Hacker News Reader

CalChrison Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA

I hoped it would be Alpha.

Understanding the problem before attempting the solution is always a good idea.

CalChrison Political meddling at the Census Bureau damages the US statistical system

Opinion.

CalChrison You could have invented PageRank

> Sergey Brin and Larry Page came up with this precise algorithm, i.e., PageRank, which was one of the key algorithms that helped catapult Google into a household name and made them tons of money. Both Sergey and Larry were grad students at Stanford, so their coming up with such an amazing algorithm doesn’t seem surprising.

No, Brin wasn’t a co-inventor of PageRank.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US7058628B1/en

CalChrison Dolly Parton has died

I saw Dolly at Hardly Strictly in 2005. She was great.

CalChrison SeL4 security proofs now complete on AArch64

Side channel timing attacks are micro architectural. The SeL4 security proofs are architectural.

CalChrison Woman pulled over at gunpoint twice after flock camera glitch

Brookfield's police chief has defended his officer's, saying they responded appropriately given the information in front of them.

This meant there were no humans in the loop.

CalChrison Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

Zuckerberg's boat needed to be monitoring 13 (bridge to bridge) as well. It was in US waters, power driven and greater than 20 meters.

CalChrison Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

https://youtu.be/qEo5Rw6AMMU?is=Hq_h6s5heJFrRLpP

CalChrison Register deprivation: spills and runtime under forced register scarcity

How much effect the CPU's register remapping has? Probably a lot and the article doesn't discuss it at all.

However, the Intel Xeon E-2236 was released in 2019; so it's hardly ancient and the current E-2400 isn't so different.

As for hardware register renaming, Tomasulo dates to 1967 and out-of-order ROBs were common in the 90s. I don't know that there's been any major new ideas microarchitectural ideas in register renaming since the 90s.

I still think it's a meaningful experiment but could be improved with consideration of microarchitectural features.

CalChrison Does creatine make you smarter?

I was taking 5mg of Creatine and was in the ER for an unrelated reason. My metabolic panel measured creatinine at 1.34 mg/dL. A panel from last year without the supplement was a very normal 0.95. These were gummies and I wasn’t slamming water.

BTW, it tends to trash the eGFR test which relies on an unbiased creatinine reading.

CalChrison The mask that compiles to nothing: how HotSpots JIT learned to reason about bits

Why is this known bits optimization being done by the JIT rather than the Java compiler?

CalChrison Is The Economist Always Wrong?

It started with Greenspan but ramped up under Bernanke.

https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...

CalChrison Dostoyevsky isn't difficult

I liked The Possessed by Elif Batuman. I had read The Idiot in high school, a death march for a term paper. But I liked Batuman's reading of it better than mine (but not enough to re-read it).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elif_Batuman

CalChrison 1,700 free online courses from top universities

Thanks. Stanford's archive seems to be one big 296.2G blob. But it's there at least.

https://archive.org/details/stanford_itunesu/

CalChrison 1,700 free online courses from top universities

The Stanford iTunesU classes have been truncated to a few seconds. So Susanna Braund's Aeneid course (which was brilliant) is gone. Same thing with their Hannibal course. I don't know that they're available elsewhere. Apple dropped iTunesU (2021?) and Stanford didn't have a backup.

CalChrison DOS Game "F-15 Strike Eagle II" reversing project needs DOS test pilots

I have a friend who flew F15s. I’ve sent him this.

CalChrison A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer

It’s odd that the operator of the scam knew full stack level details of its implementation. To me, it seems like they were targeting the author, perhaps as something like privilege escalation, identity escalation perhaps.

CalChrison A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

Berkeley has the Northern Regional Library Facility in Richmond, CA for this very purpose. I’ve checked out books where they crackled as I opened them and it was clear I was the first to read them.

https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/visit/nrlf

CalChrison Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

People don’t get credit for fixing problems that do happen. Maybe possibly in a sales scenario where your fix unblocked the sale. Otherwise nada.

CalChrison The Russian who invented semiconductors 25 years before the USA

His death at the Siege of Leningrad sounds a lot like Archimedes death at the hands of a centurion during the fall of Syracuse to the Romans. That death was told by the always reliable Livy.

CalChrison Using Tailscale with an OrbStack VM on macOS

Interesting. Can you do this with Forgejo?

CalChrison Jank now has its own custom IR

Your custom IR is above LLVM’s IR, correct? Is it like SwiftIR then? Maybe you could add a paragraph or two going through that design decision.

CalChrison Jank now has its own custom IR

The natural question is why doesn't Jank use MLIR?

CalChrison "Not Medically Necessary": Helping America's Health Insurers Deny Coverage

In fact, MA costs the government more per person than does TM. MA may have been lobbied for as a cost saving measure. It is, in fact, a profit center for insurance companies.

https://www.kff.org/medicare/higher-and-faster-growing-spend...

CalChrison "Not Medically Necessary": Helping America's Health Insurers Deny Coverage

Medicare has a similar issue. When you sign up at 65, you have to make a first big decision, Traditional Medicare (yay!) or private Medicare Advantage (boo!).

Traditional Medicare consists of Part A (hospitals), Part B (doctors) and Part D (drugs). Part A+B don't cover everything so you have a Medigap plan. I have Plan G which has very little paperwork. All up, I spend about $400/mo and I'm very happy with A+B+G+D.

With Medicare Advantage you sign over your Medicare rights+benefits to a private insurer. This may save you some money, especially early on. In fairness, not really a lot and the $0/mo plans are a scam. With Medicare Advantage, you will then have to argue with an insurance company for the rest of your life. You'll have to deal with preauthorizations and a restricted network.

With Traditional Medicare, what's covered is spelled out pretty clearly ahead of time. Docs know it. You know it. There's literally an app for that. With Medicare Advantage, medically necessary is at the discretion of the private insurance company.

Here is the scenario from a relative: he had a heart event which ended up needing a stent. He had to argue with Kaiser while this was going on. Kaiser is 240,000 people. He is one.

Medicare Advantage is very profitable.

It is possible to switch back from MA to TM which really revolves around your Medigap plan. You are guaranteed issue for Medigap plans for about 3 months before/after you turn 65. After that, you will have to undergo medical underwriting.

CalChrison Getting arrested in Japan

The description of the detention center reminds me of Room 101 in 1984.

CalChrison Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer

Buzzword compliant.

CalChrison The Joy of Folding Bikes

I have a Tern Eclipse P18 24" folding bike which I like a lot. Tern and Dahon are related. Wasn't cheap and is hard to find. I literally drove to Vegas and met an IT sysadmin in a casino parking lot at 2am. He was coming off shift. It was legit (found it on EBay and he had the manuals) but it looked+felt like a drug deal.

I have upgraded the Tern. The original FSA crank would come loose and so I replaced it with a Shimano 105 part which required a Wheels Mfg 386 EVO Adaptor. I've never had a problem with it since. I also replaced the front derailleur with an SRAM Yaw which is just perfection.

It's great out to about 20 miles and you can't go up anything really steep because the shorter wheelbase just pops a wheelie. Tires and tubes are hard to find. But it's an awesome bike to have around.

CalChrison Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen

For migraines, I take two CVS Migraine about every week to ten days. It's a cocktail of acetaminophen, aspirin and caffeine which tallies to 500 mg of acetaminophen, well under then 4g limit. It's good for four hours but you can only take two per day.

I didn't know about this acetaminophen risk. So I'll be looking for alternatives. Ibuprofen is for inflammation and not headaches. Naproxen is a candidate.