HN user

mktmkr

239 karma
Posts0
Comments48
View on HN
No posts found.

The historical context here is that AMD once had a monopoly inside Google's datacenters and pissed it away by shipping the horribly broken Barcelona followed by the not very broken, but also not very fast, Istanbul. This is a return to form for them, after a decade of poor form. The important thing for an operator like Google or Amazon is pricing power. As long as they can brandish a competing platform under the nose of Intel sales reps, they can get a better deal from Intel regardless of which they really prefer. You may have noted that a few years ago Google was showing a POWER platform at trade shows. That has the same purpose of putting Intel (and AMD) on notice that they have the capability to port their whole world to a different architecture if needed.

The Cloud 7 years ago

"Well optimized MySQL" sounds a bit like having a really attractive liver cancer. Cloud services expand your options and it's worth pondering them. Don't ask what is the best MySQL, ask for a given amount of items I need to store and recall what is the best server OR SERVICE that could do it? MySQL on bare metal? On virtual machines? RDS? Cloud Spanner?

Do cloud providers increase your ability to choose scale-up instead of scale-out? Instead of your sharded and replicated MySQL that is almost inoperable and never seems to maintain consistency, would you be better served with one gigantic database? Sure it costs $13k/month to rent one from Google but it costs a quarter million to buy one from Dell. These are all aspects of the decision-making process.

The Cloud 7 years ago

OK but that's a comparison of a $3200 machine with 7x more CPU and more than double the memory of the $100/month virtual machine. The operating costs of the metal machine (electricity, repairs) and its lifetime are unstated.

The Cloud 7 years ago

Hard to take seriously and barely rises to the level necessary for rational debate. Is there a workload that is demonstrably 100x slower on AWS or GCE compared to the fully-loaded cost of bare metal?

I think you are overstating the case that the market will pass this saving through. In reality there is some market-clearing price for a dwelling without a parking space and there's nothing the developer can do to influence it. This is the same reason that it's actually not possible to "build affordable housing" as many people demand. Yes you can build the housing but there's nothing you can do about the price it then commands.

In SF as well, but the local government has shown itself unable to resist calls to later add parking entitlements to structures after they are built. For example all "live-work" developments are forbidden by law from participating in residential parking permit zones, but the city council has repeatedly established RPP zones on blocks where the sole residential buildings are all live-work.

Yeah, except no. This is just one of those tropes that motorists use to force cities to subsidize them. Every study on this topic has conclusively shown that parking causes traffic. The construction of parking precedes the worsening of traffic, the amount of parking built is proportional to the amount of traffic observed, and the reverse process is also observed to correct the problem: removing parking alleviates traffic congestion. The case that parking causes traffic congestion is as strong as the case that smoking causes lung cancer.

There is also the reverse process: people who are older than officially recorded. When my in-laws came to the USA from Vietnam after the war they wanted to be able to work for a long time before anyone forced the to retire, so they just said they were 25 years old, an understatement of quite a number of years. Upheaval and displacement tend to wipe out government records.

Considering the number of such stations, explosions are rather rare, although one did recently explode in the USA. It turns out to be difficult to get a decent explosion out of bulk liquid petrol. Even setting it on fire is not as easy as some think. Try it with liquid diesel, practically inert. What you really need for a good time is empty petrol tanks.

They seem to be claiming to have reduced "missed" cases of AKI from 12% to 3%, but it is not clear if this has anything to do with "AI" or is purely a result of improved process/UX/human factors. I'm skeptical of your analysis because there are a lot of practicing doctors who are not anywhere near as effective as a bright third-year med student. If this software and these processes can improve the performance of the doctors we actually have in the field, that could be good.

You don't have to use the tiny screen. Mirrorless cameras generally come with a large display. I almost always use the display on my Olympus because it's easier and I don't look like I have a machine on my face (this was also an important advantage of old view cameras with the focus screen on top, like the Hasselblad 500). If you want, you can attach a much larger screen to your mirrorless camera, they just use HDMI output so get as big a display as you want.

Curious what you think is deficient about only having a 401k (and, presumably, Social Security) as a retirement plan. Isn't this the entire sales pitch of Vanguard, that you put a couple of bucks in your 401k every week and then you retire?

I'm not personally all-in on IRAs, but it seems like an accepted strategy.

This is the hazard of putting concrete numbers in a blog post like this. Among your readers will be people with experience sending this amount of traffic every second.