Hacker News: skorgu

New comment by skorgu in "The curse of strong typing"

skorgu — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 17:11:30 +0000

Since you don't seem to have commented on the article without reading it, my comment was not addressed to you. I'm not the article police; if you find something too long to read, decide not to read it, and move on with your life, we have no quarrel.

Honestly, I don't even mind the folks who do comment without reading. Comments are free, do what you like. I just find it mildly hilarious that 100% of the comments are about (the first) 3% of the article.

New comment by skorgu in "The curse of strong typing"

skorgu — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 13:17:43 +0000

This comment section is the most absolute proof I've ever seen that absolutely nobody reads the article before commenting.

Hint: it's not about integer types at all

New comment by skorgu in "A different and often better way to downsample your Prometheus metrics"

skorgu — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 14:56:33 +0000

I'm curious how this can both avoid the average-of-averages problem (presumably by using the original full-rate data to compute multiple aggregates) and also supports backfilling. Is there a danger of the full-rate data expiring and having a different behavior for backfills past that horizon? Or am I wholly misunderstading both these features?

New comment by skorgu in "Tesla announces Q2 2017 earnings"

skorgu — Wed, 02 Aug 2017 23:23:22 +0000

The flipside: you can also be lucky enough to have borrowed a ton of money just in time for the crash to drive everyone else out of business: https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/4/5/15190650/

New comment by skorgu in "How Bank of America Gave Away My Money"

skorgu — Thu, 06 Apr 2017 11:56:49 +0000

I'm ... shockingly interested in this bank letter ghostwriting thing. Could you say more?

New comment by skorgu in "Building a scalable time-series database on PostgreSQL"

skorgu — Tue, 04 Apr 2017 19:21:46 +0000

Congrats on the launch!

New comment by skorgu in "Ask HN: Is it just me or do a lot of people not know how stock options work?"

skorgu — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 00:46:59 +0000

Yep and yep. Not basic at all, this stuff is only simple once you already know how it works.

New comment by skorgu in "Ask HN: Is it just me or do a lot of people not know how stock options work?"

skorgu — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 00:16:26 +0000

AIUI, RSUs are treated as normal W-2 income when they vest.

New comment by skorgu in "NASA plans to hand over the ISS to a private corporation"

skorgu — Wed, 24 Aug 2016 14:25:21 +0000

About 18 years assuming I'm using the right formula:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=acceleration+formula&ra...

New comment by skorgu in "NASA plans to hand over the ISS to a private corporation"

skorgu — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 23:10:04 +0000

What about ion engines? I'm extremely not sure I have this math right but NEXT claims 4190 second ISP [0]. Plugging that into the rocket equation I get:

  iss_mass = 419600
  sep_isp = 4190
  delta_v = 5748
  htv_payload = 3310
  falcon_launch_cost = 62000000
  total_mass = iss_mass * math.exp(delta_v / (9.8 * sep_isp))
  fuel_load = total_mass - iss_mass
  dragon_launches = math.floor(fuel_load / htv_payload)
  total_cost = dragon_launches * falcon_launch_cost

I get:

  Total vehicle mass: 482,646.89 kg
  Fuel to add: 63,046.89 kg
  Dragon 2 launches: 19
  Total cost: $1,178,000,000.00

Not what you'd call cheap but at least in the realm of the possible. I'm assuming the ISS' solar panels (~120 kW [1]) is sufficient to power the thruster, that a dragon launch costs no more than a falcon launch (certainly false), and that the ion engine is already on board the station.

  [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEXT_(ion_thruster)
  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_system_of_the_International_Space_Station

New comment by skorgu in "Elon Musk Supports His Business Empire with Unusual Financial Moves"

skorgu — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 19:30:27 +0000

It's not a direct oil subsidy but roads are ~50% subsidized: http://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/01/23/drivers-cover-just-51-...

New comment by skorgu in "Airbus thinks it has found a way to alleviate jet lag"

skorgu — Mon, 11 Apr 2016 00:12:40 +0000

I don't know why they sell the 3mgs either because nothing less than three of them has any effect on me. Thank god for 10mg tablets.

New comment by skorgu in "An OCaml manifesto – Problems and what's needed for widespread adoption"

skorgu — Fri, 01 Apr 2016 14:04:20 +0000

Hey, that's a really useful reference, thanks. I actually learned something about OCaml from it!

New comment by skorgu in "Ask HN: Best curated newsletters?"

skorgu — Sun, 07 Feb 2016 18:28:10 +0000

I compile some random links and send them out every week: https://www.skorgu.net/weird/

New comment by skorgu in "Elon Musk Says SpaceX Will Send People to Mars by 2025"

skorgu — Sun, 31 Jan 2016 13:43:14 +0000

At least for the comet pusher, the tech needed to put a non-trivial number of humans on Mars has a ton of overlap with the tech needed to divert potential impacts.

New comment by skorgu in "Ask HN: Books you read in 2015?"

skorgu — Wed, 23 Dec 2015 16:39:15 +0000

I was on a sf kick this year apparently.

Full list (why can't amazon show me the read dates of my kindle books?!):

- Ancillary Sword

- The Magician's Land

- The Three Body Problem (incomplete)

- Libriomancer, Codex Born, Unbound

- Thank You, Jeeves

- Omon Ra (incomplete)

- Stations of the Tide

- 1Q84 (staggeringly incomplete)

- The Desert Spear (incomplete)

- The Lost Fleet: {Dauntless,Fearless,Courageous} (third one incomplete)

- Superintelligence

- Nexus, Crux (incomplete)

- Another Fine Myth

- The Annihilation Score

- The Man with the Golden Torc, Daemons are Forever

- The Fractal Prince (incomplete)

- Crooked

- Ancillary Mercy

- The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

- The Traitor Baru Cormarant

- Excession

- Hive Mind

- Seveneves

New comment by skorgu in "The Sorry State of Copy-On-Write File Systems"

skorgu — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 17:56:53 +0000

Well, yes but I don't think either of those things are really addressed by "care about data IFF backups exist". I guess I either don't get what point you're making or we're just getting distracted by phrasing.

New comment by skorgu in "The Sorry State of Copy-On-Write File Systems"

skorgu — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:53:29 +0000

"They seem to care about their data somewhat, which of course means they have off-site backups."

I don't think a reply of "there are classes of data that one can care about and still not have backups of" is unreasonable.

"...I can surmise is that they're confused"

Again, I think showing a few cases in which users can have perfectly non-confused reasons for using these filesystems is pretty straightforward as conversational gambits go.

New comment by skorgu in "The Sorry State of Copy-On-Write File Systems"

skorgu — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 19:58:24 +0000

There are lots of areas in which the data is reproducible but local continuity (and checksumming!) are still extremely valuable. Think things like large iso files, dvd rips or even intermediate stages of data analysis. Since I can reproduce them having a backup might not make sense but I still don't really /want/ to have to go to all that effort.

Especially things like scratch space for analysis you really don't want bit flips since you've maybe silently invalidated later stages.

New comment by skorgu in "Boosting Nginx Performance with Thread Pools"

skorgu — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 13:50:39 +0000

If only the nginx-provided rpm build was built --with-threads.