Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
More attention (cumulatively) than the Troll?
Comment · 6 months ago
Not too far south of SF in Mountain View, "Mountain View Ave" runs adjacent to "Miramonte Ave" - and "Miramonte" can reasonably be translated from Spanish as "Mountain View".
Comment · 1 year ago
> FFS WTF is a stone!

It's actually a pretty good weight for measuring humans (14lb). Your weight in pounds varies from day to day but your weight in (half-)stones is much more stable.

Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 2 years ago
This video linked in the article (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XBzV0bDZdQ) makes me want to donate to Institute for Justice to maybe help stop this practice. But a bit of Googling shows that IfJ were also one of the legal forces behind the Citizens United decision, which is something I really don't want to support.
Comment · 2 years ago
At Google almost 20 years ago, a bunch of our machines (possibly with slightly bespoke CPUs?) were behaving oddly. These machines were mostly in use for serving Google's web index, so almost the entire RAM was devoted to index data; the indexserver processes were designed to be robust against hardware failure, and if they noticed any kind of corruption they'd dump and reload their data. We noticed that they were dumping/reloading massively more often than they'd expect.

Eventually the cause was narrowed down to that, randomly when the machine was stressed, the second half (actually, the final 2052 bytes) of some physical page in memory would get zeroed out. This wasn't great for the indexservers but they survived due to the defensive way that they accessed their data. But when we tried to use these new machines for Gmail, it was disastrous - random zeroing of general process code/data or even kernel data meant things were crashing hard.

We noticed from the kernel panic dumps (Google had a feature that sent kernel panics over the network to a central collector, which got a lot of use around this time) that a small number of pages were showing up in crash dump registers far more often than would statistically be expected. This suggested that the zeroing wasn't completely random. So we added a list of "bad pages" that would be forcefully removed from the kernel's allocator at boot time, so those pages would never be allocated for the kernel or any process. Any time we saw more than a few instances of some page address in a kernel panic dump, we added it to the list for the next kernel build. Like magic, this dropped the rate of crashes down into the noise level.

The root cause of the problem was never really determined (probably some kind of chipset bug) and those machines are long obsolete now. But it was somehow discovered that if you reset the machine via poking some register in the northbridge rather than via the normal reset mechanism, the problem went away entirely. So for years the Google bootup scripts included a check for this kind of CPU/chipset, followed by a check of how the last reset had been performed (via a marker file) and if it wasn't the special hard reset, adding the marker file and poking the northbridge to reset again. These machines took far far longer than any other machines in the fleet to reboot due to these extra checks and the double reboot, but it worked.

Comment · 3 years ago
Reddit could offer a premium membership that allows add-free and API access, and require the third-party apps to log in on behalf of the user. The fee might still turn a lot of people off (although the lack of ads would make it so much nicer), but it at least wouldn't be a technical hurdle. That model seems to work for YouTube.
Comment · 3 years ago
Almost! :-)

I coined the term "Xenoserver" back in 1999, for a paper in IEEE HotOS proposing an architecture for allowing systems in core networks to safely accept and execute code from untrusted users (for a fee, of course!): https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/papers/1999-hoto...

I was inspired by the word "xenos" (meaning both stranger and guest, or in combination a stranger who you invited into your home) rather than the word "xenia" for the general concept of hospitality extended to such a stranger [EDIT: since I wasn't familiar with the word "xenia"].

The Xenoserver project at Cambridge University developed this idea, and eventually focused around the hypervisor, which took on the name Xen.

Comment · 3 years ago
Celiac disease and Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity are very different beasts in terms of their effects. The latter is more likely to triggered in the presence of (as you say) non-trivial amounts of gluten; Celiac disease is an auto-immune disease that, while not normally at the level of anaphylactic shock, can have very unpleasant effects in tiny amounts.

And even within Celiac disease there are a lot of variations. My mother has been diagnosed as Celiac for 50 years (back before most doctors had heard of it, and she almost died from malnutrition pre-diagnosis). She obviously avoids anything that has any mention of wheat, or has been cooked in the same oil as glutenous food; she generally avoids anything that mentions "possible cross-contamination" on the label but doesn't have to be a total stickler. I don't think she's had a serious attack in many years. A friend of mine was diagnosed as Celiac maybe 10 years ago, and is incredibly sensitive - despite his best efforts he seems to end up with horrible symptoms every couple of months or so just through tiny amounts of contamination.

The FDA limit for claiming something is "gluten-free" is 20 ppm; I believe that level exists partly because it's very hard to detect anything less than that anyway, but it also fits in well with what most Celiac sufferers can tolerate.

Comment · 3 years ago
But cross-contamination in a shared production facility can happen fairly easily (and is important for folks who are sensitive to a few parts-per-million of gluten), hence why lots of packets have that warning in the small print. An obvious "gluten-free" label means that the producer is asserting that this cross-contamination hasn't occurred and you don't have to search the small print.
Comment · 3 years ago
You should watch https://www.amazon.com/King-Charles-III-Rupert-Goold/dp/B071..., which examines this very premise. Surprisingly prophetic for a play originally first performed in 2014.
Comment · 3 years ago
Not a question of price, so much as any plan with access to particular doctors/hospitals.
Comment · 3 years ago
In terms of general benefits, maybe. In terms of provider coverage - I couldn't find an individual plan at coveredca.com that was accepted by doctors at Stanford Hospital.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton