skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I got two 16-bit instructions packed into a 32-bit word which then get fused, what I have achieved is equivalent to adding complex instruction to the ISA without really adding it.

It is like being able to make arbitrary CISC instruction by combining various RVC instructions.

How is that not a good thing? It is like being able to add tons of instructions without consuming any extra ISA encoding space.

I don’t see why compressed instructions and macro fusions need to be part of the base instructions.

These are just micro-architecture optimizations available to you if you want higher performance.

For a cheap small microcontroller you don’t want it.
Well you edited the compile command on the page just now to add -mno-red-zone, but it wasn't there before. So do you mean it is safe as long as -mno-red-zone is used?

Even then, I am not quite sure: redzone is just an example of one of the assumptions that might be violated when calls are made from an asm block, but at least some gcc devs are on record saying that calls from inline asm are not supported: the main problem is that leaf functions can be compiled differently than non-leaf, and a hidden call breaks this (i.e., a non-leaf function may appear as leaf to the compiler).
The DarkReader (darkreader.org) extension gives a beautiful dark theme to HN, just make sure you set the theme mode to "Static" instead of the default "Dynamic".
SICP has been on my list since i saw it on a post about alan kays recommend reading but never purchased a copy yet... thank you for posting a link there to it, ill hopefully get to it soon!
Alan Kay's Dynabook
I don't understand what you mean by "original book". The comment I was replying to was referring to Joel Spolsky's blog post, which does not talk about IBM mainframes. It also does not merely claim that rewrites are just painful. It ways they are the "single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make".

The counterexample is thus not rewrites that were painless. It's rewrites that were strategic successes, which clearly Windows and Mac OS were. They are, after all, the foundation of two of the world's most successful companies.
While useful, I'm averse to the complexity of such features. The steady devolution of Reddit's UX scares me.

I also enjoy the offloaded ecosystem of sites like hn.algolia.com. It feels healthy for a hacker community to build these tailored readers.
This is a super fascinating article.
Under GPL-3.0 - I don't object at all but out of curiosity can you actually comply with it on a microcontroller?
I wrote a userscript until a Dark Mode is supported natively: https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/blob/20b5858ff7a464...
I'm sure there are plenty of citizens of $YourCountry who are either (a) loyal to $CountryYouThinkIsBad or (b) not discerning about passing on some designs they got from an internet stranger.
Tangentially related, but isn't small scale farming, especially in poorer countries, something that's on its way out? Like if you are a farmer, you work hard and send your kids to school. Your kids will probably then move to the city or at least a more populous area and take up a job other than farming. As this happens more and more, doesn't the population of small scale farmers decrease to the point where we have to rely more on large scale farms?

While I don't have enough knowledge on the subject to comment directly on article, I want to ask, based on the above, does it make sense to invest in small-scale farms?
I just don’t believe these numbers. I’d like to see an independent study by a non-financially-involved university before I believe that some techies have figured out a way to boost yields more than two orders of magnitude over modern agriculture. Either there is some gimmick - a specific plant or strain or whatever - or the energy costs are 3 or more orders of magnitude over normal agriculture - or the numbers are cooked in some other way. I’d be as excited as anyone if someone could pull off a 360x or 400x yield in a useful food crop, but these guys would be trillionaires if they had actually done so.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25557032 mentions "~3000 minutes per month". GitLab's new pricing structure: [(runner_minutes, usd_per_month), (400, $0), (2_000, $4), (10_000, $19), (50_000, $99)]

You can run a self-hosted GitHub or GitLab Runner with your own resources:
https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/actions/host...

GitLab [Runner] also runs tasks on cron schedules.

The process invocation overhead for CI is greater than for a typical metrics collection process like a nagios check or a memory-resident daemon like collectd with the curl plugin and the "Write HTTP" plugin (if you're not into using a space and time efficient timeseries database for metrics storage)

An open source project with a $5/mo VPS could run collectd in a container with a config file far far more energy efficiently than this approach.

Collectd curl statistics:
https://collectd.org/documentation/manpages/collectd.conf.5....

Collect list of plugins:
https://collectd.org/wiki/index.php/Table_of_Plugins

Is there a good way to do {DNS, curl HTTP, curl JSON} stats with Prometheus (instead of e.g. collectd as a minimal approach)?
People have been hiding behind internet anonymity since its earliest days, long before the “cancel culture” boogeyman was dreamed up
I suppose it depends on the code you're trying to understand. Depending on its size, style (therefore, ability for a human or for a decompiler to understand it) and other factors, the best blend of tools can change.
Love this; submitted my site. The guidelines for noteworthiness help keep mostly-blank pages and other low-hanging fruit from being submitted.

Homepages minus favicons/webmanifest-icons don't need to be over 5kb without images, IMO. Personally, I'd rather put profile pics in an "about" page.

There is a lot you can do with 1kb of gzip-compressed, minified CSS.
I think our numbers are not incompatible. Consider the French market which I understand better than the US one and has a monopoly.
28% is the transport cost of electricity overall - the figure 40% you have probably comes from average RETAIL price of electricity in some low density zones. Let's check the average cost, gross and retail, just because I'm an engineer and care about the viability of a solution from a pure technical standpoint :).

In 2019, RTE spent 426M euros/year in long distance transportation of electricity on a 20B electricity market - we have to remember that transport also includes the real estate (80M), admin (161M), local grid (789M) according to https://www.rte-france.com/en/finance/key-figures-financial-...
Those figures are stable year over year. Year over year may seem insufficient as it doesnt consider the initial investment, but remember we already have most of the grid in place already, so that's what matters to me.

The "trick" is to make use believe that local removes transport cost, but the truth is that we still need a local grid and space to put it, which is the bulk of the cost.

Overall I consider the grid to be a low cost solution we put in place years ago when we were poorer and things cost a ton because of the manual labor - but now we already got it so why not considering it only for its cost to maintain and expand and not overall cost to "deploy" as the article did.
The more I read about Apple products the more they seem to be apt as luxury goods rather than functional computing devices.
What is the point of the partial redaction in this blog post (and corresponding journal article) if with a simple web search you can find the unredacted PII of the individual given in the example?
What do you do to make stoops more accessible to people who can't climb stairs easily?
Not that it's a justification, per se, but a lot of modern laptops won't boot without a battery. The power adapter often can't provide sufficient power to spin everything up at boot, and needs the battery as a buffer (this is why, if you run your macbook battery completely flat, it needs to charge for a few minutes before it can boot back up).
You should debate the facts not the motives.

I had no clue about this situation but it doesn't look very well. Introducing continent-wide IP-law for seeds, getting farmers into debt by having them used only approved fertilisers and then showing virtually no productivity increase against the baseline shows no redeeming quality to the program.

But hey, Gates will be declared a saint in the next 10 years so who is this little mag site to comment?
I am perfectly fine with main UI of HN , that is news.ycombinator.com . Although,i agree that some improvements can be made.

One Pro of main UI is that it is simple and very fast without fancy moving parts. I like it a lot.
This is the same reason why I love to see a long form "We did x because y" document in any project on GitHub.
Where Have All the Ammonites Gone?
They're running their own servers so these databases probably cost fractions of a cent per month.
Numenta Demonstrates 50x Speed Improvements on Deep Learning Networks
It should..from the excellent 2016 NYT link by fellow HN’er (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-b...)

[..] But if you are a sentient being reading this article in 2016, you already have PFOA in your blood. It is in your parents’ blood, your children’s blood, your lover’s blood. How did it get there? Through the air, through your diet, through your use of nonstick cookware, through your umbilical cord. Or you might have drunk tainted water. The Environmental Working Group has found manufactured fluoro­chemicals present in 94 water districts across 27 states (see sidebar beginning on Page 38). Residents of Issaquah, Wash.; Wilmington, Del.; Colorado Springs; and Nassau County on Long Island are among those whose water has a higher concentration of fluorochemicals than that in some of the districts included in Rob Bilott’s class-action suit. The drinking water in Parkersburg itself, whose water district was not included in the original class-action suit and has failed to compel DuPont to pay for a filtration system, is currently tainted with high levels of PFOA. Most residents appear not to know this.

Where scientists have tested for the presence of PFOA in the world, they have found it. PFOA is in the blood or vital organs of Atlantic salmon, swordfish, striped mullet, gray seals, common cormorants, Alaskan polar bears, brown pelicans, sea turtles, sea eagles, Midwestern bald eagles, California sea lions and Laysan albatrosses on Sand Island, a wildlife refuge on Midway Atoll, in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean, about halfway between North America and Asia.[..]
You need more broadcast power the further you’re away from earth and there’s less solar energy per m² the further you’re away from the sun (Neptune is 30 AU away, so there, per m² it’s about a thousandth of what we get around earth), and launching nuclear powered space probes (let alone a continuous stream of them) is a bit controversial.

Because of that, I think high bandwidth is problematic (Voyager 2 had 115 kbits/second at Jupiter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2#Communications) and currently has 160 bits per second; new Horizons, launched in 2006 has _less_ than that (smaller parabolic dish; less power ; dedicating fewer antennas on earth to receive data (https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/27450/why-is-new-h...))

You also would need a lot of large radio antennas on/around earth if you want to receive from these probes 24h/day (and if you don’t, you of course give up effective bandwidth)
Here's a skeptical take on vertical farming:
https://globalecoguy.org/no-vertical-farms-wont-feed-the-wor...

Johathan Foley is usually well informed on these topics.
No, Vertical Farms Won’t Feed the World
What's awkward about it?

(I haven't used it yet)
It's easy to think that because we can't see exactly what people are doing on their phone (we physically only see them staring at a glowing screen unless we stand behind them and snoop) we default to saying exactly what we see: People staring at glowing rectangular screens. This sort of thinking about cell phone use is incredibly lazy.

When I'm reading a book, I'm not just staring at a binding of paper. When I'm listening to music, I'm not just sticking earbuds into my ears and staring blankly at the wall. Has the author ever used a phone before? Or are they just glowing rectangles to them?
UV-C has been used commercially for decades, e.g. https://www.lighting.philips.com/main/products/uv-disinfecti...

For consumers, it's available today in air filters, e.g. https://www.invisiclean.com/invisiclean-aura-4-in-1-air-puri...
Author here. WebAssembly has played an important role protecting CI on the Internet and it's cool that it enables us to run LLVM in the browser. I was very surprised when I learned that some people were using it offline outside of browsers, since doing so requires a JVM-like runtime such as wasmtime. Cosmopolitan proves that it's possible to just fix C instead, which might fix all the stuff that's built on top of C too. We can in fact have first-class portable native binaries, which will only require JIT compilation if they're launched on a non-x86 machine. This is probably how Java would have been designed, if Intel's instruction set hadn't been encumbered by patents at the time. That's changed. The x86-64 patents just expired this year. So I say why not use it as a canonical software encoding.
Machine learning is going real-time
> So? Then tell me how my gap in understanding is reflected in my POINT rather then in my character.

Not only have I already done so, so too have a bunch of other accounts. Why don't you re-read what they've all said and think about it some more? I'm sure you'll be able to find something more useful to add if you do that.

> So what? Who cares if it's me? How does this matter to you and what does this have to do with the topic?

Because if you do that, you will never fully mature as an adult human being. You'll repel others away from you and then feel the pain of isolation and loneliness. You'll watch others live rich lives you wish you had. I think that is a very unfortunate path. I hope you will avoid that pain for yourself before it's too late and you can't redo all the time you will inevitably kick yourself for wasting. Life goes by very quickly and you don't get chances for do-overs.
Well, yes — cold-blooded creatures usually have/had to go dormant at night (too cold to function) and they and their eggs were/are easy pickins for any warm-blooded mammal able to operate at full capacity during nocturnal hours.
> Now take company N which is a “New Economy company”. It invests $10M in R&D to create software. This software will continue to be useful in the future, but per GAAP accounting, it will expense all of the $10M this year. So in year 1, the impact on earnings of this investment is a $10M expense, and the balance sheet reflects nothing.

This is wrong. R&D gets capitalized to the extent it has future benefits.

> " In addition, let’s say they spend $10M to acquire recurring revenue customers. They will earn revenue from these customers for many years in the future, but many of the costs are expensed immediately."

This is also wrong. Under revenue recognition rule (ASC 606) any costs to acquire customers are recognized on the balance sheet and not expensed immediately.

I stopped reading because it's clear the author isn't writing a factual article.
Makes you wonder about the role of E.P.A.
> The write-up argues that non-physical assets (software) show up as intangables (balance sheet)

It says that R&D and other intangibles should appear in the balance sheet but currently do not (with some exceptions).
Making or losing money aside, I believe Numenta is on a much smarter path to solving the AI/AGI puzzle. Everyone else is basically still expanding on the perceptron concept which did make a lot of progress but requires more and more memory/compute resources to go further which doesn't seem like the right answer in the long run.
Technically, that virtual world is still part of this world. Wonderful humans created those virtual worlds where you can probably find more wonderful humans.
Sure, here's a primary source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Three_Graces,_fr...

It's a fresco of the Three Graces. From Pompeii. From the first century.

Just whip me up a timeline here of where that fits in at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Graces

If you can find a Three Graces made in a one-digit, two-digit or three-digit year, it would do a lot to change my mind.
Not sure hn.algolia.com counts as a reader. It's a great tool, but it just links back to this site as far as I've seen.
"it also seems there is an increasing sense of entitlement to be able to say whatever you want and not be held accountable for it. "

???

I think it's definitely the opposite.

The evidence seems clear - dozens of the centre-left's most foundational global thinkers (i.e Noam Chomsky et. al.) have had to take out a page in Harper's to literally tamp down the authoritarian tendencies of those suppressing speech, mostly more extremists of 'their own side'. [1]

This represents a profound shift in sentiment from just one generation ago whereupon thinkers (such as Chomsky!) would have been fighting the 'other side' for the ability to speak their minds - as in the case in more classical authoritarian societies (i.e. Belarus).

We are not entering a world where 'those evil racist using the n-word are finally being called out' - frankly - this was already the case for at least generation.

We are now entering the phase where people are destroyed for having slightly controversial, but nevertheless respectable opinions that fit within civil discourse.

Student unions are banning comedians, and thinkers with whom they disagree.

Aside from 'public statements' - there is of course the reasonable act of contextualization. What people say while they are partying, drinking it up, among one another, as friends, is not 'public discourse'. This notion that people must live 'professionally sanitized lives every waking moment' is rubbish. The whole point of 'privacy' is the ability to speak freely.

I'm concerned by your statement, because as your professional life encroaches upon you with 'greater degrees of responsibility' - you may be projecting that narrow perspective onto society at large, and risk authoritarian moralizing from a sanitized executive bubble 'where even thoughts are guarded'.

So yes, there are a few dirtbags being called out, but for everyone one of them there's a long list of legit thinkers being blacklisted, and a much longer list of regular plebes unable to just act normally, within their own context with the moral beam of globalism like a spotlight upon them at all times.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Letter_on_Justice_and_Open_D...
The masculine label is not one that’s easy to achieve so fulfilling everything the label demands is actually a huge achievement. Things have specifically been excluded from the label for a reason, whether they resonate with you or not.
Themes for the Near Future of Tech
Huh. That's an interesting question. I looked up the original LISP paper (http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.pdf), and it looks like the -p convention hadn't been established yet at that point, none of the predicates have that suffix in the paper. But it does say this:

(LABEL, SUBST, (LAMBDA, (X, Y, Z), (COND ((ATOM, Z),
(COND,(EQ, Y, Z), X), ((QUOTE, T), Z))), ((QUOTE, T), (CONS,
(SUBST, X, Y,(CAR Z)), (SUBST, X, Y, (CDR, Z)))))))

This notation is writable and somewhat readable. It can be
made easier to read and write at the cost of making its
structure less regular. If more characters were available
on the computer, it could be improved considerably.[4]

----
[4] 1995: More characters were made available on SAIL and
later on the Lisp machines.Alas, the world went back to
inferior character sets again—though not as far back as
when this paper was written in early 1959

So at the very least, some of the syntactic conventions of LISP were mostly due to limited character sets at the time.

Trying to binary search through history to figure out when the -p convention was introduced, I checked the original Scheme paper (https://web.archive.org/web/20171201033214/http://repository...), which has some examples in Scheme as well as implementation code in MacLISP. It looks like the predicate convention wasn't really strongly established at that point; in a few places, they use variables with a trailing `?` in the Scheme code, but I don't see any use of a predicate convention in the MacLISP implementation code.

Going back a bit, I do see the predicate convention mentioned in an Interlisp manual from 1974, but without an explanation of its origin (http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/interlisp/Inter...).

A MacLISP manual from the same year also mentions the -p convention, but not its origins. So looks like it had been firmly established by 1974: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/MIT/Moon-M...

Going back further, the LISP 1.5 manual (second edition, 1965, though the printing was from 1979) has a number of numeric predicates with the -p suffix, but it does not make note of the suffix convention (https://archive.org/details/lisp15programmer00john/page/26/m... , free registration required). It does use a lot of language discussing "predicate" and use the term "p position of a conditional expression" (https://archive.org/details/lisp15programmer00john/page/22/m...), so the use of "p" for "predicate" rather than "?" seems to be somewhat well established. LISP 1.5 had a very restrictive syntax for identifiers, they were just alphanumeric.

So, I'm going to say that while it's possible that the usage of P for this purpose comes from substitutiong P for ?, all of the sources I've found seem to indicate that it stands for "predicate."
A man who’s built a new electric vehicle out of electronic waste
Yes. I learned that it is best to store those tapes with as little packing and coding as possible. MP4 might look good at a glance, but at some shaky action scenes vital information is forever lost. Raw DV for example takes 1 Gigabyte / 4 minute, but multi-Terabyte disks are quite cheap.
A better recent piece on the subject: https://www.morganstanley.com/im/publication/insights/articl...
Show HN: Zooming into this animated div crashes Safari on iOS
User armatav noticed this on another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25554162).

I was curious to see what would be needed to reproduce it. The issue is caused by the "glow" animation behind the todo list on the original page.

https://codepen.io/maybevain/full/mdrpPEg

There does not seem to be any lasting damage other than a reset to the lock screen, but try at your own peril.
Dark mode can be done purely in CSS with media queries. I wouldn’t call it complex
Why are video games graphics challenging? Productionizing rendering algorithms
Nashville bomber Anthony Warner target was AT&T 5G
What do you mean by "real term"?

Real rocket science teams really use phrases like this, including this one. Is it a joke? Yeah, kind of. Is it what they would say if they had no sense of humour? No, probably not. Is it still a thing the experts actually say to actually talk about what's going on? Yeah, it is.

a few more examples:

"Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" : explosive destruction of the rocket

"Lithobraking" : it's like aerobraking, but with less aero and more litho
In theory the linked APE library [1] can also be used for languages like Rust and Go binaries to make fat portable ones as well, right?

[1] https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/ape.html