downer68 · HackerTrans

downer68

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8 yıl öncediscuss

An order of magnitude. Jeepers, that sounds really bad.

8 yıl öncediscuss

Economy of scale, my dude.

An organization seeking to market a product based on any spare slack or wastage of their bare metal could stitch together a niche product like this from enough resources, and price it in the space where it nets them money, and is cheaper than something an individual or small business might be capable of building on their own, with the cheapest possible parts.

That's basically the the core principle of every cloud product being sold.

8 yıl öncediscuss

Good job, guys! Nice downvotes! Real nice!

I answered substantively, addressing each point carefully, and I was pleasantly rewarded for the time I took to respond.

Great incentive system you guys have worked out! Glad to see it being used as intended! Works like a charm!

8 yıl öncediscuss

I don't know how you found your way onto the addition operator (+) on your keyboard, because that's not at all what I was driving at.

I think you are... JUMPING! TO CONCLUSIONS! (get it?)

Anyway, at it's core, much of the logic within a turing machine winds up being addition in an accumulator. So, you widen the pipeline, and that adds place settings to the numeric values addressed at a location in RAM.

I think we both know that each place setting increases the maximum valus of the addressible unit by an exponential factor of the base, which in computing, and so in this instance, is binary.

Specifically: 2^4096 instead of 2^64

Golly, did I get my math right? This sure is difficult to for me to understand!

Why would anyone want a 4096 bit CPU? Oh, I dunno. I suppose 640K ought to be enough for anyone.

8 yıl öncediscuss

Actually, if you marshall all of your addressible units up front (4096 bit sentences, instead of 64 bit words), which aligns well with raw allocation units on many file systems, as an end user of the service, the overhead (to you) is reduced to network I/O if the product is built correctly.

The only hard part requiring serialized synchronization is the carry bit, across compute nodes. Share the carry bits between nodes, and while relaying a sentence to a cluster of synchronized nodes, the pipeline can shoot the sentence into the cluster as a unit, proxy and chain together the carry bits with a coordinated execution plan, and on the other side of the pipe, you get your well-timed 4096 bit result, all at 1 GHz, because the service is designed and produced to handle input at nanosecond intervals.

What are the advantages? Predictability, and expanded throughput.

Now you can look at an entire passage of text and make a determination about it in less time. Or stack many passages and composite them to assess or intuit variation. Designing the product this way makes it easy to reason about, and thus easier to market and sell. Is it possible to make a profitable system that works like this? Gee, great question! There's no obvious answer.

But anyway, from the perspective of a subscriber, it's on them to marshall their data, and then, if they have operations for which the scale of 4096 bit chunks improves results, they can get their granular operations done at 1 GHz, which allows them to predict time spent and overall cost more easily.

(e.g. I have all these [less-than-but-up-to] 4096 bit toots marshalled in a single data store, from a shit ton mastodon instances (i did all the crawling and retrieving, and saved them in one place, as a standardized data set), and I think this fact might be true about some of them, here is the rule set to interpret, please give me back the members of the toot array that return true when the function of this rule set returns true)

BTW, don't get hung up on 4096 as "the best number" I just chose it because it's a nice square number.

8 yıl öncediscuss

BTW, as an addendum, I wrote this as a pure response to the parent comment, without RTFA, and the original HN title of the submission was that of the article itself (The Right to Kill) didn't disclose that this was specifically an article WRT murder as a crime of passion, since framing an idea as a Right is more abstract, whether the victims are children or not.

Moral relativism aside, the more civilized approach to produce an effect of nearly the same outcome as murder, is exile.

This is an option that was explored and proven successful by ancient and medieval societies across the globe. When something unforgivable and unforgettable happens, those responsible may be banished instead of executed, and in a civilization of unlimited resources, dungeon-like conditions need not be a term of excommunication.

But, within the context of a scenario like this, where the sterility of contact with the outside world is, in fact, a prerquisite to the concept at hand, the approach to handle the preservation of alien customs apart from society at large demands elaborate effort.

Beyond adopting the effort to carry out what amounts to a charade, one still needs to seek a rational basis for the effort. Why bother? Why should one tread lightly when maybe the life of a child is at stake?

The handy answer is because we can. We can have it both ways. The primitive culture can be preserved, if a channel of willful exile is opened, as an alternative to murder. And having it both ways affords the option of live and let live, which is better.

Perspective may say that this condones something akin to honor killing, as mitigated circumstances, sometimes you have to cut your losses and look at what you still have left.

It would require a carefully designed protocol, to handle the exfiltration of exiled tribal citizens that primitive clans rejected for perceived crimes, but it could be done. Is it worth the effort? I think a quantitative analyst would question how much it costs, and the answer is that it's probably quite affordable.

8 yıl öncediscuss

I'm not sure that I enjoy the idea of communicating with millions or billions of people. That's not why I use the language I use.

The incidental fact that I share a common language with certain other individuals of high status, isn't why I speak this language. Would that I could choose another language, would that be the reason to choose it?

If that's true, certainly there are people with more than me, operating at higher status in other languages, so why don't I simply open doors for myself and choose to learn one of those languages?

(hint: you can't just walk up to someone and kick it to them, not in any language; there are more rules to the equation, and they are neither trivial nor obvious; I mean look at how I'm disagreeing with you right now, and in your own language, no less!)

The reality is that, all I really get from this language is a the house and food that keeps me going. The quantity of people I could theoretically interact with isn't a benefit, because the quality of people I could possibly interect with is much lower than the peaks and unicorns of whatever metric you might use to chart the value of social interaction in an objective manner, which, by the way, is conceptually repugnant to me.

So, preserving a dying language, what's that worth? Well, in the sense of using selective breeding to artificially create stunted or distorted animals as curiosities for entertainment, yeah, it seems ethically distasteful to force A child to learn esperanto, without an endgame in mind, other than for the purpose of injecting an artificial sense of nostalgia into a custom that will never see practical use. Under the hood, the mechanics of this almost translate to wasting a child's time as investment in future emotional blackmail.

So, then, to look at that idea as a corrolary to preserving and forcing an enclave to remain isolated and backwards because it's so quaint. Or perhaps because it serves as a visceral teaching tool, to demonstrate an interactive example of human existence that predates certain discoveries. What does that really mean?

Does blocking access to modernity mean, if not so much (outsiders blocking said access) for the mature members of a primitive clan within an isolated tribe, then moreso it means permitting those older members to engage in what is effectively child abuse. All this transpiring as they foster a new generation of children who will grow up without refridgerators and freezers, and effectively be restricted from knowing the delight of ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake? Children's ice cream?

What could have been? What would we see, as we watch these children blossom into adults (as modern citizens of the global village), were it not for our morbid fascination with the primitive cultures of indigenous peoples? On the one hand, children raised in mud huts could certainly do without the tape worms and eye infections that leave some of them blind, malnourished and half-starved. And what of all the patently wrong misinformation of superstition and ritual? But then again, the hollow, selfish emptiness of modernity, and the auto-immune problems, endocrine disorders and psychiatric medication required to cope with the cognitive dissonance of living beneath an RFID geolocated surveillance ad tech apparatus designed by quantitative economists leaves something to be desired, so where's the goldilocks zone in all this?

8 yıl öncediscuss

An interesting side-effect of this, is that it would enable a standard of synchronization, across geographic regions, such that one could treat a set of virtual machines as one ultra-wide-bus CPU with a 1 GHz clock speed.

All of the local overhead of real system resouces and network synchronization could handled by the remainder of the real CPU clock available to the bare metal, but contribute to the computation of a segment of a virtual bit field, at speed.

So, now maybe we get a commodity 4096 bit 1 GHz CPU as a service. Which, is maybe comparable to a 64 core processor, but without the overhead of chunking down to the width of 64 bits.

8 yıl öncediscuss

Honestly, 1994 or not, styling a passage of text with CSS just isn’t as useful anyone would like to imagine it being.

8 yıl öncediscuss

Buses fucking suck.

Buses make you wait in the rain.

Buses get stuck in traffic very easily.

Buses create traffic and make it worse with their size.

Buses idle diesel fumes as they stand in traffic.

Buses are noisy and idle outside of homes.

Bus stops in front of homes are filled with noisy people.

Buses that permit requested stops go nowhere slower than ever.

Buses are a half measure.

Buses fucking suck.

8 yıl öncediscuss

Actually, HN does do /almost/ private messages, if you hellban your account, and the recipient of your reply comment has “show dead” turned on.

(of course, anybody can activate the “show dead” option, but, in reality, there’s no such thing as privacy on a web server, since there’s always a system administrator noticing unhashed passwords scroll through the log stream)

8 yıl öncediscuss

To be honest, I really don't think laser/LED chanels are being used.

I've never seen a remote control quad copter sold off the shelve with IR LED TV remote style I/O for it's tranceiver control system.

8 yıl öncediscuss

Yes, newts and salamanders in cave systems have lost their eyes, due to scarcity of nutrition and habitats devoid of light.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_blind_salamander

8 yıl öncediscuss

"Lasers." (although, line of sight, point-to-point communication is admittedly less trivial to interfere with)

The point being that, if "criminal gangs" are up to no good, but they're parting their equipment with off-the-shelf Best Buy and Radio Shack products, they probably aren't programming DSP interfaces, aren't encoding and decoding raw bit streams, aren't masking binary objects with base64 blobs, aren't rolling their own encryption.

Or, if they are rolling their own encryption, they're using Excel spreadsheets to do it. [0]

[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/22/ba_jihadist_trial_s...

8 yıl öncediscuss

This is a joke. Consumer electronics radio communication systems may be trivially jammed, with little to no effort. It's simply a matter of political protocol (aka: warrants) for when and where such things must happen.

The article states that the services used to relay data links were common wi-fi and ordinary cellular telephone service.

The first thing that usually happens in a war zone is HAM radio service experiences disruption. [0] Cell phone back doors via CALEA [1] are already used to disrupt would-be suicide bombers around the world, and yes even in the United States. [2]

If push comes to shove, we'll all lose wi-fi and cell phones in an area of effect, around any hostile activity, whenever shit gets real.

[0] http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-radio14jan14-story.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...

[2] http://codegreenprep.com/2013/04/boston-bombing-shows-you-ca...

8 yıl öncediscuss

So what?

If I never intended for the GET to be GOT, then the browser is just as much at fault for such unintended consequences.

8 yıl öncediscuss

  This, kids, is why GET requests should be idempotent.

Or, like, you know, how about a browser only sends a request when I'm actually fucking asking for something, and doesn't try to fetch everything I've ever thought about, with my every slightest accidental finger twitch against its touch screen?

What happened to deterministic user interaction?

8 yıl öncediscuss

Okay, but what about stannous flouride and sodium fluoride?

No one ever discusses the toothpaste fluorine ions, in conjuction with the much more terrifying acid, which is the boogey man that haunts the fears behind fluoridated water, and so on...

8 yıl öncediscuss

Or, more to the point, not one single person has any recourse, whether they're an evil serial killer/rapist or not.

But, I'm trying to think about a situation where a secret identity might leave behind trace evidence that could be linked to a readily identifiable relative's samples, thus unmasking... say Spiderman.

I guess, any situation involving trespassing or physical presence under other circumstances, where a person might leave behind a single hair follicle, including the root of the strand.

8 yıl öncediscuss

But not the conjunction thereof.