Hacker News Reader

eskaon Intermittent fasting may make little difference to weight loss, review finds

Most of the studies they looked at did not use the most robust methods and included small numbers of people, making it difficult to work out the true effects.

Not a good sign for a meta study. When you average garbage you still get garbage.

As for my personal experience, I looked at scientific papers 5 years ago (no, intermittent fasting isn’t some new social media fad). The consensus back then was that it only slightly increases the speed at which one loses weight, but it helps significantly with adherence to a diet. This was a game changer for me too. With just attempts to control my caloric deficit I failed because I ended up snacking. With intermittent fasting (the strict variant of only eating once after work in my case) I simply had no appetite from the morning until my meal. I also didn’t have cravings before sleep.

eskaon Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

Discord had a scandal not too long ago where pictures of people/passports were stolen. There they said that they delete those files immediately after processing them. This proves your statement as false.

eskaon Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

Surely there is so much money to be made selling random people's faces.

I really hope I misread sarcasm in that statement. Because of course there is a lot of money in that

eskaon Cutting Up Curved Things

MachineWorks and ModuleWorks have added GPU raycasting implementations in their last versions. It’s very recent.

eskaon United States Completes WHO Withdrawal

I don’t know how people can defend this organization and criticize the US government for losing trust in it, when there’s a myriad of scandals like this one.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM&pp=ygUUd2hvIHRhaXd...

eskaon Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoing hardware shortage

Your mental model of integer vs double performance sounds outdated by decades. I’d suggest reading up on instruction performance on agnerfog, should be eye opening.

eskaon So, you want to chunk really fast?

SWAR can refer to “abusing” general purpose registers for instructions on multiple data by using nifty tricks.

eskaon A silly diffuse shading model

It is. Takes me back to asking valve about this for my bachelor thesis 15 years ago and getting a personal reply from Gabe Newell who CC’d the developer who came up with the formula, him being all giggly whether I also want to know about skeletal animation that he came up with or the lip sync stuff. Fun guys

eskaon Show HN: BusterMQ, Thread-per-core NATS server in Zig with io_uring

If all of your dependencies need to use the same build system as your project then your build system/process is defect anyway. It should be possible to invoke a foreign build system as part of your build.

eskaon I wrote a code editor in C and now I'm a changed man

There are many bad things to be said about TempleOS, many aspects of it that seem poorly constructed or wouldn't work in the "real world". I'm going to ignore them here. It's very easy to be negative, but you will never learn anything new by doing so.

I think you should reflect on why you’re so dismissive of other’s work. When I see comments like yours it makes me think the commenter must have some self-worth issues requiring them to put others down in order to feel better about themselves.

eskaon Here is the 15 sec coding test I used to instantly filter out most applicants

There are quite a few people who can code but have 0 social skills and can’t talk well or at all. In that sense I have to disagree with you, but I still wouldn’t hire them because they drag teams down.

eskaon The Cost of a Closure in C

Your code actually has 2 bugs. The first I assume is just a typo and you meant to use [1][1] == ‘r’. The second one is that you would accept “-rblah” as well.

eskaon Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

HDDs also have a spinning medium and a read head , so the optimization is similar to optical media like CDs.

Let’s say you have UI textures that you always need, common player models and textures, the battle music, but world geometry and monsters change per stage. Create an archive file (pak, wad, …) for each stage, duplicating UI, player and battle music assets into each archive. This makes it so that you fully utilize HDD pages (some small config file won’t fill 4kb filesystem pages or even the smaller disk sectors). All the data of one stage will be read into disk cache in one fell swoop as well.

On optical media like CDs one would even put some data closer to the middle or on the outer edge of the disc because the reading speed is different due to the linear velocity.

This is an optimization for bandwidth at the cost of size (which often wasn’t a problem because the medium wasn’t filled anyway)

eskaon Oracle is underwater on its $300B OpenAI deal

2026 is the year of Google Stadia /s

eskaon Parsing Integers in C

TFA says performance might be worse, but it’s easy to beat libc because it supports different formats etc that you don’t need. Float parsing is tough to beat, but only if you want perfect precision for the full range. If you just parse millions of physical distance measurements from some csv you don’t have such issues either.

eskaon Tags to make HTML work like you expect

Interesting question. I don’t remember testing this, sorry.

eskaon [dead]

It just takes one bad apple to spoil the entire batch.

This crap is why women look at me funny when I tell them I speak fluent Japanese as a white guy.

eskaon Tags to make HTML work like you expect

I’m happy to report it still fails and causes me great pain.

eskaon Tags to make HTML work like you expect

I’m not a blind person but I was curious about once when I tried to make a hyper-optimized website. It seemed like the best way to please screen readers was to have the navigation HTML come last, but style it so it visually comes first (top nav bar on phones, left nav menu on wider screens).

eskaon Are-we-fast-yet implementations in Oberon, C++, C, Pascal, Micron and Luon

The original repo is about using a subset of a language to compare language implementations. I can see the point in that. But language benchmarks like this are incredibly useless and very easy to get wrong anyway. For example it you actually cared about performance for the bounce example you would never write it like this in C. Bouncing 100 balls in a loop 50 times with 4 ifs just tests the branch predictor. There is nothing to learn from this in practice.

eskaon Casey Muratori: I can always tell a good programmer in an interview

When he introduces himself to a new audience on podcasts his standard intro is that he is not a performance guy, and he refers to his past colleagues who he learned a lot from as being on a higher tier than him.

He preaches reasonable performance instead of completely shitting the bed or optimization to the maximum (although he also teaches that).

Look at the JetBeans Java challenge on YouTube where he coaches a (imo below average) programmer. He is very kind. So your assessment just seems unfair to me.

eskaon rlsw – Raylib software OpenGL renderer in less than 5k LOC

I implemented the OpenGL API for fixed function hardware once, and chose the cut off at 1.5 with some extensions like framebuffer objects. 1.x has a lot of cruft that nobody should use, but is still easy to implement. 2.x has a lot of stuff like shaders that are a lot more work to implement in software.

eskaon Kohler launches smart toilet camera

we’ve also written about the toilet camera offered by a startup called Throne

Marketing department working overtime with that name

eskaon AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

Just yesterday I saw another Hetzner thread where someone claimed AWS beats them in uptime and someone else blasted AWS for huge incidents. I bet his coffee tastes better this morning.

eskaon Beyond OpenMP in C++ and Rust: Taskflow, Rayon, Fork Union

This stuff is sometimes difficult to search for because people don’t name it or there are many different names.

Arena allocation on windows for example is basically calling VirtualAlloc for a couple gigabytes on a 64 bit system (you have terabytes of virtual memory available) and then slicing it up into sub-ranges that you pass as parameters to threads grouped hierarchically for each cpu and then within that each group of cores that share cache and then single cores for their own cache memory. Lock the software threads to their hardware threads and done. Then for each arena use bump and maybe pool allocators for most stuff. Very basic and little code, much higher performance than most software out there. It’s also why a lot of diehard C programmers find rust lifetime management overengineered and boring btw because you don’t have so many lifetimes as modern C++ code for example.

For the boolean stuff look at the “better software conference” youtube talk about that video game physics engine for example (sorry, I’m on my phone on the jump). Again, old ideas being rediscovered

eskaon Beyond OpenMP in C++ and Rust: Taskflow, Rayon, Fork Union

Are you alluding to the microsoft terminal fiasco? It was the other way around: his terminal supported more text features.

eskaon RTO: WTAF

No, the employer would have to provide training and show that the employee is willfully not participating. That’s legally challenging for non-trivial stuff.

eskaon Beyond OpenMP in C++ and Rust: Taskflow, Rayon, Fork Union

I think thread pools are one of those solved problems that the silent majority of C programmers has solved ages ago and doesn’t release open source projects for. I’ve also written my 300 line for pool and allocator together and always laughed at taskflow, rayon, etc.. Even NUMA is easy with arena allocation. When casey muratori of the handmade network said the same thing I remember agreeing and he got made fun of for it.

BTW the for-case can simply be supported by setting a pool/global boolean and using that to decide how to wait for a new task (during the paralle for the boolean will be true, otherwise do sleeps with mutexes in the worst case for energy saving)

eskaon RTO: WTAF

In order to fire a German employee outside of their multiple month trial period they have to commit a crime or willfully ignore instructions, or the company must be in financial trouble due to outside circumstances. Underperforming is not a legal reason to fire somebody.

eskaon Famous cognitive psychology experiments that failed to replicate

I recently read the lifework book of a nobel prize winning psychologist and it was full of these disproven experiments. As a non-psychologist my trust in the experts is extremely low.