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timeu's comments

timeu | 2 years ago | on: The pro-Israel information war

> What about the hostages?

Legit question and there would have been negotiations happening to exchange hostages for prisoners (like it was done in the past)

> What about border security?

What about it? I didn't say that Isreal should not secure its border. The entire reason why Hamas was successful in the first place was because the border was not secured because the troops were moved and Israel's security services didn't take the warnings and threats seriously that Hamas was planing such an attack.

> The game theory is absolutely clear here. When an attack of this magnitude is carried out, you need to respond with overwhelming force to cutoff the possibility of further escalation. Stop it cold

First, I don't think game theories applies in this conflict and second when did this ever work in the past? At least I would argue that the "war on terror" after 9.11 was anything but successful. Actually compared to the current reaction of Israel the reaction of the US after 9.11 looks very restraint.

> Restraint here is the significant effort that has been taken by the IDF to minimize civilian casualties.

That's a bold claim, looking at the number of civilian deaths in that relative short period of time. Yes I know that the numbers come indirectly from Hamas but they were relatively accurate in the past when they were confirmed afterwards. Most people say Hamas to blame for this because they hide behind civilians. However I would argue that it's neither morally right nor strategically smart to killing dozens of civilians for one Hamas operative. Also Israeli officials were quoted with: "We’re focused on maximum damage and not accuracy" (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/10/right-now-it-i...).

timeu | 2 years ago | on: The pro-Israel information war

After an initial military response, take their time and specifically plan and target the terrorists who were responsible and organized the attacks on the 7.10. Yeah this will obviously take way longer and is harder than levelling Gaza but would avoid eventually bringing the entire world against you and producing much more terrorists than before. At the same time also try to make sure that the civilians in Gaza get humanitarian aid, so you remove the breeding ground for terrorism. This approach was also suggested by Jocko Willink retured Navy Seal (https://youtu.be/3O4dW24az98)

But the mistakes happened way before by moving troops away from the Gaza border to West Bank to protect illegal settlements and also supporting Hamas as an opposition to PLO. Don't get me wrong. Don't get me wrong the world would be a better place without Hamas however your policy has to be strategic and not emotional (i.e. revenge)

timeu | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do you exercise?

I am 42 years old and try to focus on 2 areas: strength and aerobic performance

For strength: I basically just do the "The Bridge by Barbell Medicine" (https://liftvault.com/programs/strength/bridge-program-sprea...) around 3x a week (sometimes a 4th General Practice Day). I started like most with 5x5 Stronglift probably 8 years ago but switched to this program around 3 years ago. The nice thing is that it has some variation and doesn't take too long. It consists of the big compound lifts so I think it's great for general strength

For Cardio: I started to do to 4x Zone 2 training on an indoor bike (https://peterattiamd.com/category/exercise/aerobic-zone-2-tr...) recently because a lactate test showed that I have horrible aerobic peformance. I blame it on Covid but I guess it's because after stopping with football/soccer due to a knee injury I virtually did no aerobic exercise. The upside is that a great aerobic performance has tons of health benefits (blood preassure, cholestoral, etc).

I train always in the morning (start between 6:30 and 7:00) before work in fasted state (time restricted feeding between 12:00-20:00) for cardio and with a pre-workout shake (creatine) on the strenght days. I am not a huge morning person but I got used to getting up early and the great thing is that even if my day was super unproductive one thing was accomplished and it's also quite compatible with social life (in case I want to do something after work).

Physically I am probably now in a better shape than in my 30ies and I plan to contineu to do this as long as possible

timeu | 3 years ago | on: Five hours' sleep is tipping point for bad health

My father got 3 stents inserted during an angiogram. The reason was most likey that he was suffering from sleep apnea (his breathing stopped around 60 times an hour and his o2 saturation dropped to 50/60) without knowing it. In his case it was central sleep apnea but after he got a CPAP machine his o2 saturation went back up to > 90%. One easy way to check this is to wear a pusle oximater overnight and check the o2 saturation.

timeu | 3 years ago | on: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

As an HPC sysadmin for 3 research institutes (mostly life sciences & biology) I can't see how cloud HPC system could be any cheaper than an on-prem HPC system especially if I look at the resource efficiency (how much resources were requested vs how much were actually useed) of our users SLURM jobs. Often the users request 100s of GB but only use a fraction of it. In our on-prem HPC system this might decrease utilization (which is not great) but in the case of the cloud this would result in increased computing costs (because bigger VM flavor) which would be probably worse (CapEx vs OpEx) Of course you could argue that the users should do and know better and properly size/measure their resource requirements however most of our users have lab background and are new to computational biology so estimating or even knowing what all the knobs (cores, mem per core, total memory, etc) of the job specification means is hard for them. We try to educate by providing trainings and job efficency reporting however the researchters/users have little incentive to optimize the job requests and are more interested in quick results and turnover which is also understandable (the on-prem HPC system is already payed for). Maybe the cost transparancy of the cloud would force them or rather their group leaders/institute heads to put a focus on this but until you move to the cloud you won't know.

Additionally the typical workloads that run on our HPC system are often some badly maintained bioinformatics software or R/perl/pythong throwaway scripts and often enough a typo in the script causes the entire pipeline to fail after days of running on the HPC system and needs to be restarted (maybe even multiple times). Again on the on-prem system you have wasted electricity (bad enough) but in the cloud you have to pay the computing costs of the failed runs. Again cost transparency might force to fix this but the users are not software engineers.

One thing that the cloud is really good at, is elasticity and access to new hardware. We have seen for example a shift of workloads from pure CPUs to GPUs. A new CryoEM microscope was installed where the downstream analysis is relying heavily on GPUs, more and more resaerch groups run Alpafold predictions and also NGS analysis is now using GPUs. We have around 100 GPUs and average utlizations has increased to 80-90% and the users are complaining about long waiting/queueing times for their GPU jobs. For this bursting to the cloud would be nice, however GPUs are prohibitively expensive in the cloud unfortunately and the above mentioned caveats regarding job resource efficiencies still apply.

One thing that will hurt on-prem HPC systems tough are the increased electricity prices. We are now taking measures to actively save energy (i.e. by powering down idle nodes and powering them up again when jobs are scheduled). As far as I can tell the big cloud providers (AWS, etc) haven't increased the prices yet either because they cover elecriticity cost increase with their profit margins or they are not affected as much because they have better deals with elecricity providers.

timeu | 4 years ago | on: “AI promised to revolutionize radiology but so far its failing”

Funny, when I was young my father who was a geophyisicst (now retired) took me to seismological surveys, where we hit with a hammer on a plate to generate shock waves and measure velocity (mostly for building tunnels through montains). After a hard day of physical work, my father was drawing these lines at specific points of the recorded dataset (sorry I lack the proper terms and vocabulary because it was like 20 years ago) and there are some patterns you can use to identifiy those spots but most of it was based on his intuition and years of experience. Sometimes he let me do the interpretation and all I had was the those patterns, but many times he had to correct it because of what you describe (experience, terrain, environment, etc)

timeu | 6 years ago | on: Women make up 54% of new students entering Iranian universities

Sorry but your second point does not correct. I have relatives in Iran (all my female relatives have finished university in Iran and work). Last time I visted my cousin (this is alreay some years ago) he showed me around the company he works for (IT company) and half of the software engineers there were women.

timeu | 7 years ago | on: What Happened to OpenStack?

We are working on a project where we plan to manage our new HPC system with OpenStack. This will replace 3 legacy HPC systems that were manged with propriatory management systems. Due to shifting requirements by our customers (scientist) we decided to move to a cloud framework where probably still the majority of resources is dedidcated to a batch scheduling system but it would allow us to also provide more cloud like services (jupyerhub, rstudio, databases, etc) It's quite an ambitious project and we (4 engineers) basically spent the last year understanding the in and outs of OpenStack. We also went full in with integrating all kinds of datacenter components into OS (NetApp, SDN, DNS, etc)

Some lessons learned so far:

  - OpenStack is very complex     
  - It's less of a product and more a framework and you need a dedicated engineering team with cross cutting skillset     
  - You definately need a dev/staging environment to test upgrades and customizations  
  - Some of the reference implementations of OS servies (SDN) are fine for small deployments but if can replace them with dedicated hardware/appliances you should do that.

timeu | 7 years ago | on: Mystery tracks being 'forced' on your Spotify

I had exactly the same issue. But in my case I setup a device password that probably was in one of the PW leaks. I was listening to spotify on my phone and suddenly it switched to a different device unknown to me and played mostly latin songs. When I changed the device pw it stopped

timeu | 7 years ago | on: Fasting can improve overall health

same experience with the difference that I do carb cycle. on workout days I eat high protein,carb and low fat and on workfree days I eat high protein, more fat and few carbs.

workout without breakfest does work, although if I go to very heavy weights, I tend to take a bit of BCAA before the workout.

timeu | 7 years ago | on: Simple rules for documenting scientific software

Some good basic suggestions that should be followed when doing softwaare engineering. But they forgot one aspect:

Don't be too smart for your own sake when packaging your software. As an HPC administrator I stopped counting how many hours I spent installing scientific software with broken Makefiles, interactive installers, simple github dumps, unresolvable dependencies. Sadly this is quite prevelant in life sciences (I am looking at you bioconductor)

timeu | 8 years ago | on: LLVM patch to fix half of Spectre attack

As far as I can tell this only measures the impact of the Meltdown bugifx/kernel patch for Intel CPUs. Would be interesting to see the accumulated impact of the mitigation of Meltdown (KPTI) and Spectre (using Retpolines)

timeu | 8 years ago | on: The Pentagon Is Spending Up To $2.2B on Soviet-Style Arms for Syrian Rebels

The reporting about Aleppo was a bit ridiculous (Aleppo must have more hospitals than any other city) compared to how our Media reports about Mossul and Raqqa. Go look up the numbers of how many civilians were killed by the anti-IS Coalition forces (btw it dramatically increased since Trump is in power). Only because the media is not reporting it in the same extent as in case of Aleppo doesn't mean it doesn't happen. War sucks. Plain and simple.
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