Hacker News Reader

sllabreson FastECC – Reed-Solomon coder computing one million parity blocks at 1 GB/s

previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14290617

sllabreson Multiplying and Dividing on the 6502 (2021)

I'll remember well UCSD Pascal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal especially as compiling on a system with one floppy drive required 5-6 changes of the floppy disk even for a 'hello world'. So one would think twice before starting the compiler only to find a simple syntax error after a minute or two. :)

sllabreson US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

The country of Elbonia passes the bill for the "moon bashing act" and permanently forward the clock by _12_ hours (and not just a laughable one hour), after Elbonien scientists discovered that the cost savings for street lighting alone is equivalent to half of their gross domestic product.

... and i will adjust my clock dynamically, so i'm never too late again.

sllabreson The Patriot Missile Failure (2000)

If you like such 'stories' i can recommend "Computer-Related Risks by Peter G. Neumann". A bit older (1994), but still an interesting read.

sllabreson Understanding CPU on AIX Power SMT Systems

I would say that folding is not a consequence of SMT, but of the assignment between the VP (virtual processors) assigned to the LPAR (VM) and the processing units assigned. So more a effect resulting from the virtualization with consequences in conjunction with SMT.

sllabreson Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

>> Kernel panics don't happen nearly as often as they used to

My earliest kernel I have used in something one might call production are 1.2.12 around 1995. I must say even then, with this early kernels I had no panics at all and much higher uptimes (patching for security wasn't as much of an issue at that time ;-) )

sllabreson The Cryptography of Orphan Annie and Captain Midnight

a crumpy commercial!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdA__2tKoIU

;)

sllabreson Sequencing your DNA with a USB dongle and open source code

Isn't that quite similar to help solving cold cases as example:

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

On April 24, 2018, authorities charged 72-year-old DeAngelo with eight counts of first-degree murder, based upon DNA evidence; investigators had identified members of DeAngelo's family through forensic genetic genealogy.

sllabreson Honey bees, Varroa mites and unintended consequences

~ 10 years old, and only slightly related, but interesting documentary:

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

sllabreson Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)

There was a nice GUI back then, developed Independent from the POVRAY renderer named "Moray". More surprisingly, there is still a website online for the GUI:

http://www.stmuc.com/moray/

sllabreson Show HN: P2P remote desktop – an alternative to TeamViewer / AnyDesk

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3848762

sllabreson Lidar reveals hundreds of long-lost Maya and Olmec ceremonial centers

Maybe I do not fully understand, what is requested but I think am missing something.

I thought one would like to have a ground profile, _without_ the trees. If one laser penetrates the leaves (and not the ground), why the complicated setup with to laser signals and calculating the difference. The second penetrating would be sufficient.

sllabreson 3D Printing – High Security Key

Everybody who has watched one of the many interesting Bosnianbill videos (with the cool intros ;)) might be surprised to learn that Bosnianbills video channel retires.

If you have watched one of his videos and learned something give him a nice comment and a thumb up on a video you liked, as LPL suggests [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ASQQboFg98

sllabreson Can You See the Republic of Ireland from England?

Thats about United Kingdom, but Ireland is mentioned https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10

sllabreson IBM mainframe beats other platforms for cost and performance

True for all x86 virtualization i know of. But not true for IBM Power LPARs where only the entitled CPU resources have to be licensed and can even be shared between LPAR (Power Enterprise Pool). I don't know for sure but would therefore assume that it's the same for the IBM mainframe platform.

sllabreson Image unshredding using a TSP solver

This is quite similar to the early decryption of the analog Nagravision TV encryption system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagravision worked. Did it myself at the time, but on to slow hardware/to little optimized software. The decryption took much to long to be usable, but it was fun to see that it worked quite fine

sllabreson Ever Given Everywhere

As it seems, the web page is a little to late and the ever given is free :)

sllabreson GeoGuessing with Deep Learning

The linked article https://somerandomstuff1.wordpress.com/2019/02/08/geoguessr-... is interesting -- at least for me, a very casual player ;).

sllabreson Cricut Wants Users to Pay for Unlimited Use of Cutting Machines They Already Own

Happy user of silhouette.

sllabreson Ditherpunk 2 – beyond 1-bit

Just some days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25633483

sllabreson Boeing 757 cargo door opens after takeoff

https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/g-dhkz#26d05e8c

sllabreson Chromium cleans up its act and daily DNS root server queries drop by 60B

Correct, and IIRC the TTL is 5 days.

sllabreson Reloadr – Hot code reloading tool for Python

Cool feature.

Visual Studio seems to have "edit and continue" which I only knew from VB, but seems to be available in C# and C++ too. Not the same, but it shortens the development cycle in a similar fashion.

The feature in Python reminds me on hot code loading in Erlang which I found quite interesting when i first read (never used) about the feature. I wondered which other languages provides (or didn't) an equivalent solution. Back then it felt a bit scary, with not much more than RCS as VCS around :) But I think Erlang implemented it for increased up-time, not for increased development cycle?

To keep the up-time high, today even parts or entire operating systems are patched 'live' (ksplice, kpatch, kgraft, AIX live update) (https://ksplice.oracle.com/) (https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_aix_72/insta...). Here too to prevent downtime and technologically completely different from what is presented here.

sllabreson Code Points

ma͢d͟n͡e͡ss :D

sllabreson The HP-35

"postfix based" == RPN (reverse polish notation)

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

If one wants to try out on an android mobile go to:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ab.x48

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.emulator.f...

sllabreson Wikipedia's in Trouble (2019)

not a bad example nevertheless, but as we are talking about grammar

https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/perly.y

sllabreson Automatic Optical Illusions Using Python and OpenCV

This is the same effect JPEG chroma subsampling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling encoding takes advantage of.

sllabreson Moving your SSH port isn’t security by obscurity

The articles summarizes

> It’s where you keep the mechanism secret, not the key.

I think this can be, as you write, defense in depth if the secret of the mechanism is not the only defense.

As example the block cipher for the Common Scrambling Algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Scrambling_Algorithm has been secret. As it seems that has delayed the analysis of the system for about 8 years, but not damaged the procedure.

sllabreson Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

Yes another 'glitch' and even funnier, because no one was harmed...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc.

sllabreson Nukemap

Yes, it is.

But it seems to had another use. The W66 warhead has been used in the Sprint anti ballistic missile, to intercept and destroy ICBM.