Hacker News: eadan

Stack Overflow: How We Do App Caching (2019)

eadan — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 11:05:17 +0000

Article URL: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2019/08/06/stack-overflow-how-we-do-app-caching/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27459283

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by eadan in "Apple: Person-to-person experiences do not have to use in-app purchase"

eadan — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 18:22:40 +0000

Relevant section:

3.1.3(d) Person-to-Person Experiences: If your app enables the purchase of realtime person-to-person experiences between two individuals (for example tutoring students, medical consultations, real estate tours, or fitness training), you may use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments. One-to-few and one-to-many realtime experiences must use in-app purchase.

This is huge news. Being able to use third-party payments methods to bypass Apple's 30% charge is essential for service driven marketplace apps. Classpass and AirBnB bumped into this issue [0], but, I wonder if this exception will apply for them?

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/technology/apple-app-stor...

Edit: In excitement, I missed the last sentence; group services aren't covered by the exception :(

New comment by eadan in "Ask HN: Any well funded tech companies tackling big, meaningful problems?"

eadan — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 13:25:16 +0000

This is such a cynical outlook on the world. Of course there are for-profit companies -- most I would argue -- that have a positive impact on the world, and Tesla is one such example.

New comment by eadan in "In what niche does your favorite programming language surpass all competition?"

eadan — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 13:18:15 +0000

R + the tidyverse (dplyr, ggplot2 etc.) is easily the most elegant data analysis combo I've used. However, I tend to use Python for this usecase nowadays, primarily to reduce friction when working with others where Python is the lingua franca. Also, RMarkdown is superior to Jupyter notebooks in my opinion.

New comment by eadan in "Nikola: How to Parlay an Ocean of Lies into a Partnership with GM"

eadan — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 23:28:30 +0000

Yes, and it's a good thing. For once lately, this is the market doing what markets should be doing -- fair price discovery

New comment by eadan in "The Splitgraph Data Delivery Network – query over 40k public datasets"

eadan — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 14:36:52 +0000

Is something like dolthub [0] what you have in mind?

[0] https://www.dolthub.com/

New comment by eadan in "The Splitgraph Data Delivery Network – query over 40k public datasets"

eadan — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 14:34:28 +0000

This is very cool. Relatedly, as a data scientist, I wish companies would expose their APIs through SQL. I've spent a lot of time pulling data into ETL jobs from things like mixpanel, adwords etc., and having a unified interface would make things much simpler.

I'm trying to understand the architecture of Splitgraph. Are all foreign data wrappers controlled directly by you, or can third parties host a database and connect it to Splitgraph in a federation?

New comment by eadan in "Study: Cheap gas, not renewables, caused nuclear woes (2018)"

eadan — Sat, 15 Aug 2020 20:04:53 +0000

Agreed, with modern reactor designs nuclear "waste" is a misnomer. The Dutch keep all of their nuclear waste in buildings open to the public for tours, buildings which also happen to house priceless artwork:

https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/the-art-of-preserv...

New comment by eadan in "Go 1.15 Released"

eadan — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 08:23:15 +0000

I think the fact that binary size has become smaller rather than larger is notable in a world where most other software seems to be increasingly more resource hungry.

New comment by eadan in "Wheat yield potential in controlled-environment vertical farms"

eadan — Sat, 08 Aug 2020 18:43:30 +0000

The problem with vertical farming is where does the energy come from? An acre of solar panels is not capable of supplying enough energy to grow an acre of crops, even with the efficiency gains we've had in photovoltaics and lighting with wavelengths tuned to crop growth. What's the point in having fields of solar panels when we could have smaller greenhouses filled with crops? If only nuclear energy was politically viable in the west we could have vertical farming and so much more.

New comment by eadan in "Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action"

eadan — Sat, 01 Aug 2020 11:53:01 +0000

It seems you misunderstood the article. When a minority has an intolerant stance about which the majority has no preference towards, the minority wins. For example, the majority doesn't care if all food is kosher. But, the majority would care if all food was vegan.

New comment by eadan in "Why Go's Error Handling Is Awesome"

eadan — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 13:27:40 +0000

I agree, the lack of stack traces can be annoying when debugging Go programs. Instead of returning raw errors everywhere, the problem can be alleviated by adding some context to returned errors:

  if err := foo(x); err != nil {
      return fmt.Errorf("foo: bad argument %s", x)
  }

New comment by eadan in "BBR v2: Model-based Congestion Control Performance Optimizations [slides]"

eadan — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 15:31:20 +0000

Dropbox have a good real-world comparison [1] between BBRv1 and BBRv2. They found the retransmission rate to be 4x lower for v2. It's on their edge network, so would be interesting to see how v2 performs on connections with a high bandwidth delay product.

[1] https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/evaluating-bbrv2-on-the-...

New comment by eadan in "Hash: A free, online platform for modeling"

eadan — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 15:01:29 +0000

Thanks for your response! This technology is very exciting. Since you're targeting WASM there's a whole host of possibilities. Python is already supported through Iodide [1], but I imagine other languages could also be ported, and even DSLs specifically tailored for agent based modelling. That's not the mention all the other things happening in the WASM space like webgpu [2] and WASI [3].

The potential for ABMs are huge now that we have access to cheap and massively parallel compute. Imagine arbitrarily complex models of each individual in an economy interacting with each other over a distributed network of thousands of machines -- that's possible now. Instead of trying to predict the future, we can compute it.

[1] https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide

[2] https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Implementation-Status

[3] https://wasi.dev/

New comment by eadan in "Hash: A free, online platform for modeling"

eadan — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 11:56:14 +0000

Congratulations on the launch! I've been excitedly waiting for the public release since hearing about HASH on Joel's blog a few months ago. I've been playing with some models over the past few hours and I have a few questions / comments.

First, would it be possible to perform sensitivity analysis on parameters of the model? For example, with the city infection model, run a number of simulations in parallel with different infection rate values, and see how it affects the model output. Relatedly, I think it would be useful to specify a probability distribution over a parameter rather than setting a fixed value. The state space of the model would become exponential in the number of parameters which can vary, so I understand if it's infeasible, at least in the public version.

The real-time spatial and plot views are great. I would like to try some network based simulations. Any plans to add visualizations for these?

Ask HN: Transferring large (over 100GB) files?

eadan — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 13:50:45 +0000

How do you transfer very large files? Things like raw video footage or datasets. Ideally something suitable for non-technical users.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23563079

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by eadan in "3K, 60fps, 130ms: achieving it with Rust"

eadan — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 21:37:06 +0000

This is amazing! The first thing that popped to my mind seeing the life sized "portal" was the farcaster portals from the sci-fi novel Hyperion

https://hyperioncantos.fandom.com/wiki/Farcaster

Show HN: JotFS: a content-defined deduplicating file store backed by S3

eadan — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 20:05:37 +0000

Article URL: https://www.eadan.net/blog/introducing-jotfs/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23492831

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by eadan in "Working Group Last Call: QUIC protocol drafts"

eadan — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 22:30:59 +0000

This is interesting. I haven't seen much in regard to comparing TCP+BBR to FASP other than a masters thesis which suggests FASP outperforms on transferring large files over long distances (which is exactly its intended purpose). But, I wonder if splitting a file over multiple QUIC connections and re-assembling at the other side would come closer to the performance of FASP? Could be a fun experiment, I might try it!

New comment by eadan in "Working Group Last Call: QUIC protocol drafts"

eadan — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 21:54:18 +0000

My understanding is that the protocol underlying Aspera (FASP) uses UDP for the main data transfer and a TCP connection for coordination. By using UDP for data transfer it's not restricted to the ACK ranges imposed by TCP which can hinder throughput on networks with relatively high packet loss. Its throughput is not necessarily achieved by being a "bad citizen" but by having full control over how and when it communicates lost packets.

Since QUIC is also over UDP, perhaps we now have more flexibility on ACK windows etc.

Btw. there are open protocols like Tsunami UDP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami_UDP_Protocol) that try to fill the same niche