Hacker News Reader

Donchon Craig Silverstein, Google Employee #1, Leaving for Khan Academy

I'd like to second this opinion. I've had the pleasure of reading and using a lot of his code in the form of the sparsehash, ctemplate and tcmalloc projects and I know for a fact that my own projects would have been a lot harder to write and test without this code.

He's a top notch open source advocate and a great encourager of contributions from non-Google employees, so hat's off and all the best at Khan Academy!

Donchon Vignere cracker for rethinkdb challenge

http://1.61803398874.com/

  Crypt text        : xfbhlqtlj
  Key               : 61803398874
  Key(alphabetical) : gbiaddjiihe
  Output            : rethinkdb

Donchon GCHQ Code Cracking Challenge to recruit code breakers

If you're a bit stuck try pasting:

eb 04 af c2 bf a3 81 ec 0c fe c1 75 f9 31 c0 ba d0 c1 ca 08 8a 1c 0c 8a fe c1 75 e8 e9 5c 00 00 00 5c 58 3d 41 41 41 41 75 3b 5a 89 d1 89 e6 89 d1 89 df 29 cf 31 c0 31 8a 14 06 8a 34 1e 88 34 8a 1c 16 8a 17 30 da 88 d8 fe c0 cd 80 90 90 e8 00 01 00 00 31 c9 88 0c ef be ad de 02 04 0c 00 3c 04 88 1c 04 88 3c 0c 00 89 e3 81 c3 04 00 00 75 43 58 3d 42 42 42 42 df 29 cf f3 a4 89 de 89 db 31 d2 fe c0 02 1c 06 06 88 14 1e 00 f2 30 f6 17 47 49 75 de 31 db 89 9d ff ff ff 41 41 41 41

into either:

http://www.onlinedisassembler.com/

http://pyms86.appspot.com/desasm_hex

Donchon HP's new ARM-based Servers

I think this is a highly significant move by ARM. It's amazing when you speak to datacentre people and they tell you how much of your server charges go on electricity and cooling. My recent example was £200 extra/year for an additional Opteron 6128 and £400 extra/year for the increased power usage from that processor!

There is an obvious gap in the market for low power, low heat generating, high memory throughput server processors. I'd just like to see a reference Linux distro which supports 16 ARM cores as well as a reference server card...

The specs:

http://www.calxeda.com/products/energycore/ecx1000/techspecs

only refer to 32-bit memory addressing as well (ie. <4GB of memory). Seems like the wait will be for the ARMv8 64-bit processors to be integrated.

Interesting times!

Donchon ARM reveals little dog A7 processor

Reminds me of the old BBC coprocessors, which is interesting as ARM's predecessor was Acorn Computers. Funny to see an idea from the 80's getting a second run out!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro_expansion_units

Donchon UK government response to my letter about programming in schools

I think programming is less essential than literacy and numeracy, agreed. But there are plenty of subjects that do not lead directly to jobs, drama and history being obvious examples. The point I would make is that the more people who get taught programming at school, the more people who are available in the workforce who can program. Programming is better paid than most other jobs. The skills attract foreign investment. Why would this be a bad thing?

Donchon UK government response to my letter about programming in schools

I totally agree with John's letter. When I was in primary school we had access to a BBC Micro with a Logo turtle which we could program ourselves. In senior school we had a BBC Master with the Domesday project, which was amazing at the time with decent resolution photos! The school was also lucky enough to have a ring network of BBC Micros with a shared Winchester Hard Drive. Later, we got access to Acorn Archimedes computers.

The thing that all these BBC/Acorn computers had in common was immediate access to a BASIC interpreter, and with the Archimedes, inline assembler. We had a great teacher who taught us how to use binary in bitwise operations. We were encouraged to write a program for GCSE computer studies and I wrote a library catalogue database without a backend database! A friend wrote a graphical calculator that he then went on to sell commercially. There was a regular Computer Club every Wednesday after school where you could do whatever you wanted - play games, write code, use *SHEET to do some maths...

All these things propelled me, later in life, to become a software developer and I'm glad I was given the skills necessary from school. Today, it's all about trying to get spyware infested computers to print from Microsoft Word in less than half an hour. A low-level hardware platform that is instantly programmable is a noble aim and I salute the Raspberry Pi chaps and hope you succeed!

Donchon Announcing Superfastmatch - a FOSS tool for finding overlap between documents

More info here:

http://superfastmatch.org

http://github.com/mediastandardstrust/superfastmatch