Hacker News: YjSe2GMQ

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "State of Industrial Control Systems in Poland and Switzerland"

YjSe2GMQ — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 23:54:43 +0000

One thing those are good for is being a call center for white hat hackers. I.e. if you find some holes you can report to those agencies, and they'll take it from there. I know that's what people that speak about their findings on CCC do.

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "Genetically Engineered Wheat Found in Unplanted Washington Field"

YjSe2GMQ — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 10:39:58 +0000

Anthrax is "self-safe" too. It's an organism made by evolution.

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "Zanzibar: Consistent, Global Authorization System"

YjSe2GMQ — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 19:39:36 +0000

And there's much new fun to be had when you have this many servers around. For example - once you start shuffling around tens of petabytes a day you quickly notice that bit flips are very real. Computers do what we tell them to do with incredibly high probability, but it is always below 1.

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "Thermal Decomposition of CO2 with Nuclear Heat"

YjSe2GMQ — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 08:27:09 +0000

Renewables are great, but not deployed nearly quick enough: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

Not an expert, but right now I only believe in solar geo-engineering. And, of course, never buying a waterfront property, since at this point we'll almost certainly go above 2*C.

PS. It's fascinating to see Miami real estate prices completely ignoring the incoming doom: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MIXRNSA

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "Google Cloud Networking Incident Postmortem"

YjSe2GMQ — Fri, 07 Jun 2019 08:36:32 +0000

While I agree it sounds like their networking modules cross-talk too much - you still need to store the networking config in some single global service (like a code version control system). And you do need to share across regions some information on cross-region link utilization.

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "Google Cloud Networking Incident Postmortem"

YjSe2GMQ — Fri, 07 Jun 2019 08:31:11 +0000

It's the superior format. Just like yyyy-mm-dd [hh:mm:ss.sss] is, because lexicographic string order matches the time order.

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'"

YjSe2GMQ — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 15:51:33 +0000

I'm 100% for progressive taxes (i.e. higher taxes on richer people). People should have decent lives even if they can't participate in the workforce/markets with great success.

Also taxes are a very successful way of dampening the inequality: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/04/13/american...

It's just that the top 50% or top 10% or top 1% or top 0.1% will always hold disproportionate amount of wealth, and no system will change that. Under USSR the select few in the communist party had that wealth, although it wasn't expressed in dollars (or any other currency), but in the power and unquestionability of their decisions.

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'"

YjSe2GMQ — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 09:57:57 +0000

About the intro: how many more people (since Karl Marx) will rediscover the Pareto distribution and come to the conclusion that it should not be the case ...

It's perfectly natural, so many systems follow Pareto. From Wikipedia:

- The sizes of human settlements (few cities, many hamlets/villages)

- File size distribution of Internet traffic which uses the TCP protocol (many smaller files, few larger ones)

- Hard disk drive error rates

- Clusters of Bose–Einstein condensate near absolute zero

- The values of oil reserves in oil fields (a few large fields, many small fields)

- The length distribution in jobs assigned supercomputers (a few large ones, many small ones)

- The standardized price returns on individual stocks

- Sizes of sand particles

- The size of meteorites

- Severity of large casualty losses for certain lines of business such as general liability, commercial auto, and workers compensation.

- Amount of time a user on steam will spend playing different games. (Some games get played a lot, but most get played almost never.)

I will also add popularity of words in a language, and, the most popular instance: individual wealth distribution.

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "The Thirty-Hour Week (1936)"

YjSe2GMQ — Tue, 04 Jun 2019 00:52:26 +0000

I'm confused. I simply don't work over 40 hours a week (average), don't want to lower my per-hour salary. Increased compensation for overtime would be the only thing to make me work over 40 hours, I think that's fair. Genuine question: why can't you go home early?

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "Is everything we eat associated with cancer? A systematic cookbook review"

YjSe2GMQ — Sat, 01 Jun 2019 21:50:22 +0000

This is the big way for p-value science to fail, even if every actor is honest. It's obvious once you understand what a p-value is (it literally takes 5 seconds to understand) but nearly nobody does. Even people I've worked with at a FAANG, which you'd expect have an above average understanding of mathematics.

https://xkcd.com/882/

P values don't work at all if there's a lot of people working in a field!

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "A 600-Page Textbook About Modern Monetary Theory Has Sold Out"

YjSe2GMQ — Fri, 31 May 2019 22:16:51 +0000

It is a kind of crazy cult - believing that more money simply solves problems, and that we should have full employment. There's extensive historical record on governments going drastically for full employment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20065380

That being said, MMT is also similar to what Japan has done, and it caused neither recession nor growth there. I mean the Japanese central bank owns even equity ETFs, it's kind of insane. And still no results, which is even more insane:

https://www.economist.com/special-report/2018/10/11/what-to-...

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "Generating the Mandelbrot Set"

YjSe2GMQ — Fri, 31 May 2019 13:21:48 +0000

I once wrote a PostScript program that generates Mandelbrot, tuned it so that it finishes up in reasonable time, and sent to some old laser printer. On next day morning the machine finished up churning numbers and spat out a known picture.

BTW: .ps (PostScript) is a fun little stack based language, similar to JVM. Document is simply the result of the program execution. You can program it by hand, though I do not recommend anything large.

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)"

YjSe2GMQ — Thu, 30 May 2019 18:12:14 +0000

This is not true. There are fake news that have existed for thousands of years (religion), and the mass communication seems to have a negative impact even on those strongholds of fiction.

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "Blackbird SR-71 Flight Manual (2010)"

YjSe2GMQ — Wed, 29 May 2019 03:16:48 +0000

I used to fly gliders (sailplanes). There are many cases of pilots landing on trees with minimal damage, sometimes even to the glider. Of course the huge wing span helps.

Big aviation has no such procedures because crash landing a Boeing or a fighter jet is not an option. Even landing on water (perfectly doable in a glider, though all instruments will be kaput) is a huge achievement in an airliner.

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "Tell HN: The comment tree collapser [-] is too small for mobile users"

YjSe2GMQ — Wed, 29 May 2019 01:07:49 +0000

The upvote is too small too.

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone"

YjSe2GMQ — Tue, 28 May 2019 23:06:16 +0000

It just means that on a long enough timeline everyone's and everything's survival rate drops to zero. For NY it may be 50 years, may be 5000 years, may be 5B years.

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "Huawei’s Ace in the Hole: Undersea Cables"

YjSe2GMQ — Tue, 28 May 2019 22:51:28 +0000

Poorly done PR.

Breaking News: The Suit is Back! http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "Tests that sometimes fail"

YjSe2GMQ — Tue, 28 May 2019 11:43:23 +0000

You clearly have not worked on a codebase with thousands of tests. At my previous job the build system had an option to run a test N times concurrently in the cloud. I used this whenever I wanted to commit to some other project but some of their tests were garbage (to prove that test is flaky, and therefore to be ignored). You could even binary search (running 1000 times on each pivot point) to see who introduced the flakiness. Expensive but gets the job done.

In my projects I either fix the nondeterminism or delete such tests.

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "Professional astronomers are calculating the cost of the Starlink constellation"

YjSe2GMQ — Mon, 27 May 2019 12:45:13 +0000

It is much cheaper than I thought. Thanks!

New comment by YjSe2GMQ in "Professional astronomers are calculating the cost of the Starlink constellation"

YjSe2GMQ — Sun, 26 May 2019 17:23:33 +0000

Touché. Where can I find such offers?