Hacker News Reader

throwawayishon Why Is the Pentagon a Pentagon?

That Obelisk thing and the house with the Lincoln figure in it that is in the same park (or whatever).

I have a Linux-based router/firewall, but it's all configuration files and stuff. Something with fancy graphs and statistics would be nice :)

throwawayishon AMD Ryzen 5 1600X vs Core i5 Review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXHlTMKyse8

(Heaven Unigine and Prime95 at the same time)

throwawayishon AMD Ryzen 5 1600X vs Core i5 Review

> But I guess the money you saved on buying the CPU will outweigh the electricity costs even in countries where electricity is expensive.

Unless he's running 24/7 and paying way too much, yeah, by a large margin. Even these older Xeons weren't that bad at energy saving.

throwawayishon AMD Ryzen 5 1600X vs Core i5 Review

I had a similar chip since 2011 and only recently upgraded. For thread-heavy workloads even one of the fastest E3 Xeons is only like 40-50 % faster (if no special insns like AES can be used).

Safe to say it had superb price/performance (IIRC paid like 150 € for it).

throwawayishon OpenBSD 6.1 released

Is there a router/firewall distro or administration tool for OpenBSD that's recommendable (e.g. like pfsense without all the enterprisey bloat, or like securityrouter without the licensing stuff)?

throwawayishon An efficient power converter design reduces resting power consumption by 50%

I recently powered an old Acer laptop on that I didn't use for a while. It informed me that "/dev/sda2 has gone 941 days without being checked", after it finished that and booting fully up (a quick affair, even on that machine with no SSD), the i3 status bar further informed me, that the battery still holds a 57 % charge :)

throwawayishon The end-to-end refresh of our server hardware fleet

Intel probably intentionally advertises with their weirdo socket names (1156 -> 1155 -> 1150 -> 1151) just to confuse people more. Heck, they probably choose the pin counts in such a strange order just to be more confusing. It's not like they have usable names (Socket H, H2, ...).

throwawayishon Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance

IA64 failed because it was a bad answer to a question no one asked. AMD got it right, that's why AMD64 won.

throwawayishon AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

CPU intensive != single threaded

throwawayishon AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

> Intel's quad cores are only really required for the pro Counter-Strike players who want 600fps at 1080p just to get the absolute latest frame.

The source engine isn't exactly the pinnacle of engine development.

It doesn't really know what to with more than 2ish cores, so you probably get more FPS by using a dual core instead of a quad core, which tend to go farther in terms of overclocking.

throwawayishon AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

Or when Intel HT first appeared. Or when Intel HT reappeared. Or when the first dual core appeared. Every time Windows needed updates to perform properly; Linux also needed patches to adjust scheduling for Zen and also received patches in many other instances.

This is nothing new or outstanding at all.

throwawayishon AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

The bigger E7 scratch the 200 W mark pretty hard and IBM already had POWER chips go beyond 200 W. However, cooling and power density are ... problematic. The same goes for accelerators. Supermicro will happily deliver you a 1U box with four pascals and two Xeon sockets, but there is no datacenter in the world were you can stuff 42 of those in a cabinet. [Which doesn't mean that these don't make sense]

However, high end systems don't lend themselves well to mass-deployment (i.e. scale out).

throwawayishon AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

"IBM did it first"

Well not with HBM (which is DRAM), but huge amounts of L3 SRAM on a MCM... POWER5 I believe.

throwawayishon AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

ARM cores are much weaker, crypto performance without NEON is absymal across the board. Of course, compared to hardware-acceleration software always seems slow; Haswell manages AES-OCB at <1 cpb.

throwawayishon AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

This is not part of AES-NI and has never been released in a mid-range+ server/desktop CPU, only part of some Atom parts (Goldmont). Therefore software support is poor (I think OpenSSL does not support it). It is said to be included in 2018+ Cannonlake, though.

throwawayishon AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

n-P / n-S / n-way = how many sockets/processors a system has. A 1S system has one socket / processor, a 2S system two, a 4S four and so on.

x U (or x HE, if you're talking with a German manufacturer, they like to make that mistake ... ;) are rack-units, i.e. how large the case is.

throwawayishon AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2

I think Naples is a very exciting development, because:

- 1S/2S is obviously where the pie is. Few servers are 4S.

- 8 DDR4 channels per socket is twice the memory bandwidth of 2011, and still more than LGA-36712312whateverthenumberwas

- First x86 server platform with SHA1/2 acceleration

- 128 PCIe lanes in a 1S system is unprecedented

All in all Naples seems like a very interesting platform for throughput-intensive applications. Overall it seems that Sun with it's Niagara-approach (massive number of threads, lots of I/O on-chip) was just a few years too early (and likely a few thousands / system to expensive ;)

throwawayishon WikiLeaks Releases Trove of Alleged C.I.A. Hacking Documents

If I'm not mistaken then the NYT has shown in the past that it can get basic tech/security facts like these straight.

throwawayishon CIA malware and hacking tools

throwawayishon Gravity: a new programming language and VM written in C

And why is that worth a HN submission?

throwawayishon Mid-stack inlining in the Go compiler

In case someone else is wondering: What is being called "mid-stack inlining" here is what is generally understood by the term "inlining".

throwawayishon Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

Actually Windows can and does use NTFS transactions (TxF) in the Installer and Updater code, so the probability of non-recoverable damage should be lower (which is also my experience; power off a Linux machine during updates and you are pretty much guaranteed to have many packages with empty files, partial file trees and so on; power off a Windows machine and it probably is still fine, but sometimes you get weird issues where it can't properly reinstall/deinstall some updates to try again).

throwawayishon What the death of the CRT display technology means for classic arcade machines

I don't see the "does at length argue about the health risks of X-Rays emitted" in the article. It discusses them and concludes that they are widely considered safe.

> CRTs can emit a small amount of X-ray radiation as a result of the electron beam's bombardment of the shadow mask/aperture grille and phosphors. The amount of radiation escaping the front of the monitor is widely considered not to be harmful. The Food and Drug Administration regulations in 21 C.F.R. 1020.10 are used to strictly limit, for instance, television receivers to 0.5 milliroentgens per hour (mR/h) (0.13 µC/(kg·h) or 36 pA/kg) at a distance of 5 cm (2 in) from any external surface; since 2007, most CRTs have emissions that fall well below this limit.

throwawayishon What the death of the CRT display technology means for classic arcade machines

The CPU isn't actually very powerful, they use low-power Jaguar cores at 1.6 GHz or so.

throwawayishon What the death of the CRT display technology means for classic arcade machines

There are also a handful of "rejuvenation" processes. For example:

- Filament-cathode shorts can be burned out (by discharging a capacitor across the short) - Cathode poisoning can be reversed (e.g. http://www.ke5fx.com/crt.html )

throwawayishon What the death of the CRT display technology means for classic arcade machines

> there was an inventory glut that covered the world demand for CRTs for nearly a decade after the last one was made.

I collect and restore analogue oscilloscopes and even today you can still get original NOS scope tubes for many models that have ceased production 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago.

throwawayishon What the death of the CRT display technology means for classic arcade machines

> And CRT are just a giant light bulb, bombarding you with not so good radiation.

In other words, you do not know how a CRT works.

Educate yerself, it's free: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube

throwawayishon Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

My casual observation: most commuters don't use a laptop in the train. Those who do, mostly Windows. Apples seem fairly rare, as in, every 20th unit or so.

throwawayishon Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

A PC (yes, true, technically Macs are now PCs, but they're still special PCs, or at least Apple says that) has mainly the advantage that it's cheaper while being faster. Now, to be fair, I don't like to use laptops (they're slow, limited and annoying), so I mostly refer to desktop hardware (best bang/buck ratio, easy to make very, very silent, very fast, easily extended).

Quarrel over operating systems is pretty pointless, if it doesn't run natively, slap a hypervisor on it and run whatever you like in a VM; for me that'd be a Linux or BSD, I'm not really opinionated there (although certain things run faster in Linux due to experience).

(Obviously I don't grok the laptop lifestyle, I don't understand the "work everywhere" mentality, in fact, I don't want it at all. It's called work place for a reason - at least for me. I do have a laptop (or half a dozen, who has time to keep record?), the mainly used one is a Getac unit with a carrying handle that weights ~3 kilos or so; at least it's silent, has a superbright screen and a battery that's larger than most ultrabooks by volume ;)