HN user
I'm very familiar with the literature since I'm a distributed database developer.
If you investigate high frequency trading you will understand that the quantum phenomena that I'm talking about is not just me high on mushrooms but a real world thing.
The only "time" relevant is the time when the cluster agrees an atomic, isolated transaction is time to commit from its own perspective.
No I disagree since you left out atomicity from your argument.
WalMart cannot commit if someone else committed previously, they have to try again.
Atomicity is precisely what it is. There is no fuzziness there, you either do it or you don't.
The problem with current database designs is the idea of BeginTransaction, that function is the core of the problem.
"Transactions" in the real world are NOT completed until everyone agrees.
Consider you yourself enter into a transaction with your landlord, you BeginTransaction..
However during the negotiation you choose to disagree and back away from the deal.
That transaction, even though it took three months to decide was rejected (by either party).
The only "transaction" is the committed transaction.
Hey guys, I'm a fellow developer of distributed systems here.
First of all I think what you are doing is great.
My question is what's the point of clocks at all? The current time is a very subjective matter and I'm sure you know this, the only real time is at the point when the cluster receives the request to commit. Anything else should be considered hearsay.
Specifically the time source of any client is totally meaningless since as you say further in the discussion that client machine times can be off by huge margins.
If you accept that then one has to accept the fact that individual machines within the cluster itself are prone to drift too, although one can attempt to correct for that I appreciate.
Wouldn't you think though that what is more important is that the order is more based on the bucketed time of arrival (with respect to the cluster).
I don't see how given network delays anyone can be totally sure A is prior to B, atomic clocks or not.
What is important is first to commit.
[edit] Yes would love to talk privately about this topic @irfansharif
Instead of just downvoting, how about refuting my claim?
I'm seriously curious what is the disagreement. These guys already established atomic clocks are unnecessary. Very interested in which use cases require them.
Clocks are meaningless under load.
The higher frequency the transactions the more you get into quantum physics.
In reality, nobody cares if T-Mobile debited your account 0.01ms before WalMart.
[edit] what is important is isolation and consistency of the transactons.
I worked in risk management in the mid 90's with Bond to Swap hedging.
You have it right.
I really don't want to get into it, but it involved a beautiful Russian agent driving a BMW X5, baking implements and cup cakes. That's how it started.
Not the first time I've been approached by the Russians and to be clear I have nothing against them either, but if and when they do it again, please don't steal my paper towels or abuse my washing machine.
Right so reading that you probably think it is so fantastical that it can't possibly be true, or that it is so bizarre what I wrote that it makes no sense and I'm nuts. But there are people out there who know what happened and the truth is even more strange than I can share here.
Well I would agree with you on the weirdness, it was fantastical and it was bizarre, but it isn't the first time I've been approached by them or probably the last. The first time was in the early 90's just after releasing my DES hack thing. It just got weirder from there.
Honestly quite like the attempts in some ways, it's flattering, and she really was talented as were her friends. Cute too.
So to them, please go ahead and try again but next time, leave the Costa Rica thing out, or at least make it somewhere a little more temperate.
I really have no problem working for the intelligence agencies as long as it is for a good reason.
Just be honest.
Well that's how I run my life and I know a lot of other people do that as well.
We used to talk about having "Fuck You" money back in the day.
What was the amount of cash required to get off the system.
Turns out it isn't that much, and it would be even less if the system was geared around that mentality.
I need groceries, some nice olive oil a nice clean bathroom, perhaps a bottle of wine and watch a couple of movies.
Just provide that to everyone and lay out the propaganda to set the bar that this is all you need.
If you want more than that, taxation should go through the roof on an exponential scale, and not to be fed into the military, but fed to others to get them to the same basic standard.
Anyone with billions in their bank account should be very embarrassed by that fact, and I hope they are.
People have to sleep at night, even them.
Right, eat chocolates until you are sick.
I don't think Marx anticipated just how many chocolates Eight Billion people were capable of eating.
Yes this.
Captitalism as it stands is totally unsustainable. Communism too but that was not Marx's idea that his critique should lead to what it became.
Some form of socialism is important. It should be drummed in to people that societal progress is based on individual choices.
Rand got it backwards, Marx got it forwards.
There is a middle ground, I'm sure of it; at least I hope so.
The downvotes on this really make me chuckle.
I guess there are people out there who really believe the individualism in Atlas Shrugged is a model for society? My interpretation is that's darkly satirical humor.
Okay Ayn was a genius, but I think she had a sense of humor too. At least that is the way I would like to think of it.
Genius of the Modern World: Marx
I think it's an Open University production by the BBC
Hmmm, well as I see it, Marx, like many luminary geniuses forgot about one thing.
Human Nature.
The ideas in and of themselves were profound but the prescription was unfortunately childishly naive.
That given sufficient resources and everyone pulling together we will all get along is great, but it just takes one self-interested outlier to spoil that soup, and there are plenty of those to go around.
Some people can just never have enough.
Personally I believe self interest is pre-programmed at the genetic level in all species. Dawkins wrote a book about that, and it manifests itself in everything we do individually or across species.
So back to your question, that's a good one.
The only way to make it work is probably some kind of authoritarianism, but perhaps authoritarianism comes in many flavors.
I'm highly suspicious that a single individual can do it. Even if they are a benevolent dictator they can be corrupted by the people who surround them. It really doesn't take much to Gaslight someone and it happens a lot more and in more subtle ways than many of us think.
So what is a more pure form of a benevolent dictator. A computer program with hard rules that we agree upon?
At least it would be consistent.
Then again, the program would be written initially by our own genome, and it better be pretty clever to quickly figure out how to ignore that aspect.
But just imagine it ,a logical machine that only does the right thing to maximize outcome... (Already sounds like the Genome)
Planet in jeopardy, insufficient resources, no way to create more resources? Simple answer, kill a percentage of the populace.
Looks pretty Stalinesque already. But I guess you already know that.
It's a problem for sure.
There are radical ideas to sidestep it, but those would take more than a spoonful of sugar I think to get the medicine to go down.
As far as dictatorship of the proletariat...
"In Marxist sociopolitical thought, the dictatorship of the proletariat refers to a state in which the proletariat, or the working class itself has control of political power."
The big mistake I see in HN is that the members believe themselves to be elites, which for the time being may well be true, and many here are making hay. Probably a wise move.
The truth is we are also soon to be no more than axle turners in wheel factories, and many of us already are.
I'm not a dystopian, I really am an optimist. Hence the desperation.
You rock!
Absolutely, you need Atlas Shrugged on the bookshelf to understand the mess we find ourselves in.
The most amazing thing is the hypnotic scam that has been pulled, on us that makes us believe this is all our "lot in life".
Thumbs up!
Wow cool top comment!
Which reminds me, I just watched an excellent documentary on Karl Marx which was very timely. It's largely forgotten what he was really about I think.
Really hit home that his concept of the "Surplus Value" of a worker is just as important if not more so today as it was the day he critiqued capitalism in the 1800's.
Shame about how his work was twisted into authoritarian dictatorship by the likes of Stalin. You just can't win :/
You really just nailed it though.
Next week, back to Nietzsche.
Right, NLP as a "Science" is kind of crackpot, but there are some things in the texts that are truisms and worthy of note just because they are laid out concisely.
It can be very dangerous and malicious to use that basic knowledge of how to conduct a conversation to do what? .. "make people feel special and you care when you absolutely don't give a damn about them", and the conversation is purely a means to an end.
That said, it's nice to be nice, and much better to be inclusive, even if you needed to learn that from a pretty fringe bunch of theory.
[Edit] As a side note, I was first introduced to NLP when someone used it on me in person as a means to try to get me to work for an organized online credit card phishing operation and wanted me to move to Costa Rica.
It was a very strange experience and was effective up until the point I noticed what they were doing
Took me a few days figure out what had happened. I didn't know anything about NLP at the time and was kind of shocked that this was an actual thing.
Ended up calling the FBI.
Yup totally agreed.
Knowledge of NLP helps. Not practicing it consciously but understanding the theory behind it.
Is important to make a connection and pay attention to others. Too many people make it a one way conversation and walk away wondering why things didn't go better, meanwhile they were talking 80% of the time.
Any time you can make others feel included, and their opinion matters during a meeting the better things will go.
IMHO, you aren't going to get any respect from HN mods for being "correct".
Group-Think is what runs things around here not fairness.
It's nice to see you've reached out to Alex publicly.
Any time someone or an organization brings in someone else's code and makes use of it, no matter what the license we really need to recognize that, it's just the morally responsible thing to do.
As far as ourselves, we're definitely using uWS and that is not going to go without recognition.
Nobody should need to "open a ticket", send an email or post on HN to get that sorted.
npm install and git clone making it way too easy for people not to give a crap about the works of others.
Good to see you guys are doing the right thing, uWS is a serious piece of tech and well worth recognition.
Thank you for the clarity.
I actually knew what you meant and probably the other person did as well.
It did come off a bit harsh, that was my only point and I don't think think it was offensive but it seemed like it was conflating two very different things that should have no "nearest neighbor search" with each other.
Yes, definitely agree on the last point.
What makes a genius -> My personal experience -> Rape.
Not a good flow at all :)
I'm not offended, I'm stating a fact that we were talking about what makes a genius and you decided to make it about rape and there was an implicit derision aimed at the person you replied to in addition.
I'm here discussing... Carry on.
That's not actually what you said.
What you said is it is about time we moved on from C and suggested Rust.
That seems like your own subjective opinion. Which is fine of course, each to their own.
Personally I will continue to use whatever language makes sense for the job no matter what it might be.
Happy to take one for the team if that stance doesn't work for you, I'm not the one here passively aggressively proselytizing.
And thank you for confirming that by the way.
I don't downvote, even if I could.
However, this comment is exceptionally rude, disrespectful and out of place here on HN.
[EDIT] Specifically I don't appreciate the way you changed the narrative.
Is that something you are just musing out loud, or are you proselytizing?
If it is the former free to use whatever language you choose. If it is the latter, can you please keep your opinion as just that.
I believe we are all adults here and quite capable of making judgment calls.
Rust has some interesting features and lots of other languages too. No need for the drive by.
No, those would require domain specific knowledge.
But at least inside the Linux kernel everyone is talking the equivalent of English.
Understanding English does not imply you will be able to jump into any random scientific paper with 45 years of background theory and immediately understand it either.
Being able to understand the grammar and sentence structure really helps, even if you don't understand the vocabulary or technical principles of the domain you are reading.
File under:
"When I poke myself in the eye, it hurts."
I don't think in 40 years of programming in C and C++ I have ever seen an example of someone doing something with sizeof() quite that weird, and I've seen plenty of weird things.
Plus one for the happy ending that they won't be doing that again.
I'm not the person who was asking, but thanks for the insightful comments. Makes sense.
Wouldn't a reversible computer that executes need to take up an exponentially large amount of physical space as it executes?
That might work for small problems but it doesn't seem like it would scale. Or rather, it would scale to fill the known universe.
Sorry I haven't really dug into the attached articles yet, but I will.
When you say pointers, do you actually mean pointers?
I've implemented something like you describe before in a game engine for a managed language.
Instead of using pointers though I used integers throughout.
The actual state was maintained in a flat vector of element blocks and were stable.
The nice thing about integers on a GC'd platform are that they are opaque to the GC so zero time was spent on pointer chasing.
The other nice thing is you could literally dump the entire state to disk or restore pretty much in one go.
Looks good though, and I agree (as you mention further down) that state can often be part of multiple list/trees simultaneously, so it makes better sense to keep them separate.
I adore VS Code and everyone on the team that is cranking it out has my deepest respect.
It really is a phenomenal piece of work and is just getting better and better.
Looking forward to see how it performs with Chakra Core as the script engine one of these days.
The downvote button should be banished is my only constructive criticism.
As far as the rest, I'm largely right there with you. I also use what you call the "second conscious voice" as well, and agree it's extremely helpful if not abused, plus some of the other stuff too.
I used to live in Seattle btw but back in Europe for a while at the moment otherwise would have loved to chat.
You sound to be on a good path. Best.