skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Does any major software vendor support older versions of the ABI or machine code?

The C++ Standards Committee has been prioritizing ABI compatibility at the cost of performance for the last decade or so (mostly in the standard library, as opposed the language itself, as I understand it). Some people (especially people from Google) have been arguing that this is the wrong priority, and that C++ should be more willing to break ABI. See:

https://cppcast.com/titus-winters-abi/

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2019/p186...

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2020/p213...

Disclosure: I work at Google with several of the people advocating for ABI breaking changes.
Interesting article.

Indeed the Z80 was used in the Amstrad CPC series.
There, the firmware used the alternate register set for bookkeeping, so you could use them only in a code region surrounded with interrupt dis/enabling and saving/restoring them.
The floating point format on the CPC is 40 bits, probably one of the formats mentioned in the article.

A few people still create prod for the Z80 every year, there are already 10 productions registered in 2020 on http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B%5D=Amstrad+CPC...

The CPC had a huge graphics memory for the time: 16k, making nice-looking games in paper catalog but very limited full-screen animation without piles of hacks.

Lots of actual number crunching for 3D graphics in thi old prod "All in 3D" https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=14667 (no video, you have to run it e.g. in an emulatoe).

For an exceptional result of Z80 performing number crunching and graphical hacks, see this nice demo from 2017 "Amstrad CPC demo : Logon's run - 3D meets the aging bits" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22wSm4y27Wk . Or "Batman Forever" demo of 2011 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_syHewDu5lc

I personally made a production this year https://gourichon.org/cpcitor/justget9/beta/ a puzzle game with smooth animation, which got awarded at a local contest https://www.facebook.com/groups/1120607071477318/permalink/1...
>Let’s be very clear here. I am not a fan of TikTok. I had the misfortune of coming across it when it was still called Musically and I had to explain to a little girl that she, unlike her friends, was not allowed to dance for strangers. That ruined an otherwise perfect evening.

I realize this isn’t the main point of the post but I’m very surprised this is pretty much an accepted thing now.
I would have thought the Trump administration or the media would weaponize the potential exploitation of children and turn a complex geopolitical struggle into a moral panic for the public to more easily understand.
Our IT department loads up a laptop and ships it to them, based on specs ordered by the hiring manager. IT sets up a call first thing on their first morning to talk them through initial login, setup, VPN, and anything else that is needed. Then they are handed off to their manager, all of whom have their own ways to get them onboarded to the team, but it tends to be about the same as in-office -- introduce them on a call, show them the documentation to get the products building, hand out a few bugs, and start attending standups.
So, how does China ban things like Youtube and Facebook? Both on the app store level and IP/Firewall level?
It's not for sale, you can't buy 5% of Taiwans GDP.
Portable virtual lab that fits in your pocket
CNC Fabric Cutting
>what would you advise younger people(...your own younger self)

Labels are meaningless; attach at your own peril -
Brands, religions, ideology, all other thought patterns, people - choose local,intrinsic context; what works is all a crapshoot + past generational gifts anyway.

Keep learning; there's always something new and it never gets old learning new perspectives

You can endure much more than you think.

Remember all those challenges and struggles you overcame or failed? This one is no different, but you're still here.

Let go, relax.

Pay attention; your life depends on it.

Stop living in the past; that person/life is different and done or in some other multiverse. Live now with all it's joys and sorrows.

Outdoors and nature: she always heals

Bonus insight: you become more invisible and that has opportunities!
Show HN: Lockdown Wanderlust
If you are anything like me, you'd made plans for 2020 to be a year of travel. Look where that has gotten us. So we created a site to explore and create itineraries for the traveler in you. Check it out https://travel.themakuma.com/ -> would love to get feedback from you!
The simple answer is that TSMC is a national strategic asset of Taiwan, and as such, is not for sale to anyone at any price.
The money is in managed services.
NVIDIA employs more software engineers than hardware engineers.

> Why do they need to run software in the same memory space as my mail reader ?

It is a lot more expensive to build functionality and fix bugs in silicon than it is to do those same things in software.

At NVIDIA, we do as much as we possible can in software. If a problem or bug can be solved in software instead of hardware, we prefer the software solution, because it has much lower cost and shorter lead times.

Solving a problem in hardware takes 2-4 years minimum, massive validation efforts, and has huge physical material costs and limitations. After it's shipped, we can't "patch" the hardware. Solving a problem in software can sometimes be done by one engineer in a single day. If we make a mistake in software, we can easy deploy a fix.

At NVIDIA we have a status for hardware bugs called "Won't Fix, Fix in Next Chip". This means "yes, there's a problem, but the earliest we can fix it is 2-4 years from now, regardless of how serious it is".

Can you imagine if we had to solve all problems that way? Wait 2-4 years?

On its own, our hardware is not a complete product. You would be unable to use it. It has too many bugs, it doesn't have all of the features, etc. The hardware is nothing without the software, and vice versa.

We do not make hardware. We make platforms, which are a combination of hardware and software. We have a tighter coupling between hardware and software than many other processor manufacturers, which is beneficial for us, because it means we can solve problems in software that other vendors would have to solve in hardware.

> I really do not understand why a (very good) hardware provider is willing to create/direct/hint custom software for the users.

Because we sell software. Our hardware wouldn't do anything for you without the software. If we tried to put everything we do in software into hardware, the die would be the size of your laptop and cost a million dollars each.

You wouldn't buy our hardware if we didn't give you the software that was necessary to use it.

> Isn't this exactly what a GPU firmware is expected to do ?

Firmware is a component of software, but usually has constraints that are much more similar to hardware, e.g. long lead times. In some cases the firmware is "burned in" and can't be changed after release, and then it's very much like hardware.
Wow, 5%? Is it that much?
Freely available advice from the UK's NHS would seem to be a good idea. We fund the NHS mostly out of taxation, so advice provided there has to be as close to non partisan as is reasonably possible.

I personally don't give a shit if you are a foreigner. If the NHS website can provide good advice and help someone - anyone, then my tax squids are being put to good use.

There are bound to be other good sources of health related advice around the place but why not start with the NHS and work out from there?
> Either way, the US could order ISPs to block TikTok servers

Do you think there is any legal mechanism by which they can actually order ISPs to block a server? While blocking financial transactions has plenty of precedent, I'm not sure there is any for straight up blocking communication which looks a lot more like free speech. Especially with no basis in evidence to support actual wrong-doing.
Video game playing and literacy: a survey of young people aged 11 to 16
This is cooool!
mental models are terrible. This entire farnam street /rationalist culture is terrible, fallacy screaming falls into the same category.

The reason why it's terrible is because mental models are like a sort of jumbled set of tools, copied over from somewhere else. Deep and genuine knowledge is tacit, integrated, incorporates experience and is organic. It's acquired through training and expertise and often can't be verbalised or formalised.

Relying on mental models is a sort of crutch. Maybe a good comparison is chess playing. If you're a new chess player you learn that pieces are worth X points, and that such and such squares are important, and that's basically like these sorts of models. Really good chess players don't consciously think like that, at least not in a sort of pronounced way. They've incorporated knowledge and play by intuition. They can make 'good moves' in a second or two.

I don't know why these 'fallacies' and 'mental model' things have taken off so much within certain circles, I feel like it's because people do nothing else other than reading these blogs. Real expertise or knowledge isn't gained by sitting around and 'thinking through stuff', it's by coming into interaction with the real world and immersing yourself in what you want to get better at.
I wonder whether or not that's the global maximum. I still occasionally run into sites that never figured out how to use Let's Encrypt, so they don't encrypt at all.

I personally achieved completely automatic renewals (https://jrock.us/posts/rotating-envoy-certs/) but it involved some work. (It also works so well that I don't even believe it. I have to go manually check from time to time because my monitoring never shows me any errors, and there are so many moving parts that I am continually amazed that everything works perfectly.)

Other people just aren't willing to do that. They like their nginx/Apache sitting on a lonely Linux box that they ssh into once every 5 years. The cost of changing any of that software is high, and they don't have a good system for running new software, like Certbot. We definitely didn't fix that.
> [...] a specially malformed packet [...]

as far as I understand error correcting codes can and are used at different levels of communication protocols (hardware each link, hardware at endpoints, software at end points, ...)

I often wonder if recoverable errors at the endpoints are ever used to exfiltrate data? the higher levels of the stack would see the corrected overt message, while underlying levels (hardware or software) that perform the error correction has access to the covert information encoded in the error.

This may be testable by FPGA and sorting connections by protocol, origin, destination, ... to identify connections with suspiciously high amount of ECC recoverable errors as compared to the rest.

This may be very hard to test if MitM'ed (by ISP, network card manufacturer, ...) such that benign packets get recoverable errors introduced as well (to hide the malicious ones in the noise), which would increase the complexity since now the malicious hardware or software at the endpoints needs to discriminate artificial errors from covert messages over the error channel. There would be many ways of going about this.
For whatever value a "sign off" is. It's still both unclear waht the deal is, and does anything to address the ~~pretexts~~ very real conerns that the president cited to ban the app in the first place.
I highly recommend NIGHTFALL from CBC.
https://archive.org/details/Nightfall-cbc-oldTimeRadio

Newer vintage, 80's, excellent productions
Bevy 0.2
Starts with dance videos, Figures our your preferences pretty quickly and I have found it very educational, the short format really cuts to the chase, It has prompted me to learn new techniques in cooking, woodwork, stretching... positive overall!
> What do you mean about running in the same memory space? Your operating system doesn’t allow that. Is your concern about using host memory?

Actually, the basis of our modern GPU compute platform is a technology called Unified Memory, which allows the host and device processor to share access to memory spaces. We think this is the way going forward.

Of course, there's still the process isolation provided by your operating system.
I assume as flight schools using electric aircraft become more common, so will the charging infrastructure.
Solved: Safari 14 Update Hides “Develop” Menu After Upgrade on macOS Catalina
Honestly, I switched to bazel and did not look back.
It is pretty uncontroversial that CO2 increase in the atmosphere is almost all from human activity, and that a large part of that comes from burning fossil fuels. For example the US EPA website says:

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Human activities are responsible for almost all of the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the last 150 years. The largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities in the United States is from burning fossil fuels for electricity, heat, and transportation.

and there is a link right on that paragraph to the IPCC report. Given the current EPA director, you might expect that to have been removed if there was any controversy about it.

And there are multiple lines of evidence to indicate fossil fuels are the major source, including carbon isotope ratios:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/06/how-mu...

Finally, if there was any doubt about it you could be sure the oil companies would be trumpeting it.
> what I really want is a standard dirtcheap 8 to 10 inch Android tablet with a hackable OS and a row of gpio pins

Sadly, most of these points are mutually exclusive. Android tablets are built for the average user who would have neither use for an hackable OS nor for exposed GPIO ports. Adding them would represent an added cost with no returns with respect to the market they're into.
Also, most if not all Android tablets - actually their manufacturers - are hostile to letting techies install their OS of choice, and implement tactics to discourage them, mainly keeping the hardware closed.
To date, the Pinetab seems the best example of a tablet designed from the ground up to be of interest both to users and tinkerers because it encourages to experiment with open operating systems. https://www.pine64.org/pinetab/
Yeah, reposted Tiktok videos show up on Twitter nonstop as well. At least they're watermarked with the original author's name...
> China has no interest in invading Taiwan right now

CCP has a policy of reuniting Taiwan with the mainland. If they could do it today, they would.

> Not to mention the potential for millions of people to die

Chinese premiers have stated they would sacrifice half their citizens if necessary. In fact, they are sacrificing whole towns during the current floods to save various dams, reservoirs and cities, flooding them at nite to make investigations more difficult to avoid welfare payments.

Not sure which imaginary China you're talking about.
The average price per square meter is roughly the same in Berlin and Washington DC. The real estate market in San Francisco and the bay area is an outlier. Houses in second and third tier cities in the US are actually cheaper than comparable cities in Germany, even before you take all the additional transaction costs in Germany into account.
New Karma Points on PH
This tweet from their editor-in-chief sheds some light on it:

> Sorry gang, no RTX 3080 review today. The last week and a half has taken an unexpectedly large toll. I'm looking at getting caught up in time for the RTX 3090 launch next week.

https://twitter.com/RyanSmithAT/status/1306197243263737857
Tail Recursion and Debugging (2011)
GoDaddy nameservers will show up in a WHOIS for the domain and GoDaddy uses a branded parking page. Attempting to register the domain would offer it for whatever sum. They don't really hide it at all.
> A pathetic attempt to lock developers into their hardware

Ah-ha, you've caught us! Our plan is to lock you into our hardware by implementing Standard C++.

Once you are all writing code in Standard C++, then you won't be able to run it elsewhere, because Standard C++ only runs on NVIDIA platforms, right?

... What's that? Standard C++ is supported by essentially every platform?

Darnit! Foiled again.
Natural language is adapted for many tens of thousands of years to be used by groups of hunter/gatherers working together on a common task -- which also includes arguing about related things like assumptions and priorities. In that context, physically pointing or showing things is important ("put it there"). As is also non-verbal feedback from expressions on people's faces or by where their eyes are looking. Also, people in the group can ask clarifying questions, like "What did you mean by X?" or "Can you be more specific?". Or the speaker can ask, "Did you understand what I said?" When people try to explain how to do a task without getting immediate feedback on how the receiver is understanding the communication, one can expect that natural language instructions will be missing critical information -- or may also specify unneeded extra information. Ever since I worked in the IBM Speech Research Group circa 2000, I have felt natural speech could be useful in programming -- but it will take a different perspective on how to use natural language as conversation and related creative experimentation to provide a different experience compared to what people are used to doing with conventional programming languages. It might be more akin to some aspects of pair programming perhaps.

That said, a big feature of HyperTalk (used by HyperCard) was that is is closer to natural language than most programming languages. HyperTalk supported various alternate phrasings and also the use of the word "it". And the physical "card" metaphor provided an approachable metaphor for instructions about manipulating stacks. It is sad that Apple essentially killed off HyperCard for most users with various marketing decisions as it was an amazing platform that made programming approachable for many non-programmers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk

And Inform7 as mentioned by someone else here is another example. Although Inform7 feels more about being read as natural language (when you write is within strict limits) than about being written flexibly as natural language.
iPhone 5 through 8 and some iPads self-destruct w non-MFi cables and chargers
I'm concerned about the precedent of the government getting involved in app censorship on ideological grounds.

Today TT, tomorrow whatever the Party or our Dear Leader doesn't find complimentary?
You'll never find a source for this, but there have been rumors for years that TSMC facilities have cabinets filled with explosives and (in?)formal procedures to render themselves inoperable should the worst come to pass.

If you wanted to cause worldwide mayhem, I guess this would do it, but I wouldn't assume that TSMC could just be invaded and taken over like that.
Not legally.

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-comment-tiktok-and-...
That's why, since the year 1, we tend to write applications and API endpoints
This looks like an under-recognized, purposefully-anti-competitive gambit to lock people further into Apple's hardware ecosystem, limit consumer choices, and purposely ruin a customer's product if they stray outside the walled garden.

Both of the "tristar" and "hydra" chips are fragile and prone to degradation, when they are connected directly to the Lightning port.

https://store.rossmanngroup.com/ics-components-and-chipsets/...

https://www.ipadrehab.com/article.cfm?ArticleNumber=32

iPadRehab mentions a tester, on which site also explains the causes and symptoms

http://tristartester.com/en/

More technical discussion about Lightning

https://nyansatan.github.io/lightning

Replacing these fragile chips isn't a solution in the long-term because it reinforces an artificially-constructed monopoly. In the short-term, it may get a user's device working but it doesn't help but throw them right back into debt peonage.
Shake is interesting. I've been using bazel with a degree of success. It seems to incorporate these same concerns and scales out well to large builds. I'm not sure if shake solves enough of a new set of problems to really take hold.
They're played quite frequently on BBC Radio 4 Extra as well: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00clkyv
> I get fuzzy cyberpunk feelings imagining it.

Definite cyberdeck potential
And today my chromebook has suddenly lost all its history, settings, and downloaded local files. I wonder if there was a way to have backed them up.
Enjoyed and agree with your comment.

One useful hybrid approach is to view typed note taking as rapid capture of a rough draft, which if disciplined should lead to selective re-drafting of sections that require more thorough commitment to memory.
Could? Sure. But let's not start second guessing the science until after reading the full publication, especialy the part where the correlation is observed across all latitudes, which gives a fairly solid spread of sunlight exposure.
What about easy peasy vs power users?

The cash register has more buttons than my keyboard and that's maybe a good thing. No consumer product would do that.
All the educated conservatives I’ve met have been pleasant people. It’s just that the far majority have not been educated (as opposed to liberals, which seem to be pretty much all educated, to the point where I feel education and liberalism might as well be the same thing :/).
I'm curious about this cartridge idea. I'm picturing a pipe with quicklime inside and coffee filters on the ends, with a blower to force air through. How tightly would the contents be packed?

This is a little different from what I'd been thinking before your message, which would be more of a fluidized bed reactor -- like quicklime swirling around in air in a garbage can. I think that's closer to how some powerplants treat exhaust.

I've read that there are microscopic changes to the quicklime particles after a couple absorbtion/heating cycles (their pores fill up or something), after which you need to do something to further refresh it, maybe by dissolving it and precipitating it back out of solution.

This led me to considering whether aqueous chemistry might be better.

The simplest would be to react air with calcium hydroxide (would you use a bubbler? Or a packed counterflow tower? Or a spray tower?) and collect the calcium carbonate that precipitates out.

But, based on my shaky chemistry, I understand solubility of calcium hydroxide is low, so you do better with a two-stage process like the Kraft Process:

1. Absorb CO2 in contactor:

2NaOH + CO2 -> Na2CO3 + H2O

2. Regenerate solution in causticizer:

- CaO + H2O -> Ca(OH)2

- Na2CO3 + Ca(OH)2 -> 2 NaOH + CaCO3

3. Decompose calcium carbonate:

CaCO3 -> CaO + CO2

The concentrated NaOH solution would be very caustic, so you'd have to be careful with that, but apart from that none of this seems too terribly scary?

Some parts of the above are endothermic, others exothermic, so maybe this could even let you shift energy from the summer (solar furnace?) to the winter when you need it, as part of the deal.

Or maybe this is all too complicated and you should just use a canister of soda lime granules, like an anesthesia machine? ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_lime )

I'd be interested to hear more from people whose chemistry is better than mine.
> short of breaking him out of his imprisonment.

Is anyone strategizing around this? Do they accept donations?
Yes it can due to all phone apps being funneled through only 2 corporations. Until we get a more open mobile platform and a more decentralized mobile app store then governments have easy access to strict controls over what apps we are allowed to use.
Playwright has been growing on me and it'll feature heavily in a video course I'm making for browser automation.

I'm keeping the codebase open on GitHub: https://github.com/umaar/learn-browser-testing/ so anyone who wants to follow along can do so for free.
One of them was this guy...
https://kevinlynagh.com/phonetron/