HN user

stevek

9 karma
Posts0
Comments25
View on HN
No posts found.
Simple CPU 12 years ago

I also really enjoyed the course. The book behind this course is called "The Elements of Computing Systems". I've been recommending it to lots of people.

>> "The fact that it has not decomposed shows you how unhealthy it is for children." > How does that show it's unhealthy for children? I'm not saying that a burger from McDonald's isn't unhealthy, but why is this evidence of it?

When something differs from the natural order, I think it's fair to treat it with a large dose of suspicion (even horror!) and put the onus on the unnatural to justify itself as safe.

> There are now inductive loops as you traverse the offramp. They sense if your car is exceeding a given speed, and they trigger a red light at the end of the offramp if you are. Then, after that turns green, the system triggers another red light four blocks down the road to be sure you're not drag racing.

Oh that's a wonderful nudge! These sound much more better than speed cameras. No need for a bureaucratic system of enforcement for the simple things.

Just as long as they're used judiciously. I can imagine the rage if the guy in front keeps triggering the red for everybody.

One part in the article really caught my attention:

    Recruiting and hiring isn’t considered a core activity
I think that once your company grows beyond a certain size, it must become so. We hired a full time in-house recruiter around 100 people and it has had enormous benefit.

Does nobody else find the repetition objectionable? e.g. NEW = ('N', 'New'), If your values have good names, you can easily deduce "Some Constant" from SOME_CONSTANT or vice-versa. While I'm at it, having abbreviations built-in seems iffy too.

I agree, reading assembly is a great skill to have for some domains.

You'll almost never write assembly these days, except in the most niche of niches. A much more productive approach is to use intrinsics in a higher level language and examine the generated code. You don't even need to know every instruction. At this level you'll be looking out for sillyness such as register spills, hardware dependent badness (hello load-hit-stores)

We've done this. A modified clang-interpreter spits out some json. Python scripts consume the it and generate reflection data, script bindings etc.

We're very happy with the results. It's a little bit slower than hand parsing the headers, but the robustness more than compensates for it. We set up a unity build (just for the headers) to make up the speed difference.

The single worst thing that people do wrong when writing regular expressions is to use .* x when really they should use [^x]* x (i.e. the common case of looking for some kind of terminator 'x')

The worst case I ever saw had many .* running over some c++ source which would take several minutes per file. Presumably trying all combinations of backtracking. With the negated character class [^x] it was < .1 of a second.

Edit: I see his twitter feed has .* as the icon. Ha!

Edit2: My * are getting eaten by the formatter. There should be no space after them

Yes, it's mostly for entertainment value.

However, I didn't previously know about the commmand-t plugin. It made the read worthwhile, independent of entertainment.

Looks lovely. This works really well - I've been doing the same thing on paper for years. I do find however, that you need to make the recipe a few times from the long winded version which will often have tips or extra info which can't be crammed into the diagrammatic version.

TBH it would seem more natural as a web app though. Easier to expand content too buf of course it's more difficult to monetize.

I spent quite a few days tinkering with putting linux onto a nas device which was a lot of hassle and didn't perform well (music streaming).

In the end I just got an cheap fanless atom board and was done in a few hours. Obviously not as power efficient as a plug computer, but way more time efficient. There's a lot to be said for staying with the mainstream x86 distros etc.

Flash is a CPU hog? 16 years ago

As anybody with a netbook can tell you that many videos which are extremely choppy in flash (yes, even if fully buffered) are quite playable in vlc for instance.

Now given that one of the main uses for flash is streaming video, that should simply not be the case.

I've often heard of this, but only just read it for the first time.

When reading this, I was struck by how much more horrifying it would be if the characters were running on the computer instead of being physically inside it.

Can you imagine being restarted and seeing the terrible fate of thousands of your previous incarnations?

It always amuses me to hear talk of this wonderful universal language of mathematics.

On a certain level, it's true but in each field of mathematics there are many notational differences. Not quite whole new languages but certainly heavily accented dialects.

True, things are improving - at times different people in the same field would use completely different notation for the same things!