tlb

43 ms·

631.
by tlb 4y ago
The Schwarzchild radius is only meaningful if all the mass is inside the radius. The calculation isn't valid in the interior of a larger object. In fact, the gravity near the center of a planet goes to zero, since the surrounding mass
632.
by tlb 4y ago
Sure it is. If someone steals your gold, you can call the people with guns to arrest them and get it back to you (often). It doesn't have to work 100% of the time to be an effective deterrent.
633.
by tlb 4y ago
With sufficiently parallel hardware, you can do an entire mat4 * mat4 multiplication in 3 cycles. First do all 64 multiplications in parallel, then do 32 adds, then 16 adds to get the final answer. For operations in GF(2) where they claim a
634.
by tlb 4y ago
Those are related. Part of what makes engine-powered VTOL difficult is the engines. The V-22 Osprey has two propellors and two engines, but in order to handle an engine failure, there's a complicated driveshaft and gear arrangement acr
635.
by tlb 4y ago
It reflects something like 98% of light instead of 90%, so the actual increase in reflected light isn't that big. Flat scattering surfaces are never blinding. The problem is with specular reflections off of shiny surfaces. Even though
636.
by tlb 4y ago
Google was better if you were searching for something popular, because it showed highly linked-to pages for that query. AltaVisa was perfectly good if you were searching for something specific that would only have a few pages mentioning it.
637.
by tlb 4y ago
I un-duped the submission at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33055298 Clicking it isn't a great experience: I had to do a captcha, after which it told me that my IP would probably be unblocked after a minute or tw
638.
by tlb 4y ago
What you're suggesting might work when reading from a texture scaled around 1:1 with screen pixels. That is, 1 pixel distance on-screen is typically 0 or 1 texels distance in the texture map. But when rendering an object far away, the
639.
by tlb 4y ago
The whole GPL/LGPL dichotomy requires that GPL programs not be usable as part of commercial software. They can discourage linking through copyleft, but they also need to not let their code have any other API, such as an LSP for editors
640.
by tlb 4y ago
Try https://cppinsights.io . For example, go to https://cppinsights.io/s/8401262a and click the play button at the top left. If you're doing something more complex, you might need metashell. See http:&
641.
by tlb 4y ago
That program's data set is only 0.8 GB, which is like $10 of RAM. The time difference you're measuring between random & sequential access is probably mostly due to CPU cache and TLB, not flash. Whatever real-world application
642.
by tlb 4y ago
These days, most people need the opposite. They're probably using systems optimized for spinning disks but they're running it on flash, and all the layers of complexity added over the years to optimize disk latency are just slowin
643.
by tlb 4y ago
The infant brain has been developing based on feedback from the body for months in-utero. They brain is getting sensory inputs from the fetus's movement as well as external sounds, so it's definitely not a pure function of its gen
644.
by tlb 4y ago
Modern CPUs can look ahead in the instruction stream and run 4 or more instructions simultaneously. This isn't easy: you have to respect data dependencies where one instruction depends on the output of a previous one. When something de
645.
by tlb 4y ago
On Mac, malloc has several options to help find such bugs. If you set MallocScribble=1 in the environment, it fills blocks with 0xaa on alloc and 0x55 on free. On Linux, running `env MALLOC_PERTURB_=43605 myprogram` will do the same.
646.
by tlb 4y ago
That sounds pretty grim. 3 months is a looong time to raise the first money. And the CEO should have started fundraising 3-6 months before running out of money. It's reasonable for people with founder stock to decide to not pay themsel
647.
by tlb 4y ago
What YC's users want most of all is for their startups not to fail, so the essay talks about learning what makes startups fail and how to help founders avoid it. Founders ask for other stuff from YC too: a hangout lounge in SF, comfier
648.
by tlb 4y ago
Statically provable memory safety is probably possible in some sorts of code, like business process logic where performance isn't critical, and you can use std:: containers and copy everything. A browser is a much more demanding envir
649.
by tlb 4y ago
I'm not making that claim. I'm pointing out that a customer saying "X locked my account" without the relevant information for HN readers to decide whether or not X acted improperly doesn't make for a good HN submiss
650.
by tlb 4y ago
Yes, they almost always fail to mention it. Then it turns out they’re selling cannabis to Iran or something. And (rightly so) payment processors can’t tell us what the problem is. So I’m inclined to flag all such stories missing the obvious
651.
by tlb 4y ago
That’s true about many cpu registers, but compilers take care of it correctly for everything except floating point flags.
652.
by tlb 4y ago
Oil doesn’t come from huge caverns that we could drop trees into. Oil is often deep underground, soaked into porous rock. So wood would have to be liquified before attempting to pump it into oil wells, and it ruins the well for future use.
653.
by tlb 4y ago
The figures given are per-year. The article is just sloppy with units.
654.
by tlb 4y ago
The problem with that is that cores are very expensive. They require 100s of kgs of enriched uranium. If you run them at half power, you need twice as many and your cost goes up dramatically.
655.
by tlb 4y ago
It has to be high within the core. I suppose you could add some empty space nearby
656.
by tlb 4y ago
The uranium has to be in a small volume for the chain reaction to work.
657.
by tlb 4y ago
Attribution can be difficult with IRL attacks too. So you can't be sure about every attack, but you're often sure about some of them because secrecy is hard. For example: Stuxnet was one of many responses to Iran's nuclear we
658.
by tlb 4y ago
It could be a journalist writing a story about how some company sells your information despite users checking "[x] don't sell my information". It could be a government consumer protection agency investigating the company, or
659.
by tlb 4y ago
Countries should start responding to cyberattacks the same as if a black helicopter landed and a team of commandos damaged or stole the equipment. The intention is the same and the effect is the same, so the mechanism isn't important.
660.
by tlb 4y ago
If it comes down to an I-said/they-said about whether I checked some box, then: - if it's my memory against their database, I'd probably lose. - if it's my video capture against their database, it could go either way. -

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