Breakthrough

15 ms·

61.
by Breakthrough 13y ago
This - I disagree with the entire last paragraph of the original article, although I think he meant to imply that the operations are not commutative for all real numbers x, since applying the same operation in reverse on the result will n
62.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
I missed it the first time, but oh man did I ever LOL when I saw how casual/oblivious it was written (in a "don't worry, you clicked the button so you're obviously okay with it" kind of way).
63.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
Even ZFS isn't a replacement for backups. Think of it more as a better indicator of when things are happening that clearly shouldn't be (e.g. hardware problems).
64.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
Agreed that he should have gotten permission before publicly hosting this, but looking through some of what he's done, I'm pretty impressed with what I've seen so far. He's clearly doing this to learn, and some of the comments in the sourc
65.
Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10(eevblog.com)
405 points by Breakthrough 14y ago|190 comments
66.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
Reminds me of this question on Super User: How does a CPU 'know' what commands and instructions actually mean? http://superuser.com/questions/307116/how-does-a-cpu-know-wh... Microcode in its most basic form is just a big look-up table
67.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
I find a lot of ambient music without vocals is good (Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Nettless, etc...). Not too repetitive, but the sounds give a nice "mask" to the external world and lets you focus. I also found an online radio station cal
68.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
It appears to be common nomenclature dating back to the 1960s-70s [1] to refer to the registers in a CPU as a single "file" in RAM, although the term "file" denotes the fact that you can access multiple parts of it at once. From [2]: " A re
69.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
And for those who just love seeing silicon dies up and close, you might want to check out these amazing pictures to really put things into perspective: http://zeptobars.ru/en/read/open-microchip-asic-what-inside-... Really cool to see the
70.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
Yes, that's called co-generation (or combined heat/power plants). I can't comment on fusion reactors, but this isn't really feasible with fission reactors, since the coolant becomes radioactive. Sure you could run it through several loops
71.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
It's a heat sink right now. Hydroelectric generation aside, efficiency for electricity generation is pretty much always below 40%! That, however, is since almost all our plants use the Carnot/Rankine cycle heat engine. Again though, even
72.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
For those who are curious, here's the NYT article Mr. Musk is talking about: http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/problems-wi... " [...] I do not believe Mr. Broder hoped the drive would end badly. [...] Did he use good judgme
73.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
And on the Fourth Day, God proclaimed "Thou shalt have the ability to use inline assembly in thy C/C++ code for performance-critical tasks". I can think of absolutely zero reason to write an entire program in x86 assembly, let alone any oth
74.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
It's a very valid point - it doesn't take a genius to figure out competition drives development, while having a market monopoly affords you a great position of "extortion" in regards to your customers (developers). If there was only one so
75.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
I was about to pick one of these laptops up late last year until I happened to stumble across that very bug report myself: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-cdimage/+bug/1040557?comme... Everyone seems to have it working fine with UEFI di
76.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
I have given NS2 a go actually. Last I played NS1 personally was just over a year ago. Regarding NS2, graphics are sweet, but I do not like the gameplay changes coming from NS1. I literally thought NS1 was perfect, and NS:Source would hav
77.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
http://cdr.xpaw.ru/app/70/ Seems to be using the original Goldsource content GCF, so it appears indeed to be Half-Life. Interestingly enough, the OS list shows both Linux and OSX.
78.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
This is so amazing, but I'm really hoping that they release a way for mod developers to recompile their mods to work... Do they have the multiplayer aspects working? Obligatory plug for my favourite HL1 mod: http://www.unknownworlds.com/
79.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
IBM made a laptop some years back that was powered by a fuel cell combined with batteries. It ran off of methanol, and although it was kind of bulky, this was back in 2005. http://news.cnet.com/IBM-pours-a-shot-of-methanol-for-ThinkP...
80.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
I just formatted & had to reinstall Java today, out of curiousity I used the offline installer instead... No toolbar bundled with it, didn't even give me the option to install it. http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp
81.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
Agreed. They could, you know... Try to find a proper cross-platform solution. I also love their logic here: "To give you some insight in how little uptake we saw on Android here are some statistics: for every Android user that downloads a
82.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
This is crazy... So crazy I can see it actually catching on. I'm quite interested to see how many people start using this. I also like how they say "[each] Crazy Blind Date account is tied to a phone" I'd argue that's a very false sense o
83.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
Not to mention further performance advancements in processor design since then (pipelining, SIMD, etc...), further increasing throughput above the 1000x threshold. One should also consider the increases in word length, adding the ability t
84.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
Perhaps this illustrates how much of an effect a film's director can have on it's perception. As Stanley Kubrick once said, "The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that n
85.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
This is why I stopped commenting as much on HN. I also discovered this site roughly six months ago, and while I was initially impressed, my sentiments agree with the OP. Nobody here can take a joke directed at their favourite hardware/sof
86.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
I think the only "secure" way to erase the contents of a hard drive is to repeatedly overwrite the disk surface with a mix of random/patterened data (like Darik's Boot & Nuke does). Also, for those wondering about the blocking of /dev/
87.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
Lol best graph ever, "% of the chart that looks like Pacman"
88.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
Great response, I must say. As a conjecture, do you think splitting the logic up into several smaller neural networks with different objectives (i.e. for chess, one evaluates defensive maneuvers, one for attack, and so on) would alleviate t
89.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
There's also the difficult task of real-world interaction (or as the article puts it, low-level sensorimotor skills), although I suppose this is what you mean by perceptual problems. Most things humans create are based on rules (e.g. games
90.
by Breakthrough 14y ago
Blanket statements make Breakthrough sad :( Your colleague probably did not base that on the engineering or CS buildings. Plenty of times I've bumped into a colleague and had a long-winded discussion about software radios, or have fun deba

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