jpfr

The worst part wasn’t Linus rejecting the patch (rightly imho), but him dismissing RT as a small enthusiast’s project. There’s a huge industry depending on this. Like industrial control’s, etc.

For context, here is the rebase of the RT patch set on top of the current Linux release.

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rt/linux-rt-...

The list used to be much much longer. A lot of work is already in the mainline. It remains

   - printk
   - scheduler
   - small fry / driver fixes

Though RT will require constant “gardening” also after being fully mainlined. There’s an ongoing push to educate kernel devs how to not break RT in the future.

> The current Russian regime will never be able to repair relations with the west to the extent that will allow the Nordstream pipelines to resume operations.

The new supply chain isn't yet ready to a sufficient level. The pain inflicted by missing gas could become high enough for some "moral flexibility".

Apparently some state actor did see a greater-zero-chance for resumed operations. Otherwise, why blow up the pipeline...

That doesn't make any sense. If the Russians wanted to stop the gas supply, they could just stop supplying gas. And they had already stopped.

Destroying the infrastructure doesn't give Russia an additional capability (degree of freedom). It removes the degree of freedom to restart supplying gas. And thus removes this option for Russia to use as a bargaining chip in negotiations.

I would say this is either the US, Ukraine or a EU state. To remove the threat that the EU later in the winter falters in negotations due to public pressure to turn the heat back on (literally).

The US has the additional incentive that they want to become the only gas provider to the EU via LNG terminals. That gives them an edge over the EU both economically and politically.

The Ukraine has the additional incentive that the remaining pipelines from Russia to the EU run through Ukraine. Removing the alternative options keeps the EU allied through dependence.

Nice!

A good portion of the HPC load runs 50 year old fortran code from the netlib [1]. That could be converted over. Also for the current generation to understand the technical achievements that already exist.

The advantage of the old fortran code is speed and stability - having been tested over many years. For wide-spread acceptance, a transpiler to Julia would have to show a) little or no speed regressions and b) (formal?) assurance that the resulting code has identical semantics.

[1] https://netlib.org/

There's a community doing "fpga golf". That is, reducing the number of LUT required to implement a CPU of a given ISA.

A basic RV32 CPU is down to 500-700 LUT.

    https://github.com/YosysHQ/picorv32
    https://github.com/olofk/serv

A minimal 8051 requires about 300 LUT.

    https://github.com/MicroCoreLabs/Projects/tree/master/MCL51

Not sure how this translates from an FPGA to a transistor count. But RV32 and 8051 should be within a factor of 2-3.

As a startup founder you are automatically at the top of the company food-chain.

Managers in the middle of the food-chain are all about power-struggle and social games they play to out-compete each other.

That is especially the case for non-technical managers who don’t have a sense for the underlying technical challenges. They have all their bandwidth available for political positioning and social games.

It would be great if all managers where “serving the team” in the sense of your bullet points. But alas many don’t see it that way.

IMHO many startups are successful because they have a technical person at the top. Who is capable to understand, evaluate and positively reward technical work within their organization.

Tensor.

The term is used to mean “multi-dimensional array” in the machine learning community.

That is however not a tensor.

This looks very much inspired by Band-in-a-Box.

A commercial software to generate backing music that my teacher recommended for training jazz improvisation.

The performance was okay. I found it too sterile. It didn’t really swing … especially for the target audience of jazz musicians. It was helpful though!

Judging from its look and feel, Band-in-a-Box is around since the 90s.

Robotics is very much split into research users and industry. In industrial automation you buy a device (say a sensor or programmable logic controller) that comes with a few supported protocols. Typically a field-bus for realtime communication. And for the fancy ones also OPC UA (ISO 62541).

I don't know automation vendors that sell devices with ROS-support out of the box. With the use of Python it must be hard to get ROS safety-certified.

OPC UA is like a merge of ROS (channels for PubSub communication) and "CORBA done right" (an object-model that can be transparently interacted with over the network).

Full transparency, I maintain open62541, an open source implementation of OPC UA.

The best book for me was "Vector Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Differential Forms" by Hubbard and Hubbard.

It is the only book (I know of) that brings you from absolute basics to an integrated development of the subjects from its title. And that integrated developments actually leads to a good didactic method.

The search function will show you many comments on HN recommending it.

In addition to the average people, sucessful communities attract sociopaths that gradually take over "management roles" from the community founders. Sociopath is a strong word. See [1] for how this fits in this context.

[1] https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

That article should be required reading for HN type persons imho.

No. With heat pumps electricity is way cheaper for heating.

Only on nights with temperatures below -5 Celsius gas is cheaper.

The problem is that most vendors are sold out.

> First, a bit of off-topic, but do you know we keep #open62541 open for you on Libera.Chat? :D

Ahh, that's you! I came in to say hi on the channel whn you announced. But the channel was rather unresponsive. Will do that again with a bouncer to keep the connection open over night.

Ada and Lisp are both really nice languages. Much success with that!

There's quite a bit of OPC UA bashing across this project. So let me chime in to keep the "balance in the universe".

OPC UA is a protocol to interact with an object-oriented information model. Basically CORBA done right to use object-oriented principles and reuse software components in industrial automation.

Since OPC UA is a protocol, its performance depends mostly on the implementation. Some PLCs may be crappy. But that doesn't translate into bad performance overall. My experience goes to the exact contrary.

Full disclosure, I lead-develop and maintain an open source OPC UA implementation that sees quite a bit of use by the big guys in the automation domain. We use C for performance. And we do have funding from the industry.

https://github.com/open62541/open62541

But yes, it is hard to break into this world. Especially since solutions have to be maintained for 20+ years. A solo developer usually cannot ensure that this will still be usable some years down the line.

Dude ... we basically have the same job. I take the 50% off so other people do the technical work.

And without knowing specifics on what you do, if it is helping open source then I am grateful. In no way did I want to denigrate your work. And I understand where some frustration might come from if the effort is not properly acknowledged. Yet, there is nobility in knowing to have helped society in a quiet way.

Do you know the golden rule? "The person with the gold makes the rules."

Things only become problematic when the organizational roles start to draw power from the golden rule and build a little political fiefdom to uphold their power according to their values and skills, say, lawyering. And given the different voices in this HN thread, I'm not the only one to have noticed such effects in some previously technical communities.

[sarcasm mode]

Let's see what happens once you become the person distributing the gold. Then it shouldn't be hard to extract some respect out of the grubby dirty hands of the code contributors.

[/sarcasm mode]

> The bookkeeping that’s required when you spend government money.

Oh yeah. Acquiring government funding and the reporting for it is a big part of my day job. Coding still happens ... after midnight.

The funny thing is, I might even up as a beneficiary of this. And dump 50% of the money into technical work. The rest goes to the organizational overhead needed to get the funding in the first place. But the 50% technical work have to be the focus and acknowledged as the focus.

> The people behind this study are the open knowledge foundation germany - a foundation that exists since a decade, not just some random people that met and thought “oh cool, let’s rip off some government money.”

Looking at the teams-page of the OKF, that's a funny bunch. 90% did not work on open source prior to taking this gig (with just one or two shining counterexamples). And now they are doing it "for the love of it"?

It is okay to do open source as a normal dayjob. And teaching kids to code is important as well. I guess what pisses me off is the political class taking on roles of "thought leadership" in the "secret garden of the geeks" where entrance was once earned by hard, cold lines of code free of bugs.

Now we are in a decision making role vs support role discussion.

“People skills” mostly are detecting the group consensus and running with it. Not the type of leader you need in tech.

Geeks are known to fight hard for their independent opinions. Especially when it goes against the group opinion. You need the willingness to do so - if required - from a leader ... so not a pure people person.

What is required though is being a good communicator. Most geeks learn that very fast. If properly taught...

Accounting can be hired for pretty cheap virtually everywhere on earth.

Fabrice Bellard

Paul Graham

Rasmus Lerdorf

The world is full of ‘em.

You don’t need one of those as the maintainer. They can also just hire somebody to do it for them.

But you do need some number of successful geeks in advisory roles to keep the political class on target when the funding is allocated.

On the contrary. I am very much in favor of people that put in the effort to support the organization around open source.

But it should be done by persons that also have insight in the technical work. Otherwise problems of judgment cannot be avoided.

That’s the same in every profession by the way. You want to be head of the carpenters guild? Work as a carpenter for some time. Even if it is just carpentry as a hobby. You don’t like it as a hobby? Well, that says a lot already.

There is ample organization and leadership skill among the geeks. Look at the site you are on and its background. Many millionaire geeks...

People with nice haircuts that produce nice looking documents and talk to the government for funding.

If the money funds technology that is still great!

But be very careful when a subculture becomes a platform for organizers who never did the actual work. Be it art or code or whatever.

The majority of people might have the best intentions. The fear though is that we have here a nice breeding ground for sociopathic behavior in the open source space (for a narrow definition of sociopathic: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths).

Funding basic infrastructure as open source is a great idea. And the only way to keep a market economy going. Otherwise the infrastructure is used increasingly to lock out small competitors.

However, I see a distinct lack of “geeks” in this initiative. Instead a lot of pol-sci majors that want to “manage” / claim developments they themselves would not have the skills to build.

After following the course, you should be able to grok the solver code in /src/system.cpp. That looks fairly standard.

The interesting part (to me, as that is not my specialty) lies in the translation of the 3D constraints (including rotation, etc.) into a single objective function for solving Newton-style.

I teach a class on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdkTDauaUnQpzuOCZyUUZ...

Understanding optimization at this level and being able to formulate your own problems in one of the canonical forms gives you super powers.

You don’t even have to build your own solvers. The commercial/open source ones are typically good enough.

In the context of gmp, people write architecture-specific assembly for the inner loop anyway.

Besides that, you raise good points on sources of complexity. I’m waiting for the benchmarks once such developments have been incorporated. Everything else is guesswork.

The idea is to use the compressed instruction extension. Then two adjacent instructions can be handled like a single “fat” instruction with a special case implementation.

That allows more flexibility for CPU designs to optimize transistor count vs speed vs energy consumption.

This guy clearly did not look at the stated rationale for the design decisions of RISC-V.

Notice that the TeX you have installed locally is many conversion steps removed from the WEB source.

Pascal code is extracted from the WEB. Then the Pascal is translated into C. Afterwards, years of development have accumulated on that C source to handle utf-8, modern fonts, PDF output, etc.

Most work nowadays happens on top of LuaTeX that replaces and extends pdfTeX.

There are shockingly few people maintaining that core of the TeX environment.

The source control is mirrored here: https://github.com/TeX-Live/luatex/tree/experimental

The text seems to imply that people on the "technical track" (only programming) are doing so because of some flaw in their personality. That is absolutely not the case!

This is not a good way to launch "hermit programmer" as a new term. The term is not defined and mentioned only three times in the entire text (once in the title). I suppose most readers have different assumptions on its meaning.

I know a few "hermits" (the way I interpret the term) that are excellent engineers and also excellent communicators. Only that they work via mailing lists and not in person. And that they are not willing to succumb to a manager bossing them around.

Cannot confirm. Saw it a few days ago (in France) and every major scene was straight from the book.

The movie is good. Somebody not „in the know“ might read the book after seeing the film and not even know which came first.

The movie spans only the first half of the book. The second half will be more difficult to cast into a movie script. A lot of that is Paul’s spiritual experience and inward looking stream-of-consciousness…

The bit manipulation extension was released as a draft for a public review.

See the thread here: https://groups.google.com/a/groups.riscv.org/g/isa-dev/c/YiK...

Uhm. That's not exactly a new result. See Theorem 2.7 (page 34) in [1] for the classical formulation.

If the advantage is in the notation, please enlighten me.

[1] Jazwinski, Andrew H. Stochastic Processes and Filtering Theory. Academic Press, 1970.

https://books.google.fr/books?id=4AqL3vE2J-sC&pg=PA34