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 :)
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
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 ...
> 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.
Distributed transactions are a sure sign that your service boundaries have been incorrectly drawn.
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.
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.
Sport vehicles go fast very quickly and handle well at high speeds. That's the fun part - acceleration. Getting punched into the seat off the starting line, braking into a curve, smoothly slalom through apexes, then rocketing towards the next set of curves... You've clearly never been in a proper sport car because that lesson is self-evident well below 60.
As an aside, has anyone else noticed how new posters are overwhelmingly pessimistic and reliant on dubious anecdotes?
I'd make a slightly different point - what makes a car exciting is handling.
There's a big transatlantic divide on this point. American sports cars tend to be relatively large and heavy, with huge torquey V8 engines and simple live-axle suspension. They're fast in a straight line, but they don't really handle in corners. European sports cars tend to be tiny and extremely lightweight, with a small and free-revving inline 4 and sophisticated independent suspension. They're not very fast, but they're incredibly agile and nimble.
If you want to learn to be a racing driver, you'll probably get taught in a Mazda MX5 Miata. It's the most popular entry-level racing car by a country mile. Mazda overtly based the Miata's design on classic British sportscars. In this kind of car, you can explore the limits of grip at non-lethal speeds. The lack of weight partly offsets the lack of power - you don't have a particularly high top speed, but you can carry a great deal of speed through a corner. Such a car richly rewards you for skillful and precise car control.
When it comes to driving on the street, the excitement you get from acceleration tends to trump the enjoyment of a car that handles really well. It's not anything inherent to one or the other, it's just that there are very, very few places on a public road where pushing the limits of a car's handling makes any sense whatsoever. On the other hand, even in a city a person can test the limits of a car's off-the-line acceleration, and that is usually a good way to get a smile or a laugh.
I have a car that handles well enough that it's popular for racing and it has always been a joy to drive, but the first time I drove a friend's very overpowered, automatic-transmission Corvette was quite an eye-opener. That's the kind of car where you can bend someone's mind with the performance without even breaking the speed limit, and without expending a lot of effort.
> there are very, very few places on a public road where pushing the limits of a car's handling makes any sense whatsoever
That's precisely why superlight cars with small engines and skinny tyres make sense.
Here in the UK, the normal speed limit outside of urban areas is 60mph. On a twisty country road, a base-model MX5 will start to come alive at well below that speed, especially in the wet. The basic engine is a 1.5 litre straight four producing 130bhp, so you can really use most of that engine on a public road.
It's more exciting because it's not very powerful - you need to give it plenty of revs and work through the gearbox to make progress. In a properly powerful car, you reach the speed limit before the engine has even had a chance to breathe. The tight handling and light weight allow you to carry that speed through a corner with confidence. Admittedly it does help if your country has roads with corners, which I understand may be hard to come by in some parts of the US.
There's a philosophical difference between making a car that adds some element of drama to your commute and making a car that's brilliant to drive just for the sake of driving. American enthusiasts are only just starting to fall in love with the hot hatchback thanks to the Fiesta ST, but here in Europe hot hatches have been hugely popular for decades.
My father's a lifelong Lotus Seven enthusiast, so I've heard this before. I'm afraid that when you drive something like a new Corvette or 911 Turbo, it bends your mind in some completely new ways. I don't think I'd buy one even if I could, but if my goal was to keep the occasional passenger entertained, something like that would be a nearly ideal tool.
There's no denying the Miata is an absolute gem. I am very happy that it is still made in this era of overpowered, huge cars and rocket-powered hatchbacks. Sacrilege: I know two different people who have shoehorned American V8s into early Miatas. Somehow I haven't driven that beast yet. I'm still not quite sure how it's even possible.
> Admittedly it does help if your country has roads with corners, which I understand may be hard to come by in some parts of the US.
On the other hand, you're at a great disadvantage in terms of population density. Finding a quiet road seems like it'd be a bit of a trick.
>On the other hand, you're at a great disadvantage in terms of population density. Finding a quiet road seems like it'd be a bit of a trick.
Surprisingly, it really isn't. We're extremely densely populated, but we also have very strict controls on sprawl. The UK has a peculiar planning policy called the green belt - there's a ring on the map around each city, beyond which any development is effectively prohibited. Outside of London, you're rarely more than half an hour away from open countryside.
For example, this road is about half an hour from the centre of Manchester, our third biggest city:
Powerful enough that you can have serious fun in a straight line (0-60 in the high 4s or low 5s, say) but not so much that you can't have a decent thrash without getting into license-endangerment territory.
I've had a Golf R for about a year and have plenty of legal fun it.
You've touched my heart with this comment. I had a 1.8s MX5 for 4 years. Fantastic little car. Everything about it. Couldn't find a single fault with anything. Simply superb.
I now have a 3.4 Boxster S, which feels largely like a more grown up version of the MX5. Much, much quicker - put it in sports plus mode, fire up launch control, put the PDK gearbox into manual, switch off the traction control and it's a real blast, however, on public roads, it's simply scary at times. This is the real problem, it feels very anti-social (at best) to do that on all but the quietest of roads and outright illegal on most others. Hence I feel myself yearning for another MX5...
Cars with more than 600hp or are tuned so well as to need less surely aren’t average. We’re taking at least $75k which really isn’t something an average person will ever be able to buy.
Sure you could probably build something with an engine capable of producing enough power— but I don’t think I’d want to do 200mph in a 96 Honda Civic.
Mine can, it's 20 years old and costs much less than a new Fiat. Reliable too...
If you want to buy a car like that new it will cost you a ton of money but second hand with a bit of searching you can find that kind of car easily, top speed of a car is irrelevant anyway, in this case it was simply a result of age, low mileage, budget and trim. And there is no way I am going to delude myself and think I am a good enough driver for speeds like that whatever the tires under it are.
You have a cheap, reliable, 20 year old Honda Civic that reaches 320 km/h? If that's the case I'm impressed.
Edit: not sure to which part of the comment you were replying, I probably misinterpreted it and you're talking about a sports car, not a Honda Civic. Still impressive but less crazy :)
Not a Civic. In nl there is a rule that you have to add 22% or 25% of the new value of your car to your income if the car is company owned. That's a lot of $ even for relatively cheap cars, for something a bit more comfy you'll be paying a ridiculous amount.
The trick is that there is another regime for cars older than 15, for those cars you add 33% of their actual value to your income if they are company owned.
There is a small set of cars that are still viable after 15 years, that you can find with low mileage and whose actual value is low enough that there is substantial difference between 33% of that and 22% of the new value of a much newer car.
Low mileage old cars tend to be of a few brands only, it would be very hard to find an old Civic with few miles on it, I just checked and the lowest mileage Civic that is older than 15 years still has 100K+ km on it.
Agreed ;) Also, the number of Corvettes on offer of that age is super low and I don't like them to begin with. Porsche is nice but as you noted expensive as well as very expensive maintenance wise. I did look at a couple but could not find one in my price bracket that would last even a year without major repairs.
Basic bolt ons for a gm F-body will take you up to 155 mph before being electronically limited. Don't need nitrous for that. Pretty sure though beyond 180 would be incredibly hard.. That is a ton of aero force the cars weren't designed for, not to mention tires.
If you really needed to go over 180 mph in a GM car, you'd use a Corvette. Used ones are surprisingly cheap and I'd venture to guess that all you would need to break 180mph in a C5 (OOB they do 175mph) would be a taller top gear and some engine electronics, although there are obviously lots of engine modifications available. For a little more than the 12k the parent post mentioned (I'm thinking 15k), you could have an expert bore the engine out and get an extra 130hp. For less than 40k you could be driving a real monster.
These sorts of mods are common enough among drag racers, except most of them aren't optimizing for top speed.
> Speed is overrated [...] the average sports car can do it if you have enough space.
Returning to car examples, the race build of sport car tends to be worse in top speed that its street version and favor braking/acceleration, simply because modern racing and racetracks put emphasis on cornering where driver skill and tactic is decisive, and not on long straights, where take overs result from top speeds.
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
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