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Crypto continues to help nobody and achieve nothing in the real world

It's kind of surprising how little progress has been made.

It is absolutely possible to use privacy-respecting low-fee tokens to purchase ebooks, purchase "no advertisement" article reads, or subscribe to periodicals.

Even something like Taler is better than Visa and Mastercard. I would love to know why lwn.net, ars, or the register don't try. I would absolutely pay $0.25-$2.00 per read for the ~50 articles I read per month on these websites.

Micropayments for tech readers seems like a good place to start. Tech readers use ad blockers, but are also willing to try new tools with janky UX.

Beyond Smart 5 years ago

Hamming is great in general. Some years ago, I picked up a copy of "Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers" for like $2 at a used book store. I had no idea who Hamming was, but it was cheap so I bought it.

After the first chapter I thought, "this guy is pretty sharp let's see what else he's written." That is when I found "You and Your Research".

Same here, mostly doing math stuff on x86.

There was a recent thread [1] optimizing some very primitive trig functions.

I recently watched a djb interview where he talked about the importance of fully utilizing available hardware [2 at 5:15]. That can be a good starting point, although at work its usually easier to just consume more resources than to use what you've got more efficiently.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28209097

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1svxNxG6hHc