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rdc12

328 karma · joined August 11, 2013

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rdc12··on Building the ultimate home office again
I doubt even you would be that keen to write a C++17 compiler from scratch :P
rdc12··on Recovering the Lost Apollo 10 LM Software [video]
In many cases it will prove difficult to even be able to build or run software that hasn't been touched in 10+ years. Preserving the computational environment is a whole another concern for future software archeology.
rdc12··on The Go Compiler Needs to Be Smarter
Given how brittle autovectorizers can be (small changes to the code preventing the heuristic from firing), that is pretty much the only reliably fast way to write such a library currently, and perhaps indefinitely.
rdc12··on YouTube accidentally permanently terminated my account
I hope they they create an archive of their content to prevent being in a position they can loose it all again
rdc12··on Ask HN: What are you learning?
Making my way through the Robotics Specialization (Penn Uni series) on Coursera, almost finished the first course on Aerial Robotics.

By the end of the year I hope to have built a autonomous drone, with a custom flight controller (both motor control and sensing).

rdc12··on How to flash an LED: writing ARM assembly for an STM32 microcontroller
Microcontrollers (assuming no RTOS in use), typically don't have multiple processes, they have the main thread of execution (which in the article is the entire program) and have interrupt routines that a run in response to an external event (in this case, the timer has expired).

Using the interrupt driven approach, can led to better performance both in CPU time (async communication with slower periphials etc) and battery life (sleep states).

rdc12··on How to flash an LED: writing ARM assembly for an STM32 microcontroller
The other approach to delay's (keep in mind, that there is no other process to yield the CPU too) is to use a timer (a peripheral of the micro controller).

This would take a fair bit more code to configure the timer, and setup an interrupt to handle the timer.

rdc12··on WD Passport 4TB drives don't support WRITE SAME command
Pretty sure people have discovered that is not reliable on some drives too, that it may only destroy the logical to physical map, and not change the actual data cells.

It is surprisingly difficult to ensure deliberate data loss

rdc12··on WD Passport 4TB drives don't support WRITE SAME command
On an SSD writing zeroes, may only trigger a remap of the NAND cells. There is a paper where data has been recovered under such situations... So writing zeroes hasn't been future proof for a decade or longer.
rdc12··on Sanoid – Replication and Backups with ZFS
The switch of FreeBSD's ZFS master being ZoL is still work in progress, and is not the default ZFS in FreeBSD yet. (FreeNAS being FreeBSD + Configuration + Management Software).

A fair number of the ZoL 0.8 features (encryption, allocation classes being two prominent examples) are not available currently for FreeBSD

rdc12··on Please re-add original author to docs and license
Brad Fitzpatrick is a pretty high profile programmer, would be extra crazy to remove his name.
rdc12··on Elizabeth Holmes representing herself in Arizona civil case
The other sad thing about this, is that anyone who comes up with a legitimate tech along this line, will probably fail to get funding now
rdc12··on Ask HN: What were your most impactful podcast episodes from 2019?
The really crazy part is it all started with two fairly small things, finding a supply of dev kits from an e-waste facility and a dump of passwords that didn't seem that significant at first, and all the antics depended on those two things really.
rdc12··on BusKill: A kill cord for your laptop
Or still be in possession of your phone, if eysomeone is trying to gain access to the data on your laptop, good chance they will be interested in your phone too
rdc12··on List of Fictional Microsoft Companies
That would be about the time this store started.

https://www.thenile.co.nz/

rdc12··on Computer Architecture – ETH Zürich – Fall 2019
I have also found it works pretty well (works 80% to 90% of the time), at fetching videos from random websites that self host a video
rdc12··on Computer Architecture – ETH Zürich – Fall 2019
youtube also breaks on youtube-dl, every few months. Fortunately it becomes very obvious when a breaking change has occurred.
rdc12··on Clang Format Tanks Performance
Pretty much the HN version of nerd sniping.

https://xkcd.com/356/

rdc12··on Power Plant Turns Waste into Energy and Doubles as a Ski Slope and Climbing Wall
The former, the article briefly mentions only certified climbers may climb some sections
rdc12··on Three of the Hundred Falsehoods CS Students Believe
Worst comment I have seen was in an systems paper at Uni (assignments in a MIPS's like assembly language).

add $1, $2, $3 #add some stuff.

rdc12··on Three of the Hundred Falsehoods CS Students Believe
Is anyone good at C++ thou, didn't Bjarne only rate himself as 7/10 at C++ coding
rdc12··on I got my money back from a scammer by contacting his mom on Facebook (2016)
Since that is criminal (rather than civil) wouldn't they have to convince the DA/Prosecutor to try the case, which seems unlikely in practice.
rdc12··on From a life prison sentence to a computer engineering job
"To get around the prison’s strict no-internet policy, the program built a “faux-internet” using video seminars."

That would be a pretty significant barrier to contributing to an external project.

rdc12··on People are reporting sightings of the Tasmanian tiger, thought to be extinct
There is plenty of hunters in NZ, there is even a wikipedia page on hunting in NZ I just discovered.

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

rdc12··on Google and Ambient Computing
And a strip and gut, tech acquisition company.
rdc12··on Mispredicted branches can multiply your running times
You would probably get some benefit on a per CUDA core basis, but the extra space required would mean less CUDA cores, overall it would probably be a net loss on problems well suited to GPU acceleration
rdc12··on Mispredicted branches can multiply your running times
At the software level, you don't get a choice about this thou, the CPU is going to speculate about a bounds check regardless, the optimization is it a different abstraction layer.

Pretty much any thing on the market with the compute power of a cellphone, is going to have a feature like this too

rdc12··on Russia’s Retro Lenin Museum Still Runs on Decades-Old Apple II Computers
That problem could probably be solved using an FPGA (or even simpler tech)
rdc12··on Beware of Cranks: Misguided attempts to solve impossible mathematical problems
Fair point I have no familiarity with his earlier work, or even that there was suspicion of a connection, I did mean for my point to be a bit more general, just seemed like a reasonable example
rdc12··on Beware of Cranks: Misguided attempts to solve impossible mathematical problems
I wonder if Andrew Wiles had taken a different approach when announcing he had solved Fermat's Last Theorem if he would have been considered a crank. I would imagine that problem would have attracted nonsense solutions prior.
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