working on derivative hedging for financial swaps.

Things were pretty hectic and it was a pretty small team. We were using SQL Server at best and Excel spreadsheets as information feeds at worst, trying to calculate Black-Scholes on this stuff.

I clearly remember talking to the Traders and Quants regarding certain calculations we were doing to give them bond price goals for offsetting risk on the trades.

Honestly the traders at least didn't give a crap. I would present them tables; they would look at it, and would say "yeah that looks about right" - that's a direct quote from BZW's lead trader in 1994. I can't imagine things have changed that much.

I didn't stay long in that environment; it was pretty clear to me that despite getting people like Grady Booch coming in to clean up our act our "Customers" didn't really care too much about the mechanics of how things worked, or even worse whether the calculations were correct.

Top and bottom is, while the banking industry may employ "Cowboys" in the back-office for IT services, they also employ Cowboys in the front-office making the trades.

I doubt that has changed for the better that much. See 2008 financial crisis et al.

[Edit] As a side note, for the time I was earning more money than I knew what to do with. My boss at the time felt so ambivalent about his twice yearly 50k (sterling) bonus that he threw it away at the Casino the day he got it, (remember, this is 1994). I left and took a 75% pay cut to go work for Microsoft on projects that were at least form a CS point of view a lot more respectable. Having said that, I don't want to come off too harshly, we were at the cutting edge at the time and the technology was very cool and thoroughly enjoyable. But still..

All numbers are ultimately "probabilistic" in calculations.

Sure you can state them as a "fact", but that undermines quantum theory itself and the Universe.

If you want to do the math right you really need to consider terms as peak probabilities and work from there. (See Chaos theory)

IMHO

Of course doing math with hard constraints is perfectly adequate for most macroscopic calculations.

That said, errors do add up given sufficient entropy and time.

It's quite simple to add fuzziness into the equations but quite a pain in the ass to compute with, plus you will in most cases get the same answer anyway.

As far as real numbers, they are no different from integers, just shift the decimal.

I've stopped now, but it may be worth pausing to reflect on the toxicity and the little social experiment this became in human nature.

Have a good day.

I'm taking screen shots just FYI.

Which one is that?

Sounds awesome.

Anything geospatial would be superb. Disease transmission for example.

Thanks for posting this because this has been getting out of hand recently, and it's very good to see some sanity.

There is an opportunity to do some very cool things with Rust and I think most people would love to see a "better together" mindset being shared.

I think this is a very objective and in-depth article on the matter.

"Criticizing the Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die"

https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0324/

Not sure why certain members of the Rust community aren't happy with just having a neat language. Making one false claim after another isn't doing them any favors. It's just aggravating, especially when people who should know better start to believe the hype.

FAKE NEWS!

Hey, there is a great cartoon about that here!

https://rwer.wordpress.com/2013/11/09/the-scientific-illusio...

Yes it is a quite a niche and strange query technique but looked cute

Interesting tid-bit, one Mr. Sergey Brin published this in 1995

"Near Neighbor Search in Large Metric Spaces"

http://www.vldb.org/conf/1995/P574.PDF

So I'm curious, because I had been planning on using a VP tree for something I'm mulling over. I could see stormy waters though for large dimensions.

Seriously interested to hear any feedback from people who have tried it. Any recommendations for what to do instead?

oh bummer, it was working six months ago...

Wayback machine to the rescue!

https://web.archive.org/web/20160629190654/http://stevehanov...

Quite.

This road seems a much bigger existential risk than any AI holocaust scenario I can imagine. It's very scary stuff and everyone in the field seems to be brimming with glee at how easy it all is.

Just consider that the very mundane HeLa cell line alone managed to jump continents and invade the most stringent safety precautions at dozens of labs. At least they are pretty benign.

Now imagine a nice mosquito delivery vehicle with payload strapped on that nobody has a real clue what it is capable of. I shudder to think.

A lot of people talking about how to re-establish the baseline and that it's not a big deal and nobody should worry.

I get that there are very many wonderful things that can come from this as well, but on the other hand the research is going very fast and this is one area we should be exercising extreme caution.

My manager dropped a bomb on me about 20 years ago as a young engineer and had me be a liaison with some of the people doing research on the Pi calculus.

Still somewhat shaken to this day by that very first meeting, it really didn't go that well.

I really don't grok the math behind it and it is very nice to see this pop up, and Bartosz definitely knows his stuff. I'll give it another whirl. Hats off to him for trying to make it approachable.

Also Brian Beckman and others have often had interesting things to say in these areas.

http://rebcabin.github.io/blog/2013/03/17/category-theory-re...

These days I understand the formal math behind it even less than I used to, which is to say abysmally; however it did teach me some things about how to think about composition that have subconsciously been influential I think over the years.

Nice post.

DARPA are doing a heck of a lot with CRISPR, and as you can imagine for both defense and offence angles.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-military-prep...

This whole video is great btw, where Arati Prabhakar spins through CRISPR, Gene Drive and a heck of a lot more in a presentation at UW.

https://youtu.be/ZHipS0-1ykE?t=2812

Yes interesting stuff. Seems similar in nature to "Vantage Point" trees.

http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=130

"The global economy means nothing to me when I can't get a job."

Yeah I'll buy that, but the global economy is what gave you the computer that you are using to type that message on and it makes your groceries cheaper when you go to QFC.

We certainly do need to find a better way of doing it, because we can't all be big data scientists, drone operators and bartenders. Thumbs up to that

There is no doubt that there is inequality and that inequality is accelerating, especially in the US and West.

What's the global picture look like? I mean we do want our fellow humans to do well too, right?

Maybe not spending so many $$$ on things that go boom might be a good start and instead bomb places with broadband connections, social media, las-vegas strip clubs and NetFlix.

At least that would generate US jobs and still be educational and to all our benefits to some degree.

Again, I get where you are coming from, but then there is this:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-hU7LNS3S3F0/UgQM8LZeTuI/A...

It shows Shanghai in 1987 vs 2013

From a humanist angle, those buildings are outrageous monstrosities and monuments to human egos. However, they were built from wealth generation that probably gave farmers in paddy fields the opportunity to be elevated out of relative poverty to positions where they could gain an education and likely some are now right here with us on HN.

Likely it was all paid for by your average WalMart / Apple / Amazon shopper.

A deeper question is if we feel this is money well spent, and skyscrapers as legacies certainly didn't start in China and are quite prevalent in the West as well.

Taxing the hell out of frivolous luxury goods might be a jolly good start but dunno if that's going to fly anytime soon because even that is a subjective call at best.

Boo, tricky stuff :/