Hacker News Reader

brandmeyeron Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

> And a lot of "religious exemptions" are being turned down. This would be a bit like taking a staunch vegan and forcing them to eat something (via threatening career) that was tested on animals while they said otherwise.

Considering all of the other household items that are also commonly tested using fetal cell lines (including acetaminophen, aspirin, ibuprofen, albuterol, pseudoephidrine), the analogy doesn't apply.

brandmeyeron Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

Careful: you're letting ideology get in the way of the facts.

Price gouging laws are exclusively a local and state matter, and only apply at the retail level. Although there have been proposals for price-gouging laws at the federal level, none have been enacted. State laws don't generally apply to B2B interactions.

brandmeyeron Programming PIC32 Microcontroller with Rust

One detail of note: PIC32 is a modern microcontroller built up around a MIPS core instead of one of the older (oddball) 8- or 16-bit PIC cores. MIPS is much easier to support in a compiler than the legacy PIC instruction set.

It is certainly possible to make an 8-bit core based on RISC principles (ex: AVR), but the PIC wasn't. Classic PIC has a hard-earned reputation for awful compiler support.

brandmeyeron USS Connecticut (SSN 22) struck an object while submerged on Oct. 2

My first CO believed that submarines should be stealthy all the time. He didn't put out the radar ball (a retro-reflector to account for the low observability of the sail relative to a submarine's size) or turn on any of the running lights.

We operated that way even when steaming on the surface in the shipping lanes shared with the Port of New York.

So it isn't always a matter of "actually knowing how to pilot a boat". Sometimes its just plain recklessness.

brandmeyeron Python 3.11: “Zero cost” exception handling

Nearly all loops are terminated by raising an exception.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/exceptions.html#StopIterat...

brandmeyeron Nios V – Intel's RISC-V Processor

> I'm not quite certain what's the use case for most soft CPU's on FPGA-s.

They are used for state machines and control algorithms that are complex enough that you don't want to implement them in HDL. High-speed interface (eg, DDR4, high-speed ADC) initialization and training is a common example.

brandmeyeron New features coming in Julia 1.7

I'm not OP, but I can easily see my team getting into the same situation.

Our use case involves dynamically displaying some analysis results on a status page derived from data from the field. The analysis was originally written in Python + scipy + matplotlib (Julia in OP's case). Why write the analysis code a second time just to display it on a demand-generated webpage?

You don't have to run the entire website on Julia, but maybe you do want to stand up a couple of RESTful endpoints that are integrated with the rest of the web application. If Julia can't do that, then your options will be limited.

brandmeyeron Freqfs: In-memory filesystem cache for Rust

In those cases, the filesystem provides its own block cache.

brandmeyeron You Are Overpaying Jeff Bezos for Your Databases

This has got to be the most brazenly crass sales pitch I've ever seen.

"Do you hate billionaires? We've got the product for you!"

brandmeyeron SQLite Archive Files (2018)

I don't think so. An important missing element in SQLite's format is larger block support. Modern filesystems do this via extents. SQLite has a strictly fixed block size and no support for forming larger blocks from contiguous runs of basic blocks.

Another missing element is that SQLite's support for large blobs is via linked lists of pages. That's fine for sequential access, but unacceptable for random access.

For a database to be usable as a filesystem backend, it must at least be composable with itself without sacrificing performance. Lets say you built a kernel module or fuse module using sqlite as the backend. How well would sqlite itself perform on a file in this filesystem?

brandmeyeron GMP: The GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library

GMP doesn't do well in prime fields with a small, fixed number of limbs. Poly1305 and elliptic curves are both good examples. Its general routines aren't as fast as custom routines, and it doesn't execute in constant time.

MPFQ exists for short finite field work, but it hasn't achieved the popularity of GNU MP.

https://gitlab.inria.fr/mpfq/mpfq

brandmeyeron Arm AArch64 Adds Memcpy() Instructions

ARMv7-M squirrels away the progress of the ldm/stm in the program status register to avoid restarting it completely.

brandmeyeron Arm AArch64 Adds Memcpy() Instructions

ARM has been managing interruptible instructions with partial execution state for a long time.

In ARM assembly syntax, the exclamation point in an addressing mode indicates writeback. Its difficult to be certain without seeing the architecture reference manual, but it would be consistent for instruction to be writing back all three of the source pointer, destination pointer, and length registers.

A memcpy is interruptible without replaying the entire instruction (say, because it hit a page that needed to be faulted-in by the operating system) if it wrote back a consistent view of all three registers prior to transferring control to an interrupt handler.

brandmeyeron Canada aims to block Chelsea Manning from entering country

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27414920

There are numerous articles that discuss this article in turn. The short version: Many current members of the ACLU are advocating to take up progressively-aligned cases specifically instead of civil liberties causes generally.

brandmeyeron Sri Lanka’s overnight flip to organic farming has led to an economic disaster

> Hmm what the relation from cooking gas prices to organic farming?

Organic practices -> Lost productivity per acre + increased costs per acre -> Loss of export profits -> Currency devaluation relative to international currencies (USD, EUR) -> Increasing prices of imports

All of that process is plainly stated in the article.

brandmeyeron Did IBM Just Preview the Future of Caches?

The entire point of the patent system is to encourage disclosure. Patents are by their very nature public information.

brandmeyeron C# for Systems Programming

"fat arrow" would just be symbol-speaking. Assuming you are referring to the match syntax in rust[1], I verbalize "PATTERN => EXPRESSION" as "on $PATTERN, do $EXPRESSION".

I don't read code in English, even though I'm a native speaker. So its kindof a silly question: this would only come up when walking someone else through the code. I internally read code using data-flow and control-flow graphs. The written abbreviation is just shorthand for a specific type of graph vertex (or edge).

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch18-01-all-the-places-for-pa...

brandmeyeron C# for Systems Programming

An old habit of mine: Avoid symbol-speaking or abbreviation-speaking. I verbalize "fn" as "function" and "mut" as "mutable" the same way I verbalize "std::unique_ptr" as "standard unique pointer" and not "stid unique pooter".

brandmeyeron Arm China Has Gone Rogue

See also the history of the Wright brothers' patent war in the dawn of the aviation age, and the subsequent forced patent pool.

brandmeyeron Personal finance experts don’t get wealthy by following their own advice

I agree entirely, but would phrase it differently. The baseline advice isn't about how to get rich, its about how to live a financially comfortable middle-class life.

brandmeyeron High Performance Correctly Rounded Math Libraries for 32-Bit Floating Point

Based on their press material, you'd think that nobody else has done this before at any precision. You can see the resulting confusion in this very forum. That kind of behavior is disingenuous at best.

brandmeyeron High Performance Correctly Rounded Math Libraries for 32-Bit Floating Point

> Things are much harder with 64 bits, unfortunately.

Solved and published over 15 years ago. The underlying methods were published over 20 years ago (V. Lef`evre, J.M. Muller, and A. Tisserand. Towards correctly rounded transcendentals. and Lefvre's associated PhD thesis).

https://hal-ens-lyon.archives-ouvertes.fr/ensl-01529804/file...

The Correctly Rounded Math Library (CRLIBM) is available for several languages.

brandmeyeron High Performance Correctly Rounded Math Libraries for 32-Bit Floating Point

Its unfortunate that they don't mention the prior work of the crlibm project in this domain.

https://gforge.inria.fr/scm/browser.php?group_id=5929&extra=...

Github mirror: https://github.com/taschini/crlibm

Python bindings: https://pypi.org/project/crlibm/

Julia bindings: https://juliapackages.com/p/crlibm

brandmeyeron Joe Rogan, confined to Spotify, is losing influence

NIST Technical Note 1385 "GPS Receivers and Relativity" by Ashby and Weiss discusses how to solve the GPS positioning equations in a relativistically correct way. It turns out that since the frame of reference (Earth-Centered/Earth-Fixed) is rotating, it is non-inertial and you have to apply some corrections to do the job right.

brandmeyeron Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

During my tenure, just about every leak was accompanied by howling about the people who dared leak the information. Termination? Yes. Blackballing? Yes. Summary execution? No.

brandmeyeron World's biggest wind turbine shows the disproportionate power of scale

Manufacturing needs a highly controlled environment. The industry's trend has been towards simplifying the installation process as much as possible. Smaller crew, simpler equipment, less that can go wrong on-site, etc.

brandmeyeron Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

> So then I realized that they were brain washed by the company internal communication to feel that anything annoying for Google was bad for them personally!

I think your interpretation of this experience is incorrect. Their visceral reaction was against leaking specifically, not negative information generally. Part of the propaganda behind TGIF, the internal newsletters, and so on is the idea that this inside information is part of what makes you special as a Googler.

> "...we hate so much the person that did that, that we would have like to have him dead."

While I'm sure you caught a big fish that day, I'm also sure it wasn't that big (come on: the retelling of this anecdote does not need quite that much exaggeration).

brandmeyeron Hydrogen lobbyist quits, slams oil companies’ “false claims” about blue hydrogen

In addition to sibling comments, I'd add

Focusing just on industrial misinformation, I'd add

  - asbestos and lung disease
  - mercury dumping
  - chromate dumping
  - numerous workplace hazards

brandmeyeron U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

3.5 inches on an average of ~1 meter was the measurement, in a study that a single researcher performed using himself as the rider.

This result is both weakly supported and small, and it shouldn't be considered actionable.

brandmeyeron Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

> The AFOLU sector is responsible for just under a quarter

1/4 of world-wide emissions. In developed nations it isn't nearly that large of a fraction. The US agriculture industry is responsible for a little less than 1/10 of our emissions.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas...