jcranmer

8 ms·

91.
by jcranmer 2mo ago
One of the reaction threads I saw elsewhere on social media pointed out the response rates for the surveys that come up with these numbers is plummeting--about a decade ago, we had ~85% response rate, now we're done to ~65% response ra
92.
by jcranmer 2mo ago
> government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally The government has no obligation to apply the law equally, although they are prohibited from applying the law unequally to
93.
by jcranmer 2mo ago
That's true of most of the applications in SPECint (SPECfp is a different matter); there's nothing special about compilers there. Where compiler code is going to get really unusual, I suspect, is that compilers tend to be a little
94.
by jcranmer 2mo ago
The four benchmarks selected are cppcheck, llvm, cpython, and gcc [1]. These are all essentially compiler benchmarks... and all of the compiler benchmarks in SPEC cpu2026! This makes the benchmark selection somewhat suspicious to me, since
95.
by jcranmer 2mo ago
> is there any civilization close to the achievements of the Aztecs and other Amerindians in Africa south of Egypt? Mali? Great Zimbabwe?
96.
by jcranmer 2mo ago
I recall opening up the Itanium manual, and by the end of the architecture description, just despairing of the thought of trying to write a compiler for it. Itanium, I think, was ultimately a victim of its weirdness: it's too weird to
97.
by jcranmer 2mo ago
While the pop-culture notion of the Dunning-Kruger Effect is "idiots don't know they're idiots," the actual results of the paper were (essentially) that F students thought they were D students, whereas the A students tho
98.
by jcranmer 2mo ago
In LLVM, the result of floating-to-int conversion that is out of range of the int is a poison value, which means you get essentially the full unpredictability of UB. That said, I'm a little hard-pressed to think of optimizations that w
99.
by jcranmer 2mo ago
> Microsoft was forced to respond by making a not-quite-as-bad OS in Windows XP Prior to XP, MS had two lines of Windows: the Windows 9x kernels and the Windows NT kernels. Windows XP was meant to be the merger of the two lines, adapting
100.
by jcranmer 2mo ago
Most internet protocols these days have shifted to UTF-8.
101.
by jcranmer 2mo ago
All of the major kernel ABIs are using C function interfaces as their stable ABI (except Linux, which uses an assembly syscall instruction as the stable interface, although you still rely on a lot of the ancillary C ABI for things like stru
102.
by jcranmer 2mo ago
Yeah, the fact that Project Highrise doesn't handle the transportation part of the game means that it never scratched the same itch SimTower did.
103.
by jcranmer 2mo ago
Waiting for Don Hopkins to jump into this thread, saying how he's going to release the source code soon... ( https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower if you haven't seen one of his messages on the topi
104.
by jcranmer 2mo ago
The best summary--and easiest to remember, IMHO--is that variables are declared as they are used. Want to write an array of function pointers that return a pointer to an array of pointers to int? Well, that's: array ... -> x[N]
105.
by jcranmer 2mo ago
LLVM defined its AI policy several months ago: https://llvm.org/docs/AIToolPolicy.html (There's already some consternation that it's too permissive.)
106.
by jcranmer 3mo ago
My gut reaction is that the probable cause of the discrepancy is ultimately "someone calculated something wrong." It's not like particle physics experiments actually generate something directly measurable like the muon's
107.
by jcranmer 3mo ago
I suspect that they believe they can integrate with a substantial portion of not just the US economy, but also most of the European and formal Latin America economies. And I also suspect that the number is quite high because there are so ma
108.
by jcranmer 3mo ago
The fundamental idea of a jury, when it comes down to it, is that you're asking 12 random people "was this person's actions reasonable?" given conflicting accounts of what those actions were. The process by which you get
109.
by jcranmer 3mo ago
The context for some of these posts are yet-another-null-result coming out, saying that AI isn't having the expected objective result, with the posts defending AI by saying that it totally changed just after the cut-off the research.
110.
by jcranmer 3mo ago
Since so many people are doubting you here, here is a post from ~a year ago that's pulling the same "LLMs 6 months ago were crap, now they're awesome" shtick: https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/
111.
by jcranmer 3mo ago
A "low-cost" subway is generally figured at about $80-100M/km, and in many more countries, you'd figure more like $150-200M/km as a good number. The Chinatown subway was $600M/km, which is 3-4× "reasonable
112.
by jcranmer 3mo ago
Don't forget reads and writes of /proc/self/mem! :-)
113.
by jcranmer 3mo ago
When I clicked on the link, I first thought it was going to be about, well, steam engines. Then I realized this is Hacker News, so it's probably about the Erlang VM. Turns out my first thought was actually the correct one! Glad to not
114.
by jcranmer 3mo ago
The data center construction boom has precipitated a lot of inflation in electronics and related fields, because the data centers are buying out all of the silicon manufacturing and RAM manufacturing and etc, and all of this stuff is horrib
115.
by jcranmer 3mo ago
The Roman Republic notably granted citizenship status to most of the socii during the Social War in the early first century BC. Even discounting one-off mass citizenship grants, Roman citizenship was much easier to obtain than pretty much e
116.
by jcranmer 3mo ago
> Before language was invented the only way information could be passed down from ancestors to offspring was via mutations in our DNA. Language (in the sense of "use of language appears around 100,000 years ago") is not the onl
117.
by jcranmer 3mo ago
The fundamental problem that most people want free software to solve isn't the user-level problem of "I want to tinker with all of the software I run," but the community-level problem of "I want to use the results of oth
118.
by jcranmer 3mo ago
> You have a neighborhood with three dozen people in it The average household size in the US is about 4. Three dozen people means 9 houses. That's not really a neighborhood, and most people don't live in that kind of low-densit
119.
by jcranmer 3mo ago
If you look at the "natural" disposition of the time zones, Chicago is very near the appropriate longitude (90 W) for the median of the time zone. The border between Eastern and Central time zone should be about halfway through Oh
120.
by jcranmer 3mo ago
Permanent DST sounds good to a lot of people, until they actually experience it. The US went on permanent DST in the 1970s and support plummeted after the first winter in DST (which is why we're not on it anymore). Of course, since it

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