skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I built games in the 90s. Graphics was obviously the hardest part.

We thought about things in terms of how many instructions per pixel per frame we could afford to spend. Before the 90s it was hard to even update all pixels on a 320x200x8bit (i.e. mode 13h) display at 30 fps. So you had to do stuff like only redraw the part of the screen that moved. The led to games like donkey kong where there was a static world and only a few elements updated.

In the 90s we got to the point where you had a pentium processor at 66 Mhz (woo!) At that point your 66Mhz / 320 (height) / 200 (width) / 30 (fps) gave you 34 clocks per pixel. 34 clocks was way more than needed for 2D bitblt (e.g. memcpy'ing each line of a sprite) so we could beyond 2D mario-like games to 3D ones.

With 34 clocks, you could write a texture mapper (in assembly) that was around 10-15 clocks per pixel (if memory serves) and have a few cycles left over for everything else. You also had to keep overdraw low (meaning, each part of the screen was only drawn once or maybe two times). With those techniques, you could make a game where the graphics were 3D and redrawn from scratch every frame.

The other big challenge was that floating point was slow back then (and certain processors did or didn't have floating-point coprocessors, etc.) so we used a lot of fixed point math and approximations. The hard part was dividing, which is required for perspective calculations in a 3D game, but was super slow and not amenable to fixed-point techniques. A single divide per pixel would blow your entire clock budget! "Perspective correct" texture mappers were not common in the 90s, and games like Descent that relied on them used lots of approximations to make it fast enough.
> monopoly on violence

So, you’re using Max Weber’s theory of the state in a contradictory way in my reading. Weber’s theory of the state as being the society which derives its authority from a legitimate monopoly on violence was contrasted _against_ the very “natural liberties” that you seem to espouse (e.g. the rights of peeping toms, the rights of private shopkeepers, and the limitation of the government). Either you argue that the legitimacy of the state stems from its legitimate monopoly on violence as a community (thus allowing it to dictate “decency” as you say) or you argue that the legitimacy of the state derives from the citizenry’s own natural rights to self governance and liberty.
Easier solution, adopt one of the millions of already named children in desperate need of a home and living family.

Procreation is the last thing the world needs.
Mac does it, which is why I also quit mac.

Some GNU/Linux distributions do it, but not all of them. And I have way more control over it when it does happen.

Apple was pretty solid until around Mountain Lion. Once I saw them messing with "Save As", I jumped.

I've had good experiences with LXDE and Xfce so far on multiple distros.

Anything Gnome are no longer in the running, however.
I did! Thank you for the feedback :)
Yeah, not to mention electric cars are going to be made with even less energy like cold pressing the entire chassis from a sheet of metal, higher density batteries and recycling older batteries, where as gas cars have been the same in terms of mpg.
I'm in this camp. I ran into a recent situation where I could have used a drop-in security module if the project had updated the framework in the past decade. Instead we rolled our own, which is janky and took longer than it should have.

Debts have a way of compounding. Tech debt is no exception. Tech debt begets tech debt begets tech debt, and it will hang on your velocity like a ball and chain.
I think it's a mixed bag. My parents are divorced, but are on the opposite ends of the spectrum here. My mother is extremely ambitious in her career, and maximizes out her retirement contributions every year. My father is quite the opposite, and I don't think he's made any plans when it comes to handling retirement.
This video shows how to use a Cryo ET machine: https://youtu.be/L-65mpdKLzQ
How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class (2020)
I sure as hell don't want to learn another VCS, unless it's just better, and has any chance of becoming widely adopted.

I think the short list of git grievances here are outweighed by the costs of not using git.
The sad part is I have absolutely no idea if you’re joking…
How does one manage to stop nuclear energy but not fossil fuel use? These are arguably the same sorts of groups, with probably a large overlap. How did they have such power in one area, but not in another? If there is lack of lobbyist or industry pressure pushing for it, then we have to wonder why? Nuclear isn't cost effective as a business is the likely answer, and under our current system that drives most of the decisions.
After reading about Ljubljana in the article below, I'm dying to set up shop there for half a year or so:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg8wq7/slovenia-car-free-cit...
I think it's as heavy as you want it to be— not every point on there requires a whole treatise, but each is an opportunity to be like "is there information here that I have which might be useful to my colleagues or my future self?"
Solar power itself is intermittent, yes.

But it is not a risky investment – quite the opposite actually. You can buy panels and inverters with 25yr manufacturer warranties. Maintenance costs are low and predictable (cleaning panels, replacing equipment). Energy output is as predictable as the sun, and in certain regions it is pretty constant.

It is also not "costly" in the sense that the bulk of the cost of installing solar is the labor.
I understand your feelings but I'm not saying you should do this with everyone-- just problematic or difficult people.
What an incredible waste of time just to signal wE’Re lE d0rKy
Computers aren't that much faster if we consider there's only an order of a magnitude difference between 300mhz and 3ghz. In order to benefit from the full speed of our modern ~3ghz processors your problem needs to fit into about 32kb of memory, due to physics and locality. So size of RAM today is kind of a red herring. I think if you compare the sheer size and scale of what a Factorio game looks like once it turns into a struggle for resources, versus an old sim city game, while taking into consideration how much more complicated the mechanics of factorio pieces are, then that's clear evidence there's been a lot of progress in software engineering since the 90's.
Apple hires former Tesla engineer to boost self-driving car effort
Okay, so that's actually less insane than the title suggested. They're using scroll lock to specifically toggle a compatibility mode, after enabling an option to make it do that.
>vox
PCMag story: https://www.pcmag.com/news/intel-these-50-plus-pc-games-are-... (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29123216)
looks like a great piece of tech. i appreciate how honest the guy from Carbon was. seems like they really care about farmers and the environment.
Neil Shen of Sequoia China: Everything in life can be deduced thru calculations
Title is misleading, Intel is offering a fix that allows the user to disable E-cores on the fly by using their scroll-lock key. They're only offering a reference implementation though, it's up to the motherboard vendors to ship a BIOS update with this workaround.
I'm still bitter about ifconfig.
All great stories use mundane circumstances in life to convey much deeper and abstract ideas.

One such story, I humbly hope, would be my poem.

Yes the b00bs were all over the place as they are in real life, and in my opinion how they got there is as interesting as real life.

Original people solving the original problem had a good understanding of what they are dealing with.

However with subsequent generations it became a monkey problem https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5QuwPeH9P7Y

When all you have is a DAG all solutions end up with sales person coming at your door problem. But years down the line we didn’t have traveling salesman problem but out of date libraries problem.

The monkeys tried to make their risk taking more safe by introducing all kinda of random constraints not realising that what gave power to the whole idea was actually risk taking.

And no, they didn’t try to manage risk but have completely fail to understand that risk is what made product good in the first place.

And this is how every great idea in human history fell apart, the original people had different view of a current problem however the following generations have only understood the simplified problem and down the line the the solution to original problem had became the actual problem.

I still believe the poem would make greater justice to the whole idea, but what I tried to explain here is that the simple things we have all witnessed actually hide much deeper truths about life in general.

And from there I assume QzDesktop loading times where not the issue at the beginning of this deterministic chaotic system, but simply one of the possible generational products.

I am yet to understand how to solve the monkey issue.
Thanks, I get you now.
Ask HN: What are your favorite Android FOSS applications
I recently switched to an Android phone from an iOS device I'm really looking for foss application suggestions
Rickover was in charge of developing Shippingport, the USA's first terrestrial nuclear power plant. After that, it was largely necessary to pass things over to the private sector because of capitalism.
Adobe Acrobat X Pro is excellent in this regard, but propietary and all that
DRM strikes again. Is there any DRM system in use that isn't broken within a few weeks of the game's release? It's an honest question, I don't follow the piracy scene any more, but it used to be a pretty rapid turn around on cracks. If that's still the case, then DRM is still just hostile toward paying customers and a speedbump to pirates.
It really depends. Java isn't bad as server-side software, and there are benefits to using it's runtime. For client-side software though (particularly in 2012-2020), not many commercial PCs could play Minecraft at a decent framerate. Even now, feeding the Java version huge amounts of high-bandwidth memory is the only way to mitigate slowdown, and that still doesn't account for the micro-stuttering that you get when world generation occurs. In the context of Minecraft, it was a pretty obvious mistake. YMMV, but I'd still highly recommend against writing Java software for client-side stuff.
The Goiânia Accident (1987)
Can anyone speculate what in the world is even tripping Denuvo up in this scenario? Is there a realistic threat model they add to their garbageware that tries to detect... multiple physical distinct CPUs on one system as an indicator that the game is pirated? What a weird check.
One of the ways I use the staging area is as an ephemeral wip commit: I've got a change that runs and gets me incrementally closer to the desired result, but isn't yet an atomic commit. Changes to that state can be built upon, undone etc until I've got something I'm happy to commit.
Shoot, Germany's Energiewende was designed as a denuclearization from the start. It was the primary goal. Climate concerns came later.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiewende#The_term_Energiew...
It's more like sticking your head in a river.

No updates: ignorance is bliss. Until you need to breathe -- then you die.

All updates: maybe I can just drink the whole thing...
Sometimes I wonder if we generally have too high of expectations about how quickly good government can be established.

Technology and media move very quickly, and it's easy to think "just git clone the laws and deploy" and you'll have the same results as whatever country you're emulating. But it doesn't happen that way.

I'm not really making an argument here, just wondering out loud. I don't want this to be interpreted as a reason to endure bad government longer than necessary. Maybe just to not be too disappointed when problems don't disappear over night.
I don't understand, what's wrong with Go's flag, compared to, say, python's argparse?
Why would that matter? Treatment is randomly assigned.
I do not know how you managed to come to this conclusion.

COVID-19 vaccines are directly beneficial to children because they help them to avoid serious disease.

But we can't discount indirect benefits. Drugs are for individuals, vaccines are for societies.
:).

Edit: she might connect more with video? https://vimeo.com/109486911
https://youtu.be/BpS-Y7ndNeQ

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/03/hong-kong-prot...
In addition, there was an extremely rapid increase of PC specs in the 1990s, and you if you had a 3-4 year old PC you probably could not play those games. "The PC you really want always costs $3500" as a famous columnist said.

People bought bleeding-edge games to show off their conspicuous consumption. Everyone else played them years later. People like me would stay late and play Decent, Quake, Warcraft, etc (RCT was a trailing edge game) on our work computers, because we certainly didn't have those kinds of specs at home until much later.
I wonder if reversing the statement is useful? Are the neighbors of a highly composite number more likely to be prime?
The ones that ensure with several 9's that the lights come on 24/7 regardless of time of day or weather. LCOE covers the generator alone, but not transmission lines, idled gas plants, energy storage, smart load balancing, etc.

You can keep big gas plants around in a high intermittent grid and fire them up 10% of the time. The way we view LCOE right now, those plants would be insanely expensive while wind/solar would be super cheap. But we would still pay for the backup capacity. This kind of system cost is what matters dramatically more than LCOE.
When Radiohead sampled Paul Lansky (2000)
Grid stability/storage, plus sunk costs.

Say it's a cold cloudy day with no wind and it's been so for a week. You'll need the capacity of that coal/nuclear plant those days. And let's say every other day of the year solar and wind make enough power. So who pays the extremely high fixed cost of the nuclear and coal plant so it's available that one week you need it? No one wants to, so they're shutting them down. The power company could still be paying the bond for the plant, but ultimately that's the consumer's money. Then, surprise, you end up with blackouts or you pay for new natural gas plants to be built. Prices and fragility go up.

It's likely cheaper to make demand more flexible, but that has a cost too.
Over 2000, actually.

The the problem of evil, as originally stated by Epicurus (assuming he was the original formulator) has always been weird to me. Dude was in an era where believe in multiple gods was fairly common. In addition, these gods were not generally portrayed as the combo of omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient at the same time that makes this an actual problem.

Don't get me wrong. Huge problem for followers of Abrahamic religions, but not really a big deal for someone in ancient Greece.
The original paper seems to be at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202008161.

I only glanced at it, but noticed that they hypothesized that the organism uses mechanosensation involving rhythmic pulling on the substrate and interpretation of changes in things like tension, compression or mechanical strain.
Yeah imagine a country getting freaked out over a few dozens of millions of dead and going crazy and passing a bunch of insane laws and having its politics go insane. It’s not like that doesn’t describe post 9/11 America.
Obamacare, healthcare.gov, is a good option for retiring early, depending on what state you're in. Open enrollment is Nov 1st - Jan 15th.
> contrarian argument.

It's not a "contrarian argument" if the other side doesn't know what it's talking about, and has no long-term data, which is the current situation with corona.

We know Fauci spent over 18 months lying to the American public, so you can basically say and do the opposite of whatever he says and not be a contrarian - it's just common sense at this point.

(Actually the Stanford virologists knew he was deranged as soon as Fauci said the only public policy he cared about was strictly medical-related a few weeks into the pandemic. That's not how public policy works. Over 60,000 doctors have signed their petition so far agreeing with them, not Fauci. I happened to see the same video, and never bothered to watch anything but the Senate oversight committee against him where he lied under oath abou not funding GoF research in Wuhan. Glad that's on video for 2022.)
Why nuclear fusion yields more energy than fission
Have we figured out how to store or process nuclear waste safely? I have vaguely uneasy recollection of reading about American nuclear waste.
Try that on IAR EWARM on a Cortex-M0 target.

It will absolutely fail (first because size_t is only 32b).

What's behind malloc() is what matters.

That being said, I never would have expected that code to ever succeed! Shows how much I take memory allocation for granted on more sophisticated systems. I can't remember the last time I malloc'd more than a few megabytes.
Only about 5% of polio cases in children are symptomatic.
Is the general wisdom that the executive function should be a separate co-equal branch of government (like the US), or controlled by the legislature (how I understand a parliamentary system)?
This actually terrified me, as Britain being willing to give up the commonwealth when the Queen dies may mean serious contests for who gets to write new constitutions.

It's not so much a matter of removing the Queen as head of state as unsealing the document, so someone says while you are there, we need this, and we will fight you if we don't get it. You see how this escalates immediately, and all together within months of the Queen's death.

What are the odds of over 50 countries ever trying to rewrite their constitutions in a lifetime, and then again what are they to do that simultaneously ? Absurd, impossible odds, total black swan. Except if the Queen dies. I can only hope it will be mostly peaceful?
Honestly, that’s not the actual problem. Waste is basically solved already. I am very pro-nuclear, but if I were to steelman the anti-nuclear argument, it’d be proliferation concerns.
>Directed Acyclic Graphs and SHA hashes…

… of what, though? On GitHub, and on every other project I've worked on that used git, the natural unit is a set of changes (e.g. a GitHub PR, a patch). If you run `git show $SHA`, git will show you a set of changes. But that's a lie; that's not what git stores.

If you run `git log`, it'll give you a list of commits. If you run `git show` for each, it'll show you a bunch of changes. Many users expect (quite reasonably, before they've been bitten) that if you start from scratch and apply those changes in order, what you end up with will be the same as your current tree. Nope.
"Culture fit" has become like the currency of recruitment. Supposedly what you may have to pay with for a potentially great engineer (technically) about whom the hiring team didn't feel comfortable with. I think the original question is a great one. Do we actually put these intuitions to the test?
Nuclear waste recycling is also progressing.
Spreadsheet exposing brutal 996 Big Tech work hours deletes project
I think people freak out much more easily when imagining a Hiroshima or Chernobyl or Fukushima in their home towns than when trying to picture the slow but unrelenting worsening of climate conditions over time caused by fossil burning, even though the former is local and unlikely and the latter is global and certain.
> Force is a strong word, since Windows provides ways to opt-out of feature upgrades.

I dunno, I've heard multiple reports of people leaving their machine alone and coming back to it having upgraded and rebooted into a new version, sometimes into an unrecoverable blue screen.

How would they have opted out of that?
> there is no law out there that denial always precedes acceptance.

Yeah. "Denial, resistance, acceptance" -- isn't that from the six (or was it seven?) stages of grief? But grief is for something inevitable and irresistible, a fait accompli: When a loved one has died that has already happened and there is nothing you can do about it.

Here, though, if enough of us think that our industry is going the wrong way, maybe we can still stop it.
> Such as? In my experience upper and upper-middle class kids get common names, ... Never crazy spelling, never unique names.

X Æ A-12 Musk?

Never say never.
Contemporary general wisdom is that parliamentary systems (executive subordinated to the legislature) do better than presidential systems (executive and legislature are separate and co-equal branches of government)

https://theconversation.com/parliamentary-systems-do-better-...

It is worth pointing out though that you can have a parliamentary republic in which the President has very limited powers in practice and most of the real power belongs to the Prime Minister - for example, Austria, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Malta. Monarchy-vs-republic and presidential-vs-parliamentary are (at least partially) orthogonal

There is also the semi-presidential system used in France, and a number of other countries, in which control of the executive is shared between a directly elected President and a Prime Minister chosen by the legislature. Often, the Prime Minister has more power over domestic affairs while the President has more power over military and international affairs. Sometimes they can be from opposite parties which can cause difficulty. It is half way between the parliamentary and presidential system.
Chattanooga is wonderful. Good tech scene, especially in the innovation district. Great rock climbing, hiking, mountain biking, white water rafting. Nice downtown near a waterfront with some of the best municipal internet in the country. Biggest downside is no direct flights to SF if you need to fly out occasionally.
So Scroll Lock is the new Turbo button eh? Hello my old friend.
Yeah, anything at scale I build with a bare minimum toolkit, and only use conservative tools in the process.

By conservative, I mean something which would still work today if I wrote a script for it 10 or 20 years go.
I haven't 'done this course' as I am no student; but I did read through the book and did most of the exercises. Very good and I always recommend it when it comes to compilers. Helps you think in types / languages.
Lot of hacker news is blaming Denuvo. I disagree.

This just goes to show how Intel has failed at pre-grade school level of implementation and testing of processor design.
I'm not sure there's any causality between Windows preventing overcommit and Windows having slow process creation- there's nothing inherently slower about CreateProcess()/posix_spawn() than fork() + exec() as an API.

It seems more that overcommit is a workaround for the way fork() can potentially lead to copying the entire address space into new pages, but usually doesn't. Because CreateProcess() knows more precisely how much to allocate before it returns to the child process, it can just reserve that amount and signal an error immediately if there's not enough memory+swap to back it.

(And on the other hand, Windows has a lot of legacy and backwards compatibility behavior around processes that could easily explain the slower process creation independent of the API.)
RimWorld, especially with the runtime garbage collector mod, is super super well optimized. Massive mod lists with 0 bugs or performance issues and the only thing that cripples performance at all is the "perfect pathfinding" mod, and we can't really blame them for not being able to improve on A*!
What do you think of the "lambdaway project": http://lambdaway.free.fr, an attempt to unify writing, styling and scripting under a unique syntax.

It is said that the LISP's father, John McCarthy, lamented the W3C's choice of SGML as the basis for HTML : « An environment where the markup, styling and scripting is all s-expression based would be nice. » The lambdaway project could be an answer, small and simple.