skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SMR is such a horrible backwards "technology", I wonder why vendors still push it aggressively on users after all these years.

1. Its performance is noticeably worse than CMR.

2. The density increase SMR provides compared to CMR is not that much. It's 25% at most.

3. SMR is not a separate evolutionary path that can be developed further to have increasingly more density compared to CMR. It is more like a variation of the same technology which provides slightly more density in exchange for serious disadvantages. SMR and CMR both directly depend on, and benefit from developments in platter densities. When a new, denser platter generation is introduced, CMR and SMR benefit from it same.

4. A huge portion of the drive must be reserved as a non-SMR cache area to mitigate the performance penalty SMR brings. Notice that this is an extra area that does not exist on a CMR drive so it reduces density increase SMR brings.

5. SMR drives have much larger DRAM cache to mitigate the performance penalty (64MB on a CMR drive vs 256MB on SMR drives), increasing the cost for that part.

6. Logic and mechanism of writes are much more complicated on a SMR drive than a CMR one. Drive is separated into different zones, data must be stored on a cache zone, then new data should be written into permanent zones in an optimal manner in background during idle time, managing different zones, cache area, rewrites, background tasks etc. all these makes the drive firmware much more complicated. Compared to a SSD firmware it is actually worse of both worlds: You're getting all the complexity of a SSD firmware with a worse performance than a regular hard drive.

7. What is even more worrying than those technical details are that vendors are sinking more and more resources and pushing very hard on technologically dead-end SMR technology. WD even wrote a PR piece called a "Zoned storage initiative" for trying to paint host managed SMR technology the future of storage and developed a linux filesystem called zonefs to back it up.

8. Despite all those shortcomings, they don't even sell SMR drives cheaper than CMR drives.

TL;DR: SMR is a harmful technological "drug" HDD vendors use to buy at most few years of time in platter density but with a very serious side effects.
> remember eating lunch at restaurants?

I understood this one way at first, then I got quiet. Our world is really different.
> On phones I think less so right now, if you're talking about using AV1 to get noticeably better rates than VP9.

Yes, otherwise what would be the point of using AV1 in the first place. Many (most?) Android phones already have hardware VP9 and HEVC encoders. iPhones only support HEVC, so you know what the choice has to be to maximize the compatibility. HEVC and VP9 offer pretty much identical subjective visual quality for a given bitrate for the purpose of video calling - I tested a lot.

But anyway, even if you were able to run a realtime software-only AV1 encoder on a phone, there's still the concern of heat and battery life. Mobile devices usually aren't designed to run at 100% CPU load for any kind of extended period of time. Hardware codecs are much more power-efficient.
Even better yet, say I'm on my company's Teams instance. And I'm talking with a customer, who is on another Teams instance.

I can cross over to their full videoconference with an invite, share screens, put notes in chat, whole 9 yards. For a moment, The company is just a logical division of the whole Teams infrastructure.

That's powerful.
The US army spends about $700 million on recruitment [0]. While that number has been higher recently since becoming an all volunteer army recruitment has been an expensive challenge.

[0]https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2018/11/07/to-draw-...
Really solid advice, and universally applicable for leaders of organizations of all sizes.

It took me almost two decades to understand what Jason so aptly described in his talk.
That demo looks too good for 30kbps for any codec, especially single pass real time. I am skeptical.

Also find it funny they use a 2.5MB GIF to show a demo for ultra video compression.

https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ori...
Containing the Spread of Covid-19 While Mitigating Privacy Risks
Returning to social media after ~4yr break. Starting from scratch everywhere
This might be the correct advice in many scenarios but is essentially playing with fire. A company that wants revenge could easily bankrupt you with even the smallest contractual leg to stand on. Your 200k base comp isn't going to look so sweet when you're paying a lawyer $1,500 an hour to defend you from some tech giant.
This is basically me as well, except I've tried and rejected Telegram for UI, functionality and security reasons.

Signal though for me is just a tool, it's not something I work at or cultivate. It replaces my sms tool and thats about it.

Will have to investigate status though.
I suppose thats true. Its not very interesting to think about the in-between.
Yeah, you have to dig several pages deep into the tutorial before you see meaningful code examples that distinguish it from other languages. This is a mistake that language websites make way too often.
We just bought the latest vacuum and mop robots, and they work fairly well. We had bought one 17 years ago and it didn’t work well at all. They have made good progress in the control algorithms since.
Not sure, but maybe that implies that most local comets lose their CO before getting that close to the sun?
Okay thanks for the prompt response!
In practically every big company. It isn't as much power or voice as much as litmus tests that serve to veto good stewardship.

This doesnt mean big company Directors and Executive Directors are not deserving of their promotions, it just means that they usually have an added hoop to jump thru -- increasing headcount.

I've been in senior ranks of big companies, and spoke to plenty of counterparts at other companies, and it is almost always the story.
Also stability of APIs/ABIs: within a major Ubuntu/Debian version, there is an implicit contract in most cases that if you build something against a library/software provided by the distribution, it will not break after an upgrade of said library/software.

To enforce that, a policy of version freeze+backport of bug/security fixes is almost always necessary as very few upstream projects will maintain separate branches and have a clear policy about API/ABI breakages.

(OpenSSL is actually somewhat of an exception in that regard).
"Perhaps your workload is more suited to our "WD Red Pro Elite Plus" lineup."

Western Digital, circa 2025
I would have demanded, at a minimum, to be told exactly how the NSA located me in exchange for my source code.
Springer makes some texts free for Covid-19
So here's my problem with them: large product line, large variation in features and prices, no idea which is the simplest machine that will clean my living room.

I don't want to buy the most expensive and then keep exchanging down to the simplest one that works.

Seriously, I don't know anyone who has this implemented across most of their house. They get one as a gift or experiment, and maybes it works.

I'd love to have these all over my house doing the work, but I have no idea what that actually requires.
debian.community is run by an expelled Debian developer as a grinding axe against everyone he delusionally perceives to be against him. We should treat Daniel with pity and concern, but that doesn't mean his accusations are meaningful in any way.
Astronomers May Have Captured the First Ever Image of Nearby Exoplanet Proxima C
Trump to Bar Immigration for Family of U.S. Citizens, Foreign Workers for 60 Day
> SMR drives are absolutely not NAS-ready

DM-SMR at the very least. If the RAID controller (hardware or software) is SMR-capable, then host-managed or host-aware can work.

For example, ZFS with the recent support for separate metadata devices[1] seems to be close to what you'd need for it to become SMR-capable.

[1]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/5182
Canadian university board member here ...

Rankings drive enrolment, especially international enrolment, which is a major source of revenue. Also prestige helps to attract the best researchers, who are being wooed by many top schools.
We’re not going back to normal – MIT Technology Review
Probably this https://ozwrites.com/masters/ (author of teachyourselfcs.com)
I'm just realizing that Medium might not be the right spot for me to post these daily updates.

It's nothing like it was before I disappeared a few years ago. When I went to hit publish, it gave me a lengthy explanation that, basically, it's going to be behind a paywall and there's nothing I can do about it (?)

Any ideas where I should post?
That was another solution I considered. I think that would work, but it seemed expensive to implement. I believe it would still require me to host a separate copy of my app or a standalone app that handles just payments. Stripe also creates its own child iframe for displaying payment UI, so at that point, my app would look like:

Main app
My sandboxed iframe
Stripe's iframe

So managing all the bubbling up and down of messages felt like it was going to be complicated. Limiting Stripe to a single page and forcing the new HTTP requests to unload it is a bit hackier, but is really simple to implement. You can see it in the blog post - I only had to add ~5 lines of extra code to my app to make it work.
Hey, that's not how arguments on the internet are supposed to go :-).
The New Clang _ExtInt Feature Provides Exact Bitwidth Integer Types
‘I just can’t do this’: Some parents stuck home with out-of-school children
> SSDs are not suitable for the job, at least in term of cost

I think what just happened is that CMR drives just got more expensive, which may erase some of that cost advantage. Not all of it, not yet.

But principle is worth something, too. I expect a few folks who are sortof on the border will be so soured on spinning rust by this whole ordeal, as to swear it off completely.
We have millenia of proof to the contrary, to your anecdotal evidence.

People move away primarily for economic benefits.
No single mass migration in history of humanity has ever happened "because people wanted to be close to their family".

If you want anecdotes: I know hundreds of people that have moved away from their families and only a few that moved back after being elsewhere. (Literally about half of my graduation year at university have moved away) Most people I know, that moved, see their family back "home" only once or twice per year (summer vacation + winter holidays).
+1 enjoyed how accessible this write up was
The Economist, Seattle Times, lifetime subscription to Nautil.us, maybe The Epoch Times.
Those are gaps between rings. I'm asking about the rings themselves - would they look more like dotted lines?
Wait, wasn't that Wave?
>> But the question is, can they do it without the bloat? My understanding is yes - and I can probably even tell you how.

I dont mean to be snarky, but isn't the "how" sort of obvious (though hard to achieve)? You'd have to align reward with value generated per unit of risk and nothing else. The more value you generate (on a risk adjusted basis), the greater your reward and promotion. When companies grow larger, it becomes difficult for them to measure value generated, or too tedious, or politics overpowers governance.

I'd be curious to hear your proposal on a fix.
What I want to know is how on earth did they make the page 58.7 MB. This can't be.
BTW: The budget for this robotic Mars dirt retrieval mission is $7B. Based on NASAs track record on large projects, it’s unlikely to be less than double that.

Elon Musk has estimated the cost of landing the first round of humans on Maes (probably over a hundred) at $10B total. Now Elon is a huge optimist on schedules, but on budgets he’s been pretty accurate.
I was going to talk about some panics we've had recently, but those will hopefully be fixed soon so I don't think that quite fits my message. Instead I want to talk about why 'handling errors correctly and not panicking' wouldn't work in general.

In order for that work, we'd have to have 0 panics - not just few, but none. That requires none of our code to panic, none of our dependencies to panic, and none of our uses of the standard library to panic. If you gave me a limited time frame to run the server - say a week - I think it's possible to make docs.rs that robust. However, for a server that's meant to run 24/7 for weeks on end, I just don't think that's realistic.

What `catch_unwind` lets us do is localize panics to a single web request or crate build instead of it affecting the whole server. Of course we don't want to have 500s for any user, but we _especially_ don't want the whole server to be down until a team member has time to ssh in and restart it manually.

Of course, after that there's whole question of whether making the server that robust is a good use of time in the first place. Is it better to fix a few 500s every week or to fix long-standing bugs? I don't think it's clear that the 500s are more important if they don't affect many users.
> Since the phrase is a federally registered trademark, the department has tried at times to enforce its trademark rights with cease and desist letters

This was the most shocking bit in the article for me. Trademark law was meant to prevent unfair competition, why would the government of Texas be worrying about the use of this to sell pro-Texas price merchandise? Seems like its the government itself going against the spirit of the law.
Just to clarify - Canada doesn't have forced conscription, it also has an entirely voluntary armed forces.
Amazon puts new online grocery shoppers on a waitlist
You make many good points, but I still feel like you're really underselling the potential of simple ray tracing. Hardware acceleration of intersection testing and BVH construction/traversal is only going to become more prevalent, and with temporal reprojection and spatial denoising methods, many kinds of noise can be mitigated. It doesn't even have to be that complex -- "An Efficient Denoising Algorithm for Global Illumination" by Mara et al. is only 7 pages (more like 5, really).

Regarding spectral path tracing and colored noise, Wilkie et al. have written a good paper on this, "Hero Wavelength Spectral Sampling", if you're interested.
It has nothing to do with a soul... it's just the nature of large business to revolve around marketing and accounting to maximize profits, while disregarding sound engineering.
Came here to post the same thing. This is a wildly bad site that's not affiliated with the Debian community.
The simplest machine that will clean your living room? That'd be the 675. It's currently $219.99 on their website--it can easily clean one room.

But you also mention having them "all over [your] house." In that case, I'd recommend the i7 or s9. I've got the i7 and I think it's fantastic.

There are a few factors to consider, but it's not complicated. Do you have mostly carpet or hard flooring? Any kids or pets? Do you want it to clean the whole house or just one room?
That’s pretty insightful, honestly.
Nobody is arguing that Opera wasn’t fast, only that there’s been more than a decade of massive improvements which is not reflected in your comments. I used, and paid for, Opera but its golden age is past.
Maybe the REPL behaves different than the interpreter? Haskell REPLs tend to work the same way.

GHCi, version 8.6.5: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help
Prelude> a = 5
Prelude> a = 7
Prelude> print a
7

But yeah, it doesn't seem like there's any support for first class functions either, so perhaps just a bit too much creative license in marketing?
I mean.... Sure.

I hate NYC and yet I recognise that it's the best location for fast travel to Europe... I travel back home about 2 times per year, though.

But implying that travel accessibility is the primary reason is absurd. If I had a good job offer from a company in LA - I would still take it. Even though my travel time to my mother would double(11 to 22 hours)
In what way is the Anki project a mess?
How the Father of FinFETs Helped Save Moore’s Law
My suggestion is to get the basic one suggested by the Wirecutter (model 675, $220) then get a top of the line Dyson vacuum (V11 Animal).

They are good for lazy surface cleaning but given the form factor, they’ll never have the cleaning power of the Dyson.
Huge congrats to the Boost Team. Brayton and Adam are two of the most grounded and helpful people I've met in the VC space. I'm personally involved in a few of their companies they've introduced me to and love what they're building + the community aspect. Rooting for you guys!
The speed of an encoder really comes down to how many optimizations it's searching through. The AV1 format allows a lot more options when encoding, so encoder writers kinda feel obligated to try a bunch of them out to see if they save bandwidth. But if instead a codec just picked a few optimizations and ignored the rest, it could be pretty fast. Maybe Google just found a set that worked well for an average video chat.
Restaurants could probably open with spread out tables, open windows, etc. Bars maybe not, fair enough. But in most states I think both already are somewhat open with take out.
IBM tells CERT they don't care.

That's quite the "process error"
Implementing a simple filesystem using the Linux VFS interface is a fun thing to do. You can start by implementing the bare minimum and then add more functions over time.

Yes, it is C, not Rust, but for systems work it is absolutely worth knowing.
what college was this if you don't mind sharing? I recall a similar thing happening at the college I went to
someone has trouble parking one day and decides that the solution is to make more parking a legal requirement, giving little or no thought to the second or third order effects of those laws.

Or, "someone owns a small house and one or two cars and finds they can't park because the neighbors have six roommates with one car each", or "developer builds 50 units without parking expecting the neighborhood to absorb the cars".
No, it only means that you can reassign the name `a` to a different value (i.e. it is a variable, not a constant).

It would be mutable if it allowed something like this:

> a = 5
> a.add(1)
> print a
6

Note that numbers are immutable in most languages anyway. Arrays, hashmaps, and sometimes strings are the data types that are frequently mutable.
Casual journeys are still an expensive thing to do.
Do you think a median family in US can afford a short trip to Miami, planned even a month in advance?
Looking at their site, there are two robot vacuums that are $599.99 - the i7 and the 960. When you do a comparison on the site, they list the only difference as the i7 has more suction, more features, and more compatibility with other iRobot offerings. So why do they even offer the 960? I can imagine anyone who buys that would be disappointed to find out that they could have had the i7 for the same exact price with better features.
Is there a summary or further brief explanation? I'm confused and am not able to follow or understand this post.
I’ll share it with my friends and advisors who are doing a lot of remote teaching at the moment. Unfortunately, I don’t think many of them would pay for software :/ It looks like a great app though, I might check it out!
Brand New Online Elixir Courses from Erlang Solutions
^ What an insanely good interaction, right here.
Anki has so many new addon compare couple of years ago and it get updates every week if you test the beta version of the project.
What user data doesn't google sell?

https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/download...
Care to elaborate? Did you have any problems after graduating from the "top" university?
Viva La Fiesta
graduated from there. totally agree with what's in that article. at 18 I was swept away by the "allure" of their rapid ascent and aggressive re-development of campus (which has continued to this day) and went there, despite the insane cost.

faculty were generally pleasant to interact with, the education was probably average. job prospects were mediocre - alot of competition in boston and NU is in a lower tier, comparatively.

as a measure of quality, based on my experience, that ranking is worthless.
Except for _e.g._ memory alignment, or types of a given width (until C99).
Al Alcorn Explains How Early Home Computers Owe Their Color Graphics to a Trick
I'm not certain how easy it is in the forces to get cushy stay at home jobs, but Canada actually contributes disproportionately highly to armed conflict when compared to the US, it has participated heavily in quite a few recent actions[1]. Both armed forces have logistical and bureaucratic arms along but only the US (AFAICT) has a dedicated stay-at-home path via the National Guard.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_Canada#Pos...
I don't have a Medium account and had no problem reading it without a paywall. Great post BTW! Is the goal for the daily updates just to have an easy place to post something that's too long for Twitter or is it important that there's some sort of built in audience there as well?
Landing on the moon would be an expensive diversion to any Mars missions. The moon is an entirely different, and far more hostile environment, you need entirely different suits and life support systems on the moon.

Mars requires lifting far less fuel to land on and return from its surface instead of the moon. Starship is optimized for Mars landings, and will be capable of landing up to 150 tons of supplies, equipment, and humans in a single ship.

It can land far less on the moon in the sane configuration.
Many companies DO have self-hiring blacklists. Basically a checkbox that says "would rehire". I don't know if there are legal criteria necessary to check that box.

I haven't heard of them sharing the lists with other companies.

Apple and other companies have also had do-not-hire agreements with business partners (basically no-poaching) but they were sued and I believe stopped doing that.

Now unofficially, your guess is as good as mine.
Sometime not too long ago there was a blog post or article covered on HN, about data showing student scores on some academic achievement measure over time. If I remember, all students generally improved on this measure throughout undergrad, and there was some average tendency for universities with higher average entering standardized test scores to have higher scores, but the effect seemed to be mostly driven by the students. That is, it wasn't that some schools accelerated scores more, it was that they just tended to select for higher-performing students. Also, the signal provided by school, if I remember, was relatively weak. The author was basically arguing that universities in general provide some educational value (or students just learn over time; there was no control of students who didn't go to college) but that the ranking was by and large just a signaling thing.

I can't find it now though because all the search terms I can think of just return a bunch of other stuff related to universities and students.
I suspect that hardware encoding is involved. Maybe upcoming pixel phones will feature a previously unknown hardware encoder? It would make lots of sense, especially for storing videos made with the camera.