zh3

31 ms·

391.
by zh3 4y ago
New story to me, at a guess he understood that the design had created a shorted turn so a cut in the casing would solve it. The principle of the story is however exactly the same as one I've heard before about Picasso:- Picasso is quie
392.
by zh3 4y ago
I wrote various device drivers for RT-11 back in the day, including for one of the first winchesters (Rodime 5Mb, which was a big step-up from 8" floppies - so much so I partitioned the driver into 8 separate areas). The boot ROM was 2
393.
by zh3 4y ago
I'm old enough to remmber the furore when calculators came on the scene ("Calculators Conquer Arithmetic, Performing better than humans"). Having played with various AIs, it feels similar - impressive when there's a know
394.
Questions that show the weakness of AI chatbots(chat.openai.com)
1 points by zh3 4y ago|0 comments
395.
by zh3 4y ago
Pre-judging an article without even reading it doesn't feel like the HN way (it would be interesting to know what percentage of HN readers would comment on an article they haven't read). Personally, I do think he has a point. Agre
396.
by zh3 4y ago
"teach gpt-3 to understand it's violating copyright"
397.
by zh3 4y ago
Indeed, back in the day we bolted QBus backplanes to the side of DIN41612 backplanes and wire-wrapped across to a bunch of boards each with 100+ TTL chips on them (the 5V PSUs were something like 120A). The bus clocked at around a MHz, hen
398.
by zh3 4y ago
Oh, I think quite a few people do (plenty of PDP11 programmers about). It's easy enough to fire up an emulator and run a C compiler like its 1978 (or Fortran, come to that). What's the definition of 'real' here?
399.
by zh3 4y ago
800MIPS? Not off an 11/70, for sure - much, much slower than that. 11/23's were as fast (or faster, depending on options and application) and they were maybe a single MIP or so (still got a couple of PDP11's kicking abou
400.
by zh3 4y ago
Laser galvo's. Fast flicking mirrors drawing patterns on the walls and ceiling. Use a UV laser and draw crazy glowing shapes on luminous paint (ever shone a UV laser at something luminous?)
401.
by zh3 4y ago
It seems a little like it might mean that software errors caused by race conditions can be reduced by making the timing windows smaller. As this is a complex area (it might not appear so, but it is) the pragmatic solution could be to reduce
402.
by zh3 4y ago
A true hardware watchdog is separate electronics. For example, it's really easy to make an electronic circuit that operates a relay once every 5 minutes, say, unless a 'restart timer' button is pressed. Connect the relay con
403.
by zh3 4y ago
Fair point (thought experiment: what would have happened if MS had acquired Google for a million or two in the early days?).
404.
by zh3 4y ago
Mmm...true, some programmers even have problems with gettimeofday(). The point still stands though - common problems have tested code, uncommon/rare problems rarely have battle-hardened solutions.
405.
by zh3 4y ago
Launch - or acquire? I'm sure there's a list somewhere of what's actually homegrown and what's bene bough (youtube, streetview, doubleclick, ?).
406.
by zh3 4y ago
Interesting point. Just like a skater pulling their arms in, snow melting and running to lower ground would make the earth spin faster (and let's add in the extra erosion). Sea levels are rising though (due to both thermal expansion an
407.
by zh3 4y ago
Indeed; the converse would be to add (or remove) micro-leapseconds in order to keep accurate time. That way it would happen so often that the code would get tested and we'd have working implementations (maybe we could fix the tradition
408.
by zh3 4y ago
It's actually a measure of the angle over which light can be collected, and it's defined as the sine of the half-angle. For example, if you want to launch light into a fibre-optic cable with NA 0.5, the light needs to be angled
409.
by zh3 4y ago
Having close-up experience with Garmin, just no. It's called Monkey C for a reason, and we're close to the point where even bluetooth wins over ANT+.
410.
by zh3 4y ago
Plenty of C jobs around, most are where there's a need for extreme performance (optimising usage/making the best of limited RAM/limited CPU), talking to bare metal or for things that have to last a long time (kernels, telecom
411.
by zh3 4y ago
Palantir and Peter Thiel remind me of Edward Heath's choice phrase "...the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism".
412.
by zh3 4y ago
Article from Cambridge University journal "Polar Record" [0] (I came across this while looking up the film "The Age of Stupid" [1], which IIRC had the Svalbard Seed Bank as more-or-less the last place standing after seve
413.
by zh3 4y ago
And the Svalbard Seed bank [0] - arguably more important than a github backup :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
414.
by zh3 4y ago
Knowing Norway, the price of a drink is?
415.
by zh3 4y ago
>C isn't a programming language anymore It's a perfectly fine programming language. Some of us like working with sharp tools (and sub 1 second compile times for 100kloc programs, and close enough to optimal performance, and act
416.
by zh3 4y ago
I've actually pushed rubidium ions around in UQ's setup, and a bunch of us had a tour and Q&A with the founder. It's incredibly detailed stuff (insane optical tables, and weeks tracking down a stray hair that was contani
417.
by zh3 4y ago
I remember reading [1] and enjoying the hard science (e.g. Jupiter taking its time to light up). Then the dawn...
418.
by zh3 4y ago
I've used those for many hacks. To this day there is one on my desk, with the arrow keys adjusting audio volume, with 'tick' and 'x' keys for mute/unmute. The display shows date/time/audio volume and
419.
by zh3 4y ago
>The burst even appears to have caused Earth’s ionosphere, the upper layer of Earth’s atmosphere, to swell in size for several hours. For a gamma ray burst from an object that's 2.4 billion light years away, that seems pretty worryi
420.
by zh3 4y ago
Indeed, I started in the days of 40x25 video terminals at home, and new-fangled stuff like modems were only just starting to appear (my first one was 300 baud). Getting a job and having 9600 baud VT100 terminals was truely magic (they still

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