donboscow
donboscow on Hacker News
Can you explain a bit? How can they design chip based on software requirements? I mean - they can add more threading, cores, etc. to ensure that heavyweight software like gaming, photo or video editing etc. can benefit from them, but still, the chip design is generic and any heaveweight software can benefit from it, not necessarily Apple's own upcoming in-house software, right?
Hmm thought so. They make hardware chips first, right, packing as many cores and transistors as possible in heat efficient manner? They make software like OS, apps, UX on top of the chips? Or is it that they plan the software first and build custom chip that is powerful and efficient enough to support their software vision? Seems unlikely, but just want to know.
Oops, sorry, I meant Air. Editing the question, thanks. But the Pro also rarely seems to emit sound of fan, unlike my earlier MacBooks (pre-2016), so something's changed for sure I think.
Posted by
donboscow on Thursday March 27, 2025 @10:32AM
from the self-post dept.
If you recall Jobs' iPhone keynote in 2007 - he quoted Alan Kay saying that companies who are serious about software should make their own hardware. As we see MacBooks today are slim, fanless, passively cooled. That is indeed an engineering feat.Question - how much of it is due to innovations in the OS - like optimizing code, multithreading architecture novelties, etc., and how much of it is...
Posted by
donboscow on Monday May 22, 2023 @11:12AM
from the self-post dept.
How often is Commoncrawl updated? On a daily cadence? Or weekly/monthly? If Meghan Markle wears a Versace gown, that becomes a BBC article, and that article shows up on Googling "meghan markle" 2-3 minutes after the publishing of the article by BBC. What is the equivalent time for CC?And secondly, is there a place where I can see CC coverage level? I mean - which websites they cover fully,...
Hmm got it. If a Linux skin is rewritten in Qt, and the SDK and tool chain are exposed through Qt, can they be as performant, smooth and give the native feel like Mac OS or iOS apps?
Is Xilem remotely as mature a framework as one required for writing an OS and generating a toolchain and SDK at par with Mac OS (or iOS), Cocoa/Swift/Flutter?
Hi, I thought so too. But then why did it not work for Cloudflare, and why did their custom solution work with Pingora?
Hmm I read the post. Cloudfare handles almost 1 trillion requests per day, Google does that per year. However, the request types are different, Cloudfare handles a variety of requests like caching and forwarding, while Google requests are about serving complete web pages. May be for the webserver purpose like Google Nginx may suffice?
Got it. Thanks. Which servers are best suited to handle such high levels of load, and are available for free and open usage like Nginx or Apache is? I read that Apache has even more problems than Nginx.
Good to know. Any idea why Google chose to use custom servers instead of opting for Nginx or Apache? Specially when Nginx offers excellent load balancing capabilities in-built?
Posted by
donboscow on Friday January 27, 2023 @09:06PM
from the self-post dept.
Google uses millions of servers around the world to distribute their load in an even manner, and the servers are custom Google servers instead of standard ones like Apache or Nginx. Average Google load is around 40,000 queries per second, translating to 3.7 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion queries per year. This of course also includes peak load moments like election results being...
I am aware that I need more learning, no need for that advice. I also know that BM25 and PageRank are different, were they the same, there wouldn't have been a need for two of them, my question was ver clear - which one in the long run yields better (in terms of relevance) search results comparatively. I am also aware that ES is a starter pack and Google is a beast that will need much much more than just an ES stack, what i wanted to know was - whether ES offers the capabilities to fine tune it to make it behave like such a beast. Thank you for your advice, but it is better if you read the question first before lecturing others in a condescending manner.
Yes of course. What I meant is - when I query a phrase, that phrase can be found in one million webpages, yet I get a bunch of them sorted by relevance. Surely that is a combination of two things - deep rooted crawling that gathers data from most websites, and secondly, a nice algorithm to sort them by relevance that is based on a variety of signals. ES has nothing to do with crawling, that is custom to the user using ES, but for the content fed to ES, how much does it allow customizing signals, combining them into a custom relevance logic, and how much does it allow to modify and edit the indexing logic so that say I can use a combination of BM25 and PageRank?
Posted by
donboscow on Sunday March 06, 2022 @12:09PM
from the self-post dept.
Hi, I am looking at Elasticsearch currently. Looks like a great search engine tool. I was wondering - what are its performance metrics relative to established players like Google? Like it uses Okapi BM25 algorithm, how does that measure up against Google's PageRank? Is the quality and relevance of search results it offers at par with what Google offers? And secondly, what about the performance?...
Posted by
donboscow on Monday December 20, 2021 @01:54PM
from the self-post dept.
I have a scenario - a shop runs hundreds and thousands of queries every hour. Each transaction has values like merchant id client id, purchase id, item name, item type, price, time of purchase, etc.Potentially, the database can have millions of such records, and that can pretty much scale upto billions as well. The web front end will support queries like "find the records of transactions by...
Yeah, I get the R&D part, what I want to know, what specific improvement here does the R&D here contribute to?
So, using aluminium as body material is one of the factors why Macbooks are so slim? Why can't the bulkier laptops use the same? Price?
Posted by
donboscow on Thursday November 25, 2021 @08:27PM
from the self-post dept.
There are so many laptops out there - Thinkpad, SurfaceBooks, Dell Inspiron, etc. How come they are so bulkier compared to Macbooks? Macbooks are so slim and lightweight, while an Inspiron or Thinkpad is so bulky and thick. Which engineering aspect is superior in case of Macbooks that makes it slimmer and less bulkier compared to those? Is it the OS - the way it has been written, it requires...
If you observe the Ubuntu Touch videos on YouTube, you will find that the animations, the graphics are not smooth and seamless, they stall, they freeze, they lag. Do you reckon it is more due to low end hardware underlying those phones as opposed to a fundamental problem?
What do you mean by rough? Not as smooth and responsive as say iPhone or iPad or Macbook?
Guys, I see my question greyed out. And I also see some comments greyed out. What does that mean? They are getting downvoted?
You mean to say Telegram is smoother than other apps? Will try it out. In general, would you say that Qt is supposed to work just as buttery smooth and native on Mac or iPhone as a native app? And will an OS built on Qt like Ubuntu Touch will be as smooth and beautifully craftable as iOS apps on iPhone?
Was my question not clear? If so, please tell me which part, I will be happy to clarify.
Posted by
donboscow on Friday October 08, 2021 @09:13AM
from the ask-hn dept.
There are many apps on Mac and Windows based on Qt, as well as ones built using the native SDKs exposed by respective platforms, like Cocoa and Dot Net. Are the ones built on Qt as smooth and performant as the native ones? Or will there be clear performance differences? There are questions like this on StackExchange, but they are more than a decade old, I am interested in knowing the current...