Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An Unbelievable Demo

brendangregg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 478 posts

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#241

Post by webmobdev »

satysin wrote: post #82
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, at least you realize you are a tiny country with a small population and the ego adapted to that. I am French and we are a country with a great past - but not looking ahead. We still assume that we radiate across the world and that our voice counts. It does not, and this has to be clear. There are countries that can influence events, but this is not ours. A typical example is how angry we were after the recent pi…

I am British but have lived in [redacted] for a while now and I feel the same as you about [redacted]. If Brexit showed us anything it is that the UK is no way near as important as they like to think they are. Watching the UK and [redacted] at loggerheads has been a mix of frustration and amusement for someone like myself clearly caught in the crossfire. As an "outsider" in [redacted] my biggest complaint is the stau…

    I am French and we are a country with a great past - but not looking ahead.

    I feel the same as you about both the British and the French.
Add India to the list.

The right-wing in India are obsessed about our past, and worse, desperate to associate everything about it with "Hindu religion" or "Hindu culture" despite the huge influence of Buddhism, Islam and the imperialists (largely the British who finally got the upper hand on our sub-continent).

"We were the richest country in the world till we were looted by Muslims and Christians."

"We had brilliant Hindu brahmin scientists who excelled in mathematics, medicine and astronomy / astrology.

"Look at these huge ancient temples built with extraordinary artistry that have survived for centuries."

And so on, are proof of our "great past" that they believe automatically should earn us the respect of the world.

In their obsession with the past, they totally disregard the achievements of modern independent India just because our freedom movement were lead by people like Gandhi and Nehru who opposed their idea of a theocratic-fascist state, and chose to create a secular state that treated everyone as an equal and gave every citizen equal rights.

For a country that won its independence in a non-violent manner from the most powerful empire of the world, and a country that has lifted millions of its citizens from poverty and is today self sufficient in agriculture (one of the largest in the world), and one of the few countries with an active and self-sufficient space, nuclear and defence program we have really made a lot of strides.

But for the right, India is not "respected" by the world because anti-Hindus chose secularism and thus since "we Hindus" don't respect our "Hinduness", the world also ignores Hindu cultural achievement and denies us our true place.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#242

Post by drstewart »

Could you fit in your nationality a few more times in the article? I can't tell what country you're from.

P.S: if you constantly boast about how humble your country is, you're probably not that humble.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#243

Post by thinkindie »

_l4jh wrote: post #104

I have a similar experience to this myself. A long time ago (early 2000s) I wrote a handful of tools to ease physical to virtual (P2V) migration for Windows Server. I was a systems administrator in the UK working for a large American firm. I wrote the tools in my own time and unlike in other countries my employer had no ownership of them, just to clear that up at the start. I did use these tools at work but never dev…

did you follow up with that company to make sure they granted you recognition and money for your tools?

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#244

Post by pjc50 »

jasonkester wrote: post #197

It makes me sad that the way a developer is expected to react when they discover that the Valuable Thing that they gave away for free is being sold by a Big Company for Big Money is to try to ensure that the Valuable Things they give away in the future remain free. I'd much prefer to see the people who build Valuable Things show more interest in capturing some of that value. There's this overwhelming narrative revolv…

This works in the other direction: how many developers are willing to pay for their dependencies? Would things like npm even exist if you had to pay invoices for every bit of code loaded?

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#245

Post by RyJones »

Agentlien wrote: post #133
irrational wrote: post #55

> a heavy American accent Any non-Americans want to chime in on what is a heavy American accent? I’m imagining heavy southern accent, but maybe this is something that can only be heard by non-Americans?

I'm Swedish and to me a heavy American accent means a clear rhotic r[0], slightly slurred speech, and a lot of volume. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English

I got that a lot in Iceland[0] recently.

I’d say something to a clerk, and they’d reply with “you’re an American!”

Yes, how could you tell?

You’re so loud!

Thanks?

[0]: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOgT48pM4GctCy-88GTDyyqyy...

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#246

Post by uuidgen »

maccard wrote: post #179
xmprt wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know a user is on version 3 and need to update to version 5, then why not just send out all the patches between 3 and 5? Why do you need to generate a new patch for each pair of versions. It feels a bit egregious when I have to download a 100MB update just because a few characters were buffed or nerfed. More involved changes end up being over 1GB.

Because it's not just version 3 to version 5, it's version 3 to version 84. Not all versions are made equal either - one might be a character buff, another might reorder assets in the "big huge binary blob file" for performance improvements. At a certain point, rather than downloading 30MB per update for 25 versions, and applying each incrementally (remember that you have to do them in order too), just download the f…

Microsoft made sure in windows 10 that it's almost unusable without SSD. SO you big binary blob file have random r/w access.

Most backup software is able to do good binary deltas of arbitrary data for decades. Even dumb checkpointing resolves problem of downloading 25 versions - you download latest checkpoint and deltas from there.

Don't excuse poor design and programming, when you know a file structure, creating a differential update should be short task. With a tiny bit of algorithmic knowledge you could even optimize the process to only download needed assets inside of you big binary blob - if the asset was changed 7 times during your last 25 version you only need to download the last one.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#247

Post by firtoz »

kuroguro wrote: post #207

A colleague of mine was attending a local tech conference just before Covid hit. I believe it was aimed at newcomers and various companies tried to show off exciting tech that interns/new coders could potentially work on. She couldn't believe what she saw. A major govt. backed logging company (which does do a lot of dev work themselves) were showing off one of our projects as theirs! We were using depth cameras to es…

I would imagine they would say to an intern once they joined, "yeah you won't work on THAT project, but here's some other thing for you to do". It's like the estate agency putting a listing of a nice place on a website and then when it comes to viewing the place they say "well that one was just taken but let me show you something similar".

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#248

Post by squarefoot »

Almost been there. I was once hired and given some sources to work on by a company, and those were the same exact sources I wrote at another company years before, although my name and all recognizable comments were stripped, save for a few almost invisible traces I left like my initials paired with reserved words to make them appear like directives, pragmas, etc. The guy who had given me the "new" sources was without any doubt responsible, since he was PM at the old company having access to everything, but almost certainly he had no right to use them over the old company. It took like 10 seconds to me to recognize them as filenames, function names, network usage, variables and structures all were the same, so it went like. "Hah, no problems, I recall this very well, in fact there should be my name somewhere... oh rats, it got deleted somehow, no probs however, consider it done":=).

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#249

Post by uuidgen »

whelming_wave wrote: post #121
oblio wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the reasons games do this is the data is compressed, so a "patch" might be indistinguishable from a real update. Does this happen with more advanced compression algorithms? I've rsynced zip files of different versions of internal software and the diff was always much, much smaller than the entire package.

Kind of an aside from your question, but binary patches not being much smaller than the full thing might happen more with modern games? Heresay, but from what I've heard modern games may ship multiple copies of some assets with different levels or features so they can be loaded as a sequential read off the disk. While a block-oriented compression algorithm might sync up more reliably, if you're packing 200MB of asset…

So far in in most of the world even platter disks (which have really poor performance with modern Windows) are faster than network. Which means you can download description of the difference and reorder the file locally much faster than downloading it. Yes it needs the file to made in a way that is update friendly - most current compression algorithms can be configured like that. Yes, compression will be slightly lower, but you will save on both download size AND disk space, because right now most patches require you to download patch and then apply it, requiring twice the space. If you have 5% larger asset file but can patch it with a few memcpy on a mapped file it is a win in every way imaginable.

It is just really poor programming, nothing more. And it's everywhere. If find source >/dev/null takes 6 seconds there is no reason for gradle to take 2 minutes on a rebuild. If the dev is used to that, why would they even think about patch optimisation?

Post reply on HN