Hacker News: ebikelaw

New comment by ebikelaw in "Beijing’s Three Options: Unemployment, Debt, or Wealth Transfers"

ebikelaw — Sun, 09 Sep 2018 15:14:36 +0000

Following this line of thinking, all or even more than all US GDP "growth" is attributable to wasteful medical and educational inflation.

New comment by ebikelaw in "How Tutanota replaced Google’s FCM with their own notification system"

ebikelaw — Sun, 09 Sep 2018 15:12:13 +0000

It's not an open standard, but this was the one of the interesting pieces of RIM's software stack. Their push system worked reasonably well, used little power on the handset, and organizations were able to run their own on-site push proxy supporting their own in-house applications.

New comment by ebikelaw in "Tell HN: Using Gmail? You will be force logged into Chrome"

ebikelaw — Sun, 09 Sep 2018 04:25:42 +0000

Only on Hacker News is the fact that a database has a primary key for user accounts evidence of a global conspiracy against humanity. Here's some bad news for you: literally every company with a website and user accounts has the same scheme.

New comment by ebikelaw in "Giant plastic catcher heads for Pacific Ocean clean-up"

ebikelaw — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 18:24:55 +0000

There are messes that cannot be cleaned up. We have the leverage to destroy everything. Therefore it is better to focus on preventing the mess, than in futilely pretending we can clean it.

New comment by ebikelaw in "Giant plastic catcher heads for Pacific Ocean clean-up"

ebikelaw — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 17:22:38 +0000

Can you provide some supporting statements for your point 1(a)?

New comment by ebikelaw in "Berlin Google Campus occupied"

ebikelaw — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 14:59:01 +0000

Part of the German economic success story has been keeping housing cheap, so they can keep pay down, so they can export. As soon as housing prices rise, pay rises, and the story falls apart.

New comment by ebikelaw in "Tech companies in San Francisco"

ebikelaw — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 03:46:22 +0000

Yeah they have Mozilla but not Google which occupies the other 99% of the same building. Amazon also has significant headcount in SF.

New comment by ebikelaw in "Modeled impact of large-scale wind and solar farms in the Sahara"

ebikelaw — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 22:29:39 +0000

If there’s one job that robots are certainly going to take, it is solar panel squeegee guy.

New comment by ebikelaw in "Modeled impact of large-scale wind and solar farms in the Sahara"

ebikelaw — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 20:47:35 +0000

Like any utility, you don't need a guy just hanging around waiting for the transformers to explode. You truck him in every 50 years when that actually happens. It's time domain multiplexing, essentially.

New comment by ebikelaw in "Modeled impact of large-scale wind and solar farms in the Sahara"

ebikelaw — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 20:27:31 +0000

Solar utility installations in California that I’m familiar with employ fewer than 1 person per square km.

New comment by ebikelaw in "Genoa Bridge Collapse: The Road to Tragedy"

ebikelaw — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 16:40:48 +0000

The old eastern span of the SF-Oakland bridge was a series of double-decked trusses between towers. Essentially it was several loosely-coupled, independent failure domains. In failure analysis that's not really the same thing as redundancy.

New comment by ebikelaw in "Genoa Bridge Collapse: The Road to Tragedy"

ebikelaw — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 16:02:21 +0000

We still have a lot of prestressed concrete structures that predate good understanding of creep in such structures. Box-beam highway bridges, for example, were universally built from prestressed concrete after WW2, but creep wasn't well characterized until the late 1960s.

New comment by ebikelaw in "Measuring the memory usage of popular web apps"

ebikelaw — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 16:02:02 +0000

Indeed, it's not the data but the code to support it. There's a bazillion features in there designed to avoid the user having to do additional page loads. For example in my Gmail memory profile there's 20+ MB of code to support the real-time chat feature in the sidebar. You can argue about whether there should be a middle ground implementation that has the email preloading but not the real-time chat. Developer and project manager time is unfortunately finite.

New comment by ebikelaw in "Measuring the memory usage of popular web apps"

ebikelaw — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 15:25:23 +0000

The very lightweight HTML Gmail lacks all of "normal" Gmail's latency-hiding features, which is one reason it uses so little memory. Gmail preloads all of the messages in the thread list so when you click them they are displayed instantly. HTML Gmail doesn't, and when you click a message it fetches the body from the origin. The tradeoff is yours to make. I find the HTML version infuriating when I'm tethered on mobile because every mouse click takes 10 seconds. On the same tether I can leave normal Gmail open all the time and it's fast. Ironically the lightweight Gmail is more usable on a fast, reliable wired connection.

New comment by ebikelaw in "Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know"

ebikelaw — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 15:02:39 +0000

    function getDCRTT() {
        // Assume this doesn't change much?
        return 500000; // ns
    }

:thinking face emoji:

High by 10x in my experience.

New comment by ebikelaw in "How the Go runtime implements maps efficiently without generics"

ebikelaw — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 14:00:02 +0000

Debug symbols don’t inhibit identical code folding. What you get is one copy of the function and one arbitrary file/line entry which makes it look like your program makes impossible function calls, if you happen to walk the stack. This can easily be seen in a C++ program with lots of Protocol Buffers because protobuf generated code has lots of identical small functions.

New comment by ebikelaw in "Benchmarking C++ Sets"

ebikelaw — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 04:11:02 +0000

It is very rare that I have seen a use of std::set that seemed justified, although it does happen. People just use it because it's easier to type than unordered_set!

One way to speed up set's usually appalling performance is to give it a custom allocator so that instead of N calls to allocate tiny tree nodes all over the heap, you get all your tree nodes on an arena. This can dramatically speed up short-lived sets (for example you are trying to build the unique set of some non-unique input).

New comment by ebikelaw in "Mass Transit Optimization for Buses: The Depot Problem"

ebikelaw — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 00:37:32 +0000

But why would you look at VTA when it's one of the worst-performing systems in the nation? Their ridership is in freefall.

New comment by ebikelaw in "Mercedes Readies First Tesla Rival in $12B Attack"

ebikelaw — Tue, 04 Sep 2018 21:20:43 +0000

Black people get pulled over for being black.

New comment by ebikelaw in "Mercedes Readies First Tesla Rival in $12B Attack"

ebikelaw — Tue, 04 Sep 2018 19:38:57 +0000

In California no white person has ever been pulled over for having one non-working headlight.