skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Former Pixar Systems Intern (2019) here. Though I was not part of the team involved in this area, but I have some rough knowledge around some of the parts.

> Whats the hardware?

It varies. They have several generations of equipment, but I can say it was all Intel based, and high core count. I don't know how different the render infra was to the workstation infra. I think the total core count (aggregate of render, workstation, and leased) was ~60K cores. And they effectively need to double that over the coming years (trying to remember one of the last meetings I was in) for the productions they have planned.

> How much electric energy goes into rendering a frame or a whole movie?

A lot. The render farm is pretty consistently running at high loads as they produce multiple shows (movies, shorts, episodics) simultaneously so that there really isn't idle times. I don't have numbers, though.

> How do they provision it

Not really sure how to answer this question. But in terms of rendering, to my knowledge shots are profiled by the TDs and optimized for their core counts. So different sequences will have different rendering requirements (memory, cores, hyperthreading etc). This is all handled by the render farm scheduler.

> What's running on the machines?

RHEL. And a lot of Pixar proprietary code (along with the commercial applications).

> They only talk about cores, do they even use GPUs?

For rendering, not particularly. The RenderMan denoiser is capable of being used on GPUs, but I can't remember if the render specific nodes have any in them. The workstation systems (which are also used for rendering) are all on-prem VDI.

Though with RenderMan 24 due out in Q1 2021 will include RenderMan XPU, which is a GPU (CUDA) based engine. Initially it'll be more of a workstation facing product to allow artists to iterate more quickly (it'll also replace their internal CUDA engine used in their propriety look-dev tool Flow, which was XPU's predecessor), but it will eventually be ready for final-frame rendering. There is still some catchup that needs to happen in the hardware space, though NVLink'ed RTX8000's does a reasonable job.

A small quote on the hardware/engine:

>> In Pixar’s demo scenes, XPU renders were up to 10x faster than RIS on one of the studio’s standard artist workstations with a 24-core Intel Xeon Platinum 8268 CPU and Nvidia Quadro RTX 6000 GPU.

If I remember correctly that was the latest generation (codenamed Pegasus) initially given to the FX department. Hyperthreading is usually disabled and the workstation itself would be 23-cores as they reserve one for the hypervisor. Each workstation server is actually two+1, one workstation per CPU socket (with NUMA configs and GPU passthrough) plus a background render vm that takes over at night. The next-gen workstations they were negotiating with OEMs for before COVID happened put my jaw on the floor.
Many apps don't have either, and they have shitty changelogs still...
I don't know if Peter G. Neumann remains "the most influential voice on computer security" at this point in time (January 2021) but he is still an important in the field, still a mentor, still doing RISKS, and still a voice of reason.
Just yesterday I was about to downvote somebody for what I thought was a ludicrous suggestion. But when I started writing a reply, I realized that a), he may actually have had a point, and b), though I was still sceptical, I didn‘t actually understand the issue well enough to refute him.
I'll definitely check this out. This would make it easier to move things from LinkedIn messaging (super annoying and low-frequency for many people) to email. There used to be a Chrome extension that made this possible (Rapportive?), but I think they got acquired by LI. Are there other efficient ways of doing this? I'm not looking to spam strangers — just to migrate conversations with actual connections off the LI platform.
I’m not convinced by this paper. I’ve trained a lot of from-scratch word, sentence and query embeddings in my career, it’s probably the single main thing I’ve done. I’ve never observed rescaling the average context vector to have an impact on application performance. It amounts to rescaling gradient terms, but most of those are being backprop’d from layers with batch normalization, strict activation functions, clipping, etc. There are many, many non-linear effects contributing to how that rescaling constant plays a role, and in anything other a completely shallow word2vec model with no further layers and where you just want to extract the embeddings in some application-agnostic way, that normalizing constant is not going to matter.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25539876
Thanks to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25549169 I read https://www.historytoday.com/archive/natural-histories/great... – which contains much more details but no Pfeilstorch, interestingly.
Discussion from 11d ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25515004
This is confusing, and Rust's error messages make it much worse. If you try to remove the `move`, you get an error:

> closure may outlive the current function, but it borrows `answer`, which is owned by the current function. To force the closure to take ownership of `answer` use the `move` keyword.

But 'answer' is of course not owned by the current function, and how can you take ownership through a shared reference?

The explanation is double indirection. By default, the closure captures a pointer to answer, which is itself a pointer on the stack. Without the 'move', inside the closure `answer` has type &&str and points into make_tester's stack frame. With the 'move', it copies the passed-in pointer. The error message is referring to the pointer itself, and this is not obvious.

Incidentally I have never found docs for the '+' syntax there, would appreciate a pointer to any.
It is much more likely to see decent Changelogs on Free Software.

(For many reasons, but including: "We added a new backdoor to satisfy government mass-surveillance program requirements.)
> Phone addiction or internet addiction is a symptom not a cause

Correlation does not imply causation, but that doesn't mean that it can't be causation.
A reason may also be that starting on January 1st, the state gives you 6000 euros if you buy an electric car, compared to 7000 in 2020.

Still, there is definitely a trend here.
Selection bias, it turns out, is built right into the title of the post. Also, a hard-won concept I have learned in business is that it’s much better to learn from people who were successful than from people who weren’t (not trying to be arch or facetious here).
Maybe the state of the art for immediate mode GUIs, but not everyone is hopping onto that bandwagon.
> Does anybody actively use smartwatch?

All the time. I use it to read texts (a lot of time they don't require a reply, they're just informational). Set timers. Check the weather before I head out. Track my workouts. Listen to music. Log meals. And I don't carry my phone with me when I'm working out, so sometimes I take calls on it.
I agree except some things are actually addicting. Phones are dopamine slot machines that fit in your pocket so that you can't escape.

I think it's both. People seek an escape and phone apps are extremely addicting.
This is pretty cool. I just logged into my namecheap account to see if I have any random names that might work. Unfortunately all my names are fairly specific and probably don't get any organic traffic nor are they well suited for aggregators I'd say. Just followed your Twitter account, I'd really love to see success stories.
I am really curious if this is markedly different from concerns people had about children wasting their time away reading books, as seen in Don Quijote for example.
This is just slighly informed, please prove me wrong.

The major market so far seems to have been tactical/military, so they have focused on framerates rather than resolution. And then the US blocked high framerates for civilian use...

(edit: the US blocked civilian exports.)
Docker support was the main reason to upgrade in my case. IIRC, WSL was missing some key functionality that made Docker unusable for my purposes. Of course I don't remember the details; all I know is I had no real choice.
> correlation does not equal causation.

Ok, but where is your argument that this is positive for mental health? Why show up half-assed? Brave new world is obviously a dystopia.

> but if there was a VR internet those could go away.

What the fuck? Are you serious or just have no clue how other humans work?
Relative to the price of a standard node, FPGA's aren't magic : You have to find the parallelism in order to exploit it. As for custom silicon, anything on a close to a modern process costs millions in NRE alone.

From a different perspective, think about supercomputers - many supercomputers do indeed do relatively specific things (and I would assume some do run custom hardware), but the magic is in the interconnects - getting the data around effectively is where the black magic is.

Also, if you aren't particularly time bound, why bother? FPGAs require completely different types of engineers, and are generally a bit of pain to program for even ignoring how horrific some vendor tools are - your GPU code won't fail timing for example.
As far as I know all the big apps the OP is complaining about have server-side feature flags.
It just causes extra annoyance at work. There have been a few times when some named vulnerability gets covered by a generic tech website, and the next day at work my inbox has 2-3 meeting invites from non-technical project managers to discuss what needs to be done to mitigate the vulnerability, regardless of its severity, and without even knowing if our organization is vulnerable to it.
Give us the 5 paragraph essay summary! Although 2021 will also be the plague year.
I’m new to this problem and appreciate the scope of the explanation.
I appreciate your effort in fleshing out your arguments, but you’re still conflating multiple factors. You also seem to to have an ideology against Apple and/or it’s approach. While that’s fine, it becomes impossible to have a conversation based on fact or reason.

Your claim of offering only one software distribution platform as being morally reprehensible is absurd. All Apple phones can run any web app. No consumer is forced to only purchase an Apple phone. Apple hasn’t done any more than follow the law that they have to follow given other decisions they have made.

You’re right that they made an explicit choice, but not for the reasons you’re suggesting. The App Store wasn’t created to enforce CCP policy. One could argue that allowing the uncontrolled distribution of apps that violate that security and privacy of the user is far worse.

You seem to have an intense dislike of Apple for other reasons. That’s fine, no issues there. But it is causing you to misattribute blame. They are far from a perfect company, and the App Store is problematic for many other reasons.

However, you seem to ignore the same behaviour when conducted by other businesses. Why is it ok for other phone makers, movie producers, and game distributors to censor or alter their products for the Chinese market, but it’s the height of evil for Apple to do so?

If you are truely concerned about morality, look deeper. You should direct your outrage at the CCP and less so at Apple.
They changed this about a fortnight ago. Twitter worked without javascript previously.
Tunguska: Ternary Computer Emulator (2008)
Very cool! How does this actually check without sending any email?
Anecdotally I’ve come to hate my phone: I leave it at home as much as possible.

Same for all social media. This is the only site I use that could be categorized like that.
I'm talking about feature flag based rollouts, which don't involve going through Apple or Google.
My suggestion: Don't overthink or plan too much. The most important thing is to ensure that you don't live paycheck to paycheck i.e. spend everything you earn. Keep this formula simple: Cashflow IN > Cashflow OUT and you will start seeing results early on. I am a big fan of Dave Ramsey's baby steps if that works for you.
Tesla Says It Hit Goal of Delivering 500k Cars in 2020
> Does anybody actively use smartwatch?

Lots of Apple Watches and a decent number of Garmin watches. Don't see a lot of anything else. I suspect the fact most of them are bulky and have shitty CPU options is a big part of it. Garmin users are willing to accept the bulk for the functionality. Apple Watches aren't that bulky.

I use mine for workouts, taking calls so I don't have to pull out my phone, sending text & receiving text messages, and controlling music. For my light mobile phone use, it's nearly suitable as a replacement for my phone.
Yes. The correct term for TSMC should be GigaFab, which was used long before Elon coined GigaFactory.

It was named as such because of the scale and capacity of those Fab as compared to other pure play competitor. It was also one reason how TSMC manage to win by Economy of Scale.
I do apologize for singling you out personally. That was unnecessary, and you did nothing to deserve it.

> I disagree that most opposition to conspiracy theories comes from fear of having to adjust one's worldview, or that logic and consideration are rare. This statement makes critics of conspiracy theories out to be closed-minded and unreasonable, which is a common argument made by proponents of conspiracy theories to justify not having their worldview threatened by criticism.

This is the crux of the disagreement then. Many of the prominent critics of conspiracy theories, especially ones who becomes full-time skeptics, are indeed closed-minded, in my opinion. But you describe it as a conscious activity (experiencing a fear of adjusting one's worldview) when really it's subconscious and most people are unaware of the mental gymnastics they are doing to shoot down an idea. Or for the more dedicated ones, they are playing debate rather than caring about the issue at hand, which can also be seen by groups such as the flat Earth-ers (if you think most of them actually think the Earth is flat, you have been memed).

I think you are in the minority in that most people agree this phenomenon exists, but very few can apply that knowledge to themselves. I can mostly only do so in hindsight, but entertaining ideas is definitely a practice-able skill.

> Speaking of something obvious that goes without saying, most people already accept that the world is poorly understood and many things are possible.

Perhaps among the average populous, but amongst people who are often the smartest in the room, especially the people perusing HN, this is definitely NOT true. A decade ago, I was certainly one of these people. I felt I could understand any technology from first principles rather easily, and no one around me seemed to be provoking any questions I couldn't answer. It was arrogance, and now I see it in others, too. Far more so in educated and scientifically minded circles.
That’s a fair point. I was imagining things from the user experience layer and not the data. Both are important, I do think friendlier the UX can be for basic things, the more I could get folks I know to try using it instead.

That is one way Waze started to get a leg up on Google Maps, it’s experience was creating a more meaningful experience for the average driver...and as a result, data.
If you read the story, you know that the person here was a young woman, probably from Afghanistan, on a temp visa in the US. There is no way she's going to hire a lawyer, she's probably already back in her home country.
Good. The whole thing should be shut down.
> I worry myself every time I open Google Maps on my phone. I feel like a traitor.

Easy, uninstall it and use only their web version, which is hideous in mobile.
How do you get visitors to the React Hook blog when you're not investing in SEO. Really curious.
I too basically disagree with the author (for reasons I'll go into below), but I think it's worth unpacking a little further that high quality release notes can form an important part of your communication strategy with your users. Note: high quality.

Many years ago I worked for a tools company where, for our less popular tools, user count would be in the thousands to tens of thousands, and for the more popular tools, it would be in the hundreds of thousands. Every single time we put out a release you could guarantee that a handful of people would ask for release notes even though we'd always publish them. Clearly people wanted them.

Now I work for a company where our platform caters to two very distinct groups of users - one group internal, the other external. Particularly for the internal users release notes are hugely important in order to avoid disrupting their work and deliverables to customers.

In both companies we've often had an "additional bug-fixes and performance improvements" item in the list.

Why?

Because people only have so much attention to go around: they're busy and, particularly in my current role and with our internal users, it's critical that we draw that limited supply of attention toward the most important changes. That's much more valuable than sending out an exhaustive document of every single change every time we do a release. We've found that if we supply exhaustive notes, fewer people tend to read them, and we get complaints that they're too long. As you've already suggested it comes down to ensuring that the release notes you provide are actually valuable to users.

Together with other documentation and training materials, release notes can provide a useful jumping off point for learning how to work with changes and improvements to our software.

(Not everybody reads them, of course, but having them does at least mean that when they inevitably ask for help/information, we can point them at the release notes as a starting point.)
That sounds awesome. What is the name of the service?
Is the NYT bashing the British?

Is it a pattern just to give the impression that the US is doing better because the brits are scoring some own goals?

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-new-york-times-s-uk-... (Yes, I know The Spectator is strongly biased, but do they have a point?)

Sorry, it is a political question which isn’t hn’s jam ...but the linked article just seems egregiously bashing to me.
Youtrack still somtimes comes up some very weird shortcuts :) https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JT-19706
Because I read so much nonfiction for my work as a cognitive scientist, I tend to prefer fiction for my personal enjoyment. I suppose that I could choose other unrelated nonfiction subjects, but for some reason that seems more like work again. Though, I do read some nonfiction for personal enjoyment, such as history, pop science, etc.

The evolution of my career has been (nonfiction) writer, then (nonfiction) editor, then lawyer, and finally cognitive scientist. Almost all of my adult life has been either writing and reading for study, or writing and reading for work.

Reading is still the #1 thing I do on my own time despite it also being the #1 thing I do for work, but, please, make it pretend. :)
Here's a kind of silly but accurate view of path tracing for animated features
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frLwRLS_ZR0

Typically, most pathtracers use a technique called Monte Carlo Estimation, which means that they continuously loop over every pixel in an image, and average together the incoming light from randomly traced light paths. To calculate motion blur, they typically sample the scene at least twice (once at camera shutter open, and again at shutter close). Adaptive sampling rendering techniques will typically converge faster when there is less motion blur.

One of the biggest time-saving techniques lately, is machine learning powered image denoising [1]. This allows the renderer to compute significantly fewer samples, but then have a 2D post-process run over the image and guess what the image might look like if it had been rendered with higher samples.

Animated movies and VFX render each frame in terms of minutes and hours, while games need to render in milliseconds. Many of the techniques used in game rendering are approximations of physically based light transport, that look "good enough". But modern animated films and VFX are much closer to simulating reality with true bounced lighting and reflections.

[1] https://developer.nvidia.com/optix-denoiser
Somebody on Titter mentioned that the initial submission was 7X,000 words, and they cut it down to half that to fit within a single issue.
If there's no sign to indicate that the speed limit is changed, how are you supposed to know what the speed limit is?

I've had speeding tickets forgiven in Australia because the sign simply wasn't visible enough due to overgrown trees and a 2 lane off ramp separating the sign from the road it applied to, let alone the sign missing altogether.
Byte Magazine had an article in 1986 that drew the US based on distances between cities. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1986-08/page/n103/...
> Because the expense is not really worth it

I disagree with this takeaway. But full disclosure I’m biased: I work on OptiX. There is a reason Pixar and Arnold and Vray and most other major industry renderers are moving to the GPU, because the trends are clear and because it has recently become ‘worth it’. Many renderers are reporting factors of 2-10 for production scale scene rendering. (Here’s a good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlmRuR5MKmU) There definitely are tradeoffs, and you’ve accurately pointed out several of them - memory constraints, paging, micropolygons, etc. Yes, it does take a lot of engineering to make the best use of the GPU, but the scale of scenes in production with GPUs today is already firmly well past being limited to turntables, and the writing is on the wall - the trend is clearly moving toward GPU farms.
I‘ve seen them in the Netherlands as well. These are pretty great as they completely discourage any form of cheating that is dangerous (i.e. sudden braking), but incentivize smooth flowing traffic.
Not an ILMer, but I was at LucasArts over a decade ago. Back then, us silly gamedevs would argue with ILM that they needed to transition from CPU to GPU based rendering. They always pushed back that their bottleneck was I/O for the massive texture sets their scenes through around. At the time RenderMan was still mostly rasterization based. Transitioning that multi-decade code and hardware tradition over to GPU would be a huge project that I think they just wanted to put off as long as possible.

But, very soon after I left Lucas, ILM started pushing ray tracing a lot harder. Getting good quality results per ray is very difficult. Much easier to throw hardware at the problem and just cast a whole lot more rays. So, they moved over to being heavily GPU-based around that time. I do not know the specifics.
Missiles don’t just get fired to one position, they can adjust their heading to hit a moving target.
It's 3 blades not 2.

3 is the optimal between wind area and turbulence.
Direct link to Wikimapia https://wikimapia.org/

Highly recommended for looking around when you move to a new neighbourhood or city... I would say tourism, but that is NaT (not a thing) right now.
FB's "Chief of Advertising Integrity" and Google's "Chief of Privacy Integrity" ....