forgotpassagan's comments

Interestingly, the US government may have plasma weapons as far back as 1993. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARAUDER

The first attempt at a plasma ring weapon was successful enough to be classified immediately and nobody has heard anything since. Usually that's a sign that the project was successful and further research classified/suppressed.

I've seen similar happen with Free Election Lasers and EMP weapons in recent years. And with radar stealth before that.

Another tech that seems to have been suppressed is visual/IR stealth technology dating back to Yehudi Lights. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yehudi_lights . God knows what's out there now but it isn't hard to believe that we have nearly perfect visual stealth

Python and Node use far more memory than Java. Golang uses less but not by orders of magnitude, maybe 3x less. Sounds like your JVM GC settings were off, Golang has GC just like Java.

Most Netflix and Google services are built in Java...

NYC aggressively arrests anyone breaking the rules so homeless don't stay there.

Now I'm in a city with a lot of visible homeless and the government tolerating it is the real problem. They allow homeless to build massive camps filled with drugs, garbage, and human waste.

And they don't hang out in these gross camps for company. It's mostly for easy access to drugs. The city should tear these camps down the day they form.

Homeless population is one of the toughest issues a city can have. Homeless people aren't stupid, and the more welcoming you make your city the more homeless you will end up with. Considering the size of the US, there's a practically unlimited number of homeless that can come to your city if it's welcoming enough, and that's exactly what has happened to SF. There's plenty of other places with decent weather, but the homeless problem in CA is mostly a product of the politics there.

We pour endless billions toward 'solving' homelessness when it's been a problem since ancient times. Some people are just too crazy or addicted to live a normal life. The answer is to bring back asylums to hold these people against their will, but that's too politically radioactive to do.

I have a family member of the crazy variety and I would love if they were in an asylum. I wouldn't have to worry about them dying on the streets. This family member is so crazy that if you gave them a house they would likely burn it down or otherwise ruin it anyways. Far too crazy to live with the family, basically a danger to themselves and society. I would guess the majority of homeless are the same.

All these initiatives to provide housing and training are misguided, a normal person will rarely be homeless for more than a few months. The majority of the homeless population is chronic, and these people would already have shelter if they were sane or sober enough to maintain one.

It's all part of the endless fight against proprietary systems. When cloud providers started using 'optimized' images the response was to move everything above the VM to 'container' level. The same thing happened in the VM boom once hardware makers started adding binary blob drivers to bare metal.

We'll just keep building layers as manufacturers try to lock the lower ones down :)

See WeChat in China for a good example on Android

It doesn't feel like a tech bubble really. The recent crop of unicorns may not be as successful as FB/Google but besides theranos they're making good money. Most are busy burning free cash so there might be layoffs when/if that runs out. But these aren't the vaporware companies of the 99 bubble, they all make a lot of money.

Except magic leap...

Cryptocurrency sure as hell feels like a bubble. My friends grandma was asking him how to invest over Christmas....

I agree. Microservices have no tooling and a shitload of overhead. After working on such a project I think microservices are an anti-pattern. After a certain point you have to maintain state across service boundaries and all hell breaks loose.

By spitting up your application you basically throw away everything a database gives you as far as ordering and atomicity. And you end up building a giant distributed database yourself.

Stay away from microservices. I've seen people try to make it work multiple times, the overhead for failure scenarios, lack of distributed transactions, and eventual consistency multiply the size of the codebase

Not according to Google :). They actually support and encourage distributed transactions across boundaries.

Imagine all the data Google stores with your user profile across their hundreds of application boundaries. To keep things consistent you would either need to store all profile data in one massive service or support distributed transactions.

The Netflix model is fault tolerance, with every service supporting various failed profile update scenarios. Google just decided to add distributed transactions support to spare all that overhead.

I love how Netflix is so open about their architecture, but I have one strong criticism.

After trying to get Spinnaker running, which is like 10 services for a fairly straightforward application, and reading about how Netflix has Cron jobs running to 'clean up' data inconsistencies... I started to think Google has a better approach to scaling the code.

Netflix is strong on eventual consistency, and making services as small as possible. Having tried to build something in that image, holy shit the issue of distributed transactions becomes a nightmare.

We had to build error handling in everything to handle the failure of everything else. Maybe half our code was 'just in case' to deal with exploding failure scenario complexity during service call fanout. If your service calls out to two or more services that also do data updates, God help you. There's no call ordering or way to make sure both succeed or fail, so if one does you could easily end up in an invalid state.

Contrast this to Google's approach. Maps is one service, Docs is one service. Their service boundaries are much larger so they can shove the complexity of consistency and rollbacks back into the DB where it belongs. And they avoid eventual consistency as much as possible.

If Google can make these big 'monoliths' work at huge scale I don't see any advantage to 'microservices', it's just a bunch of pointless overhead. I think Netflix has had a little too much industry koolaid ...

It only costs maybe 12k to put together something that can go 180-200. Early 2000 f-body with nitrous alone will get you to 160.

Sure the average person hasn't gone that fast but if you want to it's not that big of a deal

Speed is overrated. Every airliner you've ridden on hits almost 200 on the ground. I've been over 160 multiple times in fairly normal cars with uprated tires and brakes. Going 200 isn't really that impressive anymore, the average sports car can do it if you have enough space.

Tons of stuff is still built on the JVM. The big five tech companies (besides MS) use Java nearly exclusively for back end development. Python is good for ML and data crunching, but compared to Java it's dog slow.

Go is definitely catching on but nowhere near passing Java, maybe it will someday

I abandoned .NET over a lack of http2 support as well. The reason? It uses an HTTP implementation baked into the windows kernel. Wtf?

So not only does it lack HTTP2 support on Linux but also non-evergreen versions of windows.

And yes Go is the new competitor for Java, .NET core is a footnote because it has no open source community support.

I'll agree that C# is perhaps the best designed language I've ever used, but it seems that Microsoft decided to open it up many years too late to save it's market share.

Their best bet is creating native Java library interoperability. Third parties have been offering for years, but if it was baked in MS might just have a chance

Just use React. The frontend SPA frameworks are thankfully converging so there's not a huge advantage to using one over the other. So if you're just getting into the fray, use the most popular one because it has the best support and documentation.

Avoid Angular. It's a massive and complex framework with a vertical learning curve, and relatively poorly documented.

I also highly recommend using Typescript throughout with Tslint on very strict settings using Microsoft's extensions and VsCode as your editor. This will provide the least painful experience for a front end transition that's already going to be....shocking

Shhhh it's semantic versioning

There is something else, in the darkest reaches. It has many incantations, but the non-believers have a singular name. Lisp.

I doubt it with the insane transaction fees and confirmation delays, they're better off using Western Union on both counts at this point

I wasn't going to say it... But somebody did

I love that Apple cares about privacy when just about every other megacorp is a really fancy advertising agency

IMO Lightning network solves a non-problem. It only sets up a transactionless channel between two parties. The whole promise of Bitcoin was secure transfer to anyone. Maintaining a balance between two parties is trivial and solved thousands of years ago.

The whole reason we have currency is to allow transactions between people that don't trust each other, so I don't think Lightning network will do anything significant

For technical reasons, Bitcoin honestly sucks. The block rate is so low that transactions cost many dollars and take hours to confirm. This is only going to continue to get worse, as it turns out that having a global ledger is actually the opposite of a decentralized system.

I can't do anything with Bitcoin that I can't do more easily with my credit card. It offers no value except a tool for rampant speculation. Block chain is junk, and while I see promise in the future I strongly believe we're in the Myspace stage. Something better will come along in a few years and blow this garbage away. Something that's actually usable as a real currency in all the ways I can use a dollar and maybe more.