StringyBob

Vital bit of background context from the article:

Now in his 50s, Erp was 19 and still living in his hometown of Harare, Zimbabwe, when he got the call from a local shopkeeper telling him that a drunk driver had collided with his father, who was riding a motorbike. By the time he arrived on the scene, it was too late. He found his father’s body under a blanket. “I’m long past that”, he says in his thick Zimbabwean accent, swilling his tea. “But my feeling is that if I can save someone else that experience, then that’d be quite a good thing.”

See also virtual 6502 and ARM1 e.g. http://www.visual6502.org/sim/varm/armgl.html

This spaghetti also reminding me of a scene from the three body problem (trying to avoid spoilers)

Amazing, I had no idea how far things had diverged between logic and flash since the move to 3D.

https://borecraft.com/files/Comparison_Current_NAND.pdf (from 2019) has some of the cross-sections I was looking for - and that only goes up to 96 layers!

What does 'layer' mean in this context? I'm only familiar with planar style logic process nodes which have maybe up to 20 layers (and way more lithography steps to manufacture those layers), but I am completely ignorant of how the term is used for a flash process node.

How many layers are needed for each physical cell? Is it 1,2, or a lot more? Is this effectively 321 physical TLC cells stacked vertically and some planar style logic at the bottom of the stack.

Also, where do multiple pieces of silicon factor into this - I assume we might be up to 16 silicon dies deep with through-silicon-vias, which would mean a cross section of a package could actually have 5000 layers - that sounds crazy!

Intel had over 130,000 employees as of a couple of months ago.

15% layoffs is nearly 20,000 people.

Intel had over 130,000 employees as of a couple of months ago.

15% layoffs is nearly 20,000 people.

I don’t use GitHub in my day to day work, but since I don’t see any other answers: for me the main reason it to prove the tag hasn’t been changed under me feet. It’s too easy for a lightweight tag to be changed without you knowing, whereas an annotated tag has some permanence of a date, comment, sha, author etc.

Yes - extremely poorly thought out from Apple.

Has caught out multiple people at my workplace. Feature is buried in the camera pipeline of MacOS, had assumed it was a bug in zoom that it could not be properly disabled - until same thing happened in a msteams call too, so realized it wasn't the zoom feature recognition triggering!

For a highly developed English-speaking country it is very underrepresented in software tech.

We’re here quietly - all working for American / multi-national companies. Just little of the Silicon Valley startup culture here in the UK.

Whatever happened to caveat emptor?

From NYtimes 2015 [1]

Some consider the Autonomy acquisition to be the worst corporate deal ever.

Just how bad is confirmed by the latest revelations from a shareholders’ suit over the deal: Mr. Apotheker didn’t even read the due diligence report on Autonomy that H.P. commissioned from KPMG, the giant accounting firm. Nor did Raymond J. Lane, the board chairman, or any other member of the board, according to a report prepared by the law firm Proskauer Rose, which was hired to represent H.P.’s independent directors.

Had they read even the executive summary, they would have discovered numerous warnings — enough to have prevented the deal in the first place, or at least to have led them to renegotiate it.

“For the C.E.O. not to have read it, for an acquisition this size, is highly disturbing,” said Charles M. Elson, director of the Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware and co-author of “The Art of M&A Due Diligence.” “And the entire board should have at least read the executive summary.”

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/business/leo-apotheker-ma...

24 in one month for July 2009!

Always impressed by how fast a CT machine actually spins compared to that first version that took half an hour to rotate 180 degrees!

You can see them with the cover off in many videos eg https://youtu.be/9jYu-VZ79Fs

As he states near end of video, nothing else right now beats streaming for convenience. I’d prefer a system where my monthly subscription gets divided up only between artists I listen to, but it seems in reality that hasn’t happened as a lot of the revenu goes to big record labels to persuade them to keep the big artists on spotify (and not even necessarily to those big artists!)

Just wanted to say hello, as someone who used to regularly browse haddock.org for interesting links before hackernews existed!

For at least one gen of MacBooks (maybe the ill-fated 2016 MacBook Pros?), this was actually a design fault. In the battle for thinness there was not enough separation between screen and keys when closed, leading to damage to screen coating over time. Newer versions had a slightly larger rubber lip on the screen to increase the separation - as I noticed after getting a replacement for a damaged model

There was a general rule banning drones from Sagamartha national park, but actually you just need a permit. However if you are going over Everest, you are crossing the border from Nepal to Tibet (China), so you would have more of a challenge getting approval there.

In general though drones qualify as ‘quite annoying’, in national parks - particularly in areas like peaks or base camps where others are present.

What devices are there in the field are reliant on the Google IoT Core Service platform?

Are there ‘smart’ devices that are just going to stop working unless people rewrite the firmware for a different system like AWS or Azure IoT?

The quotes in that page have some of the most spectacularly misleading statistics I’ve seen for a while. Might as well point out that for telling the time looking at my watch is more energy efficient than looking at the clock in my car dashboard (and then calculating energy efficiency while comparing power consumption of a car and a watch)

Am I reading this right? That section also says he made shape charges out of cucumber that could cut steel!

It’s complicated is an understatement ;)

I assume most people have no visibility of the effort of hundreds of engineers who work on behalf of the big smartphone companies tuning for what happens in the image pipeline between camera/raw Bayer data to what your app receives.

There is a reason the quality of pictures in phones has got so good - lots of tuning, quite a bit of magic, as well as software and hardware co-optimization.

ps. By far the worst. Because it supports multiple syntax types I can never remember the ps command options. Even if you google for examples you get different syntax and end up with a mix of the same option letters doing different things in one command. It seems to lead to all sorts of subtly unexpected behaviors

What works for me: Take a minimum of 2 weeks vacation in one block (3 or 4 is amazing if you can negotiate it - don’t be afraid to ask if you are at $bigcorp). If possible don’t use a computer in that period, don’t check work mail/slack on a phone. Don’t do side projects if they are computer based. You need to try to do something (or nothing is ok too) as long as it is different physically/mentally. You need to get out of your current mindset and environment. That likely means getting away from your current location to avoid the temptation to just sit around at home and watch Netflix (which is not a big enough change).

Let your team know you’ll be offline for the vacation period, the world will continue while you take a break.

See how you feel on your return.

I have no idea who or what to believe, but there is a quote from someone claiming to be a NGO documenting war crimes that has had their records wiped by this https://github.com/IdealismIncinerator/node-ipc/blob/master/...

I’ve seen claims that if you factor in negative externalities, the true price is at least double, and maybe nearer $15/gallon

I’d say ‘recommendation’ not ‘ad’ :)

This was the related section https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g?t=4637s that lead me down the rabbit hole of watching the whole thing

I have no connection other than stumbling across it after seeing this story today and thought the critique tied in well.

Having watched cryptocurrency from a distance via HN etc. for over a decade, I thought I had a general understanding, but this made me realize I wasn’t aware of what smart contracts really were (just looked up solidity today and details of The DAO hack). The potential for irreversible losses, fraud and security holes are much bigger than I realized.

This also lead me to this video which will now be my ‘go to’ recommendation for anyone asking about crypto and NFTs - it’s a general critique and social commentary of the issues with crypto - not specifically about this case, but I thought excellent, and the first time I think I’ve watched a 2hr vid on YouTube ‘Line goes up’ - https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g

Well, you can just grab the data very easily: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/download

Not as much tech detail, but for an alternative source, here’s an intro by the team dashboard lead - https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2022/01/20/reporting-the-vital-sta...

Also - I’ve been really impressed by the openness of the team actually doing the work - eg threads like https://twitter.com/pouriaaa/status/1476892793729654787

and in particular this analysis of debugging a problem that the dashboard encountered - which also gives a lot more background context: https://dev.to/xenatisch/cascade-of-doom-jit-and-how-a-postg...

Did someone say ‘3D XPoint‘?

https://www.theregister.com/2015/07/28/intel_micron_3d_xpoin...

Always thought 3DXpoint (later released as optane) seemed cool, but had an almost impossible hill to climb by being completely oversold before it was released such that it was doomed to disappoint.