ShinyCyril

I'm also using the Python-based Pelican for my personal blog [1]. I was originally using a homebrew solution, but decided to switch over to something a little better-tested. The Fabric deployment options [2] are really great. Of course the static nature means that a JavaScript-based comment system is needed, for which I'm loving Isso [3] - it's self-hosted, lightweight, doesn't have spam issues and respects user privacy.

[1] https://mikeanthonywild.com

[2] http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.6.3/publish.html

[3] https://posativ.org/isso/

Will do - thank you.

That's good to know. My email is in my profile - feel free to shoot me a message :)

Oops, don't know how I missed the part about graduates.

Thank you!

Do you know if Argon Design hires graduates? I would love to break into the HFT / FPGA design space, however it seems like the barrier to entry is rather high.

> Anyone want schematics and parts lists for anything they make? There's an email address you can send a message to that will respond with them. All plain-text, no validation.

Could you expand on this?

This one certainly lives up to its name: https://github.com/leachim6/hello-world/blob/master/v/verbos...

I've added you to the Hacker News for ... list I've been curating: https://github.com/mikeanthonywild/hacker-news-for-x.

My background is in EE, so forgive me if this is a stupid question. Are there any cryptographic hash functions which support a closeness metric? Having written that out, it seems that such a thing would be contradictory, as to be able to compute their closeness would give information away about their nature and thus make them possibly reversible.

I haven't checked out the high-level synthesis part, but I've been using Vivado for a project recently and it's absolutely horrible. To name some of the issues I've had;

- Memory leaks (grows from about 1GB to 11GB and starts swapping in a couple of minutes when editing existing IP)

- Single-threaded synthesis is slow (though isn't limited to Vivado specifically)

- Failing after 20 minutes of synthesis because of errors that would be easy to check at the start

- Placing debug cores can result in needing to synthesise, find something went wrong, delete debug core, re-synthesise, re-add debug nets, synthesise again...

- Aggressive caching results in it trying to find nets which were changed and no longer exist, despite re-creating the IP in question from scratch

- Vivado creates a ridiculous amount of temporary files and is a royal pain to use with version control (there is an entire document which details the methods to use if you want to create a project to be stored under version control)

I've been playing around with IceStorm for the iCE40 device and it's an absolute joy to use: fast, stable and simple. I appreciate that there are a lot of complex tools and reports which Vivado provides, but I would much rather use an open source tool like IceStorm for synthesis alongside the advanced tools from Vivado.

You make a good point. I hadn't heard about Foursquare in a very long time, so I had no idea that they were trying to do something similar to monetise it.

Like I said though, it costs us practically nothing to run and it's been a great learning experience so far - I don't see any reason to give up just yet.

The app requires each person of the group to have the app. Like messaging apps, no-one will use it unless all of their friends use it too. We're currently implementing a 'hot-seat' feature to mitigate this and make it even easier for couples to use.

Thanks for your feedback. Both myself and my girlfriend, and my business partner and his girlfriend use the app regularly. Occasionally we use it with family too. We launched a beta recently and got some users, but didn't get much engagement - I think partially because we pitched it for groups of friends.

Currently it costs us practically nothing to run, so we're just focused on getting users.

Monetisation will come primarily from providing analytics to restaurants. Because of the way the app works, we can go to a restaurant and give them info like "x number of people were interested in going to your restaurant, but they went across the road to your competitor instead". In addition to analytics, we planned to do the usual promoted results and coupons etc.

This one takes the cake for me: https://twitter.com/TayandYou/status/712760257542549505. I wonder how long it will be before Microsoft has to intervene.

That's perfectly fine for those of us who use such addons, but does nothing to help the average non-technical user from being tracked.

Many German websites have had this for years. I seem to remember hearing that it was mandated by law that social buttons had to be deactivated by default to protect privacy, but I'm not sure whether that was actually the case.

Here is a brief explanation in a German computer magazine: http://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/2-Klicks-fuer-mehr-Datenschut.... Their implementation: http://www.heise.de/extras/socialshareprivacy/ (which I believe this is a fork of?).

I would really love to see more sites adopt this approach. Tracking users in this was is completely unacceptable.

These slides mention the possibility of using PCIe or QPI to attach to the CPU: http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~calcm/carl/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=c....

There's been a huge shitstorm on Reddit about Windows 7 / 8 forcing an automatic upgrade to Windows 10 [1] [2] [3] [4], with many accounts of people going away to do something and coming back to find their PCs had updated to Windows 10 without their permission. However I've not been able to find any stories on this from reliable sources. All I've found so far is a forum post on CNET and a submission on Slashdot [5] [6].

Does anyone know what's actually going on with this?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/4a5edx/psa_window...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/4a7bkp/psa_micros...

[3] https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/4a0asv/warning_w...

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/4a59p4/psa_wi...

[5] http://www.cnet.com/forums/discussions/forced-to-upgrade-fro...

[6] https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/03/12/1634229/windows-10-...

Just a shout-out about the Icestorm project which provides a complete open-source toolchain for Lattice's iCE40 FPGAs. It's mostly the work of one guy (Clifford Wolf): http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/.

It's worth noting that arachne-pnr (https://github.com/cseed/arachne-pnr) is written by a different person (Cotton Seed).

This looks nice – I've been using [Isso](https://posativ.org/isso/) for the past year or so.

For those interested, I started compiling a list of HN-style news aggregators: https://github.com/mikeanthonywild/hacker-news-for-x. I really love this sort of format for niche communities, but many of them lack sufficient exposure!

Hmm didn't have much luck with: https://mikeanthonywild.com/stopping-blocking-threads-in-pyt...

    { 
        "1":"betterthreads provides an enhanced replacement for the an enhanced replacement for the python this isn't actually a true thread instead it uses gevent to",
        "2":"the widely-accepted solution is to set a timeout on our blocking functions so we can periodically check a which we set from the main thread to indicate we want the child thread to stop",
        "3":"if the thread is still alive the when the *timeout* argument is not present or ``none`` the operation will block until the thread terminates",
        "4":"`runtimeerror` if an attempt is made to join the current thread as that would cause a deadlock",
        "5":"`join` a thread before it has been started and attempts to do so raises the same exception"
    }

That said, I think to summarise that particular would require a certain level of domain expertise, something which a general bot couldn't provide.

OSDev does indeed have some great resources, but sadly most of the info is targeting x86. Of course the general principles of interrupts, framebuffer memory etc. can be applied to other platforms provided you have an understanding of the platform. Which I guess is the problem - there are tons of great resources, however to fill in the gaps between them requires a knowledge of the platform which a beginner won't have.

The best approach I've seen so far is the excellent Nand2Tetris, however it can't run on hardware due to the custom HDL it uses.

It really is fascinating how up to a certain point, it was possible to understand the workings of 90% of the early 8-bit computers. Sadly with the vast improvements in speed and efficient comes a cavernous increase in complexity. While the fundamentals of computer architecture haven't changed that much, modern computers are these hugely complex beasts.

I've always been captivated by the Homebrew Computer Club and have been considering putting together a set of tutorials which go through the steps of creating a really basic CPU with an FPGA (perhaps a simple RISC-V core?) and writing a toy OS to run on top of it. A lot of this stuff you learn at Univeristy, but not everyone has that opportunity. I'd like to see a comprehensive guide which walks someone through every step and teaches the fundamentals of computer architecture, hardware design and systems programming in a fun and hands-on way (it's how I've always learnt best).

Would anyone find a 'Retro PC from scratch' resource useful?

Chips like the BCM2835 are available for purchase, just you need to have a very large purchase order.

You needn't be limited to using Pelican themes. Pelican uses Jinja2 for templating, so it's very simple to migrate templates over to the platform with an hour or so (if that!) of tweaking.

Worth noting is xyhve [0], a virtualisation solution written by the author of this article.

[0] https://github.com/mist64/xhyve

I wish I had picked that for my masters dissertation - ML + DSP seems like a really interesting area!

As in more bits per-pixel.