Hacker News Reader

groundlogicon Google refused to call out China over disinformation about Hong Kong

A solution: break up the Alphabet companies and Amazon/AWS.

groundlogicon Google refused to call out China over disinformation about Hong Kong

Through the magic that is called legislation. (And if the megacorp is too big, break it up.)

groundlogicon Google refused to call out China over disinformation about Hong Kong

I feel like they are separate tasks. Companies should be apolitical. Governments should be political. Governments should actively set limits for what companies can and should/should not do.

groundlogicon Google refused to call out China over disinformation about Hong Kong

Google really wants to get back into China.

I guess I don't really blame them. I also really want GCP to enter China. It would make it so much easier to launch truly global services. I hate that "World except China" and "China" overhead.

(Maybe GCP needs to get slighly disconnected from the politicized part of Google - like Search and News?)

groundlogicon China’s assault on Cathay Pacific

I'd think that he'd say something if it was false.

groundlogicon Go Scan 3D – Handheld 3D Scanner

Reminiscent of the Logitech Scanman handheld 2D scanner from 1988 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Logitech_ScanMan...), but now in 3D. (How is there not a Wikipedia article about this product? I bet deletionists are to blame.)

I think this concept could eventually be a success just because it has the potential to be a lot cheaper than a fully automated/mechanized solution.

Just like the Scanman was a lot cheaper compared to the very expensive flatbed scanners of the 80s. Smaller, lighter, zero/minimal amounts of moving parts, etc. Perhaps not good enough for professional use, but the pro market was kinda small anyway.

I guess the endgame is that high-end 3d scanning functionality gets built into regular smartphones.

groundlogicon China’s assault on Cathay Pacific

https://www.newsweek.com/cathay-ceo-refused-name-hong-kong-p...

> The Taiwan News claimed that Cathay Pacific CEO Rupert Hogg's decision to resign last week came after he refused to name names to the Chinese government when he was asked to provide a list of employees who were involved in the Hong Kong protests.

> China's Civil Aviation Administration ordered Cathay to provide a list of employees who were involved in a recent protest. He was also ordered to suspend the employees. According to the Taiwan News, Hogg provided the list—but it included only one name: his own.

> His resignation was first announced by CCTV, China's state-run television station, 30 minutes before Cathay Pacific announced Hogg had stepped down.

groundlogicon WeWork IPO filing shows it's losing nearly $5,200 per customer

This is an insane IPO. (Insane in a pretty bad way.)

groundlogicon Cerebras Systems unveils a 1.2T transistor chip for AI

First: thanks, this was exactly the kind of historic knowledge I hoped would show up in this thread!

Gene Amdahl ran this; geeze, no surprise they got funded.

Do you happen to know how many "compute units" this chip was designed to handle?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilogy_Systems

> These techniques included wafer scale integration (WSI), with the goal of producing a computer chip that was 2.5 inch on one side. At the time, computer chips of only 0.25 inch on a side could be reliably manufactured. This giant chip was to be connected to the rest of the system using a package with 1200 pins, an enormous number at the time. Previously, mainframe computers were built from hundreds of computer chips due to the size of standard computer chips. These computer systems were hampered through chip-to-chip communication which both slowed down performance as well consumed much power.

> As with other WSI projects, Trilogy's chip design relied on redundancy, that is replication of functional units, to overcome the manufacturing defects that precluded such large chips. If one functional unit was not fabricated properly, it would be switched out through on-chip wiring and another correctly functioning copy would be used. By keeping most communication on-chip, the dual benefits of higher performance and lower power consumption were supposed to be achieved. Lower power consumption meant less expensive cooling systems, which would aid in lower system costs.

Edit: '"Triple Modular Redundancy" was employed systematically. Every logic gate and every flip-flop were triplicated with binary two-out-of-three voting at each flip-flop.' This seems like it should it should complicate things quite a bit more dramatically.. they were doing redundancy at a gate-level, rather than a a CPU-core level.

groundlogicon Information operations directed at Hong Kong

Right. This part of the work is left to the foreign-living chinese nationalistic diaspora. They get their directions from the CCP nonetheless.

Again, for casual readers: Chinese people in the US who don't support squashing democracy fighters in HK (I think/hope that's the vast majority of them - maybe more hope now that I'm being downvoted) are awesome.

groundlogicon Information operations directed at Hong Kong

I don't think HN is immune to these kinds of CCP ops.

groundlogicon Rendering on the Web

This area desperately does need terminology to be nailed down.. but.. I don't really like the proposed terminology. It's kinda hard to understand and follow. (The meat is in the table at the end of the article.)

groundlogicon Seymour Cray: An Appreciation (1997)

Ah.. I can imagine all kinds of weird bottlenecks making it hard to deliver a high-res bitmap at a reasonable framerate, or at all, to a screen back then.

Anyway, if you end up reading this: I really enjoyed so many of your dadhacker posts, years ago. Thanks.

groundlogicon Cerebras Systems unveils a 1.2T transistor chip for AI

Sure, that makes sense.

With this many cores it seems like the probability that a core dies during a multi-hour job (or in case it's used for inference, during a very long-lived realtime job) is pretty high, so the software in all layers would need to handle this kind of exception. They probably don't, today, since we haven't seen a 400k core chip before.

groundlogicon I Miss Microsoft Encarta

I certainly agree on the benefits of curation.

Using google was awesome before SEO.

I never really used Encarta deeply - I bought my Misumi CD-ROM reader in like 1994, without a bundle.

groundlogicon I Miss Microsoft Encarta

Obviously this is pure nostalgia. Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways. And available to people "in the developing world". (I don't really get why Scott included that part. The number of people who have access to a PC with a Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM and also don't have web access via their phones.. my guess is that the total number is about 17, globally.)

That said, nostalgia is fun sometimes.

groundlogicon Cerebras Systems unveils a 1.2T transistor chip for AI

Sure, that practice is pretty wellknown.

But at this scale?

groundlogicon Cerebras Systems unveils a 1.2T transistor chip for AI

If you divide that giant piece of silicon into 400k processors, and then only use the ones that actually work...

I wonder if they figure that out every time the CPU boots, or at the factory. At this scale, maybe it makes sense to do it all in parallel at boot. Or, even dynamically during runtime.

There may be edge case cores that sort of work, and then won't work at different temps, or after aging?

groundlogicon Cerebras Systems unveils a 1.2T transistor chip for AI

> The 46,225 square millimeters of silicon in the Cerebras WSE house 400,000 AI-optimized, no-cache, no-overhead, compute cores

> But Cerebras has designed its chip to be redundant, so one impurity won’t disable the whole chip.

This sounds kinda clever to a semi-layperson. Has this been attempted before? Edit: at this scale. Not single-digit cores CPUs being binned, but 100k+ CPU core chips with some kind of automated core-deactivation on failure.

groundlogicon California’s Biggest Cities Confront a ‘Defecation Crisis’

Relevant:

"Plastic-bag ban led to hep A health crisis?"

https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2017/sep/08/stringers-pl...

groundlogicon Software architects should be involved in earliest system engineering activities

That's probably the best/most succinct answer.

groundlogicon Software architects should be involved in earliest system engineering activities

There are of course many definitions. In my current small company, here's one definition of the "technical manager" role:

Figure out what to do, figure out what not do (10x more work), handle hiring/firing (both are really hard, but in different ways), handle random human situations with employees, motivate the team, get people to grow (give them incrementally larger individual responsibilities over time), get developers to focus on stuff that actually matters, manage the technical debt, plot a clear plan forwards. Feed developers with tasks, suitably small or large depending on their XP level. Learn exactly what kind of tasks each individual can handle. Pre-chew medium-hard tasks so that the can be handled by junior devs. Follow up on tasks, especially those that have an architectural impact. Create product progress. Manage issue tracking. Be on top of devops. Do some random small dev tasks yourself so you don't lose track of the code. Run regular team meetings. Etc. It's an exercise in time utilization/fragmentation.

groundlogicon Video Game Preservation – An archive of commercial video game source code

Thanks for the work, dude. It's an awesome collection.

Edit: a suggestion: you should have an index somewhere with a year-by-year list of the games. Maybe create an index github repo with some static HTML/markdown?

groundlogicon Video Game Preservation – An archive of commercial video game source code

Note: This collection is the work of Simon Morgan, https://sjm.io/.

groundlogicon Video Game Preservation – An archive of commercial video game source code

I just did some busywork picking out what I think were the impact-wise most important games out of these (roughly half of them - super subjective :)), and then sorted them by release year, for your browsing pleasure!:

Robotron: 2084 (1986) by Vid Kidz for the Atari 7800

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/robotron-7800

Galaga (1987) by Namco Limited for the Atari 7800

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/galaga-7800

Dig Dug (1987) by Namco Limited for the Atari 7800

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/digdug-7800

Centipede (1987) by Atari, Inc. for the Atari 7800

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/centipede-7800

Asteroids (1987) by Atari, Inc. for the Atari 7800

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/asteroids-7800

Ms. Pac-Man (1987) by General Computer Corporation for the Atari 7800

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/mspacman-7800

Commando (1989) by Capcom Co., Ltd. for the Atari 7800

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/commando-7800

Prince of Persia (1989) by Jordan Mechner for the Apple II

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/princeofpersia

Hovertank One (1991) by id Software, Inc.

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/hovertank3d

Wolfenstein 3D (1992) by id Software, Inc. for DOS

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/wolf3d

DOOM (1993) by id Software, Inc.

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/doom

Rise of the Triad: Dark War (1994) by Apogee Software, Ltd.:

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/rott

Beneath a Steel Sky (1994) by Revolution Software.

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/bass

Heretic (1994) by Raven Software

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/heretic

Gravity Force 2 (1994) by Bits Productions

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/gravityforce2

Descent (1995) by Parallax Software Corp.

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/descent

Hexen: Beyond Heretic (1995) by Raven Software

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/hexen

Abuse (1995) by Crack dot Com

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/abuse

Duke Nukem 3D (1996) by 3D Realms Entertainment, Inc.

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/dukenukem3d

Descent II (1996) by Parallax Software Corp.

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/descent2

Quake (1996) by id Software, Inc

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/quake

Quake II (1997) by id Software, Inc.

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/quake2

Postal (1997) by Running With Scissors

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/postal

FreeSpace 2 (1999) by Volition, Inc.

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/freespace2

Homeworld (1999) by Relic Entertainment

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/homeworld

Aliens versus Predator (1999) by Rebellion Developments Ltd.

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/avp

MechCommander 2 (2001) by FASA Studio

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/mechcommander2

DOOM³ (2004) by id Software, Inc.

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/doom3

groundlogicon Video Game Preservation – An archive of commercial video game source code

I guess, if all else fails, mail them to the Internet Archive Physical Archive in Richmond California:

https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360017876312-How-...

It should be a matter of time until someone figures out the DRM, and this is the right place for these historical artefacts to be.

(And if you do manage to rip them yourself, please upload the images to their cdrom collection (https://archive.org/details/cd-roms)!)

groundlogicon Hacking the Sonos IKEA Symfonisk into a High Quality Speaker Amp

IKEA seem to be killing it in speaker area these days. Even as Swede, that's kind of unexpected. I guess they saw a market segment where a lot of wood is used (this one's plastic though), and there were high margins for the premium products and then decided to go for it.

There's obviously a great deal of outsourcing to chinese and taiwanese manufacturers going on here, but they seem to be very competent in the customer role.

I love my IKEA Eneby BT speaker from last year. (This one, with the add-on battery: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00357636/)

I would love for IKEA to go into the standalone analogue speaker segment with a fantastic living room speaker, just to piss off those (often) European and quite pretentious speaker brands. Take on B&W and the likes!

groundlogicon Seymour Cray: An Appreciation (1997)

The book "The Supermen: Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer" (1997) is great.

What struck me when reading it was that the Cray 1 that Seymor Cray designed alone in his cabin.. when it went for sale in 1977 for $7.9 million it was a 64-bit single core computer running at 80 Mhz, with 8 MB RAM. This computer could probably have run Quake! In 1977! At a respectable resolution/framerate! In 1977! :)

groundlogicon Cloudflare S-1

Exactly - relatively little technical depth.

groundlogicon Cloudflare S-1

GOOG and FB also seemed overpriced a week after their respective IPOs.