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alecmg

200 karma · joined April 12, 2019

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alecmg··on Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore
the mechanism of it is not that paper is saturated with water, but that while there is water in the container, paper doesn't get hotter than 100C and a bit, not enough to ignite.
alecmg··on My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
nothing like Russian, South Asian maybe
alecmg··on AMD's Strix Halo under the hood
oh great, they are not using a confusing name anymore... wait, now they are using a stupid name!
alecmg··on Turning Off Zen 4's Op Cache for Curiosity and Giggles
Phoronix regularly tests this, search for keyword mitigations

https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-zen5-mitigations-off

alecmg··on UK to finish with coal power after 142 years
Could it be quantified how much UK is using coal power of other countries?

Since industry is moved outside, the products we consume use power of producer country, mostly China. Is there a correlation in reduction of local coal power and amount of energy intensive products imported?

alecmg··on Ask HN: Video streaming is expensive yet YouTube "seems" to do it for free. How?
I WISH it would be prefetching video in background while showing ads.

But no, always goes to spinny wheel buffering after ad ends. Oh, and thats after having some spinny wheel to load the ad in first place ffs.

alecmg··on SD cards expected to hit 4TB in 2025
~100 MB/s write speeds?

what use case needs an SD card that can be written for 40000 seconds?

alecmg··on Ask HN: Which monitors do you use?
> The new 4K 32" 3rd gen QD-OLED panels seem to be the closest to perfection, but I'm not sure if they're suitable for long sessions of programming, web browsing and reading documentation (i.e. displaying static UI elements for hours) due to burn-in and temporary image retention.

Wouldn't worry about burn-in. 3rd gen should be more durable and equipped with all kind of burn-in mitigation tech. And a 2-3 year burn-in warranty

My concern about OLED used to be the weird pixel layout, not great for text. But on 4k QD-OLED pixels are smaller, so text fringing is not noticeable. And LG WOLED coming this year should have no problem at all.

alecmg··on Russian cosmonaut sets record for most time in space – more than 878 days
Not an issue if they have a means of propulsion capable of delivering 1g the whole way

Which is necessary to go any meaningful distance in space anyway

alecmg··on Speeding up Cython with SIMD
ahh, I wish they included speed comparison to numpy.average

I know, thats not the point and average was only picked as a simple example, but still...

alecmg··on UltraRAM
definite deja vu from Optane

Capacity and price killed it, no word about these in the article

alecmg··on GIL removal and the Faster CPython project
I saw comments that if introduced together with Faster CPython single thread performance optimisations, nogil would end up no slower than previous version. So it is best time to implement
alecmg··on GIL removal and the Faster CPython project
maybe its a reference to Amdahl's law?

If you can parallelise 90% of your code, you get only 10x improvement even on infinite number of cores

alecmg··on Firefox finally outperforming Google Chrome in SunSpider
I think that site opted for consistent graphs - points lower on the graph is faster/better, indicated by blue down arrow
alecmg··on Petalisp: Elegant High Performance Computing
without knowing much of either, sounds like petalisp to lisp relation is numba to python. Or numba to numpy?
alecmg··on Two Mice Technique
Started getting RSI symptoms in right hand years ago. Mainly from heavy gaming, but I needed to use mouse at work as well so right hand was not getting any rest.

Switched to using mouse in left hand for work, right hand for gaming. Never looked back. Turns out mouse motorics are almost independent from human handedness.

To comment the article, depending on OS and mice, you will have trouble assigning different orientation to different mice. Usually if you want left hand mouse to have index finger "left" click, it will also switch your right mouse... and trackpad...

alecmg··on Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010)
I think Windows is even more permeated with legacy

Off the top of my head:

Nobody questions why main drive is C:, remnant of [an] early computer having two floppy (not sure) drives on A: and B:

Or more recent - C:/Windows/System32 holds 64 bit executables; 32 bit exectuables live in C:/Windows/SysWOW64

alecmg··on Windows needs a change in priorities
Its ironic and scary how 3.11 was the last Windows with consistent

a) UI design. It was either a DOS box or a Win 3.11 style window

b) file sharing, simple and intuitive

c) integration with browsers. Browser was standalone. There was no integration.

alecmg··on Hyundai Nexo sets new world record 887.5 km travelled on single tank of hydrogen
We were getting 1000km between fill ups (60L tank) on a family road trip in a bog standard 1.8L gasoline (!) Ford Mondeo, seating 2 adults 2 kids and with trunk loaded to the brim and A/C running on full.

Really difficult to be excited or impressed by these "records". Both Tesla and H2

alecmg··on Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
Any of these use FLAC? Or does everyone invent their own wheel?
alecmg··on Show HN: Stream-unzip – stream unZIP files in Python
Last I was dealing with zip files in Python 3 years ago, I was unpleasantly surprised that there is no way to open Zip64 archives.

It is a semi-proprietary format not supported by zlib. Some tools, most notably Windows will sometimes use it to create large zip archives that go beyond limits of original zlib. An unsuspecting user would compress some files and there is no warning which format has been used.

alecmg··on Ask HN: Maybe I'm just not smart enough?
If questions are from specific field (combinatorics/algorithms etc) then general intelligence doesn't help. Even if your IQ was 150, you won't answer those questions without study and practice.
alecmg··on Seasonal energy storage in aluminium for 100% solar heat and electricity supply
I remember reading Donald Sadoway got inspiration for developing liquid metal batteries [1] from watching how aluminum smelting is basically a battery already.

These batteries are more efficient than aluminum energy storage, and were also aimed at large scale with cheap abundant materials (initially at least). But high temperatures involved make it not very convenient.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_battery#Liquid-met...

alecmg··on Ask HN: Things to do after 2nd vaccination dose?
Like with any condition that your body is expected to take care of.

Drink lots of fluids, rest. If you have excessive fever 38+, use fever reduction medicine of your choice.

Unlike a common cold, vaccination after effect should go away after a day or so. If symptoms persist, contact medical professionals.

alecmg··on Firefox 86.0
Found a random improvement: Kraken 1.1 benchmark runs faster now.

Improved from roughly 760 to 700ms on my 5800X.

Still ways to go to reach Chrome at 560ms

alecmg··on Browsers eating RAM
graphs don't show for me on page
alecmg··on McLaren drops the V8, moves to V6 plug-in hybrid for its next supercar
Axial flux electric motor, cool.
alecmg··on The simple way to share files directly from your computer
Mandatory xkcd

https://xkcd.com/949/

alecmg··on A trick that makes Python faster than C++
But then your C++ code will grow to be multiple times bigger than Python. And you will spend even more time on implementation.
alecmg··on Don't Believe the Hype About Hypersonic Missiles
This article sounds like "sour grapes".

Keeps comparing hypersonic missiles to ballistic. Concluding there is no benefit. But what about cruise missiles and air launched long range missiles?

Also assumes that all hypersonic weapons will use rocket engines. But that is exactly why interest is back, there are now air-breathing jets that power hypersonic missiles. Meaning range, maneuverability, size improve compared to rockets.

And US is way behind in this.

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