Top all-time · #4321
Antoine Berke Durak
Personal blog · lambda-diode.comprogrammingsystemshardware
Antoine Berke Durak's personal blog at lambda-diode.com covers programming, systems and hardware. Since 2010, 18 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “You need to use error-correcting memory ”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its analysis of computer memory reliability, especially the ECC memory posts on bit-error rates, plus related pieces on prime-test error odds and neutron-induced transmutation.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- You need to use error-correcting memory 5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2010-02-08
- Updates on the need to use error-correcting memory5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-04-02
- Monads are a Class of Hard Drugs (2008)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-12-29
What Hacker News says?
Great thanks! [edit] Looks like the calculation was revised [0] after criticism: > Under these assumptions, you'll have to wait about 33 to 600 days to get a 96% chance of getting a bit error. What's more worrying is the variance, the above calculation is based on expected well behaved DRAM.. yet some computers just seem to have manufacturing defects that make the incidence of errors high enough to be a regular prob…
Comment linking /opinion/ecc-memory-2
on “ECC matters”Submitted Interfacing Fortran with OCaml as a story · 78 points
HN discussionThat number is flawed, and the author did a follow-up with better results: http://lambda-diode.com/opinion/ecc-memory-2 "33 to 600 days to get a 96% chance of getting a bit error." Still, it seems way too high. I guess anyone with ECC RAM could confirm that they are getting those sort of recovered error rates?
Comment linking /opinion/ecc-memory-2
on “ECC matters”Submitted You need to use error-correcting memory as a story · 68 points
HN discussionApologies, you're totally right. I should have linked to the source: http://lambda-diode.com/opinion/ecc-memory#:~:text=A%20syste... .
Comment linking /opinion/ecc-memory
on “ECC matters”Submitted Monads are a Class of Hard Drugs (2008) as a story · 43 points
HN discussionThe probability of a bit error on normal RAM is quite high [1]. The more RAM you add the more likely you are to see corruption. Not that ECC fixes everything - I still see uncorrected ECC errors on the older HPC nodes on our grid. [1] : http://lambda-diode.com/opinion/ecc-memory
Comment linking /opinion/ecc-memory
on “Mac Pro”Submitted Updates on the need to use error-correcting memory as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAn article of frequency of errors http://lambda-diode.com/opinion/ecc-memory-2
Comment linking /opinion/ecc-memory-2
on “Apple’s 2019 Mac Pro will be shaped by workflows”Submitted On the need to use error-correcting memory as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is absolutely true. Every time you run it, a non-prime has probability of at most 1/4 of passing. Run it 5 times, and you'll catch 99.9% of non-primes. What about neutron flips? Judging from http://lambda-diode.com/opinion/investigations/transmutation... you can probably expect one every 4-5 years. If you run MR 20 times, your odds of wrongly declaring a non-prime prime are on the same order of magnitude as the…
Comment linking /opinion/investigations/transmutations/.../ecc-memory-3
on “A regular expression to check for prime numbers”Submitted The Tiobe index is meaningless (2008) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI want a laptop with 64 or 128 GiB of Chipkill ECC RAM. Any of this soldered-on, anti-R2R/-consumer Apple trend-copying is BS. This crap about "YAGNI" or "it costs too much" have no idea what they're talking about and don't understand the reasons or use-cases. At home, I may have a 96 core EPYC with 512 GiB of Reg'd ECC RAM, but it doesn't have the locality or reachability of something that's with you. Network prese…
Comment linking /opinion/ecc-memory
on “There’s no place for expensive laptops with 8GB of RAM anymore”Submitted Monads are a class of hard drugs (2008) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWhy do you consider ECC the biggest scam out there? Btw, is there any updated paper/source with some stats on bit-flip odds in modern computers? Last I've read was this one [1] but it's been debated to death. [2] [3] [1] http://lambda-diode.com/opinion/ecc-memory [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109401 [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ayleb/got_4gb_...
Comment linking /opinion/ecc-memory
on “AMD Ryzen Full Lineup Prices, Specs and Clock Speeds Leaked”Submitted Monads are a class of hard drugs as a story · 1 points
HN discussionlol @ "they should sell hard disks with 10^15 reliability instead of 10^14!" This is the funniest outrage I've seen in a while, just because the suggested fix is so specific and (relatively) low for the huge amount discussed. It's like saying, "It's an outrage that this drink holds only 37 ounces! For this kind of money I expect it to hold at least 38 ounces. I would pay for that." - My 4 downvoters are clearly a lo…
Comment linking /opinion/ecc-memory-2
on “Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009 (2007)”Well, I might have been the first to put OCaml in space, specifically on low-Earth orbit aboard GHGSat-D in 2016. I designed the payload software as a collection of SystemD services talking over DBus, and it included a CCSDS-to-DBus bridge to talk to the platform (the thing that hosts the payload, controls and steers the satellite). The payload also did perform symmetric-key encryption of the resulting data, as per…
Comment linking /static/data/GHGSat_OCaml.pdf
on “O(x)Caml in Space”
