strmpnk (u/strmpnk) - Readit News

strmpnk commented on Irish police to be given powers over passwords bbc.com/news/world-europe... · Posted by u/shivbhatt

mysterydip · 5 years ago

Can regular government workers do that, or just actual diplomats? If the latter, just go for their assistant.

strmpnk · 5 years ago

I had a diplomatic passport for many years as a kid. It was definitely handy in our case as cops were quite corrupt where we were living and would try to con us out of money all the time. I don't know how far it'd go in court or under a serious warrant but in practice they always left us alone once we showed our passports.

strmpnk commented on New proof reveals that graphs with no pentagons are fundamentally different quantamagazine.org/new-pr... · Posted by u/theafh

mFixman · 5 years ago

I'm impressed by how clear the article is for a layman. I only know the very basics of graph theory and Ramsay theory and I understood the topic perfectly. This is in comparison to the paper [1] which at a glance seems terse and difficult to understand.

If anyone likes Ramsay theory and these kind of articles, I recommend Erdős' biography "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers".

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.04994

strmpnk · 5 years ago

Quanta Magazine does an excellent job with balancing accessible writing and advanced topics. It's just enough to get someone interested in the problem and the basic ideas to start thinking about it.

strmpnk commented on Elixir and Phoenix after two years nts.strzibny.name/elixir-... · Posted by u/bfm

gregors · 5 years ago

Neck in neck! That's amazing. Thanks for testing that out.

strmpnk · 5 years ago

I wouldn’t call twice as fast neck and neck (others seem to show that the old interpreter is neck and neck) but the primitive JIT is clearly pulling ahead here.

strmpnk commented on Elixir and Phoenix after two years nts.strzibny.name/elixir-... · Posted by u/bfm

gregors · 5 years ago

I'm a huge elixir fan, but in micro made up benchmarks I consistently see Ruby win over Elixir. I haven't run it with the jit.

One specific case that cripples Elixir - is as far as I know Elixir can't handle large multiplications efficiently. Ruby, Python use karatsuba or some derivative - from what I can tell multiplication in Erlang doesn't. Though I haven't actually asked anyone and was just poking around on my own.

example: Multiplying the first 100_000 numbers together I get

ruby multi.rb 3.47s user 1.91s system 99% cpu 5.396 total

elixir multi.exs 14.32s user 0.62s system 103% cpu 14.441 total

strmpnk · 5 years ago

I was curious to see what my JIT build looked like for me so I ran the following: https://gist.github.com/cararemixed/c232b888b9dbdaeb67967f35...

This shows a significantly different story between the two with at least similar code. Note I am not trying to optimize for the fastest factorial here as both can be made much quicker but roughly equivalent code seems to tell a different story for me.

(NOTE: I put the code in a module as iex interpreted expressions on the top level are always slower than compiled modules, even when pasting them into iex. Doing the same for Ruby didn't show any difference for me.)

strmpnk commented on A few notes on message passing blog.erlang.org/message-p... · Posted by u/srijan4

toast0 · 5 years ago

It would seem off heap messages could be a base for this. I've not gone all the way into the weeds on those, but it seems like it could be possible to start with sending a whole message to another process by bumping a refcount and adding a reference to that process's mailbox without needing to make a new copy.

If that works, and is useful, you could extend by bumping the refcount, and adding a new type of subreference to a process's mailbox.

I don't think you'd want to send something referencing multiple off-heap messages or adding some terms and a reference (although maybe, who knows), because that would be a lot of complexity. And you would also want to be sensitive to subreference memory leaks, like can happen with binaries where a binary is large, but only small subreferences stick around, leading to lots of wasted space (this is extra fun when you put a small subbinary into ets/mnesia and it lives forever (well until you restart beam, but that can be a long time).

strmpnk · 5 years ago

This is sort of what Pony did with its ORCA based GC. It has some tricky edge cases to optimize in practice but it can be made to work especially well if data is immutable.

strmpnk commented on A few notes on message passing blog.erlang.org/message-p... · Posted by u/srijan4

dnautics · 5 years ago

So this isn't entirely true; binaries above a certain size have their own recounting, process independent GC going on in the BEAM; I wonder why the VM doesn't use a similar system for highly mobile data structures (copy to a common refcounted "scratchpad" on first send).

strmpnk · 5 years ago

The analog for that would be shared literals which are not copied (super important for small map overhead reduction if the constructor initialized a fix set of keys like elixir structs as the key index is shared). The persistent_term module allows any value to be registered as such at runtime and avoids a lot of caveats that came with mochi_global and the like. While they aren’t ref counted it can definitely help cut down on copying in my experience.

strmpnk commented on Browsers eating RAM flotato.com/post/memory-c... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

zamadatix · 5 years ago

Don't have a Mac so can't look into it but can anyone confirm this test is actually right? E.g. Brave claims (I don't use Brave I just know they had this claim) Safari is worse for memory usage https://brave.com/brave-one-dot-zero-performance-methodology... while this product that uses Safari claims it's 10x better.

Obviously both claims can't be true. From what I remember with Edge (pre Chromium) and Firefox I'm going to guess Safari doesn't really use 1/10th the memory of everyone else - maybe I'm just not familiar though!

strmpnk · 5 years ago

I’d suppose some of it relates to sites with heavy ads. Safari with no extensions will likely require more resources which makes the comparison a little skewed vs Safari with some ad blocker support added via extensions.

It looks like their test includes plenty of ad heavy sites like news articles which seems to confirm that the results are cherry picked.

strmpnk commented on Ask HN: Does your employer want you to state pronouns in email signature? · Posted by u/flash_tier

futureshock · 5 years ago

I am LGBT and not in favor of it being pressured or de-facto compulsory. I would hope it was popular enough that people understood what it meant so that trans people can have more acceptance and understanding. I don't have it in my email signature, but if my company released a policy saying it was acceptable, I might add it. I would probably not add it without management permission since it is their choice how they want to present their brand to their clients. I think strongly pushing it on straight people is more likely to create a backlash and create a counter-movement.

strmpnk · 5 years ago

I’m trans and agree with this, though I offer another reason to avoid making it compulsory.

Before I came out I felt very awkward with regards to my own pronoun display. I wasn’t ready on one hand and on the other I felt terrible seeing other pronouns even if it was attached to my deadname only.

I’d encourage people to do it if they’re comfortable with it on a personal level as it can be a very personal thing. I also want to thank all of those who do add it. It’s a big deal for many of us and can make a real difference in exchange for very little effort.

strmpnk commented on Oso – open-source policy engine for authorization in Rust github.com/osohq/oso... · Posted by u/dragonsh

denysvitali · 5 years ago

What's the main advantage over OPA?

strmpnk · 5 years ago

I looks like it’s written in Rust which isn’t super special but would be far easier to embed as a library in other languages compared to Go in OPA’s case. Polar also seems like a nicer policy language (strong Prolog vibes) though this is subjective as I’ve not done a deep comparison yet.

strmpnk commented on Bunnie's Precursor Crowdfunding Begins crowdsupply.com/sutajio-k... · Posted by u/nanomonkey

Rebelgecko · 5 years ago

I don't quite get why they say that it's trustworthy because it uses a soft-CPU running on an FPGA. Doesn't that just shift the potential attack from one vendor to another? e.g. instead of trusting a CPU from Mediatek, now you have to trust an FPGA fabric from Xilinx

strmpnk · 5 years ago

This is true, but the difficulty of making a general purpose FPGA fabric manipulate generic bitstream descriptions in an undetectable way is much harder than putting hidden backdoors in well defined ISAs. What amount of hardware validation is reasonable?

It depends on what you'd like to accomplish, but given that powerful FPGAs are now more affordable and plenty of great FPGA friendly libraries are emerging which work with open source tools, the barrier for Soft-CPU implementations has lowered significantly. This sort of project looks great for cases where trusting blackbox chips was questionable.