HN user

blasdel

17,577 karma

My name is Fred, I live in Seattle.

I normally go by 'blasdelf' (last name, first initial) on the internets (reachable @gmail.com). I mistyped when creating this account and didn't notice for over a month.

Posts665
Comments2,733
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mlq.me 6y ago

Take a Way: Exploring the Security Implications of AMD’s Cache Way Predictors [pdf]

blasdel
63pts21
aws.amazon.com 8y ago

EC2 T2 Unlimited – Going Beyond the Burst with High Performance

blasdel
8pts0
www.amazon.com 8y ago

Amazon to Build Second HQ in North America

blasdel
11pts1
www.popsci.com 13y ago

Thank You, Bravo, For 'Start-Ups: Silicon Valley'

blasdel
5pts0
rant.monkeydom.de 13y ago

Apple's no internal client syndrome

blasdel
160pts42
www.4chan.org 13y ago

If Only it Grew on Trees — 4chan launches subscription service

blasdel
1pts0
fuckjetpacks.com 13y ago

"Flick to tv" represents everything wrong with product design today

blasdel
84pts29
expletiveinserted.com 14y ago

Lessons from the Failure of Readability’s Author Payment Plan

blasdel
6pts0
mjg59.dreamwidth.org 14y ago

No, really, secure boot does add security

blasdel
2pts0
www.brunerd.com 14y ago

OpenDNS does not prevent infection of Flashback

blasdel
1pts0
fishbowl.pastiche.org 14y ago

Johnny and Jenny Can Code

blasdel
2pts0
openradar.appspot.com 14y ago

Rdar://10597149: Xcode just doesn't work worth shit

blasdel
4pts0
mrgan.tumblr.com 14y ago

I was an unskilled factory worker

blasdel
1pts0
www.paulgraham.com 14y ago

Schlep Blindness

blasdel
7pts1
www.information-age.com 14y ago

Mining dark fiber

blasdel
5pts0
omgbloglol.com 14y ago

Bad (or, my unfortunately unfavorable review of Bob Martin’s keynote)

blasdel
4pts0
www.reddit.com 14y ago

I'm Robert Khoo. The guy that runs the business side of Penny Arcade. AMA.

blasdel
2pts0
www1.informatik.uni-erlangen.de 14y ago

TRESOR Runs AES Securely Outside RAM

blasdel
35pts20
www.jsoftware.com 14y ago

APL is more French than English (1978)

blasdel
5pts1
inaka.github.com 14y ago

Edis is a protocol-compatable Server replacement for Redis, written in Erlang

blasdel
2pts0
blog.millermedeiros.com 14y ago

The problem with CSS pre-processors

blasdel
2pts0
www.betabeat.com 14y ago

Let’s Not Party Like It’s 1999

blasdel
1pts0
www.nybooks.com 14y ago

How to Dispel Your Illusions by Freeman Dyson

blasdel
3pts0
raganwald.posterous.com 14y ago

Did you ever take that test yourself?

blasdel
2pts0
www.washingtonpost.com 14y ago

Stanislaw Lem Google Doodle

blasdel
1pts0
lawrencemandel.com 14y ago

Update on Multi-process Firefox Development

blasdel
2pts0
www.themorningnews.org 14y ago

What I Didn’t Write About When I Wrote About Quitting Facebook

blasdel
2pts0
bmichael.me 14y ago

The iPhone Argument For Pop Music

blasdel
1pts0
www.quora.com 14y ago

What will happen if the SEC chooses to permit crowdfunding?

blasdel
2pts0
blogs.agu.org 14y ago

Words matter: terms that have different meanings for scientists and the public

blasdel
1pts0

If he were an American, that time would put your father in La Société Charly Miller: https://rusa.org/pages/CharlyMiller

I had fun the whole time!

Mentally I don't really suffer anything, though I did cry like a baby while riding through misty valleys at dawn the third day. I had realized I'd crossed into Normandy, and got emotional from working out from first principles why I new that detail of french geography. In the first town I passed through in daylight the locals were hanging up large banners for their 75th Anniversary of Liberation by the US Army.

I had a few serious physical setbacks from my ankle, losing a cleat bolt, a wrong turn — but it was easy to run into old friends out on the course to regroup and make new friends along the way helping each other out of predicaments.

I lost a lot of my endurance abilities from Covid, so when I do it again I will definitely be shooting for a different goal: https://adrianhandssociety.com/

Haha I just kept gallivanting around Paris afterwards, I spent 10 days in France and cumulatively slept maybe 30h total.

I hadn't done much riding that summer because of a broken ankle and actually re-fractured it mid-ride from vibration/stress while descending into Brest. The biggest trouble was that it was impossible to get any ice for it, but I found nice self-adhesive bandages to immobilize it the next day and was fine completing the ride.

My personal fastest 24 hour split was about 600km, while riding the first half of the Paris-Brest-Paris brevet in 2019. I had my first sleep after that in Brest and took much longer breaks for the return journey for a total ride of 1240km in 78:02:21 (with ~26 hours spent stopped).

I'd done many 600km brevets before that comfortably in 35-37 hours with a ~4hr sleep in the middle, but at PBP there were thousands of other strong riders and it was fun to work together.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randonneuring is a lot more "normal" of a way to ride your bike all day than the Ultracycling approach in the article. Instead of grinding out laps of a racecourse solo, ride from town to town on pleasant backroads socially.

AWS EC2 | Seattle, DC | Systems Development Engineers

EC2 Recovery Systems is seeking hands-on engineers with a passion for designing and developing highly scalable, distributed software. Our systems monitor the entire EC2 fleet and automatically take actions that directly improve customer experience by maximizing the availability and reliability of compute resources. The team’s problem space is diverse and interesting and you will have ample opportunity to work with a variety of technologies in support of maximizing the health of all compute workloads across the EC2 infrastructure.

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/1350796/software-development...

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/1383738/software-development...

If you've received emails, Cloudwatch events, or SNS messages where the body starts with the string "EC2 has detected degradation of the underlying hardware hosting your Amazon EC2 instance" and wondered what those sparing words are describing, you will find these roles compelling.

Don't forget that Rome also has a wildly nonuniform interconnect between the core complexes, and the system integrator gets much less control over it than Intel's UPI links. When you really need to end up with a very large single system image at the application layer, the bigger architecture works out to be much cheaper than 256gb DIMMs or HPC networking.

8-socket CLX nets you 1.75x the cores, and 3x as many memory channels vs. a 2-socket Rome system. It also scales to a single system image with 32 sockets if you use a fabric to connect smaller nodes:

* 4-socket nodes: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/servers/superdome.html

* 2-socket nodes: https://atos.net/en/solutions/enterprise-servers/bullsequana...

That's 48tb of DRAM with all 128gb DIMMs, or 12tb+128tb when using 512gb Optane PDIMMs.

And that if there are evidence or facts that overturns their current belief, they'll gladly accept it. There are no such equivalence in religion.

It is explicitly the role of a Prophet, Messiah, Bodhisattva, etc. to do such things — introduce new evidence that overturns or convolutes current beliefs

The day to day practice of all established religions involves reasoning through a historical lineage of commentaries on existing evidence and continually appending to it with new instances. Religion exists at the intersection of jurisprudence (what should be?) and the scientific method (what is true?). Both Law and Science are human philosophies that directly descended from religious primitives.

In a previous life I wrote code that only ran in Cygwin, it depended on a dummy networking driver to talk to the WinCE core of a sonogram machine.

Running Windows VMs as kernels for Cygwin environments felt less weird than most modern container architectures.

5 years ago after a princess tea party I ended up with some tall silver tiaras full of sparkly gems, and I started wearing them on my bike helmets. A tiara fits perfectly into the spot for roadies to park their sunglasses.

The constant feeling of "hey my eyes are down here buddy" in public proves that it works!

Yes T2 performs quite admirably! If your CPU-bound workload doesn't use much memory, smaller sizes of T2 Unlimited can be a much better deal than C4.

T3 gives you both threads of your physical core and commensurably more CPU credits per hour to utilize them. You may notice that even T3.nano offers 2 vCPUs where T2.small has 1 vCPU.

The c5, m5, t3, c5d, m5d, z1d, r5, r5d, m5a, r5a, a1, c5n, p3dn instance families all use the Nitro Hypervisor, which is based on Linux KVM code but offloading a lot of functionality to the Nitro System instead of using the normative QEMU setup.

Firecracker runs as a process in a customer-provided Linux 4.14 or newer kernel using the upstream KVM apis, that can be on an EC2 Metal Instance or on your own hardware.

The modern instance families support Turbo Boost, which is the X% guaranteed and up to %Y extra best effort you desire. On many of the largest instance sizes you get P-state control which lets you "disable that best effort extra bit" — but most operating systems will by default use it to strategically burst some cores even more at the expense of others.

Many workloads really just need a significant fixed amount of memory, and only periodically need high-performance CPU. T2 instances are much faster than you'd intuitively expect, if your workload is very bursty you can easily beat C4.

The newer Unlimited model "just" removes the edge case of being throttled if you run out of earned CPUCreditBalance, so you no longer have to reason about its interactions with other scaling factors.

It also allows a whole new usecase: if your workload doesn't need much memory or high I/O but will utilize as much CPU as it can get, you can save big by picking smaller burstable instances with Unlimited.

You only start getting billed long after your instance would have been throttled in the Standard model (or if you terminate with a surplus balance)

If your CPUCreditBalance didn't normally get near zero before it's mostly just insurance against grey failures. It also makes the credit model radically easier to reason about.