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systemBuilder

117 karma · joined March 31, 2015

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systemBuilder··on OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change
They need to have a license structure like ARM. With ARM you can license their IP cores or you can license their architecture. Apple and NVidia and even Qualcomm have different needs (higher performance, higher process node, better battery life, and higher cost is okay for them) and they take an Architecture License (Qualcomm occasionally licenses IP cores, too.)

Spacelift and Env0 need architecture licenses. People on TF cloud essentially are licensing their IP cores. Their terraform cloud service is being run very poorly. When outsiders moved to provide an alternative for this thing which is broken inside of Hashicorp, the lawyers have been sic'd on them! That is not adult behavior. It shows a great naivety in business affairs ...

systemBuilder··on The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)
IPv6 only solves a problem if you don't understand the problem itself! Just because people have five devices doesn't mean they need 65,000 * 5 internet addresses ... there is an endpoint for every port and each device needs only a handful of ports if not only one! Each user can certainly get by with five ports on five shared ipv4 addresses.

As I said before IPv6 will never happen fully because it solves a non-problem very expensively - by assuming the whole world is 64-bit workstations!

systemBuilder··on The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)
I was asked by my employer in 2003 when IPv6 would replace IPv4? After substantial research, my answer was, "never"!!! I almost got fired for that answer but I am correct so far.

There are a large class of people out there who do not understand the end to end argument in system design and who never saw a piece of bloatware they didn't love. For them IPv6 will happen tomorrow. They are to internet like maga people are to democracy - caustic.

In 2004 IPv6 was hyped as solving the impending IPv4 address shortage. NAT had already been invented and there was no shortage as IPv4 addresses were allocated as inefficiently as possible and there was no market to buy and sell IP addresses nor was there any rental cost for owning ipv4 addresses. So it was solving a non problem.

My employer Qualcomm eventually proposed using IPv6 for cell phone handsets in an overlay network called openran. This was a convenience and not a necessity because there are more than 4 billion cell phones in the world.

You just don't need these bloated addresses in IPv6. You need banks of addresses mainly for the server. The client never needs 65,000 incoming or outgoing connections. The number of client computers in the world that are running as servers and that need open datagram accessibility from anywhere in the internet is virtually zero. Want it? yes! Need it - meaning impossible to do without it - No! There are always bridging workarounds to avoid giving client machines dedicated IP addresses!

IPv6 is not respectful of small system design and hardly provides usable improvements to IPv4. IPv6 was a marketing tool invented by Cisco to sell bigger more expensive routers, not to solve a problem with any economy ... It is especially detrimental to IOT.

systemBuilder··on Microsoft lays off portion of workforce as part of ‘realignment’
Probably better to discuss it at : https://www.thelayoff.com/microsoft

Once upon a time an even better place for such discussions was : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

systemBuilder··on 40 years ago, Tron changed sci-fi movies
I remember it well (I was 20). It was a very boring movie. I think it's famous just for being 1st, i guess they poured all the money into the CGI because it's a 2-star story.
systemBuilder··on People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
This is one of the stupidest articles I have seen in a long time. I could just as easily write an article about "The number of professors today with US citizen parents is at an all-time low" based on Figure #1 of this article but it wouldn't be politically correct so it would never be published by the washington post.

https://www.aip.org/statistics/reports/trends-physics-phds-1...

Note that public funding for grad students really exploded in the 1960's so there are just a hell of a lot more PhDs running around today because their degrees were paid for by the US government. In the 1950's and earlier, PhDs were paid for with something called CASH (not credit), from the POCKET of the parents of the PhD - a concept that we just don't have any more today ...

systemBuilder··on People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
ru kidding me I saw a top-10 school give a professor offer to a stanford grad. She did a shitty interview talk about a PhD topic that didn't matter. All the grad stuents who heard her talk agreed.

But as it was explained to me by a member of the faculty recruiting committee, "She's a woman and the bad PhD could have been the advisor's fault". She turned down the offer for something better.

Academic recruitment is a total crock of shit. You just need to tick the boxes, "woman, top-3 school" and THEY have to justify NOT hiring you ...

systemBuilder··on People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
I got an engineering job at a top-30 EE dept (UBC). By the pay was really poor - i once had an elite dad but he died when i was 13. So I quit the job, as I was no longer elite. An elite family can backstop you when you are taking a low-paying academic job in an expensive city.

The thought that poor people would go for a professor job is no true. I believe most poor people would much rather have money to help their family, money to bank for security, money to pay back their student loans, money to start a family life, etc.

Also it's worth pointing out that academia is a huge pyramid scheme and jumping to the next rung of the pyramid can be made much much easier if your mentors (ie your parents) know which tricks to use to make the greatest leap possible.

systemBuilder··on Ask HN: How on earth are you using your Apple computer with external displays?
My friend tried to run 3 external monitors on his 2019 Intel 8-core 16" 32gb MacBook pro and it gets to melting temperature, throttles, and just sits there with a spinning beachball disc for most of the day. Lid closed, vertical cooling stand! Seriously.

My wife has a 16" MacBook pro 2019 with a pathetic 16GB of ram. When she connects a 4k 30hz Sony x800h tv to her MacBook (via HDMI dongle) it heats up terrifically and throttles down to about 1/10th speed and the mouse jumps across the screen and button pushes can take minutes. Her solution? Avoid external monitors! Seriously.

I am able to use my 8-core 32gb 2019 MacBook pro with a 4k tcl s405 4ktv & HDMI dongle but it takes about 5 minutes each day to get it to sync to the dongle that never gave me problems with a 2018 MacBook pro. I had to change my calendar reminders to add minutes to the alarm first thing in the morning it's SO FLAKEY! Seriously.

So two out of three of us are enjoying external HDMI monitors with our MacBook pro 2019. But we aren't enjoying them very much!

systemBuilder··on Don't use Kubernetes yet
Open shift : an unstable trailing-edge version of Kubernetes with too much security to the point of wasting everybody's time. Or so says my team which is still recovering from that unmitigated disaster ...
systemBuilder··on Don't use Kubernetes yet
Am I supposed to believe these blanket statements from a person who doesn't realize 1e0 = 1e1 = 1e2 = ... = 1 ?
systemBuilder··on Tesla sends untrained employees to work on cars as service becomes problematic
In my last 3 visits to dealers 1 resulted in a fix, two were absolute disasters and the dealer broke the car more ... Dealers seem to be losing any edge they once had ...
systemBuilder··on Tesla sends untrained employees to work on cars as service becomes problematic
If it's any compensation all self driving car companies are staffed by liars. Big ones. Of the AI variety, which deserves a special genus all its own.
systemBuilder··on Good Developer Laptop
The problem is that manufacturers want to detect the SWE customers and mark those laptops up by $1000. What do you get for that extra $1000? Another 16GB of RAM ...

We own a Thinkpad yoga and various MacBook pros. The Intel MacBook pros are thigh-burning junk. Put 2 or 3 screens on it and watch it slow to a crawl. The $2k Thinkpad is giving us sketchy battery behavior after 133 power cycles. I'm not happy with any laptops these days the manufacturers are way too "my way or the highway" with their inflexible ripoff config and pricing strategies ..

systemBuilder··on Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
It's not that we don't have nuclear power plants, nuclear fuel, and nuclear technology.

One problem is that France's nuclear industry has committments to use something like 2/3rds of the world's reserves of Uranium Ore.

Another problem is, we've had 3 once-in-1000 years accidents in 40 years. By my calculations, the entire world will be a radioactive waste dump in 250,000 years, given the rate of land contamination by nuclear accidents.

Why do nuclear cheerleaders ignore this fact? They must.

systemBuilder··on Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?
In my wife's case, the 16GB macs don't even have enough memory to drive a 4K display. Her mac goes crazy, overheats, fan at 100%, everything slows to molasses, piece of junk. And it's x86.
systemBuilder··on AMD is now worth more than Intel
Exactly true the rise in the cost of next-generation fabs has completely changed the business model so that only foundries can survive. Benjamin Graham analysis is not capable of detecting this inflection point in industry strategy nor can it detect Intel's stubborn refusal to adapt and change!
systemBuilder··on AMD is now worth more than Intel
Not exactly true AMD is still doing a little bit of manufacturing at Global Foundries but that place threw up their hands in the air and quit innovating! So stuck at 10-12nm ...
systemBuilder··on AMD is now worth more than Intel
It was projected and widely broadcast throughout the industry 12 years ago that fabs were getting more expensive faster than any single design domain for semiconductors was growing! So the only way to build next generation fabs was to onboard new types of designs to offset the cost of the fabs which was doubling every two or three years!

Intel had the greedy stupid arrogant policy of going it alone for everything, and failed to onboard cellular (3x!) and AI and flash and tv and the list goes on and on and on .... Hence they wasted more than 10 years without onboarding a single new type of semiconductor into the Intel Fab production process! It doesn't matter if they designed the best chips in the Universe they can't keep up if they can't build the next generation Fab and they can't do it with CPUs alone so at the moment they are facing total financial destruction of in house CPU production!

Taiwan Semiconductor had the wonderful intelligent smart idea to crowdsource designs from all over the planet and of course that open market for foundry services is the only way forward and Intel was a fool for a decade at least! It's still not clear they can mend their ways!

Unless Intel proves it can succeed as a foundry, they're doomed - or will lose their fabs! It's not an easy transition to make for such a large company!

You seem to think it's a minor thing for Intel to pick itself up and start driving again. No. False. The other competitors have boarded jet airplanes (foundry model with much greater economies of scale) whereas intel still thinks it can compete in the cars (in-house fabs) of 50Y ago ..

systemBuilder··on AMD is now worth more than Intel
Up until now AMD has benefitted from a great deal of animosity towards Intel by absolutely everyone in Silicon Valley including Google Facebook and Apple. It didn't take much to realize that if you were building a laptop or building a data center intel was ripping you off. I know my employer (Google search) felt this way!

From Haswell (4000-series) to the 12000 series I would say there was maybe one generation of improvement in between and six marketing generations where nothing got better nothing got faster but prices were outrageous -$600 for a slow hot MacBook cpu, and everything got new marketing names!

So the industry has been desperate for an alternative to Intel since 2009 and AMD has finally delivered on the promise by building data center chips and adapting them to laptop use. I was an early AMD investor because of rx480 at $3.50 by the way but I sold out at $10.50.

From here on AMD will truly have to earn its keep and things will be a lot tougher as they are no longer the scrappy underdog anymore!

systemBuilder··on Modern smartphone lenses are crazy
Sony also made the AppleColor 640x480 monitor in 1987 with the release of the Mac II. This was quite likely the most fantastic monitor available in this size in this year. It was rumored to be a regular Sony Computer monitor without an anti-reflective coating so it could be brighter and clearer.
systemBuilder··on Tell HN: If You Are in Russia
If you think that promises never to join NATO would satisfy Putin, then you are brainwashed by Putin! Ukraine has already offered that peace offering of NATO neutrality. Putin has as also demanded that all Soviet / Warsaw pact countries become undefended so they will be naked tó Russian aggression!

Putin wants to expand his dominance in northern Asia. 140m citizens is not enough; he wants to add 45m Ukrainians to have 185m! He is a colonial dictator in his homeland and does as he pleases!

systemBuilder··on Bicycle Recommendations
You can definitely notice 2 lbs + butted tubing upgrade while riding a bike. It's essentially why Raleigh offered 3 grades of steel bikes in the 70s :

28 lbs : carbon steel (2 models)

25 lbs : 531 butted main tubes, forks (2 models)

23 lbs : 531 throughout (2 models)

The super course was a bit of an aberration (27 lbs; 531 plain gauge steel main tubes only; only a 1 lbs upgrade from carbon steel; the 531 did not improve the bike but the sticker on the seat tube conferred bragging rights!)

systemBuilder··on Bicycle Recommendations
You are correct the upright position on a city bike is harder on the spine! That is why upright bicycles usually have a real mattress sprung saddle not just a piece of cheap plastic or carbon!
systemBuilder··on Bicycle Recommendations
I met a guy at a bike shop who was buying aluminum handlebars and he said that his carbon bars had failed on him twice! Both with bloody consequences! I've probably ridden 20,000 miles of my lifetime and had zero failures with aluminum bars!
systemBuilder··on There was a time before Mathematica (2013)
Wolfram is a blowhard with an ego too large for hyperspace. I remember attending a rambling lecture at the UIUC Beckman institute on his "new kind of science" topic with no interesting results and at the end of 65 minutes he said, "Are there any questions?" and everyone just stood up and began filing out of the room and Wolfram became irate, and began complaining that nobody had any questions - we had learned nothing at all.
systemBuilder··on How much boilerplate code you need to write a ray-tracer?
Really annoying that he never gives a single answer to the question posed in the title of the article. Such a troll for a title . .
systemBuilder··on Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes (2013)
How about leaving your 16 year old twin boys to fend for themselves at home? Yes. We got a visit from CPS ... SHEESH!
systemBuilder··on Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes (2013)
If I am reading the graph of infant mortality in Finland correctly their rate is 2 per thousand children and the USA rate is 6deaths per 1000! Maybe we should write to Biden and get cpsc crooked rules revoked and start giving out baby boxes?

Medical Xpress: U.S. infant mortality reached historic low in 2019. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12-infant-mortality-hist...

systemBuilder··on Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes (2013)
CPSC has always been a way to get your chief competitor's products banned! Good old fashioned American corruption!
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