sippingjippers

Is there any indication of the size of the lookup tables in question?

edit: whups, wrong Mark :) I was thinking of Mark Hammond, not Mark Shannon

At least in the case of the Digital Euro, one of the explicitly documented goals for the scheme is to alleviate dependence on US payment processors within Europe

(that's buried somewhere in https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/Report_on_a_digital_... )

I'm fairly noobish at understanding all this stuff, but as I understand it there are severe structural issues with the existing banking system that make a completely new mechanism desirable. For example by depositing cash into traditional accounts, it is also equivalent to providing capital to traditional banks to loan from. It would therefore be difficult to supply cash to end users without also increasing the availability of credit, which may be undesirable for any number of policy reasons.

The experience with pandemic emergency payments has brought forward an idea that was already gaining increased attention at central banks around the world, that is, central bank digital currency (CBDC). Legislation has proposed that each American have an account at the Fed in which digital dollars could be deposited, as liabilities of the Federal Reserve Banks, which could be used for emergency payments

https://www.clevelandfed.org/en/newsroom-and-events/speeches...

The problem is Lenovo machines look and feel like PCs, and that's not a complement. I got the XPS specifically for the trackpad, its the only one around that I know of that handles any way remotely like a MacBook's.

I'm an idiot, this hadn't even occurred to me. Thanks

I moved to XPS 15 as my first non-Mac machine in over 10 years, and I must say I'm far from impressed by the build quality.

These laptops are gorgeous new, but they are SO fragile. One of the screen hinges is broken, I've replaced numerous keys, the keyboard is now developing some debounce/key registration issue all over the right-hand side, the speakers are both blown (left first then the right), the trackpad sits 0.5cm above the case (needs replaced), the glue holding the rubber to the bottom of the case expanded with heat and leaked out everywhere. Probably more I've forgotten

I'd still consider buying another, but I'd also strongly consider changing vendors once this machine finally dies

I think this has been the case for the 13" for some time, but at least the XPS 15 9550 I have does not suffer from it

Noticed this a few times, where race is associated with some bad behaviour as if it made matters any worse. What does it matter if the developers were Turkish?

edit: are the downvotes because you believe race matters in this case, or some other problem with the comment?

For single node sure, but the moment you have some set of jobs requiring a multi node setup, the chance of wanting to find yourself in a situation where the cluster has essentially bricked itself due to a momentary power outage reduces to zero really quickly.

The only place etcd might not pay off is in disposable dev environments or something, but do you really want your prod setup to page only to discover a complete cluster rebuild is necessary to resolve the problem?

Classic bait-and-switch. This essentially happens with every review site after they build up enough brand awareness to pull it off. I guess it happens because from the perspective of the company it makes total sense to try. Why earn pennies on the dollar from e.g. ad clicks when you can get huge lumpy (and possibly regular) payouts for much less work in much less time

It was intended more to invoke general ideas about management ease than being a specific remediation, however elsewhere in the thread there is an example of a diagramming tool split out across 37 individual AWS services/service instances. In a traditional design, this is conceivably something where all state and execution could easily fit in one VM, or perhaps one container with the state hoisted off to a managed service. In this case we could conceivably fix some problems with an app like that literally just by kicking the VM

AWS in particular seem to have a carefully refined technical sales/certification/advocacy channel whose main product is those fucking stupid architecture diagrams. Hello world service with $4000/mo. worth of geo-replicated backing databases, CloudWatch alarms, API Gateway instances, WAF etc.

But don't let it encourage you to think serverless has no value, or it can't be done portably or cheaply. It has its sweet spots just like everything else.

It's not clear to me how much experience with serverless architectures the author of the parent comment has, but speaking as someone with plenty, the operational costs of serverless are at least equal to managing stateful infrastructure, with much less control when things go wrong. Lambda was a major step up in long term predictability compared to for example App Engine, where there have been plenty of instances of overnight unannounced changes, or changes announced with incredibly short notice period, requiring developer time rather than ops time to bring an application back to service.

On the ops side even with a platform like Lambda, training an operations team to take over maintenance of a nested spaghetti of random interlinked services and bits of YAML trapped in random parts of the cloud is a total nightmare. The amount of documentation required and even the simple overhead of enumerating every dependency is a long term management burden in its own right. "The app is down" -> escalate to the developers every single time.

Compare that to "the app is down", "this app has basically no ops documentation", "try rebooting the instances", "ah wonderful, it came back"

I'm pro-cloud in many ways and even pro-serverless for certain problems, but let's not close our eyes and pretend dumping everything into these services is anything like a universal win.

They've all had this almost since basically prehistory (e.g. mod_proxy_lb). The process management bit not so much, but having a web server manage app server processes, that's an abstraction I could live without

Hmm, this is true. Another way to think about it perhaps is that, I don't think any race can be avoided just by slowing things down somehow, the rules of the game are only slightly changed in that case, and perhaps not in a way that has any benefit to slower traders.

For example at IEX when they introduced their speed bump, it was to protect their so-called 'mid peg' hidden orders. What they found was that these orders were still the target of adverse selection because some HFT trader could submit speculative orders well in advance, by predicting price movements based on fast information from connectivity to the order books of other exchanges.

That PDF is an awesome read ( https://iextrading.com/docs/The%20Evolution%20of%20the%20Cru... ), but I think it speaks to a more general problem of trying to slow down. Even if auctions on all exchanges only occurred once every 10 seconds, there will still always be an advantage to whoever can aggregate information the fastest and use this to submit a best price at the latest possible moment to participate in the auction.

In my uninformed state, it doesn't seem possible to truly reverse this process, and I'm left wondering what problem would be solved by attempting to eliminate HFT from the markets

I remember this :) scgi, FastCGI, uwsgi, probably gunicorn has its own too.. never quite understood the obsession with inventing mini protocols once you have a persistent server process running already and can just use HTTP proxying. They're a pain in the ass to debug and no real tooling for poking at them.

The Internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it

Gosh, it's genuinely shocking I haven't heard that phrase in a long time.

Order-triggered auctions are slowly becoming a thing, but they have limits too. In this scheme, everyone submits an order and e.g. once every 100ms the exchange will cross them. Very little understanding of them, but they look cool

It's an ongoing debate, but there are some facts that don't change regardless of stance in the debate.

If you limit HFT, then markets /do/ become less efficient. When two trading venues for the same instrument exists, say, in Europe and the US, there is no benefit to any participant for a price disparity to exist for a long period. If $GOOG tanks 10% in a day, and a retail investor buys $GOOG at its old price in Europe, who is better off? Similarly for a seller in Europe, what if you were fleeced 10% because your holdings moved favourably in the moments before you sold?

HFT also makes trading cheaper for everyone. Much of the time these firms are primarily competing with each other. One way that competition manifests is in the bid/ask spread. With firms fighting for order flow, if they can improve their offer by a single cent to ensure price-time order book priority then they'll improve their price. For Joe Retail buying or selling that instrument, he just received a small improvement on the spread as a side effect of essentially duelling titans.

There are more aspects I'm not smart enough to discuss, like how HFT basically enables entire asset classes through dynamic hedging. The only reason that option markets exist on most stocks is because there is an HFT counterparty that sold you the option rapidly buying and selling the underlying stock to ensure its exposure to the position was only the premium you paid for the option.

HFTs also provide some market stability, first through increasing liquidity having a volatility smoothing effect, and second through so-called "volatility compression" as a result of option market dynamic hedging causing HFTs to buy when others are selling and sell when others are buying. This one has a darker side as depending on their aggregate positioning, HFTs will eventually begin to dump just like everyone else.

I believe HFTs are also necessary for exchange-traded funds to be priced correctly and function correctly. That's essentially because two markets always exist for an ETF: a primary market between dealers and the fund where creation/redemption units are traded, and the secondary market where regular folk buy its shares. Given the prevalence of ETFs as a retail investing vehicle, if they were mispriced this would be potentially disastrous for individual investors.

Probably a bunch more good reasons for HFT, I'm not sufficiently versed in this stuff

Wholeheartedly agree, actions like this add significant oil to the idea of national and regional Internets. Long term its hard to imagine how this won't eventually become a thing out of necessity

Interesting, I was already using DecentralEyes. Do you know why the fork happened? What policy does DecentralEyes keep that LocalCDN extends or violates?

edit: will be sticking with the original, looks like the fork maintainer made no effort to work upstream first, which is a very bad look for what is essentially a piece of security software. https://gitlab.com/nobody42/localcdn/-/issues/5

Now let's compare performance after implementing 2 decades worth of missing program optimization techniques

(edit: downvotes? I'm sorry to ruin the romanticizing, but surely it should come as no surprise that these old compilers aren't fast due to black magic)

Not shown: 12U quarter rack stuffed full of GPUs

It's supposedly possible to produce load-bearing bricks out of glass, no idea if it is easy to do at scale though

This is def worth paying attention to, psql is one of the few genuinely good examples of well balanced business-private participation. Most enterprise open source is a shit show in some way or other

This is a fairly drastic simplification. There are a bunch of different pieces of QUIC, (not least, sorry I'm not authoritative either)

- SSL and "TCP" handshake are collapsed into a single transaction

- That transaction is worst case 1 network roundtrip, best case (returning user) 0 roundtrips

- Anti-filtering baked in. Quic reveals almost nothing for middleboxes to filter on. There is not yet an accepted solution for encrypting the target server name (SSL SNI) but that's still being worked on AFAIK

- "Modern" congestion control approach, where "modern" means "fuck any TCP connections sharing the link"

It's cool bro, just recompile libinput after commenting out this line. 2020, year of the Linux desktop :)

You are extremely lucky if you get a contemporary online livestream under 10 seconds, this includes AFAIK all of YouTube, and the vast majority of HLS-based streams - which are often 30 seconds latency or worse.

Getting buffers down to 500ms is already pretty insane assuming reliability doesn't suffer. 250ms is well within the envelope of a single drop on a 3G network killing playback