I wonder if this is how those privacy screen protectors work. Where it's just like looking at the screen through a cell structure with walls that prevent light coming out at an angle.
No, those languages have not solved it. None of the languages you list there are actually as fast as C for tight inner loops, they sometimes get close under certain circumstances, but they're still very much 2nd class languages in terms of performance.
They're only "fast" compared to slow interpreted languages like Python.
Yes they have, because those microbenchmarks are tailor made for the winner, using a very specific compiler implementation with language extensions, which apparently is only valid if the language happens to be "C".
This is such bizarre cope. It's okay for a language to not have first-class numerical performance characteristics. Langauges can have other reasons to exist. Just don't like about the performance, that doesn't help anyone.
It is not coping, it is a two measures, two weights attitude when putting C into a pedestral, you even missed on C++, which all major modern C compilers are written on, and share the backend with some of those languages.
There's no German manufacturer among the top 10 in offshore wind. Siemens business had started in Denmark (and was #2 there) and after merger with Gamesa is now headquartered in Spain, with a lot of technical facilities still in Denmark.
While depending on China for Solar panels is of course a liability, it's a very very different liability from relying on fossil fuel imports.
A solar panel has an effective lifetime of 20-30 years. A barrel of oil is literally set on fire.
If China stopped selling solar panels, there wouldnt be any energy crisis, just an inability to install *new* panels.
Same goes for the battery dependencies we have on Chinese imports.
Not a perfect situation of course, but there are some clever things the EU is doing about it. For instance, the recycling requirements is creating a local industry of people who intimately know all the components and construction of Chinese panels and batteries, and these people will be vital in kickstarting the domestic industry if China tries something. It also means that we're getting better and better at recovering rare earth minerals from decommissioned products, and we are building domestic reserves.
The proliferation of online gambling is IMO one of the bigger under-reported trends in modern society, and has a real potential for massive externalities throughout society.
I'm aware, but the existence of this site both reminded me of the existence of this problem, and IMO likely will inspire polymarket or some other crypto gambling site to offer the 'real' version of this.
Having a gambling addict in your life can be just as destructive if not more destructive as having a drug addict in your life.
This is something that most people don't currently understand because most people don't really have much experience with gambling addicts and the sort of horrible things they will do to satisfy their cravings, but as the amount of gamblers in society grows explosively, we're all going to be feeling the effects of being surrounded by these people.
it was always going to happen. there was even an episode of The Office where they started betting on meaningless outcomes for a little sense of purpose.
It's all sliding slope when the only way an average citizen can reap the economic growth of their own country is stock market and saving only makes them poorer.
> Why ever do anything at all with your money, ever, otherwise? Except for basic needs.
Why indeed? If people are only buying stuff because they are afraid of their money being worth less in the future then those are things people don't even want, let alone need. Why is it a good thing for us to endlessly churn out stuff people don't even want?
Yeah, you would have to focus on buying things you actually need. Be able to save for and look forward towards a stable future.
Don't get a new pocket computer every year because the software is not updated anymore. Use fewer subscription services? Maybe do away with the disposable vapes with lithium ion batteries in them.
Yes, but simple inflation isn't the problem. In a stable economy, we spend money as we received it, and take on loans for large purchases. In fact the economy was that way before. Now, things are too unsteady for that.
> In a stable economy, we spend money as we received it, and take on loans for large purchases. In fact the economy was that way before.
You used to be able to save for most large purchases without going into debt. Even cars.
But no, these days cars tend to be so goddamn expensive while at the same time being so low-margin products for the dealerships that even if you theoretically can pay in cash, the salespeople do their best to force you into some sort of debt because the kickback from that is the only way they make money. And practically, rents suck up so much of your income you can't save anyway.
In a deflation based economy as invisioned by crypto currency enthusiasts, there is no incentive to lend your money to anybody. Neither a private person nor banks would have strong incentives to do that, because you have a guaranteed increase of value if you just sit on your money.
Nothing. It's just a number in an account. It's what we call money basically.
Banks don't profit from keeping your deposits, they profit from running the money supply which empowers them to create new money which they tax or, in other words, loans on which they charge interest.
Go and try to withdraw something tangible with intrinsic value from a bank and you'll see they don't owe you anything at all. The most you'll get from them is paper, but even then you'll find it withdraw all your money in paper.
I just opened an account for you in my own bank, in fact. You have one million credits. You are free to send and receive credits from anybody else with an account (which is nobody, unfortunately). I owe you nothing.
When was the last time you went to the bank teller and handed them $100 in cash? I haven't done that in well over 20 years now. Notes and coins represent less than 3% of the money supply in countries like the UK and US. It's not what money is any more.
What does that mean? You think someone is physically wheelbarrowing something around between banks when you make a transfer? The banks settle up at the end of day and the net amount moved between banks is far smaller than the total transferred. What do they settle up in? Another layer of electronic funds you don't have access to.
If even the smart people on HN can't understand this it's little wonder the finance industry has such a stranglehold on society. The banks just run a ledger. That's all they are doing. But it's a ledger they control and they are allowed to create new money in it. In fact 97% of money is created by the banks when they issue loans.
It's a fundamentally different model to the antiquated "banks lend out your deposits" one.
You don't understand what it means for a bank to receive $100 in its bank account? This has nothing to do with lending, except that deposits are loans from you to your bank.
What's dishonest about your take is your strawman interpretation of the poll results. Just because you disagree with the majority of people does not mean they simply misunderstand the question and think
"hurr durr summer better than winter, me choosey summer"
Well, at least thats the way I would have responded to the question when interviewed. Maybe I'm dumber or more mindless than the average german.
There were say some 100s of people called by phone, asked a lot of questions about a lot of topics, one of them is "which do you prefer: summer or winter time" - I would have said summer (without thinking to much) because I like the long summer evenings too.
That has nothing to do with misunderstanding the question.
It is of course possible that the average interviewee is well prepared or thinks long and hard before answering without letting the wording influence their answer.
But you should at least consider the possibility that also the german naming (summer/winter) could influence some people (like me) in their answers.
(I think the wording can have a big influence (maybe because of my linguistic background) but you are free to disagree)
I live in Köln, and the reason people want to move to Sommerzeit year round is that during Winterzeit near the solstice, the sun rises at 8:30 and sets at 16:30, which means that most people are not getting any daytime sun if they work inside.
They get a tiny bit of sunlight right as they arrive at work, and then when they work all day, step outside and the sun is already gone, which is really depressing. Many many people look at this situation and decide that if they have to choose between light before work or after work, they'd take the light after work.
Well, Canada is a VERY wide country. We have 4.5 time zones across the country, and BC itself is as wide as Germany.
Perhaps even more surprising for you maybe is that even within a Canadian province, its not just one time zone. There are several regions along the border between BC and Alberta that already eliminated daylight savings time years and years ago, so they were on a different time zone for half the year.
I know it's big (I've just not seen it myself), but also it's only 5m people in BC if I can believe Wikipedia. That's like a big city. Maybe that actually makes it less of a problem though, we simply don't know :)
I think if Canada was just two or maybe even three BCs wide, we probably would have settled on just one timezone for the whole country, but the country is so wide that the sun today will set 4 hours and 6 minutes later in Halifax than it will in Vancouver, we just fundamentally do need timezones inside the country, otherwise it'd be a total mess.
Once you start putting timezones inside a country, the provincial borders start to become pretty natural places to put timezones.
And yes, you are correct that the small population makes it easier. Or rather, it's less about the small population, and more about the spikiness of the population. Practically Nobody lives anywhere near the border between BC and Alberta, it's a gigantic mountainous national park the size of a medium-sized European country. Almost everyone in BC lives in Vancouver, and almost everyone in Alberta lives in Calgary or Edmonton. When I lived in Edmonton, it'd usually take me about 12 hours to drive to visit my parents near Vancouver, and if I was in Calgary it'd take around 10 or 11 hours. So putting a timezone change at the halfway mark is pretty much irrelevant.
The strong interconnections and vibrant border regions of European countries are the main reason so much of the EU is in one timezone. If it weren't for that, it'd probably make sense to put a timezone border between Germany and Benelux / France, but that'd be too annoying for everyone, so people just put up with a wide timezone. e.g. this map gives a good idea of where the 'natural' timezone boundaries are, and lets you compare against what people decided on based on political / economic realities.
The US is sort of intermediate here. In a few cases state borders are time zones borders, but in practice they're determined by which big city people are most integrated with and that often oesn't line up well with state borders. For example the bit of Indiana that's closest to Chicago is on Chicago time.
About 90% of BC is nothing but wildlife and trees. You can't really compare it to Germany in any capacity, it doesn't work. Canada has land with literally 0 people on it bigger then the entirely of Germany. The vastness of Canada cannot be understated. Canada is almost 10mil km2, Germany is 350k km2.
Julia has a big culture and a lot of interfaces built around writing non-allocating code. We sometimes even overemphasize eliminating GC allocations from stuff.
Generally, the code ends up looking rather similar to non-GC languages. You create some buffers outside of your performance-sensitive parts, and then thread them through your code so they can be accessed and re-used in the hot loop or whatever.
It could be better, e.g. C++ and Rust both have some nice utilities for this stuff that are a bit hard to replicate in Julia, but it's not auch a huge difference, and there's also a lot of advantages on the julia side.
E.g. it's really nice to have the GC available for the non-performance critical parts of your code.
Since I don't know Julia, let me ask: how easy is it to add a use of the GC by mistake in a critical part of the code (maybe a junior dev does it)? Are there any tools to lint against that (some sort of function attribute to deny uses of GC in the function perhaps)? If it happens, how hard is it find the culript lines of code?
Because from what I have seen in other GC languages, the answers to any of those questions haven't been great.
You can use AllocCheck.jl to guarantee your code doesn't allocate. It's conservative, so it'll sometimes throw false positives, but shouldn't throw false negatives. You apply the checks to function definitions.
You can profile memory usage line by line in detail pretty easily with tools like @timeit or @btime
In practice I've found it pretty easy to get inner loops down to few or 0 allocations when needed for parallelization
Tooling for this in julia is evolving, but currently works fairly well. It could be better, but could be a lot worse.
There's static analysis tools that might be over-eager finding allocations, and there's also runtime measurement tools which should go into your test suite if it's of vital importance to monitor.
Additionally, the HPC folks are looking into Chapel, which also has a mixed mode approach to memory management, similar to Swift with memory ownership, than either C++ as it has always been, or looking into Rust.
Turns out a little bit of ergonomics actually matter.
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