Unfortunate that the author doesn’t bring up FoundationDB version stamps, which to me feel like the right solution to the problem. Essentially, you can write a value you can’t read until after the transaction is committed and the synchronization infrastructure guarantees that value ends up being monotonically increasing per transaction. They use similar “write only” operations for atomic operations like increment.
Yes. A consistent total ordering is what you need (want) in distributed computing. Ultimately, causality is what is important, but consistent ordering of concurrent operations makes things much easier to work with.
Consistent ordering of concurrent operations is easy though. Just detect this case (via logical clocks) then order using node ids or transaction ids if the logical clocks show the transactions as being concurrent. Am I missing something? This feels like a very solved problem. (I’ve worked on CRDTs where we have the same problem. There exist incredibly fast algorithms for this.)
I don’t think so, I think it is solved in the general sense. However what Spanner does is unique, and it does use synchronised clocks in order to do it.
However, Spanner does not solve the inter-continental acid database with high write throughput. So I don’t see it as ground breaking. CRDT’s are interesting, I’ve followed your work for a long time, but too constrained to solve this general problem I think.
Yes, though the API of having a write-only value that is a monotonically increasing counter is much simpler than having to think about causality or logical clocks.
The key here is a singleton sequencer component that stamps the new versions. There was a great article shared here on similar techniques used in trading order books (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46192181).
Agree this is the best solution, I’d rather have a tiny failover period than risk serialization issues. Working with FDB has been such a joy because it’s serializable it takes away an entire class of error to consider, leading to simpler implementation.
I betting $10 Apple’s foldable will be two iPhone Airs where one side has 0 bezel hinged together with extreme mechanical precision and maybe some fairy dust to make the gap when unfolded unnoticeable.
This creates a foldable with no durability issues and no “crease” problems. Also the two halves of the display could be on the outside when folded, avoiding the need for a third display and getting a rear display for free. I would buy 3 of these.
Having the displays on the outside when folded removes all the durability advantages of closing the phone with the screens inside.
I don't even know if that affects my opinion of whether you'll be right or not, because putting glass on the back is definitely more fragile than machining the phone out of a solid block of aluminium. Am I remembering this incorrectly? Was that the unibody MacBooks? Regardless, I found the aluminium backs a lot less fragile, but we all gave them up pretty easily for wireless charging.
Is there something equivalent to longbets.org, but for bets which are about matters that aren't important to society? I'd take you up on the bet - not because I think you're wrong, but because I think it's fun and fairly harmless gambling that is unlikely to lead to either of us developing a habit - but has easily sending small amounts of money internationally been solved yet?
I'll bet $10 it hasn't! That I can't send $10 from one country to another, without paying fees that are a significant proportion of that amount, or needing to put an unreasonable amount of effort into setting up an account with a 3rd party service or doing the transfer with that service.
And the two bets above are a bad look, so I'll also bet $20 that you can't get me doing any more gambling by the end of the day.
> I'll bet $10 it hasn't! That I can't send $10 from one country to another, without paying fees that are a significant proportion of that amount
I'd take you up on that bet! I'm not sure what an envelope costs, but probably less than $0.1 if you buy more than one, then add a stamp (usually around/below $1 in most places in the world AFAIK, even for international destinations).
Please send the $10 in an envelope to Oranjerie 114, 7311 WP Apeldoorn, Netherlands whenever you can :)
Ha! Fine, it will have to wait until I'm next near a post office with time to kill, otherwise it's not convenient. I think you'll allow that "not an unreasonable amount of effort" could imply "convenient".
I think the post offices where I am only sell the envelopes in bulk, and buying a pack will probably add an unreasonable 20% - 30% of the amount, but I'll concede that most people will probably have an envelope from a bank and a glue-stick lying around.
This is very off-topic, but sending something to an address which I can't tell is complete, without a name, has reminded me of something I find interesting.
A few years ago, my mother received a postcard from a friend who didn't have her address handy. She sent it with just my mother's name (first and last), the city, and country (New Zealand). It took some time, but it reached her! In NZ, "city" is used for some pretty small places - the population is only around 70,000. But I'm still very impressed with the effort to deliver that to her. Especially for a postcard - even internationally the postage on those is not a lot!
Hmm - I've just seen that postage is $1.55, so >15% of the amount. I'm not sure that is a reasonable fee. I'm deducting $2 from what I'm sending! Lucky there are $2 notes here.
Of course, if not stated I suppose it would be reasonable to assume international bets are are in USD, but it's close enough, and this feels like it's only just holding up anyway.
And most importantly, I think sending $8 is funnier than sending $10.
Sweden - Netherland: 3.6 euros to send a letter. Sure I could fit a couple of 500 euro bills there, but the point was that you cant send money with out paying too much.
I think I agree with the hacker new hivemind, but I think I formed the opinion separately. I did a few small transactions with bitcoin ages ago, and it was a huge pain. Buying the bitcoin was painful, and then I couldn't send an exact amount, it's better to receive change to a different address, and the fees weren't as cheap as I expected for small amounts.
I often hear this has been solved with additional layers, and I see that you mentioned Ethereum instead of bitcoin. Is that significantly easier? $0.25 is not bad for $10, so the fee seems fine. I'm accepting money in an envelope as a solution, and that costs more, but I'm keen to hear whether this would have been easier.
Bitcoin maximalists have purposely ruined the cheap transactions on Bitcoin (in order to sell their own centralized solution) by limiting the block size. If everything had gone according Satoshi's original plan, we would have transaction fees in cents today. That's why I mentioned Ethereum, because it's eating Bitcoin's lunch in cheap transactions and contracts.
If you ignore parts the transaction sure it is cheap. What can I do with USDT? no shop near me would accept it, most major digital commerce stores like Amazon won't accept it, my bank won't accept deposits in USDT.
If I have to start and end with USD which is what anyone interested in other three functions of money want, there is USD -> USDT and back to USD costs, and depending on geography there may not be cheap or legal way to make that trade, which means it is going to be far more expensive than just the $0.25 "gas" fees.
Go to a site like bitrefill and buy a gift card for any store where you want to spend it. I often buy Amazon, Uber, Apple, etc. cards from them. Pretty straightforward. Obviously they might not support any stores in your country, but they seem to have a wide reach. And they are not the only ones in the game.
Download a wallet on your phone, I guess. As long as you are not downloading unverified APKs left and right, your 10$ should be pretty safe. I can even bet a 10$ on it!
I guess you'll be more worried about a $200-$4000 phone over $10. If you are planning to get hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of crypto, buy a hardware wallet. They are hack proof and you can write down the seed phrase as a backup in case the wallet bricks.
The reason you need to worry about the screen of a foldable is because it’s plastic. Normal phones with glass screens are plenty durable. So if you could manage to make a foldable with glass screens, it wouldn’t matter much that the screen is on the outside when it’s in your pocket.
The most popular betting website is Polymarket. Payment is via crypto. The fees aren’t super high. The typical user is more likely to lose money by making bad bets. If you don’t want to spend money, there’s Manifold.
That would be an unacceptably fat foldable. Foldables are 4.1mm to 4.2mm at the head of the class and iPhone Air is 5.6mm. Double that and add a bit for folding and you're still under 9mm (acceptable) with today's leading folders, and about 12mm (not acceptable) for the hypothetical Air.
I think it’s a cool idea, but for there to be no crease the 0 bezel sides would have to have incredibly sharp edges. Seems like a real cutting hazard when the phone isn’t folded out (especially if the screens are still glass instead of plastic)
Unless Apple comes up with a way to have the crease still physically be there, but visually seem like it isn’t. Perhaps using a waveguide or something similar.
Apple fans were fine with the notch. If I were them would embrace the bezel and make UIs like a book with distinct left and right panes. Even embrace multi tasking and run two regular apps side by side.
This would be kind of amazing for reading ebooks, too. Turn most readers sideways (ibooks definitely included) and they tend to give you two columns of text anyway.
i wonder why people so obsessed with "no crease". If apple truly care about "perfect screen", they would remove the face id "notch/island" 5 generations ago.
The last time Apple introduced a product with a moving part was the Airpods line. I think we'll see a foldable iPhone about the same time we see a touchscreen Mac.
What a weird argument, Apple ships tons of AirPods and MacBooks with hinges, not counting accessories like the iPad keyboard (introduced after AirPods) or display stands.
Gaudi is among the best engineers and artists who ever lived, and I won’t belabor his greatness. It is cool though that Rhino (https://www.rhino3d.com/) got a shout out in this article, it is a similar blend of engineering and artistic excellence that I’ve only dabbled in briefly, but repeatedly pops up in the toolkits of the most interesting engineer-artists. One of my personal favorites is John Edmark who among other cool things made these shutter-synced 3D sculptures that are absolutely amazing: https://www.johnedmark.com/phifib/#itemId=572301305559869e24...
What's interesting about his engineering is that he used to obsessively make models of the cathedral to "spike" his ideas. They show this in the museum.
One of the most waterfall projects of all time actually had a fair bit of agile behind it.
Very cool. I think if you squint this is sort of like a 4D moire. You have a repeating 3D structure which you're looking at through a "grid" in time, causing aliasing.
While this is a common view, recently I’ve begun to wonder if it may be secretly an antipattern. I’ve run into a number of cases over the years where additional fields don’t break parsing, or even necessarily the main functionality of a program, but result in subtle incorrect behavior in edge cases. Things like values that are actually distinct being treated as equal because the fields that differ are ignored. More recently, I’ve seen LLMs get confused because they hallucinated tool input fields that were ignored during the invocation of a tool.
I’m a little curious to try and build an API where parsing must be exact, and changes always result in a new version of the API. I don’t actually think it would be too difficult, but perhaps some extra tooling around downgrading responses and deprecating old versions may need to be built.
One thing is the graphics are a generation behind what you would usually expect from a game of this quality. I’ve been playing it and I can confirm it is wonderful, and the graphics just makes me impressed with the amount of focus the tiny team (33 people, I think?) put into making what matters great (though I’d be excited for a remaster in the future).
The idea of product discovery has value. Advertising funds product discovery by taking some of the funds that you pay for goods, and funneling that money to platforms and creators that are willing to help others discover that product.
There is an alternative model where we simply pay professional product discoverers. Think influencers, but whose customer is the fan not the sponsor. It would be a massive cultural shift, but doesn’t seem so crazy to me.
Businesses will then send the discoverers free samples, provide literature, and send “advisers” to talk with the discoverers, and you’ll be right back where you started.
Is it a consideration with monetary value? Then it’s advertising, much like how bribing public official is still (theoretically) illegal even if you don’t do it in cash. If it’s not, then the discoverer has no incentive to act according to the business’s demand.
I’m not understanding why this is a good standard: right now, anyone who sees a billboard or a TV ad has no incentive to act according to the business’s demand, yet you want to ban those. So you think it would be OK to advertise to discoverers, but not to final purchasers.
For the record, I’m not saying this is the perfect model and we should move to it immediately. My only claim is that it isn’t crazy.
I think the fundamental difference between advertising to discoverers vs advertising to consumers is that currently “discoverers” (platforms, content creators, billboard owners, etc.) make money directly from advertisers. Success as a “discoverer” is at least somewhat correlated to income (with more money, platforms can be more successful; content creators can create more compelling content; landowners can buy more billboards). If that money is coming from advertisers, you are biasing the market to prefer discoverers that can secure the most advertiser funding, which in turn preferences advertisers that can spend the most on advertising. This isn’t fundamentally bad, since a compelling product can make a lot of money that can then be spend on advertising, but it also creates anti-consumer incentives (like marketing something that is just good enough not to return as the next best thing). On the other hand, if discoverers are paid directly by consumers, that biases the market to prefer discoverers who identify products that bring the most value to consumers for their money.
I meant to include his name near my mention of PVC flutes. Love watching him play (both in the sense of playing music and in the sense of seeing his creativity and passion on display). Nicolas Bras is always a fun watch!
I’m genuinely surprised it took this long for Apple to do this. Having a full contacts list has long been one of the most valuable pieces of information for ad targeting. It’s why you can not be on Facebook but they still know everything they need to know about you because enough of your contacts are on their platforms.
Surprised because Apple is the company that made this sort of permission request so granular. Contacts contain some of the most permanent and “graph-building” data you can imagine, but they let this through for 17 years.
One possible reason they didn't address it sooner was Apple was receiving a cut of google's ad revenue on iPhone that had grown to 36% share, until Google's own antitrust case deemed the arrangement illegal earlier this year. The more data available to Google the more effective their advertising. /conspiracy
If I’m not mistaken, the embedded swift mode aims to make ICU (the 27mb file for Unicode support) optional (and thus easily removed where it isn’t needed)
