adrian_b

48 ms·

661.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
The US wages are desirable only for buying the things that have about the same price everywhere (because they are imported from the same Asian countries, with prices passing through US dollars), i.e. mostly electronics and computing devices
662.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
There are too many HN readers who downvote the comments that state real facts about which they are not aware, instead of bothering to investigate and learn something new for them. What I have written above about the C-derived languages is a
663.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
The "for" structure introduced by the C programming language in 1974 was a very big mistake. It has forced all programmers to write everyday a lot of superfluous boilerplate for the most frequently used kinds of loops as the price
664.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
"Competitive" as in "slower". The SPEC benchmark is useful to estimate the performance of computers that will run programs that are not optimized for their specific architecture. The Ryzen was already faster in SPEC, but
665.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
The only reason for someone to buy any of the laptops with this chip is the NVIDIA GPU. The CPU is decent, but it does not have any advantage over much cheaper and also faster x86 CPUs. Similar NVIDIA GPUs can be obtained in laptops with di
666.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
The effort of fabricating yourself dense CMOS integrated circuits, instead of giving your design to a foundry, to have it fabricated there (where a malicious foundry could modify the design), is huge, even when you do not want a state of th
667.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
No single open weights model comes close to either Mythos or GPT 5.5. Nonetheless, running many of the open weights models over a codebase, with an appropriate harness, can provide about the same vulnerability coverage (i.e. each of the ope
668.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
Anything that causes a persistent change of the state of a system is imperative, regardless of how detailed the command is. printf("Hello world!"); also does not tell anything to the system about how to accomplish this. Any
669.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
Tcl being based on strings creates the same problems like in bash scripts, i.e. it is too easy to misuse the quotation rules, leading to subtle bugs. Using for scripting LISP-like languages is much more foolproof, especially for more comple
670.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
All C-derived languages (e.g. Java and Rust) have a bad syntax, with tons of superfluous parentheses and many other superfluous tokens, like semicolons or commas. This normally matters very little, because a good editor will always insert a
671.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
Actually not all those are ancient customs, and not all that Janet uses is newer. In the first description of the language LISP, from March 1959 (AIM-008), John McCarthy had used the names "first" and "rest", instead of
672.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
While I do not like the excess of parentheses of LISP and similar languages, their syntax is very consistent and predictable. Moreover, while LISP has an excess of parentheses, it omits a greater number of commas that are required in many o
673.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
While the relational model is claimed to be based on relations, the vast majority of the "relations" used in practice are functions, not general relations. A general relation exists only between the columns of a table that are inc
674.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
DROP TABLE ? Most of SQL is not imperative, but it certainly also includes some imperative commands. Inserting a new row into an existing table is an imperative command, which may be the most frequently used of the SQL features, in certain
675.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
It scales, because the surface of the network of tubes that fills the volume also grows with the volume, unlike the external surface that encloses that volume. When the volume is scaled, the tubes (i.e. capillaries) are not scaled in size,
676.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
I also do not believe that our RNA and complex amino acids are likely to be universal. On the other hand, the simple amino acids are known to be universal, both from chemical analyses of celestial bodies and from abiotic syntheses in labora
677.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
RNA was indeed the initial replicant, i.e. the first molecule that contained an arbitrary sequence of blocks and which could be used as a template to generate copies at itself. However, such a replicant could appear only after a life form w
678.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
In living beings things can be 3-dimensional, like a brain, because they are penetrated by a fine network of tubes through which fluid is circulated, taking the heat away. This is likely to also be the only solution for truly 3D integrated
679.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
Amino acids are much more likely to be involved in the appearance of life anywhere than other molecules. For instance it would be much less surprising if an alien life form used another kind of polymer to store information, instead of nucle
680.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
The living beings use much more amino acids than those that compose proteins. The relatively low number of amino acids that are used in proteins appears to be caused by the difficulty of modifying the genetic code by adding not yet encoded
681.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
TFA does not discuss the missiles that only reach a hypersonic speed, which is true for any ballistic missile, because such missiles have existed for a very long time. It discusses the hypersonic missiles that are maneuverable, which for no
682.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
In TFA, only the missiles with terminal guidance are discussed, of which three models are currently known, one in each of USA, Russia and China, none of which has been deployed yet.
683.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
This is mentioned in TFA. The current lasers are not powerful enough for this purpose, they may be efficient only against drones or other slower targets.
684.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
Over-the-horizon radars have very poor resolution, so they are useful only for early warning, not for guiding an interceptor. For targeting at distance, you need antennas mounted on high masts or airborne radars.
685.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
USB 4 includes more than Thunderbolt, because Thunderbolt was not compatible with USB, despite using the same connector. All features of Thunderbolt 3 have been inherited by USB 4, like also all those of USB 3, including the ability of Thu
686.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
I agree. It seems that the choice between left-handed and right-handed amino-acids was random. However, it is unlikely that other kinds of life forms could use both kinds indiscriminately, because mixing them creates difficulties in the ass
687.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
10 Gb/s Ethernet interfaces work fine on 10 Gb/s USB. Both interfaces have almost the same raw bit rate (in both cases "10 Gb/s" is only an approximation, but the differences between the true bit rates and 10 Gb&#x2
688.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
Unfortunately, USB does not work like Firewire, where this was possible. USB 4, i.e. Thunderbolt, allows the emulation of network interfaces if you interconnect the USB Type C ports with a cable, but here you have USB 3, so this does not wo
689.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
The amino acids that can be found everywhere include ten of the simpler amino-acids that are used in proteins (glycine, the 2 acids, the 3 branched, alanine, proline and the 2 alcohols). The other 11 amino-acids from proteins have never bee
690.
by adrian_b 5mo ago
In the second part of the article there is an explanation which for me is the most plausible, and which would not be applicable to Martian soil. Even if they killed all living beings in the soil, after their death the enzymes that are the c

More ›