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Yeah, so technically a Turing machine has infinite memory.. so no real-world computer is fully Turing complete.

Not Linux related, but I've been trying trying recent (at least to me..) C-64 accessories:

I've tried the "Kung Fu Flash"- it's a software defined cartridge that is cheap- just a single STM32 and can do pretty much everything. I bought this because I'm trying to duplicate the developer experience I see on "8-bit show and tell"- it can emulate the "super snapshot", but not the REU. It's a really nice way to quickly try a lot of C-64 software and games.

https://8bithardware.wixsite.com/website/post/kung-fu-flash

https://github.com/KimJorgensen/KungFuFlash

I also have an SD2IEC: what I've learned is that it would have been useful to get a variant with an extra DIN socket. It's nice but I was never a fan of C-64's DOS and this reinforces it. To mount a D64 disk image you have to: OPEN1,8,15,"CD:MYIMAGE.D64":CLOSE1... yuck..

JiffyDOS (replacement ROM for the C-64) improves this (it's faster and includes a permanent DOS wedge), I bought one- it's on the way. I'm curious to try it with the real 1541 drive.

What got me started on this recently is the "Penultimate +2" cartridge for the VIC-20:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNGyneXHKJQ

In this case, I basically bought a VIC-20 just to try out the cartridge.

jhallenworldon micro – A Modern Alternative to nano

You should try a more recent version of it: sudo apt-get install joe

JOE has syntax highlighting, UTF-8, regex, shell windows, hex editing, incremental search, column/rectangular block, macros..

jhallenworldon Amiga runs Michigan schools' heating and air conditioning systems (2015)

Well that's what I figure: you buy their thermostat. We don't use ours for hvac control, just water leak monitoring.

Can you imagine what Samsung (or any large corporation) would want for a centralized controller for an entire school district?

jhallenworldon Amiga runs Michigan schools' heating and air conditioning systems (2015)

Maybe replace it with LoRa... but what device is in each building? I doubt you have to update the heating/cooling systems, they are likely just relay closures.

Also each school is probably on the net these days, so replace with some Wifi IOT device.

Or Samsung "Smart Things".. but unlikely to last 30 years..

jhallenworldon What’s causing the rise of hoarding disorder? (2019)

The value of your hoard is zero if you can't find the item you need, so organization is key.

My recent scheme (I organized during Covid): everything goes in covered Sterilite transparent containers with labels from a brother printer. The containers are cheap, stackable, somewhat waterproof and I find it helps that you can see a bit inside them. There are many sizes to choose from, I tend to use the 6 qt. and 16 qt. sizes the most.

They do crack if you drop them, but this is mitigated by the price.

jhallenworldon Hollerith Constants

Now keep in mind that FORTRAN IV was the standard source language for portable compilers into the 70s..

jhallenworldon A Single-Cycle 64-Bit RISC-V Register File

In many RAMs, if you read and write to the same address on the same edge, the read returns the old RAM contents, not the new one. So you have to bypass the RAM- you add a mux and a register to use the new data instead of the old if the addresses happened to be the same. In FPGAs, this bypass logic is sometimes automatically generated, depending on the coding style you used for inferred RAM.

This is in addition to bypassing the ALU stage.

So the computer architecture question is whether or not massive amounts of bypassing (with resulting slower fMAX) is worth it, vs. stalling. You need a representative test suite to answer this.

jhallenworldon FCC fines robocaller a record $300M after blocking billions of their scam calls

To allow political ads I would guess.

jhallenworldon “BASIC Computer Games” code in modern languages

It had to be a horrible experience for him since for sure he was familiar with other BASICs. One example: Prior to Pirates!, in 1982, Sid Meir made a game called Chopper Rescue in Atari 800 BASIC:

https://www.mobygames.com/game/41499/chopper-rescue/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUyebYD5UO0

C64 BASIC had to be a step back, but that's where the sales were to be made. For example, in Atari 800 BASIC variables were not limited to two characters.

C64 BASIC was really PET basic from ~1976, very close to Microsoft's Altair BASIC.

jhallenworldon When did people stop being drunk all the time?

An interesting case is the state of Georgia, which was a free state check out:

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

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

Of course people knew slavery was wrong, but profits. We may not have slavery today, but the same kind of people are around, for example against minimum wage increases or for non-compete agreements.

jhallenworldon TV Typewriter Remembered

When I programmed assembly language in the 80s, one thing we had was a fast line printer (possibly a Centronix chain or band printer). I never missed the teletype (I used a DECwriter a little), but I do sometimes miss that line printer.

Line printer output is formatted. So the equivalent to this today would be if the assembler or compiler generated a listing as a .pdf file or maybe a web page. It's technically possible I guess, but not something that has caught on- replaced with IDEs.

jhallenworldon IMAX emulates PalmPilot software to power Oppenheimer’s 70 mm release

Check out the "automatic fabric punching system" running on cassette tape:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWJZFQHklBg

No need for emulation when the original equipment is still working.

jhallenworldon Motorola 6800 EXORciser development system simulator

I used one of these back in the day for 6809:

https://www.iobium.com/applied_microsystems_em189_e.htm

It was awesome. The trace-back memory was great for finding bugs: it would print disassembled instructions prior to some trigger (you could connect the ICE to a terminal to see this).

jhallenworldon Motorola 6800 EXORciser development system simulator

Very cool! I'm going to add this photo to the GitHub readme unless anyone objects.

jhallenworldon Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

I work at a design firm: working with hardware startups is our business. Hardware is hard, but we are available to help:

http://www.nklabs.com

We help with mechanical design, engineering simulation, PCB design, embedded systems, FPGAs, firmware, agency testing, and can help set you up with a contract manufacturer.

jhallenworldon Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into subscriptions [video]

Onshape is DOA for us- if Onshape goes away, so do your designs. They must know this is a huge issue, but still they provide no way to download your full work.

jhallenworldon Supreme Court Opinion on Student Loan Forgiveness [pdf]

The point I like to make about student loans:

The USA gets to print a great deal of money and run huge deficits without incurring much inflation (even taking into account the recent inflation event). Why? Dollars are the world's reserve currency. Why? Demand for dollars is high, partially because oil is priced in dollars (petro-dollar recycling). Why? Well Iraq tried to change this, look what happened to them.. you get the idea, it's partially a consequence of history and our huge military helps.

So then it comes down to who gets this extra money. In petro-dollar recycling, much of it goes to defense contractors. I think it's entirely valid to have a discussion on the equitable distribution of this money and arguments that we can not afford loan forgiveness are total BS. The reason the money goes to the rich is because they own congress. It's in their vested interest to keep the price of labor low- one way to do this is to get people deep into dept as soon as possible.

jhallenworldon Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard (2020) [pdf]

Financially advantageous students enjoy huge benefits. Enough so that they end up in a self-sustaining insular group of their own- an upper class if you will. Do you really want this?

I understand what you are saying about meritocracy, and for sure Marxists went too far: it's fascinating looking at the what the early Soviet Union attempted: watch the Asianometry episode where they tried to ban money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWWqhsh848E

So I think the answer is of course a balance. College admissions should mostly be a straight meritocracy based on grades and high school achievement. But some help for disadvantaged classes, plus some random chance, plus some legacy for the money and contacts it brings.

Pure meritocracy has problems: an example of this is police departments. Do you really want an all-white police force patrolling all black neighborhoods, even if all of the white applicants have better scores than all of the black applicants?

Also you ignore discrimination. Decades of redlining and other similar policies have created many of today's problems.

jhallenworldon Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard (2020) [pdf]

Lack of diversity would damage their brand, so how can they legally promote diversity? Well they could promote poor students- affirmative action for lower classes.

I think allowing legacy while also promoting lower class students is OK. The lower class students benefit from the money of legacy student parents as well as the contact with the well connected legacy students themselves.

I could imagine that next there would be a supreme court case against this. A conservative court might then ban consideration of class. But then we are left with a Harvard that really is a just a club for rich kids. Smart kids who are not rich could try to fight against legacy promotion, but I doubt a conservative court would do anything about it.

jhallenworldon Vincent van Gogh's paintings and drawings

I highly recommend this long video:

"Waldemar On The Life Of Vincent Van Gogh"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=365r2m7_B10

Waldemar is awesome, Van Gogh's life is much more interesting than I ever thought.

Also highly recommend all of Waldemar's other "Perspective" videos. You will no longer be a noob. These are definitely from his perspective- it's all about Mary Magdalene with Waldemar.

jhallenworldon Optimizing a ring buffer for throughput (2021)

There is a trick to get rid of the wrap-around test. Use modular arithmetic (best if ring size is a power of 2, then even when the integer wraps everything still works):

    next_write_idx = write_idx + 1;
    if (next_write_idx == read_idx) return full;
    ring[write_idx & (RING_SIZE - 1)] = data;
    write_idx = next_write_idx;

This eliminates one possible incorrectly predicted branch and allows you to use all slots of the ring. The original code always leaves one slot empty to avoid the ambiguity between empty and completely full (where in both cases, the indexes have the same value). This could matter for small rings.

The way to think of the indexes: they hold the number of items written to or read from the ring since reset.

I guess a similar optimization to the cached entries is to pop as many items as possible before returning:

    local_write_idx = write_idx;
    local_read_idx = read_idx;
    while (local_read_idx != local_write_idx)
       process(ring[local_read_idx++] & (RING_SIZE - 1)]);
    read_idx = local_read_idx;
    return;

This has other advantages: the ring read is a tight loop and you are repeatedly calling "process"- the working set (the cache and branch predictors) will be all set up for it after the first call.

jhallenworldon AMD Introduces World’s Largest FPGA-Based Adaptive SoC for Emulation

How about KV260 or KR260? (250K LEs, Ultrascale+ 16 nm)

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/amd/SK-KV260-G/13...

The price is very good for Ultrascale+.

I think something could made cheaper using an Efinix Titanium chip, someone should do it. Their own dev. board is too expensive:

https://www.efinixinc.com/products-devkits-titaniumti180m484...

jhallenworldon AMD Introduces World’s Largest FPGA-Based Adaptive SoC for Emulation

https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/27/amd_versal_fpga_emula...

77 mm x 77 mm package (a bit larger than my old Pentium Pro).. I'm amazed they have any yield for a chip this large at 7 nm.

18 M LEs. 6864 DSPs. 6865 balls.

How long does place and route take?

$57K for the smaller VP1802..

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/xilinx-inc/XCVP18...

jhallenworldon Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

I was a USENET addict- long ago I had a shell account on "world.std.com" (The Software Tool & Die)- they were the first dial-up ISP, located in Brookline, MA. Anyway at some point they stopped- by which I mean they stopped billing me and people moved on to the web. But for at least a decade they left the machine running, and I could use it no charge.

So anyway, on a shell ISP, you read and post news with the "trn" command- "trn" is a text-only newsreader client.

For discovery- well USENET was in the filesystem. So "comp.arch" is located in /usr/spool/news/comp/arch. So you could just "find" and "grep" to discover new groups. Also there was a newsgroups file that had the full list- I forgot the name of this.

For the web today? I know there are for-pay sites, don't know any free ones. Maybe others do. Google groups was kind of good enough if you only frequented a few groups.

You can use https://www.eternal-september.org/ with a newsreader client. See: https://www.maketecheasier.com/best-usenet-newsgroups/

I just tried it with claws-mail. Here is a quick start for Ubuntu (this feels like 1999):

    apt-get install claws-mail
    claws-mail
      it forces you to create a mailbox, don't worry about this (you can delete it later).  Once you have the main screen:
        Configuration->Create Account
          Name of account: USENET
          Protocol NEWS (NNTP)
          News server: news.eternal-september.org
          Check This server requires authentication
          Fill in USER ID and Password you got from email after signing up with Eternal September and close.
     Now right click on mailbox USENET, select subscribe to newsgroup.

jhallenworldon Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

For technical discussion groups: USENET. Either moderated newsgroups or even unmoderated ones for obscure enough topics. Spam is the issue, but not much spam on USENET these days.

Also, the ham radio guys like groups.io, which is where yahoo groups migrated to. There are a lot of groups there on specific things, like Yeasu FT-857D transceiver. Groups.io has per-group file storage, which is handy for this.

Anyway on USENET, you can access it via google groups, but it's a bit non-obvious. Here is an example group:

https://groups.google.com/g/sci.math

But how can you find groups? You click on "all groups and messages" on the top, then enter a search term and hit enter. Then click "outside my org". When I do this for the term "france" it shows "4635 groups outside your organization". Open the list and look for the groups that have "." separators, for example "alt.france".

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.france

The ones without the dot separators are google groups- if you post, the message does not go outside of google. I don't know if you can create a USENET newsgroup through google groups- probably not.

It's kind of crap for discovery, but OK once you have a set of groups you use often.

Edit: actually a better way for discovery is a website like this: http://www.harley.com/usenet/master-list/index.html Once you have the name of the newsgroup, just append it to the groups.google.com/g/ (also the site provides a link).

jhallenworldon A student’s desire to get out of a exam led to a compression algorithm

I thought Huffman coding was obsolete, arithmetic coding replaced it. It allows for fractional number of bits per symbol, so is more efficient.

jhallenworldon Google cuts office space in Bay Area by more than a million square feet

Yeah, it's a more generous explanation that they want to tap into the Chicago area talent pool. It's possibly true, a new office like this was no doubt planned years ago.

jhallenworldon Google cuts office space in Bay Area by more than a million square feet

Compare average programmer's salary Chicago vs. Mountain View...

jhallenworldon The US is building factories at a fast rate

From sam.gov:

https://sam.gov/opp/57075abba039462f8ed76c2641de3394/view

"The contract requirements are geographically spread over the State of Alabama in the following counties: Clarke, Monroe, Wilcox, Dallas, Autauga, Lowndes, Montgomery and Elmore along the R.R. “Bob” Woodruff Lake, William “Bill” Dannelly Reservoir and Claiborne Lake. Alabama River Lakes consists of approximately 1,092 miles of shoreline, 39,452 acres of water and 68,006 acres of land. Facilities include 6 Class A campgrounds, 38-day use/land water access areas, 9 Multi-purpose Areas, 3 Visitor Centers/museum, 9 maintained but undeveloped Natural Resource areas, 2 Contractor maintenance Compounds, along with a Resource Management Office and other associated operational facilities. Provide services for maintenance, repair, minor construction (as defined in AR-420-1 and DA PAM 420-11) including all planning, supervision, administration, labor, equipment, materials, supplies, and replacement or repair parts that is required for performance of this contract.

The contract scope of work will include, but is not limited to, some or all of the following types of work: maintenance and repair of buildings, facilities, offices, water and electrical systems, concrete structures, maintenance facilities, operational areas, roadways, vehicles, boat docks, bathhouses, washhouses, toilets, gatehouses, security fences, sanitary disposal systems, launching ramps, playground equipment, bulletin boards, game courts, playgrounds, telephone lines, picnic sites, campsites, and other related facilities."