n1ghtmare_ (u/n1ghtmare_)

n1ghtmare_ commented on Facebook Renames to Meta about.facebook.com/meta/... · Posted by u/TiredOfLife

If what they're doing now is any indication, I don't think they'll succeed with it anyway. They've got almost zero credibility with anyone under 30.

Their existing prototypes are outrageously embarrassing. I'm the kind of person that has a hard time watching The Office because I feel second-hand embarrassment, and I can barely make it a minute in to any of their VR demos. They're so uncanny, awkward, and embarrassingly goofy. At least The Office has some endearing quality (sorry for the weird comparison).

I'm not sure if it's Mark Zuckerberg's influence or what... but everything about Facebook lacks some sort of jour de vive. Like, their idea of "making work fun" is stuff like... an astoundingly cringe-worth video about healthcare open-enrollment? This kind of thing dumbfounds me https://vimeo.com/639318528... and I don't even consider myself a cynical person.

All of this feels only a few degrees removed from Jonestown.

n1ghtmare_ · 4 years ago

I feel exactly the same way about Memojis, yet people use them and apparently don’t find them as cringy as I do.

n1ghtmare_ commented on Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm? · Posted by u/strangecasts

dzik · 7 years ago

Erlang. Same here. Reading first few pages of a book describing principles of OTP (processes, share-nothing, messages, etc) was mind blowing. Company I worked for at the time (and I still do) decided to switch from Java to Erlang in middleware area. This decision seemed like a mixture of insanity and enlightment. Do you switch from one of the most popular languages in the world to something that most developers never heard of? Surely, exciting, but will it work? How do we hire new staff? After our R&D confirmed it was promising, me with couple of other developers were tasked with rewriting quite an expensive piece of middleware software that was unfortunately reaching its maximum capacity. We had no knowledge of how the software worked, we just knew its API. We were given time to learn erlang so we did. We all switched from eclipse to vim (some to emacs). After a bit of playing around with erlang we did our job in just 3 months. New app was much smaller and was easily capable of handling many more messages than the previous one. And it was written by erlang newbies! Then many more erlang apps we have created. It turned out to be a really good choice. Also the level of introspection you get out-of-the box with erlang is just amazing. I have never seen anything like this before.

Now I can compare Erlang to Java and it is really baffling how the heck Java took over the world. To do erlang I just need an editor with some plugins, ssh connection to linux with OTP installed and of course rebar3. To do Java I need 4GB of RAM to simply run an IDE with gazillion of plugins, maven to cater for thousands of dependencies for the simplest app and I need to know Spring, Hibernate, AOP, MVC and quite a chunk of other 26^3 3-letter abbreviations. No thanks.

n1ghtmare_ · 7 years ago

I already asked about this in the parent post that refers to Erlang, but do you happen to have a write up by any chance, where you go into more details. I’m super interested! It would be really appreciated. (This is not the first time I hear people praising Erlang in comparison to popular OOP languages)

n1ghtmare_ commented on Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm? · Posted by u/strangecasts

ilovecaching · 7 years ago

My first big Erlang project made me completely rethink my acceptance of object oriented programming in C++, Java, Python, etc. I realized that I had blindly accepted OO because it was taught as part of my college curriculum. After several years in industry I had concluded that programming was just hard in general. It wasn't until my first project in Erlang, where an entire team of OO devs were ramping up on functional programming, that I discovered that the purported benefits of OO were lies. I also realized that the idea that concurrency and parallelism must be hard is untrue. OO simply makes it hard.

Now I see OO as something I have to deal with, like a tiger in my living room. Thankfully, so many new languages have come out recently; Go, Rust, and Elixir being the ones that I use regularly, that have called out OO for what it is and have gone in more compelling directions.

Hopefully one day they will teach OO alongside other schools of thought, as a relatively small faction of programming paradigms.

n1ghtmare_ · 7 years ago

This sounds fascinating. Do you have a write-up where you go into more details? A couple of examples with before and after perhaps? Seriously that would be amazing.

n1ghtmare_ commented on Mexican Newspaper Shuts Down, Saying It Is Too Dangerous to Continue nytimes.com/2017/04/03/wo... · Posted by u/schoen

Cyph0n · 8 years ago

I'm not sure about Singapore, but Doha and Dubai are the both capital cities of a monarchy: Qatar and UAE, respectively. Keep that in mind if you ever visit.

I lived in the UAE for ~14 years, so I can give you some idea of how safe Dubai is.

- You can leave your car in a parking lot for hours, unlocked, with expensive devices clearly visible. Nobody would even come close to it.

- There is no need to lock your house when you leave. People usually do though, because it just make sense to do so.

- You can walk virtually anywhere in Dubai at any time of night, completely alone. Nobody will bother you.

- The UAE has some of the friendliest police I've ever seen. Oh, and they are extremely professional and responsive, and are insanely good at what they do [1].

In my 14 years living there, I have never once been robbed, have never even witnessed a crime or robbery, nor have I ever heard of someone (e.g., friends) falling victim to one. The only incident was a break-in at the home of a family we knew. That's it.

And I hear that Doha is even safer than Dubai!

[1]: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Mabh...

n1ghtmare_ · 8 years ago

I've been living in Abu Dhabi (capital of UAE) for the last 12 years and although I started getting more and more annoyed with the country, I can absolutely confirm what you're saying. Safety is almost always at the top of the pros/cons list.

n1ghtmare_ commented on When Is Cheryl's Birthday? nbviewer.ipython.org/url/... · Posted by u/jonp

_asummers · 10 years ago

Where can I find more puzzles of this flavor? This generated some fun discussion on my Facebook wall.

n1ghtmare_ · 10 years ago

A lot of similar puzzles:

http://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes

n1ghtmare_ commented on Re: MemSQL the “world's fastest database”? (2012) postgresql.org/message-id... · Posted by u/Cieplak

jandrewrogers · 11 years ago

The biggest effects are varying page sizes as bits move through silicon and latencies to memory access, which reflects cache hierarchies but also NUMA, DIMMs, and other considerations with respect to how memory is connected to the system and the topology of how memory moves into the local CPU cache. Due to the physical size of supercomputers, the latency variance for "flat" cache coherent memory access can become so bad that it has pathological characteristics on algorithms that work adequately with lower latencies. With how fast and efficient CPUs are today, on single system boards this has a huge effect. For example, it is not uncommon to lock a core to physical memory that is directly attached to that CPU's memory channels instead of some other CPU's memory channels in databases.

Some performance-sensitive open source libraries do varying amounts of memory topology aware optimization. The rudimentary tricks can often be worth a 2x performance boost for in-memory processing.

In the same way that really clever schedulers and disk I/O systems (they don't let the OS do it) in good databases try to optimize the average access time and variance, high-performance in-memory systems use very similar techniques to optimize the average access time to any particular piece of memory. The techniques are very similar in the abstract but there is a lot less written about the nuances of in-memory scheduling; it often involves understanding lower level details of the silicon than programmers are used to studying. The net effect is a large reduction in busy stalls and contention.

Also, people tend to forget that even though lock-free algorithms are fast on average, they tend to have a lot of overhead in systems with many cores unless they are used sparingly and accessed relatively infrequently. Eliminating that waste can have large performance benefits.

To your question: In order to minimize the need for thread coordination and optimize memory scheduling, the first thing you need to do is design algorithms and data structures that approximately match the topology of your storage, whether memory or disk or both. And that rarely looks like idealized random access memory. Then you optimize for locality of execution. I've designed database kernels that had thousands of parallel threads running. It turns out that the techniques used to eliminate almost all coordination in that case produce extremely efficient database kernels on a commodity server with vastly smaller resources.

Understanding the topology of real silicon systems is a large part of "optimization".

n1ghtmare_ · 11 years ago

Wow, dude, your post made me feel VERY incompetent. This happens a lot on HN.

n1ghtmare_ commented on Ask HN: I have to analyze 100M lines of Java – where do I start? · Posted by u/user1241320

crpatino · 11 years ago

I don't think there are that many companies with ~10^8 LOC code bases in the world, let alone for a single product[1]:

Facebook(webapp): ~310^7 LOC Linux Kernel: ~210^7 LOC Windows XP: ~5*10^7 LOC My impression is that 10 million LOC codebase is relatively common... but past that the size of the organization (company or volunteers) needed becomes a major sorting criteria.

[1] http://www.wired.com/2013/04/facebook-windows/

n1ghtmare_ · 11 years ago

I realize Facebook is not a trivial software, but seriously - this large? I heard this before and I just don't get it.