i336_

> ...if you want to absolutely wring the last clock cycle out of a hot path, you usually need good microarchitectural knowledge...

Could starting with compiler output for a given problem be a good idea for new programmers?

For example, I might take a complex problem I want to solve and then implement a series of solutions in multiple high-level(-ish) languages like C, FORTRAN, or even possibly Haskell. Once the implementations are correct, I get all languages to output assembly, and then spend a while pouring over the output, possibly doing some further iteration on the high-level source code in the process.

My thinking here is that, the compiler is basically a gigantic database+graph of "use this instruction in this scenario" and a crazy complicated state machine to direct operations throughout the graph. Way too complex to read through... but I can make a compiler tell me the 90th-percentile+-most-relevant instructions to use by simply writing my program in that compiler's language.

Obviously, the standard caveats about compilers producing terrible output apply - I'd never recommend treating compiler output as normative or "good for educational use", just a decent startpoint - and something to have no qualms about surpassing.

I was extremely curious what REPL this is, and it appears to be TXR: http://www.nongnu.org/txr/

(My conclusion was based on finding file-get-string and file-put-string in https://fossies.org/linux/misc/txr-176.tar.gz/txr-176/share/...)

Very interesting. Thanks for the demo and references!

Woooops, that one totally flew over my head. Perhaps I shouldn't post when slightly tired :)

Thanks very much for this. I expect that the simple design that I (and others - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14452315) posted was likely inspired by this - which is interesting!

Right. It went straight over my head. :)

Wow, interesting. This info is definitely filed away, thanks.

I don't quite remember but I think I might've been commenting on something on GitHub when I saw the time glitch.

Initially for a moment I thought "why not just have OCD local NTP tracking?" but then I realized that time glitching around (even at the millisecond level) can be disastrous. One way to solve this is to obsess about keeping up to date with NTP, but instead of updating the time, update a global reference to the offset. Then your time server is simply (system date)+-(saved offset), which should be super fast. And of course this can run on the node generating the HTML.

Me too. I noted as such here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14452439

Note that the person who replied is not the person who owned the repo.

Either this is a case of Put the joke into air ten feet of north of me. Verify the result. or there was an issue with the repo.

If I was doing this I'd be looking at making a real repo with a magic string in its README.md - because there's a big difference between HTTP 200 on / for github.com, and everything working correctly so that magic string displays.

PSA

This webpage from 2007 is the first place I saw the same fundamental board design: http://woodgears.ca/marbleadd/

Direct video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcDshWmhF4A

The design in the two links above is fairly simple (I'd hate to see the patent office decide it was unique[ly patentable], for example), and so I doubt that this person from 2007 was the first to build it.

But I wouldn't be surprised if this particular design and video served as some serious inspiration for the linked product.

To clarify, I recognize that this system far surpasses the basic wooden adder I've linked. But the similarities are there.

And thinkpads.

I used it to add X11 autorotation to an X61 tablet. No spin animation, but it was a cool one-day hack nonetheless.

The fun part was that the orientation analyses was done from a shell script, and actually worked 100% of the time (unlike so many phones)! \o/

The insane part was that DRM/KMS on Linux is 1000% crazy and I had to patch the kernel to stop poking the backlight on every. rotation. event, grr. (I had to do it in the kernel - I basically killed DPMS - because X11 libdrm is utterly incomprehensible.)

I can totally agree about relative timestamping in both directions (past+future) - my argument is more about the UX of situations where you're canonically referring to a past event.

So as not to spam with my reply to a similar comment, I'll link it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14452335

Very true.

I just think there should be an intent argument specifiable to the library to indicate that the duration in question refers to an event that has happened in the past.

In such a scenario, the library should mark the duration as happening "just now" and possibly flag a warning or raise an exception.

The reason I say this is that, humanly speaking, "Your message was sent 23 seconds from now" is amusing at best to developers who know what's happening (negative time delta) and linguistically confusing to general users ("was sent" vs "from now").

This repo shows as empty for me.

As of right now...

On the one hand, I see "Everything operating normally." at the top in green, and no flags or alerts.

On the other hand, the charts look good, but "App server availability" looks interesting, the right edge of the chart is pretty much at 0%.

I've noticed this behavior with a lot of services.

I can only chalk it up to something like clock drift between the processing node and the database server.

Irritatingly I can't remember which site it was but I posted something somewhere a couple days ago and immediately after hitting enter the site marked what I'd said as submitted "a few seconds from now". I never fail to be amused that the fuzzy time library being used has code specifically designed to handle this edge case scenario. :D

WebSQL is so sad.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42288596/websql-has-incr...

I remember reading on http://reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport some time ago (I unfortunately don't remember what thread) about someone who decided to move their server rack. Said rack had a UPS, but no wheels.

The 10k HDDs in the blades didn't really like it...

Any video editors got a few minutes?

There's an open video stabilization request here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ImageStabilization/comments/6e1mgj/...

So far there's https://streamable.com/lrkhg which sorta gets partway there.

No problem!

Stretch is a really awesome idea, by the way. :)

That makes a lot of sense. Yet another case of insane defaults :(

Servers are like castles of old. They need to be properly defended!

Oh, thanks! TIL.

Hey OP, just wanted to let you know - the animation is making a horizontal scrollbar appear and disappear at the bottom of the page.

What I think is happening is that as .limo-container (which is 100% of page width) rotates, its "real" bounding box is expanding and contracting ever so slightly. Just open the devtools and focus on that div, you'll get it immediately.

(I'm on Chromium 57.0.2987.98 (Developer Build) on Linux, FWIW.)

Unsure why you're being downvoted. I'm in Australia and cannot access the site either :(

Thanks! Parsing git information without using git has always been mildly interesting to me :)

This is most definitely for zsh, FWIW; I choked slightly on `echo $var[1,12]` for a minute there. That's not a problem - you wrote this for your shell prompt, you use zsh, it makes sense to use zsh features - I'm just noting that others might need to do a bit of porting.

(I personally use bash by choice myself because it's the most widely installed shell and I don't want to switch until I fully know how to make the most concise and least surprising use of it.)

Oookay, we're going to need the gist of how you built that. That sounds cool.

Hmmm.

Getting the bug report to the right dev and eliciting the ever-important "huh, that's weird" is a really tricky routing problem due to Microsoft (and similar companies') scale.

So... maybe... a team could be created, whose sole purpose is to distill potential issues into tiny testcases that take the fewest number of seconds for someone with domain knowledge to look at and go "okay I doubt this is invalid". Not to actually repro the issue (which might require significant setup), but rather to get an initial go/no-go.

Then teams around the company could be routed batches of testcases to look at every couple of days.

I know I'm describing issue tracking here - the specific point I'm getting at is that the first team I mentioned would handle all the back-and-forth with the customer until the testcase was as small as possible.

The caveat emptor with this idea is that it's inspired by a single datapoint (OP's bug report) and may not scale to more nuanced problems. Hardware failure, for example, would fall right through this approach.

Update for the record: I was, very happily, completely wrong.

dang got in touch to let me know the delay was due to backlog and that he'll properly reply when he gets the chance. Absolutely fine by me; I'm super glad to know my email was fine :D

No,

> We encourage ... users who wish to install systemd to use Debian.

Interesting. So V8 isn't really innovating implementationally in terms of major new research ideas - it's just scrounging around and borrowing old, awesome research from decades gone past.

Reminds me of the container-based virtualization renaissance that's happening right now.

Hmm, and I've always thought Chrome's extra-thick titlebar was liberated from the Xerox Star UI (http://imgur.com/6h13MlP).

Some licensing and status tidbits:

- http://ec-lang.org/ and http://ecere.org/ point to each other

- ec-lang says "designed in 2004", ecere says "founded in 1997", both point to https://github.com/ecere/ecere-sdk - unsure what to make of this

- https://github.com/ecere/ecere-sdk/blob/master/LICENSE is BSD 3-clause (revised)

- some of the demo screenshots on the ecere website list something called "GNOSIS", a closed-source 3D library (with free educational licensing) also written by the project authors

- the GitHub repo lists forks of emscripten ("This branch is even with kripken:master.") and binaryen ("This branch is 2 commits ahead, 35 commits behind WebAssembly:master.")