davidmr

I’ve worked on several systems that had enough flop/s to make it in the top 5-10, but for which we never submitted benchmarks. Sometimes their backend network layout technically would make them several smaller clusters for an HPL run, sometimes it’s because the cluster is too heterogeneous to get a good benchmark result, and sometimes it’s because the employer wants to keep a low profile.

Most of the time, it just that it’s a hassle. It takes a while to prep and tune a big hero run for benchmarking, and if you spend a billion dollars on a cluster, it’s making you a lot more than that. Taking it down for a day or two stops the money printers.

Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”

You still need to traverse physical segments in the wireless path: think receiving dish to the next transmitting dish, the end of the path to get from the trading systems onto the roof and into to the first dish, etc. Every nanosecond counts.

I'm sure some HFT traders are going to make an absolute fortune, but I doubt it'll have a huge impact for most other people.

They’ve been using hollow core fiber (and funding research into it) for nearly a decade. I know it goes back further than the 2017 spinoff mentioned in the article, but https://optics.org/news/11/9/52 talks about it a bit.

But what about Jump Capital? They have a crypto division that also does market making. The difference here is there are given a large chunk of tokens to market make with, as they please.

It may be a little early to make that comparison. Jump is still being investigated for its crypto shenanigans.

I think it’s a way of keeping the museum’s single most popular piece of art on display whilst working it. I think most museums would remove it for a while, but so many people come specifically to see this painting that they want to keep it viewable, so they make a little show of its restoration.

I dunno; I’ve been through that floor 5 or 6 times since they started work, and people always seem to love the spectacle of it.

Same. That sounds like a way to make that relationship between front office and back office as toxic and unproductive as possible.

Or have them set up in a way that makes them hard to run full-system benchmarks on. I can think of a couple of financial firms that have clusters that would rate on the Top 10, but a) as you suspected, they’re too busy running the money printers to take them down for a few days to run benchmarks, and b) they’re split up into more manageable little clusters, so the high speed fabrics don’t connect and allow every node to talk to every other node, which you need for an HPL run.

Do you have issues with other rollerball pens? I’m also left-handed, and really struggle with them (especially the G2). My issues seem to be that when I’m pushing the point across the paper, rather than pulling it across like a right-hander would do, they often dry up and there’s no ink coming out.

I like how quick drying gel pens are, but I haven’t been able to write with them consistently. If that happens to you with other rollerballs, I’ll give that Pentel Energel a try.

In your experience, has this led to more careful hiring?

Not in my (albeit limited) experience in the Netherlands. What I’ve seen it lead to is people hired initially into temporary one-year contracts, which are then converted to permanent contracts if things work out. I’ve definitely seen people be fired or otherwise pushed out even on permanent contracts. It’s not impossible, but as the above poster mentioned, it’s not easy either.

The quality of employees hired was certainly no better than at other companies I’ve worked for where firing was much easier. That’s with a sample size of 1 Dutch company though, and that company sucked, so it’s not a great dataset from which to draw conclusions.

In the financial industry, you don’t get your bonus when you’re on garden leave. This is usually the majority of your pay, so while it’s definitely nice to be paid to do nothing (I’m on garden leave currently until next September), you’re not earning up to your potential.

Or, you know, $5 worth of spray paint.

does JWST ever look at Earth?

Sadly not. They went through an enormous amount of effort to keep it from having to look anywhere near Earth.

Here’s what it would see if it could, though: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/articles/what-would-earth...

Do you think that encouraging a run on a bank is truly the responsible thing to do today?

It turns out that high altitude balloons don’t pop when you put small holes in them: https://apnews.com/article/268893fddde785d029d5a51b136951eb

I’m not sure I understand what you mean. I’ve run HPC clusters for a long time now, and node failures are just a fact of life. If 3 or 4 nodes of your 500 node cluster are down for a few days while you wait for RMA parts to arrive, you haven’t lost much value. Your cluster is still functioning at nearly peak capacity.

You have a handful of nodes that the cluster can’t function without (scheduler, fileservers, etc), but you buy spares and 24x7 contracts for those nodes.

Did I misunderstand your comment?

Not in the context the person you responded to meant it. Yes, you can very easily get 50GB/s from a few NVMe devices on a single box. Getting 50GB/s on a POSIX-ish filesystem exported to 1000 servers is very possible and common, but orders of magnitude more complicated. 500GB/s is tougher still. 5TB/s is real tough, but real fun.

This is tangential to your point, but I’ll just mention that Azure has some properly specced out HPC gear: IB, FPGAs, the works. You used to be able to get time on a Cray XC with an Ares interconnect, but I never have occasion to use it, so I don’t know if you still can. They’ve been aggressively hiring top-notch HPC people for a while.

That was definitely one of the weirdest things of working in academia IT: “hey. Can you buy me a workstation that’s as close to $6,328.45 as it is possible to get, and can you do it by 4pm?”

I must not be understanding what your point is because I think the data show that some doctors pay much more than $71k/yr[1]

[1] specifically the table on the last page of https://www.ama-assn.org/sites/ama-assn.org/files/corp/media...

In Berlin, this morning: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/08/car-driven-int...

At the time of the last list, there were two systems in China that had recently broken this barrier, but their owners have chosen not to submit benchmarks to the Top500.

It certainly does—my apologies. This is where I saw it first. Unfortunately I can’t change it.

This is certainly not universally the case, even in very well-regarded departments. The University of Chicago, for example, does not require it: http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/thecollege/mathematics/.

I believe that the current state of affairs is that warrantless searches of US citizens’ devices at (or near) the borders are constitutional.

https://www.theusconstitution.org/litigation/merchant-v-mayo... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/10/come-back-warrant-cong...

This really is a shameful state of affairs that Congress should fix, but I’m not holding my breath.

5 seconds of looking would have found you this:

“The Ford Foundation is not connected to the Ford Motor Company. The Ford Foundation and Ford Motor Company are two separate and legally unrelated entities whose operations are completely independent and have been for more than 50 years. There is not any financial authority, decision making nor funding relationship between the two organizations.”

I also find that my desire for such a heavy drink decreases dramatically the warmer it is outside. My partner and I aged a batch of eggnog for a year, drinking 1/12th of it every month to see if there was a point at which the returns on aging diminished. It was genuinely difficult to be enthusiastic about sampling a glass of heavy cream, sugar, egg yolk, and bourbon on a 30° summer day.

Many long years ago now in a past life, I was a network security guy for a big research university. Overall, that was a pretty fun job: universities make for a target rich environment. The downside was we that we were responsible for handling DMCA complaints to the university (this was a relatively new law and p2p sharing was just starting to become mainstream).

We'd take the complaint, check the netflow logs to verify that the IP in question really was running file sharing software at the same time, turn off the Ethernet port, report them to the Dean of Students, turn them back on after the deans talked to them, etc., etc.

My boss at the time was sick of doing the RIAA's dirty work for them (back then the RIAA was way more vigorous about enforcement than the MPAA. I don't remember why). So he decided that we were going to make a web site to give step-by-step instructions with screenshots to show how to disable file uploading in every p2p client available. We didn't care what the kids were downloading because the DMCA complaints only came in from uploads.

Fast-forward a year or so and the site is pretty popular. We'd get asked by at least one or two other universities a week if they could copy our instructions locally for their students. Being a university, of course we would encourage it and only ask for attribution for the copyrighted text and images.

Every now and then, I'd Google around and see who was using our instructions, and one day I noticed a .com show up in the results, which was unusual. I don't remember what the name of the site was, but it was some site trying to convince people that copyright infringement is bad and the music industry really are the good guys, etc. I know for sure we didn't get any requests from anyone like that, so I did some digging.

The site didn't have a DMCA contact listed (as required), so it took some serious digging to find out who really owned the site. As I'm sure you've guessed by now, it was owned and operated by none other than the Recording Industry Association of America. They had stolen the entire site, text, screenshots and all, removed our copyright information, and rebranded the pages, claiming the work as their own.

I dug through my email to find the most recent takedown notice they had sent us, changed all the names to reflect the current situation and fired it off to the RIAA's General Counsel. About 10m later, I got a phone call from a very concerned attorney. I genuinely couldn't stop laughing as he was talking, so I referred the matter to our attorneys and thought no more of it.

It sucks to know that your career has peaked so early. It's all been downhill from there.

One may want to be less, not more clear when one is breaking the law in writing. Apple and Google settled a class action lawsuit over this exact thing.

It’s disappointing how few people stood up to this. I recall Jobs threatening Palm’s CEO with patent trolling if Palm didn’t play ball, which I suppose would give me second thoughts about not cooperating…

Edit: https://9to5mac.com/2013/01/23/the-heated-email-exchange-bet...

Mr. Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and Twitter, retaliated by blocking Mr. Trump from all sites.

I stopped reading there and I realized that the 20 seconds I spent reading up to that point were wasted.