Apply-focused indie lab researching computational foundations of systems across domains using math/CS. Ex-founder (fintech/infra), CS + big data/distributed systems
A distributed system is slower than a laptop or phone by definition of “distributed” which entails a network which has a higher latency than your local system. It’s not about raw speed/latency as much as it is about volume.
I used to compare distributed system with freight trains vs F1 cars. But there are a ton of low latency distributed systems too like your LTE network.
The key factor is how much data is shared by how many endpoints. Having these two very high makes it for very hard problems. Like streaming high definition events to millions of people.
Games like quake are transient and have a small number of users sharing data and if it fails it doesn’t matter enough to need failover, although that could be done relatively easily with a write-ahead log. You need session stickyness at the load balancing layer but otherwise latency is more important than scale, so you don’t need a distributed system per se. Writing a small C/C++ server would make a lot of sense if you didn’t have Go, Rust, etc.
All I'm seeing when opening this is a big red warning
> Deceptive Website Warning
> This website may try to trick you into doing something dangerous, like installing software or disclosing personal or financial information, like passwords, phone numbers, or credit
> Despite being advertised as a community-driven project, key decisions, including financial management, partnerships (with Kayak, for instance), and the inclusion of proprietary components in the code were made by a small group of shareholders, often without input from the broader contributor community.
Are you suggesting a Google/Apple Maps alternative with the differentiators being privacy-focused, "No ads. No tracking. Developed with love by the open-source community"hits #1 on HN and somehow the OP or HN polyculture doesn't care about being forked aver governance concerns, the inclusion of proprietary components in the code, using project’s donation funds for personal expenses, and running ads because of "other reasons"? Please say more.
the finiteness, in a sense, makes it non-exponential.
it boils down to the core characterstic of polynomials (equivalently "algebraic") of being finite series (compare with formal power series that don't have this limitation) of constant powers. Hence, given an input, you can get something that is a polynomial of that input, that makes it a finite sum of constant! powers of that input.
The sum is finite (vs formal power series which can be infinite)
The powers are constant (this is what makes it non-exponential)
> Despite being advertised as a community-driven project, key decisions, including financial management, partnerships (with Kayak, for instance), and the inclusion of proprietary components in the code were made by a small group of shareholders, often without input from the broader contributor community.
This applies mostly to assembly lines. If you've seen large industrial complexes, you should know factories are not rooms. Instead they are large scale "machines". Tire factories, large pipe factories, chemical plants, etc. are much more complex than most assembly lines.
You can order from Costco on Instacart here in the Bay Area.
This said, there's a lot of quality stuff at Costco (besides their huge wines collection) that you can't find anywhere else.
It's a vast generalization of the cost to verify a problem/solution.
- P means polynomial
- NP means nondeterministic polynomial
Roughly polynomial (P) represents the upper bound of the cost to verify, and the polynomial characterization says that given a problem with a certain input (e.g. the input can be the number of training examples in ML training set or the number of constraints/conditions in a general problem— e.g. all the places you want to visit on your next trip, given many "wants" in a group)
When the cost is polynomial relative to the input size it means it can only be finitely larger than the input - that's a characteristic of the polynomial which is just a finite sum of powers of x (the input).
When the cost is nondeterministic polynomial, one way to think about it in what is called a nondeterministic Turing machine. The nondeterministic part refers to the "states" that the machines can transition to from any current state. When the transition can happen to more than one state, we say it's non-deterministic— and can imagine it's determined by some probability.
The general assumption is that polynomial (P) is easier than nondeterministic polnomial (NP). This isn't necessarily the case as there can be arbitrarily large finite numbers (making P solutions intractible)
The P vs NP problem is one of the main open problems and generally considered a crank magnet and general confusion. For a good (likely the best) resource see https://scottaaronson.blog/
Without a complementary policy to cut salaries for introducing inefficiencies, they just created the unbounded incentive for more inefficiencies that can lead to ever larger savings.
These are mostly splints that were developed by two medical companies in Venezuela and which have open sourced their models so that they can get more to help with the effort.
https://twitter.com/clehene