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Cold Showers

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Re: Cold Showers

#251

Post by jahewson »

AdamH12113 wrote: post #245
thom wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There appear to be slightly weird commercial reasons behind this, because gaming GPUs have great CUDA performance but NVIDIA won’t let you put them in a datacentre. So buying your data scientists gaming laptops (RGB and all) generally works out faster for any reasonable price point. That said, a dedicated server with a decent Xeon and MKL set up correctly generally outperforms CPU-bound stuff.

What prevents gaming GPUs from being used in a data center? Is there some licensing restriction?

Yes, it’s part of the EULA for the driver.

Re: Cold Showers

#252

Post by shepherdjerred »

siwatanejo wrote: post #172
kevinmchugh wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for all Ruby developers but I found that I could read a pull request from just about anyone I worked with a and find a spot where they hadn't covered a possible nil with a test. And yes, we had coverage checks. A type system can keep you from having to write those tests.

> A type system can keep you from having to write those tests. Because with a proper static lang (hint: not Java, not C#), nil doesn't exist? Right.

It can if you choose to return Optionals instead of nulls.

Re: Cold Showers

#253

Post by joeldo »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #236
joeldo wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is an item in the first declaration? Is it an id? Is it an object (if so, what type of object? Id and qty or some other data)? I guess you now need to read through the implementation or docs. The first is much easier to read incorrectly .

If it were an item id the argument would be item_id. It is an object. What type of object? The type that can be added to a cart. You don't just drop a programmer into the code and have them call a function in a vacuum. Nobody just throws random objects at a function. They are familiar with the code in general and they know what to do.

- If it were an item id the argument would be item_id. It is an object.

You've never worked with vaguely named variables? What you are suggesting is guessing the data type based off the name.

- What type of object? The type that can be added to a cart.

Okay sure, but what precisely is that?

- Nobody just throws random objects at a function.

I couldn't agree more - so the follow up question is what is the fastest way to get familiar with what type of input or output this function returns?

- They are familiar with the code in general and they know what to do.

For very small projects with very small teams after some onboarding time perhaps, but outside of this I would disagree.

Code changes over time, parts that you use to know intimately get changed subtley and erode knowledge away. Having types in place highlights these changes if your assumptions are incorrect.

Re: Cold Showers

#254

Post by zimbu668 »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #110
CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #12

> Benchmarking cutting-edge graph-processing algorithms running on 128-core clusters against a single-threaded 2014 Macbook Pro. The laptop consistently wins, sometimes by an order of magnitude. LOL, this hits close to home. My company had a modeling specific VM set up to run our predictive modeling pipelines. Typical pipeline is about 50,000 to 5 million rows of training data. At best, using an expensive VM, we mana…

Haha! Back in ~2014 or so my company was spending nearly $30,000/month on an EC2 "compute-optimized" cluster to transcode live video streams to multiple renditions. One of our engineers said hey, why don't we try to colo some real hardware? We did a test with a single bare-metal 8-core Xeon server and it completely destroyed the performance of the EC2 "compute-optimized" cluster! After that we colo'd 4 big Xeon serve…

So you saved, $28,400 a month. Did that make a material difference to the company? I often tell people above me I could save us $10k a month at AWS and generally the response is, "Yeaaaaaaah that's great, could you do XYZ instead to help us land an additional $1M in ARR?"

Re: Cold Showers

#255

Post by ncmncm »

woojoo666 wrote: post #238
ncmncm wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java does not have anything like strong typing. Likewise C. Results comparing to Java or C are intrinsically useless and actively misleading. Studies insisting static typing has no effect always assume the runtime-typed program is less buggy than it really is.

How are you defining strongly typed here? Wikipedia says the definition is loose [1] but also says that Java is usually considered stronger than many other languages [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_and_weak_typing

Java's type system is only passively useful. There is no way to put it to work on behalf of designers to deliver more powerful libraries, unlike C++, Haskell, and, to a lesser but still significant degree, Rust.

Re: Cold Showers

#256

Post by MajorBee »

WalterBright wrote: post #222
baby wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Frisco for San Francisco wait what. I live in SF and everybody just says SF

I've heard SF, SanFran, Frisco, and Cisco.

Kinda going off on a tangent here, but it was a mild "ohhh" moment for me when I first realized that the company Cisco is actually named after San Francisco, followed by a second such moment when I realized that Cisco's logo represents the Golden Gate bridge.

Re: Cold Showers

#257

Post by franga2000 »

oogali wrote: post #239
nemothekid wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if my company is pretty much all engineers? I don't know how that changes the equation. No one is undervaluing your skills; it's would you rather spend your time driving to a colo center to replace a RAID array or working on $product. With AWS you are outsourcing an IT team, not just processors and how you approach pricing should reflect that.

I hear this bad argument often (“replacing hard drives”) and I don’t understand why. It’s as if we’re mentally stuck in a bad hacking movie from 1999. If you’re doing colocation to save money, you’ve also figured out that going to the datacenter sucks and it’s a terrible place to do work. You’re not building your own servers from scratch, you’re generally purchasing them from a vendor who offers a warranty and option…

> Or is it just me and my circle that do this?

Nope, this seems to be the norm. I've worked on a couple colo servers that nobody at the company had ever actually seen in person. They figured out colo in Germany was the best deal, so they had some servers delivered straight to the DC and the staff there installed them and plugged them into an IP KVM. Not sure if this is a standard service most providers offer, but I'm sure a big enough cheque would convince most - and considering the cost of transporting both the hardware and engineer to install it, that cheque can be quite large.

Re: Cold Showers

#258

Post by franga2000 »

jahewson wrote: post #251
AdamH12113 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What prevents gaming GPUs from being used in a data center? Is there some licensing restriction?

Yes, it’s part of the EULA for the driver.

> The updated end-user license agreement (EULA) states: “No Datacenter Deployment. The software is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.” [0]

I guess it's time to invent a blockchain that trains ML models as PoW :)

As a sidenote, I have rented servers with GeForce cards from multiple providers in multiple countries, so this rule doesn't seem to be respected very much. And since it's part of the driver EULA, nvidia can't legally go after server providers, since they don't install any drivers, just build and rent out the hardware. For all they know, all their customers are running noveau.

[0] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-updates-ge...

Re: Cold Showers

#259

Post by zimpenfish »

m_kos wrote: post #240
jamal-kumar wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use AWS for a damn thing because of exorbitant costs. I just don't get why people think that it's necessary other than that they're the types to get drawn into marketing hype. There's just so many better things for your company to be spending the money on.

I agree that cloud compute is usually (too) expensive, but it is sometimes useful and cost-effective. Not long ago, I need to very quickly run a one-off analysis, which required over 200 GB of RAM. It was much cheaper and faster to spin up one VM on GCP for a day than having to order parts, etc.

Similar - wanted to see how much ram gron would need for a particular file and needed much more than the 16GB or 32GB available at home. Quick and easy to spin up a 192GB EC2 to verify it needed ~95GB all told. No way I could have done that without something like AWS.

Re: Cold Showers

#260

Post by jamal-kumar »

m_kos wrote: post #240
jamal-kumar wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use AWS for a damn thing because of exorbitant costs. I just don't get why people think that it's necessary other than that they're the types to get drawn into marketing hype. There's just so many better things for your company to be spending the money on.

I agree that cloud compute is usually (too) expensive, but it is sometimes useful and cost-effective. Not long ago, I need to very quickly run a one-off analysis, which required over 200 GB of RAM. It was much cheaper and faster to spin up one VM on GCP for a day than having to order parts, etc.

What was the price?
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