Hacker News Reader

sehuggon The Baseline Interpreter: A Faster JavaScript Interpreter in Firefox 70

What's a good way to diagnose optimzation/deoptimization performance issues? The Z80 emulator I use for http://8bitworkshop.com/ has some long pauses while it's spinning up. It uses a huge generated switch statement, which I'd assume is hard to optimize if type info isn't complete. (I'm replacing it with a simpler emulator which works much better though)

sehuggon The Baseline Interpreter: A Faster JavaScript Interpreter in Firefox 70

If it's any consolation, Gmail is dog-slow on my Samsung Chromebook 3. I switched to "Basic HTML" mode to make it bearable.

sehuggon 30 years ago: Voyager 2's historic Neptune flyby

I remember reading in a 1986 SciAm about how the team worked around spacecraft failures, like compensating for temperature and the doppler effect in the sole functioning radio receiver, and slowly rolling the entire platform to compensate for seizing motor shafts: https://books.google.com/books?id=rYIJJP7audkC&pg=PA42#v=one... (New Scientist)

sehuggon FBI tells lawmakers it can't access Dayton gunman's phone

“It is prudent to anticipate that a major incident may well occur at any time that will galvanize public opinion on these issues ... Whether we end up with legislation or not, the best course for everyone involved is to work soberly and in good faith together to craft appropriate solutions, rather than have outcomes dictated during a crisis.” -- AG William Barr, July 23 2019

"Never let a good crisis go to waste" -- Winston Churchill, probably

sehuggon Big Pharma is using faux generics to keep drug prices high, critics say

critics say

Uh, so does the DOJ: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/mylan-agrees-pay-465-mill...

sehuggon Smartphone Sales Are in Freefall, and That’s Okay

Ooh, thanks :) Just after I built a new version of Ruby and everything ...

sehuggon Smartphone Sales Are in Freefall, and That’s Okay

I'm using a 2011 MacBook Air right now for dev, and the only roadblock is that I can't upgrade the OS past 10.10.5.

sehuggon Scientists must rise above politics and restate their value to society

Pugwash wasn't just a bunch of lofty idealists, they participated in direct negotiations that kicked off the peace process in Vietnam: http://pugwashhistory.blogspot.com/2009/07/mcnamara-and-pugw...

Despite the headline, the article seems to be arguing that scientists reclaim their seat at the table, and get their hands dirty. A tall order in this era.

sehuggon Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

Often the zoning codes specify a minimum number of parking lots per housing unit. Some cities are removing the requirement in some areas, like Buffalo: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/01/buffalo-is-first-to-r...

sehuggon Amazon's Anti-Union Training Video [video]

Target made one back in the day: https://archive.org/details/TargetAnti-unionPropagandaVideo

sehuggon Mining Bitcoin on an Apple II

Ultra-low-power MCUs are ~80 μA/MHz, so yes, you can get there. Bitcoin doesn't require a lot of RAM, which helps power consumption significantly.

sehuggon Mining Bitcoin on an Apple II

If there's a successful hash, does it ATDT to the Bitcoin BBS to upload the block via Zmodem?

sehuggon The Tragedy of UCS-2

I vaguely recall making an alternate string class in the 90s that did this, also precomputing hashCode() in the constructor.

sehuggon ZipCPU – A small, lightweight, RISC soft core in Verilog

Bing has been using soft-core processors for search, 240 threads per FPGA: https://www.enterpriseai.news/2014/09/03/microsoft-using-fpg...

sehuggon ZipCPU – A small, lightweight, RISC soft core in Verilog

I didn't know yosys did formal verification now: http://zipcpu.com/blog/2017/10/19/formal-intro.html

Cool.

sehuggon Secretly Public Domain: Most books published in the US before 1964

Lots of TV shows before 1970 weren't renewed or had copyright notice errors, making them PD -- many of them on archive.org: https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_TV_series_with_episode...

sehuggon Every Noise at Once

Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 3,294 genres by Spotify as of 2019-07-29. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.

Lots of other cool Spotify-scraping projects by the author at the bottom.

sehuggon The Beginning of the End of the Beef Industry?

Not the worst, but probably not the best either: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/coconut-oil

sehuggon Home is a small, engineless sailboat (2018)

If you are interested in anarchic sailors check out Moxie Marlinspike's "Hold Fast" documentary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8105879

sehuggon When zebra mussels colonized Lake Erie, it began to recover

The alewife invasion and mediation is an interesting fish tale: https://fishingbooker.com/blog/history-of-fishing-on-the-gre...

sehuggon Atari Centipede’s Hidden Code Trap

Yeah, I don’t get it. You could just compare the ROMs directly. I can XOR any arbitrary secret message with a long enough key.

sehuggon Archive of Apple video and images by decade

Woz quotes Breakout as the motivation for his Apple ][ design, i.e. "I'm going to design a computer that can play Breakout."

sehuggon California’s mountain lion faces ‘extinction vortex’

I found this WWW page with the Google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_vortex

It's a boundary below which specific feedback mechanisms accelerate extinction, fragmentation of populations being one condition.

sehuggon 'Hell is coming': week-long heatwave begins across Europe

Not just lack of A/C, but social isolation. Most who died lived alone, just as in the 2018 Quebec heat wave that killed 74.

sehuggon The Day the Music Burned

The Anthology series is also a really good example of using archive material effectively. For example, you can see how songs like Strawberry Fields Forever and Day in the Life evolved over multiple sessions.

sehuggon C64 Power C Tutorial

The dominant C compiler (CC65) has a separate stack for parameters and local variables, and keeps SP as a pointer in zero-page. This is a nice general approach that allows for deep stacks, recursion, and lots of locals, but isn't very efficient.

Newer experimental 6502 languages either forbid recursion (cowgol) or limit parameters passed to functions (C02), but I can see a language using a hybrid of stack and zero page to keep locals and parameters.

The drawback of high-level programming on the 6502 is you are always looking for ways to make it better... :)

sehuggon US Customs Database Of Traveler Photos Was Hacked And Stolen

The Register reported the Perceptics breach on May 23: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/23/perceptics_hacked_l...

sehuggon Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002 (2015)

The only IDE I see is TTimo from id using Anjunta: http://anjuta.org/

sehuggon Breaking the physical limits of fonts

A weird thing about some early discrete arcade games is that they generated 3x5 pixel digits without a ROM. They used a 7448 seven-segment decoder -- you know, like those cool LCD/LED clock radios. A BCD counter drives the 7448, then it feeds into a couple of multiplexers and a handful of gates, which generates the video signal.

I gotta think there's a better way, but I'm not inclined to second-guess these designers.

sehuggon The toll climate change is taking on oceans

In the past 200 years alone, ocean water has become 30 percent more acidic—faster than any known change in ocean chemistry in the last 50 million years. https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/invertebrates/ocean-acidific...