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alecmg

200 karma · joined April 12, 2019

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alecmg··on Double-decker browser tabs can be yours with Vivaldi
So still catching up to original Opera browser?

Where is the M3 mail client!?

alecmg··on Gravity Energy Storage: Alternative to batteries for grid storage
I think it was a reference to the way we get electricity.

Burn gas at the plant to heat water to run steam through turbine to get electricity ... and then use electricity to heat water again? Just use gas at the end point.

Getting heat from fuel (or sun) is easy and efficient. Converting it to electricity isn't.

If electricity comes from a non-fossil-fuel source - it is even more expensive/valuable.

alecmg··on Zstandard v1.4.7
Last I looked at benchmarks, only lz4 level 1 compression is faster than fastest zstd setting. At all other lz4 levels, zstd has a mode as fast but with significantly better compression.

But that is throughput. How latency (on small files/chunks) is affected I have no idea.

alecmg··on I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
while on topic of window adjusting shortcuts

I got way too used to Win+arrow keys for moving and resizing windows, inluding in multiple monitor setups. Any Linux WM that replicates these shortcuts?

Using Win+arrow I can minimize, maximize, make window stick to left or right half of screen or any of corners and move between desktops.

alecmg··on AMD Zen 3/Ryzen 5000 announcement [video]
Cache access times are measured in nanoseconds. Light nanosecond ((c) Grace Hopper) is ~30cm
alecmg··on US Spy Plane Impersonates Malaysian Aircraft to Fly Close to Chinese Airspace
... at time of war?
alecmg··on Nvidia Unveils GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs
click Feed - Not Found

click About - Not Found

to be fair, the empty white not found page did open probably under 64ms...

alecmg··on Ask HN: What's the best alternative to Chrome, and why?
adding a vote for Firefox

It is not lightweight by default, loves to use memory and cpu cores (and now even gpu) when possible. But doesn't use excessive amounts.

I am not a regular user, my Firefox would often have hundreds of tabs open. But performance is not impacted one bit. Background tabs do not take much memory or slow browser down until you get to them.

Of course with any browser try to use fewer extensions

alecmg··on Floating-Point Formats and Deep Learning
Hoped to see opinions on Unum [1]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but most machine learning does happen around 1.0. Unum should give more precision for same bits, same precision for less bits around 0 and 1. And some other interesting features.

But would require new hardware and software.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unum_(number_format)

alecmg··on How did anyone do math in Roman numerals? (2017)
How is Python definitely not "safe, productive and easy to use". It has faults, but these three are not them.
alecmg··on Putin says Russian Navy to get hypersonic nuclear strike weapons
Add to combination use of atmospheric oxygen to make it really significant and a technological breakthrough.

Its relatively easy to build a rocket carrying both fuel and oxygen and make it go hypersonic. Using oxidiser from air gives it unique range and maneuverability capabilities.

alecmg··on The Zen of Erlang (2016)
I'm sure developers are not measuring their own productivity in lines of code. Rather how fast tasks get completed or how easy it is to modify code etc
alecmg··on How Pulse Oximeters Work (2015)
even holding your breath for couple seconds will tank saturation, so pretty likely high altitude will do the same until your breathing adjusts to compensate
alecmg··on Researchers generate complete human X chromosome sequence
15% is quite outdated. There have been major updates to nanopores and software. Typical single read error rate is less than 5% these days.

Single read accuracy is not as important for such projects. As coverage gets to 50-60X, expected assembly accuracy is Q30 on human.

alecmg··on Text-Only Social Network
Thank you

I was in a camp with many other comments here, that this is 21st century and supporting UTF-8 should be a default.

But that malware example makes me almost do a 180. Who in their right mind thought that full Unicode should be allowed in file names?

Is there a middle ground? Text-only bits of Unicode?

alecmg··on How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner (2012)
nicely put

and it doesn't contradict the article. If you have always worked in one paradigm and think you are an expert in it, learning new development skills can make you see you were not that good in your previous area.

alecmg··on ICBMs Still Matter
ok I'll bite. How many tens (of millions)? Can any country purge ten million own citizens to improve their global reach? Is it like a warcraft movie spell?
alecmg··on Symbian Won
not enough information

was it related to symbian design choices?

alecmg··on A/B Street: A simulation game to fix Seattle's traffic
This sounds suspiciously familiar

Do you have your windows taskbar in non-default position? Mine is on top of screen and some games in some display modes give offset mouse position

alecmg··on Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, including non-paying
Tox.chat

with added bonus of no central server

alecmg··on Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power
are they for real? Wood is so inefficient as fuel that shipping it over anything more than 500km (number taken out of my behind, but it is in the ballpark) takes more energy than is contained in it.

The only reason to do so is to end up with high value in "biofuels" category. Just for show.

alecmg··on Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)
> Get rid of the num row and limit movement for fingers to one key in any direction using layers to simulate the missing keys (corne or kyria)

Wow this is first time I hear this recommended in relation to keyboard ergonomics. As a user of compact 49 key keyboard without a num row, can at least confirm it is not bad for productivity. Numbers and symbols are on layers and thus spread over keyboard. As a programmer I use a lot of symbols and I like the compact layout more. Precisely because there is less weird finger movement away from working zone.

Another thing I can recommend on regular keyboards is angled home row finger position: sdfv and njkl instead of usual asdf jkl;. With corresponding change to zone of every finger. Elbows on arm rests, wrists are straight.

alecmg··on When Parallel: Pull, Don't Push
you are splitting hair on definitions.

It is the pure function nature of functional programming that makes it easy for concurrent and parallel tasks. Recursion is neither here nor there

alecmg··on Intel Announces 10th Gen Core CPUs
CPU cores same as 6th (7th, 8th, 9th) gen, no new features

4 socket changes, no new features

alecmg··on 2M chickens to be killed in US processing plants due to lack of employees
Bad example.

Empty shelves in USSR only occurred at later years and were not a (direct) result of having a planned economy. It was a bad side offect of introducing parts of self-regulation a la market economy.

It doesn't take much planning to not waste 40% food.

alecmg··on Building a PC, Part IX: Downsizing
Those who kinda like downsizing, but don't want to be limited to ITX and SFF parts

Heres Raijintek Thetis [0]. Takes full size ATX motherboards, GPUs, CPU coolers and power supplies. Dimensions 210×360×366 mm (27.7L), smaller than most mATX cases and rivaling some ITX.

I keep looking at it, trying to find an excuse to build a new system, but waiting for next gen Ryzen.

[0] https://www.raijintek.com/en/products_detail.php?ProductID=5...

alecmg··on Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?
Less a pin to a bubble, more a wrecking ball to a house made of sticks

Effectively shutting down more than half of all business is slightly more than bursting a bubble. It is world war II scale event, with exception that there is no war that could take all the unemployed hands to the front and to producing weapons.

alecmg··on Ryzen 4000 Review
If you are interested in cpu being utilised, should lower graphics setings from ultra. On ultra GPU is the main bottleneck. Try same on Low settings
alecmg··on Introduction to Writing Genetic Algorithms
GA is cool

Population size 1024 took only 52 generations to get from random gibberish to "Helln, woqld!"

Then over 6000 generations to arrive to "Hello, world!", which seems not very efficient.

As every member of population is evaluated for fitness every generation, we performed 6M evaluations.

If same task was bruteforced (all combinations of 13 length from alphabet of 89 letters 89^13 variants) it would take much more than 6M.

alecmg··on Ryzen 4000 Review
You're not going to see Zen 3 until Q4 earliest
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