nwallin

86 ms·

871.
by nwallin 7y ago
The fdiv bug in the Pentium x87 unit was discovered because someone was manually checking their Excel spreadsheets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug
872.
by nwallin 7y ago
It's very dependent on the code. I'm currently writing a path tracer as a side project, and -Ofast is sickeningly faster than -O2. Like 4-5 times faster. -O3 duplicates all the loops into two versions: one with AVX instructions
873.
by nwallin 7y ago
Slavery is so illegal in the developed world that it's not even an issue. When people engage in human trafficking, the law enforcement apparatus puts the full brunt of its power into punishing the perpetrators. The government spends su
874.
by nwallin 7y ago
> This has some interesting implications – there’s no ‘divide’ instruction, for instance, because it can take a variable amount of time to finish. To perform a divide, you need to first compute the ‘reciprocal approximation’ (something w
875.
by nwallin 7y ago
> "An open source tank-based warfare game with online multiplayer, going strong since 2008!" (or whenever the project started) 1992, FYI. Same year as Wolfenstein 3D. Not sure what the original graphics looked like, but I know
876.
by nwallin 7y ago
The potential harm that can be caused by a <2lb quadcopter is utterly microscopic compared to the damage that can be caused by motor vehicles. Yet the regulatory burden on a small quadcopter is an order of magnitude more complex than tha
877.
by nwallin 7y ago
"But your honor. The speed limit is 65 and I was going 64." "You were exploiting a loophole. You may have been adhering to the letter of the law, but you were in gross violation of its spirit. We don't play games in this
878.
by nwallin 7y ago
I'm only familiar with XAML+WPF+C#+VS. One particular pet peeve of mine is the fact that it won't catch typos in data binding. If I have IsEnabled={Path IsEnabeld} in my XAML, the designer won't catch it. At runtime, the erro
879.
by nwallin 7y ago
I don't think the person you're replying to is arguing XML vs JSON as much as UI in markup vs UI in native code.
880.
by nwallin 7y ago
I've never seen a US ATM spit out anything but $20 bills. Ever. Higher denominations are so rare that many businesses don't accept them.
881.
by nwallin 7y ago
It's 2019. If your workloads are limited by single thread performance you need better software. It's why vulkan and dx12 are a thing. (The single thread limitation of committing a frame to the GPU has been reduced by an order of m
882.
by nwallin 7y ago
Quick sort comes with a steep penalty. Worst case is O(n^(2)). The reason quicksort is good is because it's in place. Once you throw away the in place aspect of quick sort, it's straight up bad. This implementation of quicksort is
883.
by nwallin 7y ago
I think that's the point the person you're replying to is trying to make. The author nails it for red green color blindness, but fails for most other forms of color blindness
884.
by nwallin 7y ago
Human perception of brightness is almost entirely cued off green levels. #0000FF (ie full blue) simply isn't very bright. #0000FF contrasts far far far more strongly with #FFFFFF than it does with #000000. This is true even for (most t
885.
by nwallin 7y ago
The Z80 takes 3-6 clock cycles to execute a single instruction. The 6502 executed one instruction per clock cycle. So a 3.5MHz Z80 gives comparable performance to a 1MHz 6502. The Z80 had more registers than the 6502, which is nice, but the
886.
by nwallin 7y ago
Having once male child eliminates the possibly of having two female children. You take a four entry truth table and scratch one out. The truth table is male->female, female->male, male->male. Tuesday is a red herring. Note that the
887.
by nwallin 7y ago
Please explain to me why it is different whether to switch doors after opening all but one door vs after opening all but one door? (note: when you do this in real life, you stop talking now. let them explain it.) When you have N>2 doors,
888.
by nwallin 7y ago
I feel like dressing up like an Indian and throwing whatever Finland's primary export is into a harbor.
889.
by nwallin 7y ago
FMA is "safe" in that if it breaks your code, it was already broken. It can only make the results slightly more accurate, unlike for instance the rsqrt instruction which is less accurate. (and as such is not a safe optimization) G
890.
by nwallin 7y ago
No, the real reason had nothing to do with electricity. In fact dual taps were entrenched before electricity was common place. Mythbusters have done several demonstrations over the years of what happens when you take a hot water heater, dis
891.
by nwallin 7y ago
> I'm sure there are shops out there that end up using agile and don't become these ridiculous monstrosities, but I feel like those shops would be successful with or without agile. I think that's the key. Agile isn't
892.
by nwallin 7y ago
Holy shitballs. This is amazing. Why isn't this the default? Maybe I can wait till the pixel 5... oh.
893.
by nwallin 7y ago
> no os choice, no hardware choice, slow provisioning These are probably positives from large org internal perspective. "We want to switch x from y to z." "We can't. In fact we want to switch u from z to y." >
894.
by nwallin 7y ago
Yes. "Server" implies redundant power supplies, 4-?? disks, an excess of high quality capacitors, a heavy steel case, a motherboard probably 4x the area of a typical ATX motherboard, ECC RAM, far more RAM slot capacity, etc. Furth
895.
by nwallin 7y ago
I don't necessarily think you're wrong, but I think you're missing the point. Situation: some manager is tasked with updating some antiquated COBOL monstrosity. They're given twelve peanuts, some shoe string, bubble gum
896.
by nwallin 7y ago
The equal protections clause of 14th amendment prohibits unequal application of the law. The business next door can do anything they please with their building lawfully, but the protected landmark building is prohibited by law from doing th
897.
by nwallin 7y ago
The hardware/driver situation is unambiguously better on Linux than it is on Windows. I've had ten times as many problems on Windows over the past ten years or so than I've had on Linux. (never been a serious user of OSX, alt
898.
by nwallin 7y ago
I think you're underestimating the number of memory redirections that are necessary for chaining. It's more than one. That's the killer. It's important to be wary of assuming your data will be in cache. It usually isn&#x
899.
by nwallin 7y ago
Radix sort is worst case O(n). (which is what I'm assuming the parent commenter is referring to) It's not n in common situations, but nlogn in pathological cases the way Timsort is. The reason is it "violates" the n logn
900.
by nwallin 7y ago
I subscribe to HN for the insights into technical subjects I might not otherwise have exposure to. My primary takeaway has been "this is why we can't have nice things", whether it's safe air travel, affordable housing, o

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