PathOfEclipse

Almost 20 years ago I helped our company choose between Git and Mercurial as the replacement for Subversion. Unfortunately, I helped them make the wrong choice, Mercurial.

I say wrong because clearly Git won the war and I haven't used Mercurial since then. However, I still think I made the right choice from a technical perspective; I thought Mercurial was way more user-friendly while providing all the features and performance needed. But I guess I couldn't read the future in terms of which one would win out!

My experience profiling is that I/O wait is never the problem. However, the app may actually be spending most of it's CPU time interacting with database. In general, networks have gotten so fast relative to CPU that the CPU cost of marshalling or serializing data across a protocol ends up being the limiting factor. I got a major speedup once just by updating the JSON serialization library an app used.

It takes an incredible lack of awareness or intellectual honesty to hold Fox news to this standard, but not CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, and ABC, or, if we include print media, the NYT, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Reuters, AP, Axios, LA Times, and the Atlantic.

It sounds to me like you're just nitpicking his words. I can't find this quote anywhere, but he's probably saying Wikipedia is taking "stances", to use your word, on subjects where it should instead be trying harder to be neutral and provide multiple perspectives in a balanced manner. Sincerely trying to understand and convey the perspectives of two opposing sides looks vastly different from taking one side, amplifying their talking points, and suppressing or refuting those of the other side.

The counter-arguments to all this all tend to boil down to some form of condescending tone or moralizing:

* left-leaning is just reality-leaning. LoLoLoL right-wingers are sooo stupid!

* Wikipedia should take the left-leaning stance because it is good, moral, noble, and righteous, while the right-leaning stance is vile, evil, unconscionable, and despicable.

If either of those thoughts cross your mind, then, congratulations, you are left-biased. You should try your hand at Wikipedia article editing. I'm sure they'll love you.

You're not trying very hard to see a side that's different from yours, are you? You are responding to a comment saying "leftist != realistic", yet you seem to be pretending my intent was to say "here's proof Wikipedia is left-leaning." Neither of my links were given to "prove" bias, either, only to show that accusations of leftwing bias are accusations that Wikipedia is valuing propaganda over truth and objectivity.

Anyways, to get off-topic from my original comment, here's some evidence for you to ignore:

https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-...

https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/is...

https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased

https://stophindudvesha.org/the-myth-of-wikipedias-neutralit...

Can you provide some links for this? A quick web search turns this up at near the top from 2024:

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-9-9700x-perform...

The benchmarks show a 10% drop in "application" performance when SMT is disabled, but an overall 1-3% increase in performance for games.

From a hardware perspective, I can't imagine how it could be physically possible to double performance by enabling SMT.

I think it was always a mistake to pretend hyperthreading doubles your core count. I always assumed it was just due to laziness; the operating system treats a hyperthreaded core as two "virtual cores" and schedules as two cores, so then every other piece of tooling sees double the number of actual cores. There's no good reason I know of that a CPU utilization tool shouldn't use real cores when calculating percentages. But, maybe that's hard to do given how the OS implements hyperthreading.

.NET perf can be great in the sense that it provides more tools to write C-like code while still taking advantage of safe memory management, as compared to Java. On the downside, both their JIT and their GC seem to be far less sophisticated than the JVM.

Why, for instance, does the CLR GC not have something like TLABs? The result is that it seems like .NET devs have to worry a lot more about the expense of small, short-lived allocations, while in Java these things are much cheaper.

Overall, I think it's easier to program idiomatically in Java and get decent performance out-of-the-box, while C# may provide more opportunities for optimization without having to rely on something equivalent to sun.misc.Unsafe and offheap allocations.

I have no problem with you preferring .NET to Java, and I apologize that my first-cited article was not the best one to share to describe the problem (I should have read it more carefully first), but if you had responded with something like:

"Your deadlock scenario is related to synchronization contexts and can be avoided by ..."

rather than:

"You clearly don't know what you're talking about (but I won't bother telling you why)"

Then we could have had a much more productive and pleasant conversation. I would have responded with:

"Sorry, that article wasn't the right one to share. Here is a better one. The issue I am talking about isn't synchronization context-related at all. It's actually much more insidious."

For example, starting with .NET 6 there is a pure C# threadpool implementation that acts differently under problematic scenarios.

We're seeing this issue entirely in .NET core. We started on .NET 6, are currently on .NET 8, and will likely migrate to 10 soon after it is released. It's again worth mentioning that you provide zero evidence that .NET 6 solves this problem in any way. Although, as we will see below, it seems like you don't even understand the problem!

I'm certain you're basing this off of your personal experience from more than a decade ago of some forsaken codebase written in an especially sloppy way.

No, I'm referring to code written recently, at the job I work at now, at which I've been involved in discussions about, and implementations of, workarounds for the issue.

Moreover, there isn't a single mention that the real way to get into actual deadlock situation is when dealing with applications enriched with synchronization context.

100% false. This deadlock issue has nothing to do with synchronization contexts. Please actually read the 2020 article I linked as it explains the issue much better.

Pathetic attempt at strawman.

I realize responding to this is to just fight pettiness with more pettiness, but I can't resist. You should probably look up the definition of a strawman argument since you are using the word incorrectly.

That's a very harsh reply with zero evidence behind it. Based on your response, I am willing to bet I understand the platform better than you do. And the deadlocks I'm referring to are happening in apps written by other people who've been in the .NET ecosystem exclusively for more than a decade, or even two decades.

Here's an article from 5 years ago:

https://medium.com/criteo-engineering/net-threadpool-starvat...

But does citing a more-recent article matter to you? Probably not. A source being 13 years old only matters if something relevant has changed since then, and you certainly couldn't be bothered to point out any relevant change to support your otherwise fallacious and misleading comment.

What actually amazes me most about this is that people in .NET seem to want to blame the person writing sync-over-async code like they are doing something wrong, even going so far as to call it an "anti-pattern", when in reality it is the fault of poor decision-making from the .NET team to fold work-stealing into the global thread queue. The red-blue function coloring problem is real, and you can't make it go away by pretending everyone can just rewrite all their existing synchronous code and no other solution is needed.

If all you know is one ecosystem, then it seems you are susceptible to a form of Stockholm syndrome when that ecosystem abuses you.

I've been working in .NET/C# for the past few years, and while I'm happy with it, I still think the JVM/Java are the best ecosystem overall I've worked in. It's amazing how many things the Java ecosystem gets right that .NET gets wrong.

For instance, Java introduced the fork/join pool for work stealing and recommended it for short-lived tasks that decomposed into smaller tasks. .NET decided to simply add work-stealing to their global thread pool. The result: sync-over-async code, which is the only way to fold an asynchronous library into a synchronous codebase, frequently results in whole-application deadlocks on .NET, and this issue is well-documented: https://blog.stephencleary.com/2012/07/dont-block-on-async-c...

Notice the solution in this blog is "convert all your sync code to async", which can be infeasible for a large existing codebase.

There are so many other cases like this that I run into. While there have been many mistakes in the Java ecosystem they've mostly been in the library/framework level so it's easier to move on when people finally realize the dead end. However, when you mess up in the standard library, the runtime, or language, it's very hard to fix, and Java seems to have gotten it more right here than anywhere else.

I don't know what the "right" answer is, but I worked at a company that built a fairly unwieldy monolith that was dragging everyone down as it matured into a mid-sized company. And, once you're successfully used at scale it becomes much more difficult to make architectural changes. Is there a middle ground? Is there a way to build a monolith while making it easier to factor apart services earlier rather than later? I don't know, and I don't think the article addresses that either.

The article does mention "invest in modularity", but to be honest, if you're in frantic startup mode dumping code into a monolith, you're probably not caring about modularity either.

Lastly, I would imagine it's easier to start with microservices, or multiple mid-sized services if you're relying on advanced cloud infra like AWS, but that has its own costs and downsides.

An argument, though, is an exchange of ideas that ought to surface insight and lead to a conclusion.

That's one definition, I suppose, but it's not the definition you'll find in any dictionary I've seen. The author here seems to be assuming that the only valid reason to argue is to learn. People argue for many reasons other than that.

If you’re regularly having arguments with well-informed people of goodwill, you will probably ‘lose’ half of them–changing your mind based on what you’ve learned

Again, the author's unspoken presupposition begs to be questioned. Why do most people actually argue in the public sphere? For instance, why do we have presidential debates? The candidates certainly aren't there to learn. They are not even trying to persuade their debate partner. They are arguing to convince or persuade their viewers of something. These could be undecided viewers, or they could be viewers who have already made up their mind but may either feel strengthened about their beliefs or weakened after listening.

Similarly, if I'm debating someone online, it's often less to convince that person and more to convince anyone else who might be reading. I have heard of people in real life who have read debates I've engaged in and expressed both gratitude for my willingness to do so and that they were strengthened in their beliefs on the subject.

Ah, so now you're just pivoting to "left-leaning means untrue/ propaganda".

No, I said far-left goes hand-in-hand with being ant-Israel. Do you know what words mean? I actually do think the far-left is wrong about just about everything, but they do often mix falsehoods with things that are true, so of course not everything they say is untrue.

And since you just ignored BI and GSSR, I assume you don't have anything to counter that.

No, I'm just not going to take the time to address every article in particular, which you have no room to complain about, given you completely ignored every article I linked.

Looking at the BI article, for instance, they talk about "proportionality", which is a completely bogus and corrupt idea of warfare. You don't fight to respond proportionality; you fight to win and to win decisively. I have no interest in kowtowing to morally bankrupt leftwing morality.

In the end, you're nothing but a propagandist pushing pro-Israel narratives through opinion pieces and actual propaganda sites like Daily Wire.

Every pro-Hamas rally is filled with people who hate America and the west. I know I am on the side of good and you are on the side of depraved evil, and I will fight to defend what is right.

and publicly discussed removing all Palestinians from Gaza (ethnic cleansing)

That's not what ethnic cleansing is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing

There has to be intent to make the area homogenous. The people of Gaza voted in Hamas and have been working to destroy Israel ever since. It is well within Israel's right to remove them, and I fully support them if it comes to that.

Look at the comments here if you doubt that people have wisened up.

I actually I saw other comments, that were not downvoted, of people explaining how HRW is biased and conflicted. And, HN has always been deeply-left leaning. I'm happy to trade away some karma to speak the truth to people like you.

Actually, yes, the associated press is deeply far-left and anti-Israel (the two go together).

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4519187-who-radicalized...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/flashback-former-associated-p...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/board-member-of-politico-owne...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/jewish-group-sues-ap-for-prov...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/terrorists-themselves-former-...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/ap-hits-new-low-with-charisma...

And, what are the point of your links? Isarel accidentally kills civilians, which is virtually unavoidable in urban warfare. Hamas hides behind civilians in order to increase civilian casualties because they know the far left news will report on it to their favor. And, they purposely kill Israeli civilians because they are terrorists. One side is pure evil. The other is doing better than just about every nation in the world in fighting a just war.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/hamas-kidnaps-tortures-and-mu...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/idf-reveals-terrorists-brutal...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/yarden-bibas-describes-hamas-...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/american-israeli-hersh-goldbe...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/hamas-leader-using-at-least-1...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/hamas-loves-dead-palestinians

No. I'm saying what you call "factual reporting" is inaccurate and dishonest propaganda. And the "opinion pieces" I'm sharing are all based on facts and realities.

If any source is deserving of a comparison to InfoWars here it's HRW itself. You can't unilaterally smear every right-of-center source as completely untrustworthy and expect to stay on the side of reality for long.

https://effectiviology.com/credentials-fallacy/

Also I've provided more than ample evidence that HRW is deeply compromised on this issue and has been for many years: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/oct/29/human-rights-w...

Do you have a list of rankings for different wars and countries? Yeah. Of course not.

Bias means you're more likely to amplify facts in your favor and discount those against you. I said nothing about reality. I 100% agree that the political left is far more detached from reality than the right, especially when it comes to the Israel-Hamas conflict.

An honest seeker of truth wouldn't just say Jay's estimate was off, but compare it to other estimates of the time. Bhattacharya's IFP estimate was .2%. The WHO's IFP estimate was 3.0%. Which of the two had the more accurate estimate? The WHO, with billions in funding, or Jay operating by himself on a shoestring budget, all while the CDC in its bureaucratic incompetence couldn't be bothered to do any real studies? In fact, a positive outcome of Jay's study was to help understand just how bad the initial estimates were!

And as far as the great Barrington declaration is concerned, it is widely accepted now that the lockdown strategy failed, and that focused protection would have saved far more lives and caused far less economic harm and educational harm, which by the way, correlate with loss of life and loss of years of life. Even far left news outlets admit this now: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/covid-lockdowns-big-...

I like how you claim data doesn't support this being a problem but at the same time can't be bothered to cite any data. I'll do it for you: https://5666503.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/5666503...

"Alarming proportions of students self-censor, report worry or discomfort about expressing their ideas in a variety of contexts, find controversial ideas hard to discuss, show intolerance for controversial speakers, find their administrations unclear or worse regarding support for free speech, and even report that disruption of events or violence are, to some degree, acceptable tactics for shutting down the speech of others."

"Less than one-in-four students (22%) reported that they felt “very comfortable” expressing their views on a controversial political topic in a discussion with other students in a common campusspace. Even fewer (20%) reported feeling “very comfortable” expressing disagreement with one of their professors about a controversial topic in a written assignment; 17% said the same about expressing their views on a controversial political topic during an in-class discussion; 14%, about expressing an unpopular opinion to their peers on a social media account tied to their name; and 13%, about publicly disagreeing with a professor about a controversial political topic. "

And as for examples, the sitting NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, who in hindsight was far more correct on everything COVID-related than the CDC was: had this to say about his experience at Stanford: https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-censorship-an-interview...

" I presented the results in a seminar in the medical school, and I was viciously attacked. ... It was really nasty: allegations of research misconduct, undeclared conflicts of interest… In reality, the whole study was funded by small-dollar donations."

"It was very stressful. I had to hire lawyers. I've been at Stanford for 38 years and I felt it was really, really out of character. At one point, the Chair of Medicine ordered me to stop going on media and to stop giving interviews about COVID policy. They were trying to totally silence me."

setAccessible is also used to be able to access private fields, and not just to be able to write to final fields. Most libraries shouldn't need to set final fields, and I say this as someone who was very against when they deprecated java.lang.misc.Unsafe. I've only had to set a final field once in my career and it was related to some obscure MySql/JDBC driver bug/workaround. This particular deprecation seems very sensible to me.

The downvotes for your comment are quite telling of the demographic of Hacker News. But even leftwing media are admitting the Democrat party has a problem:

https://newrepublic.com/article/192078/democrats-become-work...

"We cannot solve this problem without an honest assessment of who we are. How we see ourselves as the Democratic Party—the party of the people, the party of the working class and the middle class—no longer matches up with what most voters think."

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/01/21/eric_adam...

The Democratic Party "Left Me And It Left Working Class People"

https://www.thirdway.org/report/renewing-the-democratic-part...

"For the first time since the mid-20th century, the central fault line of American politics is neither race and ethnicity nor gender but rather class, determined by educational attainment. But in the intervening half century, the parties have switched places. Republicans once commanded a majority among college-educated voters while Democrats were the party of the working class. Now the majority of college educated voters support Democrats"

But I suppose there's too many well-off, well-educated, white collar elites on this site who aren't willing to face the reality that their politics have been ruining blue collar lives for decades, and the political backlash has finally hit a crescendo powerful enough to wash over Washington. So I guess we blame it all on disinformation campaigns?

It's a good question, and, in the worst case, I would disagree with the Trump administration and lose some trust in them. There is also the possibility that missing context would provide reasonable justification for the order. For instance, I think "Russian election interference" investigations have mostly been a partisan operation with little evidence that such interference has had any meaningful impact on U.S. elections. These investigations are mostly used to make the political right side look bad by tying them to Putin. It would be reasonable for the Trump admin to defund these investigations as we have much greater problems to be worried about.

You should continue to be cautious, as the Guardian article is pretty weak. It's first point is that Russia wasn't mentioned in a talk about cyber threats, which means very little by itself. It's second and final point comes from an "anonymous source". I'll believe it when the source becomes de-anonymized. Too many deep state "anonymous tips" have turned out to be lies. It should be noted that CISA has a history of strong leftwing activism:

https://www.dailywire.com/news/u-s-cybersecurity-defense-age...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/biden-administration-colluded...

Trump is not far right and never has been. He's actually moderate on most issues. The current far right position is the Tucker Carlson "isolation at all costs" and "Putin maybe isn't a bad guy" garbage. Trump holds neither of those views.

My second link was incorrect, sorry. I thought I had fixed it during editing. I pulled the quote from here: https://www.deseret.com/entertainment/2024/05/19/nellie-bowl...

You can share your opinion... as long as it's the correct opinion :)

That's obviously true of every newspaper in existence. No employee is allowed to publish any opinion that goes against their employers' wishes.

From: https://nypost.com/2024/05/30/media/ex-new-york-times-report...

Two people were fired at the NYT after publishing a perfectly reasonable op-ed.

And from: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10170541/Bari-Weiss...

"In the book, Bowles tells the stories she wasn’t allowed to tell at the [New York] Times: She writes, for example, about Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, which transformed into a police-free “autonomous zone,” or CHAZ, Antifa protests, and the experience of attending an anti-racism training called “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness.”"

I believe that truth and true religion are one and the same. The founder of my church said:

"The first and fundamental principle of our holy religion is, that we believe that we have a right to embrace all, and every item of truth, without limitation or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men, or by the dominations of one another, when that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds, and we have the highest degree of evidence of the same.”

I would like this to be my last response. I don't want to endlessly debate or make you feel like you need to endlessly respond. If you would like to respond with some links to the evidence that supports a complex model of gender as being more in line with reality, I'd be happy to take a look (without responding, of course, with my opinion on that evidence).

I edited my message while you were responding, and I think the edits make it more clear that the reinvention of gender was done by people with no scientific proof of what they were doing. They were instead acting as philosophers and theologians of their own atheist religion, which is also incidentally what post modernists tend to do. You speak about reality and yet all I see are a bunch of people denying reality as they try to reshape words to describe the fantasy in their heads.

Lastly, claiming that, if a model is more complex, therefore it is more true, is a logical fallacy. I hope you can see at least that. You've given zero backing to your assertions other than "your model is too simple." It's not enough to say that. You have to show that another model is more true or better in some way.

We've seen the fruits of gender theory: decline, suffering, and destruction. China won't let any of that on their Tik Tok equivalent, as we've learned recently, and we all know why. Its untrue, and it acts as deadly poison to civilization. The tension between conservatism and progressivism is to allow good new ideas to thrive but to reject the bad ones. It's becoming more and more clear that gender theory is the latter, and it should hopefully soon be left to the ash heap of history.