Hacker News Reader

StephenFalkenon Intel Ivy Bridge graphics processor fully documented

I'm quite impressed by this bold move from Intel. Showing such a treasure trove of detailed information about Ivy Bridge graphics can only help to build better open source drivers and overall support. Phoronix has more details:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyN...

StephenFalkenon Codecademy closes $10M round

I did the first 5 weeks of Code Year. But it turned out to take too much of my time with less than optimal results. Honestly, reading "JavaScript: The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockfordm, saves a lot of time and gives you a more enlightening experience relating to understanding JavaScript.

StephenFalkenon Sebastian Thrun AMA on reddit

I can't forget an inspiring and landmark conference communication given by Sebastian Thrun last January that struck me deeply:

http://youtu.be/SkneoNrfadk

StephenFalkenon Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

We desperately need open sourced chip cores. An open community would build them with open source EDA tools and the final tapeout would be physically produced by a foundry. I know open source EDA tools are still decades away from proprietary ones, but we won't go anywhere if we don't start somewhere.

StephenFalkenon Dropbox' Public/ folders will be phased out soon

Well, now the "get link" drop-down menu item sends you to a webpage, where you can finally click "Download". It's a total waste of time. The fast workflow of the Public/ folder will be gone.

StephenFalkenon Dropbox' Public/ folders will be phased out soon

The Public/ folder is probably the most useful feature of Dropbox. It is totally user friendly and integrated into the desktop. You just have to drop a file in the folder and get the public url from the drop-down menu. It couldn't get much easier than that. And now it will be phased out. Really sad news. I guess it's about time to try Google Drive.

StephenFalkenon C vs GO

"Object oriented programming with ANSI-C":

https://ritdml.rit.edu/handle/1850/8544

StephenFalkenon New York to London in an hour - by train

I remember seeing a Discovery documentary named "Extreme Engineering: Trans-Atlantic Tunnel" that precisely details this concept. It's available online in five parts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frYWTrEfPRs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKaVQ5Tt_Zk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zci_6AOCAo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2c6vzcmULU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoPI2doRkgA

StephenFalkenon Internet as a 'Hostile Overlay'

Steve Reeding, one of the creators of IPv6, shares his crucial insight on how some networks adapt, survive, and impose themselves:

"I have a different take on that. Yes, a lot of people were dissing tunnels yesterday. I'm actually a big fan of tunnels. I think the way the IPv4 Internet was built originally was basically by tunneling over the phone system. Ignore, you know, getting leased lines, putting computers on the end, building a network with no cooperation at all from the phone company. In fact, I once saw a phone company memo that referred to the Internet as a 'hostile overlay'. You know, and we basically, you know, demolished their billing plans and everything, and built this network in spite of the desires of the carriers. And, as I see the IPv4 Internet getting more and more like the phone company, I thought one way to deploy IPv6 is basically tunnel over all that junk. Iterate the same thing again. And I gather, you know, some people, you know, who are concerned about this are looking at other ways of sort evolving the Internet, where you, you know, tunnel over HTTP or whatever you have to do to basically get over all that cruft and build a new network on top of it. So that, to me, was one possible way, you know, as the IPv4 Internet rotted the underneath. We would tunnel over it and then we would throw away the rotted bits and replace them with wires."

StephenFalkenon Accepting my first credit card payment without PayPal, part 1/2

In recent years, it's been interesting to watch the rise of Dwolla (https://www.dwolla.com/) as an alternative payment network. It charges nothing for under $10 transactions, and only $0.25 for any transaction over $10, no matter how large it is. The only drawback is that, for now, it only works in the US.

StephenFalkenon The Mechanics and Meaning of That Ol' Dial-Up Modem Sound

By far, the sound of ZX Spectrum's games loading back in 1982 , when I was a kid, is definitely the greatest and most favourite digital sound of my whole life:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6uwfM8F5uU

StephenFalkenon Time for a return of the Cypherpunks, Crypto-Anarchists & Techno-Libertarians?

For those that haven't yet had the chance of reading a foundational text related to Cypherpunks and Crypto-Anarchy, there is "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" by Tim May (back then a Chief Scientist at Intel) -> http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html

StephenFalkenon Field programmable gate array that's 4.2x faster than a 16 core CPU

Try to check SystemC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SystemC).

StephenFalkenon ISO C is increasingly moronic

It's interesting to note the bumpy road that lead to the final standardization of C as ANSI X3.159-1989, as documented on the following post:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/msg/991b9116ffa83...

Dennis Ritchie spend part of that time fighting against the introduction of several new features he felt were not the proper future of the language. Unfortunately, he had little to no involvement on the C99 standardization process. The final outcome was a butchered language. I'm sticking to C89/C90 on all my C development, no matter what.

"I was satisfied with the 1989/1990 ANSI/ISO standard. The new C99 standard is much bulkier, and though the committee has signaled that much of their time was spent in resisting feature-suggestions, there are still plenty of accepted ones to digest. I certainly don't desire additional ones, and the most obvious reaction is that I wish they had resisted more firmly." --dmr

StephenFalkenon The American suburbs are a giant Ponzi scheme

I guess some people have found more sustainable healthier ways of living inside a city:

"Bicycle Rush Hour Utrecht (Netherlands) III" -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-AbPav5E5M

StephenFalkenon Restoration of 1st Edition Unix kernel sources

Back in April 2006, the great Al Kossow of Bitsavers uncovered some unknown papers and documented his findings on The Unix Heritage Society mailing list:

"Preliminary Relase of UNIX Implentation Document" -> http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2006-April/001367.html

The files -> http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/bellLabs/unix/

For as strange as it may sound, this amazing finding went unnoticed for 2 years. Nobody paid any attention to this precious paper...until April 2008. That's when the whole restoration process really started:

"Whence 1st Edition Unix Kernel Assembly?" -> http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2008-April/001695.html

There was a mailing list specially dedicated to the whole restauration process:

"The Unix-jun72 Archives" -> http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/unix-jun72/

It was really an impressive effort for bringing back to life the first edition of the operating system that forever changed the computer world.