astrobe_

2,139 カルマ登録 15 年前

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2 時間前議論

tbh, I'm not sure if we need "more clever" CPUs since they cause more and more unpredictable performance outcome -- and more pressing issues like Spectre. Besides, looking at the evolution of technology tells us that performance increases mainly comes from parallelism, like multicore and GPUs. Which doesn't apply to "annoyingly not parallel" problems of course. But besides "gambling" approaches like branch prediction, there's not much you can do about them in the general case.

5 時間前議論

Yes. Civilizations relying on tin were basically quite vulnerable because tin is uncommon [1]. The coincidence between late bronze age collapse and the transition to iron age seems to be explained by the fact that once the disorganization no longer allows tin trade, makers turn to the second choice, iron.

Iron making was known during bronze age, but it was technically more challenging that tin+copper because it requires higher temperatures.

It's amusing to note that it lead to the development of the iron/steel making techniques, so much so that once the tin "was back", steel was cheaper, more reliable (from the logistics perspective) and better.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_sources_and_trade_during_a...

8 時間前議論

Yes. I'm moving the goal post a bit here, but I was actually thinking about design mistakes and dangerous constructs - the kind of thing you do when you write in a "hacky" way - either deliberately or because you don't know better. Although these are not directly under the scope of type checking, a more restrictive language can have a positive influence.

昨日議論

I'll paraphrase someone who commented on HN once (about dynamic vs static typing, IIRC): permissive languages are enablers for solo programmers, but you need more restrictive languages for team programming.

This matches my experience because you don't chose who you work with. Skill level is uneven among the team. Less skilled co-workers will make mistakes that will have more consequences when the language is more permissive.

That's one of the reasons you want code reviews, but then you convert your skilled programmers to teachers. This is not a good trade, because the time they spend improving the skills of other programmers is partially wasted because programmers are free to come and go. AI could change this picture.

The name of the game is therefore to keep your teams small and skilled, but this is can be difficult because of typical company politics - e.g. "bus factor" considerations, shortening time-to-market is often achieved by adding more programmers.

昨日議論

> is in fact set in a fictional region of Japan, but is created so lovingly that you’ll believe it’s real life.

This is actually a major cheat. Realism is expensive, and exposes your creation to the equivalent of the "uncanny valley" for vehicle simulation - the simulated world is never accurate enough and you can't help but notice the differences with reality. E.g. if you see generic buildings ("autogen") near a location you know IRL, the simulation feels immediately sloppy.

Yet, as long as I'm not interested in visiting real places, I would go for a vehicle simulation in a fictional world any day. I wouldn't mind if the vehicles were also fictional, as long as they require some technique to drive them. What matters in games is challenge and mastery, but not what you master; your RTS, FPS or chess skills have very little value IRL.

> Zoom out far enough—and for some reason it will let you—and you see the tiles, the roads that don’t line up, and the various tricks and techniques that allow it to look so realistic from low down. But don’t do that! That’s silly. This is a train sim, not a plane sim, you’ve no business in the sky.

OpenBVE one-upped BVE train sim with external cameras, and as a result you see all this too. In my eyes, they sort of miss the point of a train simulation: the view point is normally attached to the driver, so one can use all sorts of tricks to avoid having to "paint the entire wall" - which is quite important if you count on a community of fan modders who have limited resources.

一昨日議論

Hardcore fans may like the BVE train sim [1]. A lot of Japanese fan-made lines (add-ons) with custom sounds. Generally speaking, the game is far from AAA, but the "hand-made" feel makes up for that.

The downside is that sometimes it is difficult to install addons or to figure out their custom features because the instructions are often poorly translated from Japanese and websites often have no English translations at all. One should also note that some addons include and run "homemade" DLLs to implement custom features.

It seems that the community is on the decline though, because while searching around I have found a lot of dead links. One can try OpenBVE [2] (partially compatible with BVE), which is less Japan-centric but should have some Japanese lines.

[1] https://bvets.net/en/

[2] https://openbve-project.net/

9 日前議論

Let's go for "PearTube" then.

12 日前議論

> Using a Gregorian Date before the calendar was introduced is almost certainly an error.

It's just an extrapolation; using the calendar being used at the considered time would be meaningless for us, e.g. the short-lived french republican calendar [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar

12 日前議論

And that's also why we are in the 21st century, not the 20th.

14 日前議論

ORMs and variations like Protobuf or things that have to be cross-plateform in the wide sense. The perspective that the same source will behave the same in various environments, and "velocity" trumps performance considerations. If you want to work on things where performance matters, consider embedded/firmware programming ;-)

15 日前議論

It seems this -que was already a relic at that time, or maybe sort of literary, because it coexisted with et (as in etc, et cetera, &c), which still exists e.g. in French. Or maybe one is from antic Latin and the other is from "vulgar"/late Latin ?

15 日前議論

Still romanian. "The common law—so named because it was common to all the king's courts across England—originated in the practices of the courts of the English kings in the centuries following the Norman Conquest in 1066" [1]

France (and Normandy) was conquered by Rome before it was granted to Rollo, a Viking. A few generations later, his descendant William the Conqueror claimed the English crown. Just like what happened with Gauls and Romans, the conquered people adopted large parts of the language and customs of the conqueror. That's why the English language is ~25% of Roman origin for it's vocabulary. I suppose it is the same for English common law.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#History

16 日前議論

You can have them in C/C++ at least [1]

[1] https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/language/operator_alternativ...

17 日前議論

The title reads "too little, too late" to me.

20 日前議論

This only makes a difference in terms of memory size, not in terms of speed, because for decades processors and compilers have been optimized for moving bytes around.

But one would note that in order to gain memory for this particular case of slicing, one introduces 2 extra words (size and pointer) for every other cases. Like perhaps the second most common string operation, concatenation. In those other cases, the benefit is slightly negative.

I've had extensive experience with "counted strings" because I implemented a bunch of Forth interpreters which also uses this scheme. Including the common trick of using counted and zero-terminated strings, which is the worst of both worlds in the end. Forth is the kind of language that quickly show you how bad your choices are.

I eventually dropped all that and adopted ASCIIZ strings because they are generally more efficient (if you pay attention to the strlen() performance pitfalls) and having a dead simple interface with the rest of the world (OS, libraries) is more valuable.

21 日前議論

We sill probably see an increase in the use of OS-level memory compression tricks instead - things like zwap on Linux, for instance. Because the trend is usually to cure the symptoms, not the cause, as it is generally easier to set up and good enough. Makers who already have invested on memory-careless tech such as Electron won't rewrite; at best they'll just be replaced by better alternatives.

28 日前議論

I think it was sarcasm. I have about as much experience as them in low-level C programming, and I was wondering why this is on front page. I've also discovered again a few things too, so I won't look down on OP. It's certainly better than vibe coding.

29 日前議論

If you like nitpicking, Poe's short story *The unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall" [1] should keep you busy a couple of days ;-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unparalleled_Adventure_of_...

先月議論

I'd say if it does have methodological deficits, it should be ignored. Measuring a length with a wet spaghetti can only result in nonsense.

先月議論

I haven't shipped millions of units but I do have occasional glimpses of the HW side as a firmware programmer. My impression is that decisions regarding costs are not always entirely rational, hence my questioning. Thanks for the answers.