skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What does uncorrectable error mean in RAM?

First, let's define a correctable error — that means an error where you have enough additional information (in your Hamming-code stream, in a parity bit, whatever) to repair the error, e.g. a one-bit error when you're using ECC RAM.

An uncorrectable error, then, is one where you do have enough information to detect the corruption, but not enough information to figure out the correct repair for the corruption. (The amount of information required to detect corruption is always less than the amount of information required to correct it.)

With ECC RAM, usually exactly two bit-flips will produce a detected, but uncorrectable, error on read-back.

With non-ECC but "with a parity-bit per word" RAM (which exists, and is a bit cheaper than ECC RAM), you can't correct anything, only detect. (Which is sometimes all you need, if you're willing to do the calculation over again.)

All that being said: completely separately from these hardware-level features, some operating systems (e.g. macOS) compress memory, and generate page-level checksums of memory pages as they're compressed. A checksum failure during memory-page decompression can also trigger the kernel to throw this kind of "uncorrectable error" itself.

There may also exist (i.e. it wouldn't be impossible for there to be) RAM modules that continuously calculate page checksums for each page on each write; and then check the contents of pages against these, perhaps asynchronously, in sort of the same way a ZFS scrub works. I've never heard of this being done, but it feels like the sort of thing you'd implement in hardware for an extremely "ruggedized" system like a Mars rover. If this approach were to be implemented, it would also emit "uncorrectable" errors.
>The more I think about your reply the less sense it makes to me.

I think the issue is more with your understanding then my explanation.

>What do you think is the definition of macrostate?

We first introduce the very fundamental statistical ideas of microstates and macrostates.
Given a system (e.g., a gas), we view it as built from some elementary constituents, (e.g.,
molecules). Each constituent has a set of possible states it can be in. The thermodynamic
state of the system (which characterizes the values of macroscopic observables such as
energy, pressure, volume, etc. ) corresponds to many possible states of the constituents
(the molecules). The collection of states of all the constituents is the microstate. To keep
things clear, we refer to the macroscopic, thermodynamic state as the macrostate. The
vast disparity between the number of possible macrostates versus microstates is at the
heart of thermodynamic behavior! The number of distinct microstates giving the same
macrostate is called the multiplicity of the macrostate. The multiplicity is a sort of micro-scopic observable which can be assigned to a macrostate.

>The standard notion in statistical mechanics is that if we have, for example, a volume of gas in equilibrium at (constant) ambient temperature and we measure the pressure it doesn’t change. The macrostate doesn’t change. That’s what being in equilibrium means. The macrostate is in that case defined by the variables P,T,V. If all you knew was the value of these three variables and they didn’t change how could the macrostate - or the entropy - change?

This notion is wrong. It CAN change. It just has an extreme low probability of changing from equilibrium to some low entropy state. The probability is low enough that you practically don't need to consider it, but you must consider it from a technical standpoint.

If by sheer luck all gas particles moved to the exact left side of the container. My measurement tool (thermometer) for macrostate was on the right side of the container then it registers zero. There is nothing in the laws of physics that prevents this from happening. Only probability makes this situation unlikely to happen.

>You tell me that if you know the precise position of the particles of that gas then the macrostate and the entropy change all the time.

No. I'm saying that the temperature reading on the thermometer a macroscopic measurement is INDEPENDENT of knowledge. Your mind doesn't control microstates and thus the macrostate of the system.

>But you also tell me that “Knowing more or less about a system does not change it's entropy.” Which is in flagrant contradiction with the two previous paragraphs.

Flagrant? You're offended? Well you can leave if you're offended. Using words like this also Offends me so we can end the conversation.
There isn't anything particular about a company being immortal. The issue is now. No one wants to be there when a company is dying. There's nothing heroic about "going down with the ship" in the corporate world.
I'm from Idaho, I feel like someone could drop me anywhere in the world and I'd probably do ok. Unless there's humidity j/k :-P

Kind of a random question, but what do you think about van life aka Instagram tourism?

We're seeing a lot of stacked rock piles, trash left at campsites, defaced natural formations, just people in general crowding into areas that used to be "secret". We have a sense that people visiting here don't share our values around leaving no trace. Is that happening everywhere? Is it a trend? Will it get better or worse? Etc etc.
I don't assume it can be measured, and I think large organizations are stupid and morally shallow enough without letting them loose with the mandate to maximize a handful of simple metrics.
LiteFS author here. That's a good explanation, Simon. Preventing writes on the replica is a nice benefit to FUSE versus an external process.

Another benefit of the control is that we can maintain a rolling checksum of the entire database at each transaction so we're able to verify integrity when replicating. That's also what allows us to do asynchronous replication across a loose membership of nodes since we can easily detect if a node diverges.
I am in the same kind of ball park as OP. Been doing sysadmin for a long time, and I teach at the university too... see a lot of students graduating and their network skills are weak. Bad troubleshooting skills at linux/unix fundamentals.

When I talk to friends doing sysadmin work about this, they kind of gravitate towards: "I throw this in AWS, need k8s, terraform, cloud-whatever-hot-tech, etc, and if it breaks, my json/ansible/CI/CD will just restart it" as the prevalent attitude now.

I feel OP, but I do wonder if we are just moving to a space where people do not optimize/troubleshoot at that level? I do a LOT of hands on grunt work, performance optimizing servers / kernels / networks, but I am at a university. I think my skills are probably worthless in todays "real IT" world. (which is sad, I would love to get a new job :)
> even if CO2 magically made the food both more nutrient-dense and with higher growth rate

I just detailed on how that will happen, no need to use magic. Increased CO2 will be better for plants worldwide (including deserts) and for agriculture, that's maybe the one positive thing I can find about global warming.
I haven't "removed all agency." My very first comment explicitly says that responsibility is shared. I also don't want to get rid of advertising; only that it does induce demand, and that's what it exists to do.

I think it would behoove you to read this thread more charitably.

Edit: that being said, I don't need an advertisement to tell me that I want the majority of things in my life.
While I wouldn't use it like this in day to day speech, in rhetorical speech the use of "very" repeatedly can be used to emphasise a point.

Someone warning against dangerous driving might say "a car at speed can be dangerous because it's very heavy, it's going very fast and so it's very likely to kill or give life changing injuries to somebody if it collides with them."

I think it has a better effect when spoken than when written, though.
Yeah, getting the most use out of your paper (or picking said size in the first place) was a time-honored tradition of print typography. And sure, not 1:1 applicable to the screen.

I do think that the screen typography department has been seriously lacking here, though. Scrolling a single column can't really be the end of wisdom.

But the main problem we've got is that the ad people took care of on-screen typography once we progress far enough that screen sizes and resolutions actually would've made more things possible. Not the tradition of typography that made newspapers, books etc., but the flyer and full-page-ad demographic. PageMaker, not FrameMaker.

Browsers barely have the tools to make reading effective and enjoyable. CSS is oriented towards other purposes, and the browsers themselves only have the bare necessities – practically hidden "user stylesheets" or the one-size-fits-all "reader mode".
Soon grep will be a systemd module.
A number of years ago I had a great boss who was trying to target hire someone so he made a ridiculous job req asking for expertise in “git’s, gat’s, gots.” It was a defense job
And the point of this is...?
Brazil is by far the highest, there's no comparison. Electronics in Brazil cost roughly double. Other places are 20 or 40% more, not 100% more.
What an incredibly weak argument, I'm disappointed to read it.

We're not talking microseconds, we're talking a fundamental problem in computer science for 30 years which is no closer to being solved.

We're talking about a classification of bugs which are solved by other means rather easily that do not take an unknown performance penalty on one of the slowest to improve component of modern computers.

Grandma isn't losing anything due to this, heartbleed: this ain't. Spectre: this aint. and crucially we have the tools to ensure this never happens again without throwing our hands up in the air and saying "WELL COMPUTER NO GO".

If you're actually scared, I invite you to run OpenBSD as I did. you will learn very quickly that performance is a virtue you can't live without, a few extra instructions here, a lack of cache on gettimeofday() and suddenly the real lag of using the machine is extremely frustrating.

And again, for the final time I will say this: we can fix this and make it never happen again without any loss in performance.

that you keep advocating a loss in performance tells me that you've spent a career making everyones life worse for your own experience, I am not a fan of that mentality.

or maybe I've worked in AAA Game Dev too long and we don't get the luxury of throwing away performance on a whim.
U.S. Has Made ‘Dramatic Change’ in Technology Used for Nuclear Code System
Yet, the US government surely cared quite a lot about Snowden publishing the things they were hiding...
No, I disagree. A couple of those things pointed out are fair: they’re unfair comparisons that aren’t apples to apples, which matters for benchmarks. The SQLite one for example is like me benchmarking a game on two PCs to test graphics performance, but with wildly different settings on both. It tells the end user nothing useful about the comparative performance.

All of those things are easy mistakes to make though. Where it’s a bit not great is if there was apparently communication about it and the Bun team didn’t at least change the SQLite comparison — it’s not “OOTB” behaviour, it’s a library.
Fungi are the whole thing. Mushrooms are a part of the fungi.
Please do it yourself! Your level of knowledge is rare and could be helpful to a lot of people. I'd happily buy a copy of "The Greybeard IT Bible" if you wrote/published it as I'm sure many others would. Would even be cool to have a pro version where you do short podcasts/talks on certain tricks of the trade included.
Here's a single file, no dependency nntp / Usenet server library in python3 I wrote. It includes an HN gateway as an example. I have used it with slrn (tui), meli (tui), pan (gui) and thunderbird (gui)

https://github.com/epilys/nntpserver.py
One can be both against Russian aggression and against unconstitutional actions by the US government at the same time.
Oh, nice, I'll have to play around with that a bit.
I used to hack away with Delphi back in the day. I tried getting back into it with Lazarus, but I really find Pascal syntax painful to work with again for some reason. It just has some strange conventions and I feel like I'd have to actually read a book to become proficient. A very different experience than learning, say, Kotlin where I could essentially pick it up knowing other OO languages and having a good IDE
The term is "math-washing". It's use as a means to facilitate accountability laundering has been a sticking point for a while.
Is AirCanada bad? I have a big flight on there in a few months (honeymoon) and it's gotten rescheduled numerous times but otherwise service has seemed fine.
NSFW had become an euphemism for p-o-r-n(w/exposed parts) and in that sense it’s not NSFW because. In literal sense it is. And that discrepancy is somewhat confusing.
Playing devil's advocate here:

> Lacrosse players tend to be white and male

I suspect they also tend to attend certain schools, and that could very well be causal.

> Why would it make any kind of sense to artificially shrink their candidate pool?

It doesn't make sense to shrink it if you have 10 candidates. But if you have thousands of resumes, it's not shrinking, it's filtering.

> It's not right to

It's naive to expect big corporations to act morally. Best you can do is force them to act legally.
We agree to disagree.
Royal Fish
Slushygate?

> "a series of incidents in which Wilson and other officers assaulted pedestrians by throwing beverages out of unmarked patrol vehicles, sometimes filming their exploits"

Double FFS. What a scumbag bully.
It's not that strange. They are writing a paid newsletter oriented towards Americans, which is why it has that "Live, laugh, love" tinge to it. Besides, you could say an endless number of troubled audiences might read the article. Handicapped folks, parents with needy and noisy children, depressed/repressed engineers who don't leave their house, and thousands of other profiles for whom travel is but a distant dream. You just have to write and not worry about all that. Heck, the people who can't travel might enjoy the escapism.
What aidenn0 said.

Specifically it's one of the 'g' commands (like gg which goes to the top of the file and gG goes to the bottom). Just put your cursor on an identifier and gD (goto definition is the mnenomic).

:help g
Note bringing in goods like this, without declaring them at customs and paying due taxes, is often illegal.

The rules differ between countries, and so does the chance of being caught.
I also had this experience. I read blog posts like this one that said "just start with postgres," so tried that, and spent a bunch of time with GIN and RUM indexes trying to work around edge cases before going to Elasticsearch, where things worked out of the box because it's designed to be a search engine. I'm sorry I can't remember specifics anymore -- it was stuff like filtering and result counts. There just tended to be more surprises because everything was a custom addition instead of a feature enabled by default. In retrospect for an evolving product, adding Elasticsearch was more of a one time up front integration investment, while working around edge cases in Postgres felt like an ongoing limitation we'd be stuck with.
I get so excited thinking about the opportunities that will arise over the next 10-20 years for people who understand the lower-level (or are willing to figure it out) well-enough to clean up the AWS mess.
Federal Courts Agree to Refund Fees They Overcharged People for Access to Pacer
Groups indeed!

When I worked at IBM just out of college, my manager introduced me to someone who was getting promoted three levels up. It turned out that he had some months previously figured out how four people working together could evade the accounting controls and transfer $25 million out of the company on a Friday afternoon and be in Brazil or wherever (never to be seen again, presumably) before Monday. He reported the flaw in the controls and the promotion was the recognition of his acumen...
I find https://www.wordhippo.com/ a much superior vocabulary discovery tool. It has myriad (very many) recommendations for "very late" whereas losetheevery.com has none.
How many chickens you raise on average? I wonder if scale would help bring the costs down (not down to $5, obviously).
I'd love to see a sci-fi writer use this as a premise and explore the unintended consequences. Or maybe a story about this where there was a seemingly minor miscalculation somewhere or some overlooked factor that ended up being catastrophic.
It absolutely does not mean we can't solve the core problem. You can work on two things at once. You can take medicine to treat disease while you work to fix the underlying root cause
Multistability, perceptual value, and internal foraging
I wished someone leaked current NSA projects like Snowden did back then... We would probably be very disappointed to see how little changed and how worst it is.
Exploring the training data behind Stable Diffusion
I'm doubtful counting on the police in real time to help grandma if she's in trouble, they normally show up well after the damage is done. But you're right some people are not able to protect themselves but I'm still not convinced they would be worse off.
I wouldn't do it. It doesn't sound like this upgrade is urgent so why rush into it without having everything you need?

Your boss has delegated this task to you. That means you have the authority to decide how/if it should be done. When they return just explain that you would rather get it right the first time.
Then there are a few other physical servers with load balanced redundant VMs, and it fails over seamlessly. HAProxy makes this pretty easy to handle. But we almost never had any hardware issues, servers are pretty reliable.
I'd love to read a writeup on that project. Sounds fascinating.
A language which has compilers on most platforms.

Thanks for the F77 recommendation.
We migrated FTS to OpenSearch from PostgreSQL a couple of months ago. Here the main issues we had with PostgreSQL FTS:

- cross-tables FTS requires at least materialized views, which lock data for writing at refresh. This was too much worrying for us.

- sorting by rank is not indexable, so we can't sort our dataset and have acceptable timings at the same time. Our dataset isn't enormous, but neither small (~1.5m records)
You have illustrated that “hiring is broken” and “recruitment is broken” threads get posted on HN fairly often. A small sample from a small and possibly unrepresentative subset of job seekers.

I don’t question that maintaining a profile on LinkedIn or similar sites will lead to a lot of unsolicited recruiter email. I don’t have a LinkedIn account anymore, so that fixes the problem for me. I explained why that happens, I didn’t say it doesn’t happen.

The recruiting and hiring processes we see in the tech industry may not give the best results for anyone, and may have unwanted side-effects like spam. I tend to agree, which is why I have made similar comments before, and why I have advised not playing the numbers game to find a job.

In my experience good recruiters exist. You have to cultivate an actual relationship with competent recruiters, not just put a CV on LinkedIn and expect every recruiter to care about you and your preferences.
On point. Though if someone struggles with repeating themselves, I can recommend oh-my-zsh git aliases. They replace common git commands with shorter equivalents, like git push -> gp, git pull -> gl, etc
Can you post a link to any of those products?

A USB charger that is male would be so unusual, I can't even imagine what it would physically look like.
Yeah, I've had this (very annoying) prompt when logged in for a long time now
Elon Musk ceases supporting Ukraine via paying for Starlink
Anyone who wants the job of a cop, for the pay that it offers, should immediately be suspect.

I have held this belief my adult life and see it proven time and time again. The only motivation to do that job with that level of stress is either seeking power/authority or very rarely some altruistic motivation. Which of those things do we hear about more?
Even if experts are convinced that the e-voting system is secure, it cannot be understood by laypeople. To a random person on the street, e-voting is absolutely intransparent, it's a magic black box that spits out a result. And as soon as distrust of the government comes up (no matter whether justified or not), e-voting can amplify the allegations of voting manipulation.

In contrast, paper and mail voting are things that are technically less secure than a well-designed e-voting system, but they can be understood by laypeople. In Switzerland, my vote goes into a ballot box, guarded by people from different parties. They are counted by citizens from different parties, with many people in the same room. Manipulation has happened in the past, but it has always happened in a constrained scope (e.g. people fishing voting ballots out of the mailboxes of their neighbors). And if it happens large-scale in a single town, this may be detected by statistical analysis ("the number of votes for a certain party is unusually high or low compared to other similar towns"). If citizens don't trust the count, they can request a re-count of the sealed voting ballots by other people.

Making voting simpler is a good thing. In Switzerland, we have had mail voting for a long time now. Yes, you still need to fill out a piece of paper and bring it to a post box, but the thing that takes the most time is actually informing yourself about the things/laws/referendums you're voting on, not filling out the paper. And the attack vector on mail voting is easy to understand.

The problem with e-voting is not security, it's trust. If we erode trust in our voting systems, we erode trust in our democracy. This has already started to happen in a few places, most notably in some areas in the US where e-voting systems are deployed, and where certain groups of people keep repeating their allegations of voter fraud. (They can claim this about regular voting as well, but it's easier to disprove than with closed e-voting systems that only very few "experts" can understand.)
You use the spare that's next to it, failing that, in a desperate situation, go to any computer store, buy the biggest gaming PC you can find, load it up with RAM and use that. It'll work, your customers won't know nor care.

In practice, I wouldn't recommend colocation until you are at the scale and budget where you can maintain your own spares. Better outsource it to a dedicated host like OVH/Hetzner/etc that has tons of servers and can immediately replace the hardware.
Good gracious.

"WEINBERG'S SECOND LAW: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization."
>Now if you mean I'm making an assumption about a candidate

That was even more obvious than the sports and cognition fact.

Here's the thing: you're doing the exact thing that caused the problem in the first place. Creating thought experiments and narrating them at length regarding scenarios which are a rarity, given a problem which occurs frequently, in an environment with thousands of other variables.

In a world where we do in fact have better indicators which are still not used, despite being well researched. We have plenty of options remaining before we need to be this nitpicky.
Is Bluespec the Rust of Hardware Design?