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moosedev

656 karma · joined January 31, 2020

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moosedev··on Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting
Not quite RTX, but it almost happened, 25 years ago :P http://www.x86-secret.com/articles/divers/v5-6000/v56kgb-6.h...
moosedev··on A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000
The earlier machines had much higher quality capacitors that are mostly still OK afaik. Consensus (if I may be so bold as to try to represent it) in the Amiga community today is: definitely recap the later Amigas (A600, A1200, A4000, CD32) with their cheaper SMT caps that usually leak and slowly destroy the motherboard, but A1000* and A500 usually don’t need it.

*The caps on the motherboard, anyway. I am not sure about the durability of the internal PSUs. I haven’t bothered to replace anything in either of the A1000s I acquired recently.

moosedev··on I am (not) a failure: Lessons learned from six failed startup attempts
That's true. It feels like every other ladder-climbing wannabe out there is also trying to attract powerful people's attention on Twitter et al these days, so I imagine it's much harder to stand out than it was for a kid in the 1970s. But you're not wrong.
moosedev··on Ask HN: What is a common PR review time at your company?
As a reviewer... it really, really depends on how trivial or gnarly the PR is.

If it's a simple change that is obviously correct, I'll try to unblock the author ASAP - often within minutes, even if it interrupts my flow.

If it's a giant PR with lots of risky changes in vital code, an awkward-to-unreadable diff, and/or maddeningly questionable design/coding decisions that require me to think a lot and compose some nuanced, reasoned comments to steer you in a better direction, then, well, you might find yourself nagging me for a review 2 days later. (And I'll probably ask you to split up PRs like this in future, e.g. to separate major refactoring from any logic changes.)

moosedev··on Remote code execution via MIDI messages
Great project, write-up, and sense of humor in the videos!

> Using that part number I wasn’t able to find any information about the chip online apart from an article that claimed it was based around a “SuperH” CPU core – an ISA that I’ve encountered for the first time ever in that article.

Also found in Sega 32x, Sega Saturn, and Sega Dreamcast! And some early Pocket PCs (turn-of-the-century handhelds running Windows CE) like the HP Jornada series, although most Pocket PCs were ARM-based.

moosedev··on The GTA III port for the Dreamcast has been released
https://x.com/falco_girgis/status/1873520002306871358
moosedev··on Show HN: WebGPU Tech Demo
Nice demo - small tip/bug report, when I enable performance stats I get “FPS: 30.2ms”, which doesn’t make dimensional sense - one side of this statement has the wrong units.

If “30.2ms” is how long it took to render 1 frame, then label it “frame time”, not FPS (frames per second, or frame rate). Or if you want to show FPS, compute an actual FPS value, ie 1000/frame_time_ms.

(Frame time is a better metric for performance optimization work than the more popularly known frame rate, because frame time is linear, and frame rate isn’t.)

moosedev··on 80286 ATX mainboard based on the IBM 5170 AT PC
The tradeoff would be speed and implementation simplicity against the high cost of SRAM, like you highlighted :)

(Re your 386 RAM board: Nice necroproject!)

moosedev··on 80286 ATX mainboard based on the IBM 5170 AT PC
Oh right, I didn’t read far enough to see there’s no DRAM support - very unusual for a 286 system (at least a PC-compatible one). That’s a big tradeoff, indeed. Thanks!
moosedev··on 80286 ATX mainboard based on the IBM 5170 AT PC
Those are SRAMs. A 286 system wants DRAM, which is usually a lot cheaper.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/difference-between-sram-and-dr...

moosedev··on Software Engineer Pay Heatmap Across the US
Note the “all” in the example binds to “across”, not “McD’s”.

“All McD’s” - quite precise; literally all the McD’s.

“McD’s all across the country” - a much looser group, implies various McD’s spanning roughly coast to coast (hence “all across the country”), but not necessarily including the westernmost and easternmost McD’s - just a decent distribution of west-to-east, perhaps with no giant gaps (like missing the whole Midwest).

moosedev··on Gaining access to anyones Arc browser without them even visiting a website
Agreed!
moosedev··on Gaining access to anyones Arc browser without them even visiting a website
You’re technically correct, given a literal reading of the post you quoted, but the use of “could” there was idiomatic - let me explain:

There’s a (fairly dated) idiom, “it’s the least I can do”, used when you are offering to do something to make up for a mistake or offense, but the person you hurt says your offer of compensation is unnecessary. For example:

Situation: Person A bumps into Person B in the cafe, causing B to drop their coffee cup.

A: I’m so sorry! Let me buy you another coffee.

B: That’s not necessary - it was an accident, and I had almost finished my drink anyway.

A: It’s the least I can do!

B: Oh, thank you so much!

Buying B a new coffee is not _literally_ the least A could have done - the least A could have done is nothing - but that’s the English idiom. “Can” is acting more like “should” here. You could read it as “It’s the least I can do (if I’m a good person, which I am)”.

moosedev··on Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
moosedev··on Roguecraft Devs on Developing for Amiga in 2024
Thanks for sharing this! I've been using vscode-amiga-debug for a while but have often wished it had a stdlib, if only for quick prototyping & debugging side quests.
moosedev··on The Resilience of Internet Infrastructures in Pacific Northwest to Earthquakes [pdf]
> To address these issues, we design ShakeNet: a framework to study the impacts of earthquake-induced shaking on the Internet infrastructure.

Appears to be distinct from existing[0] seismic sensing-related things[1] called ShakeNet. (Cool paper, kinda wish they had Googled that name before deciding on it!)

[0] https://www.usgs.gov/publications/shakenet-a-portable-wirele... (2015)

[1] https://shakenet.raspberryshake.org/

moosedev··on Things I learned while writing an x86 emulator (2023)
You might enjoy Ken’s latest article on some of this stuff, posted just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40899393
moosedev··on Apple downgrades new M2 iPad Air, 9-core GPU instead of 10-core
> Who buys iPads anyway?

I do.

> I have two and I regret it.

Apparently, so do you.

moosedev··on The VGA Attribute Controller Is Weird
A lot of monitors* in that era (1994ish) that could handle 640x480 or 800x600 at an acceptable-ish refresh rate of 60, 72, or 75Hz, could only do 1024x768 as an interlaced mode - meaning odd and even lines were drawn on alternate frames, so the overall refresh rate was effectively halved. The lack of phosphor persistence over such long "frames" manifested as visible flicker. IIRC, 1024x768 @ 43Hz interlaced was a common (supported, if rarely used) standard. It hurt.

* Graphics card RAMDAC bandwidth was a limiting factor for higher resolutions x higher refresh rates, too. And video memory limited higher desktop resolutions x higher color depths for years - really until 3D accelerators were coming of age.

moosedev··on Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
GP is (quite reasonably) using a deliberately slightly silly example as a rhetorical flourish. I would do the same. Think of it of a stand-in or totem for all of the possibilities (from silly to very real) that leap into horrifying life in an engineer's brain when they learn that a critical system has a single point of failure.
moosedev··on Relativistic Spaceship
I assumed they meant a baseball at baseball speed.
moosedev··on A Grand Theft Auto III Re-Implementation
I think the GTA 3 family of GTA games did, yes. They were PlayStation 2 games first, and RenderWare was relatively common for PS2 games.

Source: worked in game dev using RenderWare on PS2 back then

moosedev··on Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers
I think I read in one of the earlier Titan threads this week that density increases pretty slowly with water depth. Water isn't very compressible, after all. So, to your question, I would guess "yes, but not by much".
moosedev··on Ask HN: Tired of being a software engineer, what next?
+1 to talking with a therapist. If you’re in the US, you may have access to Lyra through your FAANG job, entitling you to a bunch of free-to-you sessions… but even if not, if you can find a therapist you click with, it’s worth the money, IME.
moosedev··on Neural Network Architecture Beyond Width and Depth
Paper was submitted almost exactly 1 year ago, and last revised in Jan 2023.

Not sure if title needs a (2022), just pointing out the above in case anyone else like me read “19 May” and mistakenly thought it was a 2 day old paper :)

moosedev··on The Great CPU Stagnation
I’m sorry you went/are going through that.

I know you said it’s been ruled out, but I sometimes wonder if I should worry more about aging lithium batteries in older devices… the oldest ones (e.g. 2000s handhelds) are now old enough to be retro-cool and therefore worth keeping for nostalgia, but they’re also a bit scary.

moosedev··on The Great CPU Stagnation
Yikes. What started the fire?
moosedev··on Ask HN: Those learning about neural networks, what do you find most difficult?
OP said “watched”, so probably this playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAqhIrjkxbuWI23v9cThsA9Gv... . It’s pretty good!
moosedev··on My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated
> nearly 20

Nearly 30. Sorry :-)

moosedev··on Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023
Height was probably something like mid-2021 to early 2022. But note that Apple (broadly, handwaving, obviously subject to stock price fluctuations, offer negotiation, time-in-role, etc.) pays their software engineers less than the other FAANGs. Substantially less than a few of them.
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