h3lp · HackerTrans

2 か月前議論

In the interconnected, online world, you can do more damage without root access

     "they can read my email, take my money, and impersonate me to my friends, but at least they can't install drivers without my permission"

   https://xkcd.com/1200/

h3lp

2 か月前議論

The clocks need precise oscillations to measure time: the mechanical clocks used pendulums and springs; the maser clocks used precise microwave cavities; the atomic clocks that are dominating today use oscillations of electrons in selected atoms.

Americium is not a good atomic clock material---it doesn't have superior electronic transitions, and the nuclear transitions causing its radioactivity would get in the way.

Nuclear oscillations could also be used: there is a proposal to use a low-energy nuclear oscillation in Thorium; it would be more stable than electronic oscillations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_clock

The distinction of what can or cannot be called 'radioactive' is somehow artificial: masers, atoms and nuclei all emit radiation, so they all are technically 'radioactive'. Conventionally, 'radioactive' radiation requires energies that cause ionization of common materials, usually quoted as above 10eV. The Thorium nuclear transition is actually below that, so technically it is not radioactive---but I'd still not want to sit next to such clock without some shielding, because even UV radiation with energies above 3eV is known to damage living tissue.

h3lp

3 か月前議論

From the wikipedia article:

   Site preparation began in February, 2024;[12] the prefabricated restroom was placed by a crane in March;[2] and installation was completed on April 22, 2024, costing about $200,000 to the city.

so maybe government did the right thing, after trying all the other possibilities.

h3lp

3 か月前議論

From googling, didn't actually use them https://eelbattery.myshopify.com/products/original-grade-a-e...

h3lp

3 か月前議論

Thank you, great info. You have great suppliers though: I can get close on batteries (I see four for $355, so $88 instead of your $70) but for panels the best I can get is $220 instead of your $32---how do you go about getting them at those prices? Also, what Ethernet Power Router for $290? Is that a Fiberhood product? How and where would I order it?

h3lp

3 か月前議論

I don't doubt that you can have a low marginal cost, but you still have to invest money to get this system installed. You dismissed my argument as 'vague and hand-wavy', so please give a concrete estimate how much it would cost to install a 10kW system on a typical house in the US midwest, and maybe in Europe or Australia.

h3lp

3 か月前議論

They say $0.01/kWh is the target price, to be reached after some decades.

Don't get me wrong, I am excited about solar power but careful about the economics: the capital cost of solar right now is well over 1$/W (panels+inverters+installation/hookup) and even though it is falling nicely, the amortization schedule needs to be considered. A rule-of-thumb figure is 1kWh of power per year from 1W nominal installed, so the capital cost will have to be amortized over 100 years to reach $.01/kWh. The installed price has to come down by a factor of 10 for this to work out.

h3lp

3 か月前議論

in sqlite you can do it with FILTER:

   $ sqlite :memory: 
   create table t (product,revenue, year);
   insert into t values ('a',10,2020),('b',14,2020),('c',24,2020),('a',20,2021),('b',24,2021),('c',34,2021);
   select product,sum(revenue) filter (where year=2020) as '2020',sum(revenue) filter (where year=2021) as '2021' from t group by product;

h3lp

4 か月前議論

Good insight, but if you discount the visual elements (tabs, buttons, etc), you're limiting TUI to CLI, and I think that's unwarranted. The value proposition of both TUI and GUI is two-fold: you see the available action options, and you see the effect of your actions. So, yes, TUI and GUI _are_ closely related: who cares whether we're displaying pixels or character blocks.

Unfortunately, they are often artificially differentiated by the style of the UX interaction: TUIs promote the keyboard actions, and GUIs prefer mouse without corresponding keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately for GUIs, their designers are often so enamored with WIMP that they omit the keyboard shortcuts or make them awkward. I hate it when, even if the ACTION button is available by keyboard traversal at all, it requires some unknown number of widget traversals instead of being one tab away.

Since the keyboard is almost always used for the textual data, it makes sense to me to always enable it for command execution. Well designed GUIs and TUIs provide both WIMP and keyboard UX, which sadly is not the norm today, so here's my vote to make them larp for each other more.

h3lp

4 か月前議論

The compilers used to be unreliable too, e.g. at higher optimizations and such. People worked on them and they got better.

I think LLMs will get better, as well.

h3lp

4 か月前議論

   Any competent computer engineer can design a much better ISA than RISC-V.

Hello, my fellow bitter old man! I have to respectfully disagree, though. Firstly, RISC-V was actually designed by competent academic designers with four preceding RISC projects under their belt. The tenet of RISC philosophy is that the ISA is designed by careful measurement and simulation: the decisions are not supposed to be based on gut feeling or familiarity, but on optimizing the choices, which they arguably did.

Specifically, about detecting the overflow: the familiar, classic approach of a hardware overflow (V) flag is well known to be suboptimal, because of its effect on speculative and OoO implementations. RISC-V has enough primitives to handle an explicit overflow checking, and they are consistent with performance techniques such as branch prediction and macro fusing, to the point of having asymptotically vanishing cost--there can be no performance penalty. Even more so, the RISC-V code that does NOT care about overflow can completely ignore these checks.

h3lp

4 か月前議論

A lot of computer users are domain experts in something like chemistry or physics or material science. Computing to them is just a tool in their field, e.g. simulating molecular dynamics, or radiation transfer. They dot every i and cross every t _in_their_competency_domain_, but the underlying code may be a horrible FORTRAN mess. LLMs potentially can help them write modern code using modern libraries and tooling.

My go-to analogy is assembly language programming: it used to be an essential skill, but now is essentially delegated to compilers outside of some limited specialized cases. I think LLMs will be seen as the compiler technology of the next wave of computing.

h3lp

4 か月前議論

Greg mentions discipline and vision as determinants of successful software, which is correct but I think he misses another aspect of vision: the ability to attract and crystallize a community around their project. Arguably, most successful softwares thrive in the long term because they have a team of people that inspire each other, fill in with complementary talents, and provide continuity.

h3lp

4 か月前議論

Great example, and a lost opportunity in the interview---they should have asked "What are the requirements that would invalidate this answer? and what would you design if the requirements were changed in this way?". Maybe even "how long is the runway for your Progress solution if we consider future scaling up of the requirements"

h3lp

5 か月前議論

The alcoholic knows the bad outcomes, and chooses to ignore them. The hapless Android user does not understand the negative consequences of sideloading. I think this makes for a substantial differerence between those two.

h3lp

5 か月前議論

Well, power envelope IS the limit in many applications; anyone can build a LOBOS (Lots Of Boxes On Shelves) supercomputer, but data bandwidth and power will limit its usefullness and size. Everyone has a power budget. For me, it's my desk outlet capacity (1.5kW); for a hyperscaler, it's the capacity of the power plant that feeds their datacenter (1.5GW); we both cannot exceed Pmax * MIPS/W of computation.

h3lp

5 か月前議論

Literate programming is not about programming in natural languages: it's about integrating code (i.e. the formal description in some DSL) with the meta-code such as comments, background information, specs, tests, etc.

BTW, one side benefit of LP is freedom from arbitrary structure of DSLs. A standard practice in LP is to declare and define objects in the spot in which they are being used; LP tools will parse them out and distribute to the syntactically correct places.

h3lp

5 か月前議論

I guess it would be a consumption-based tax. The usual argument against it is that it's regressive: the poorer people spend higher percentage of their income on consumption, and therefore end up with a higher tax burden relative to their income. This can be counterbalanced by e.g. not taxing groceries/food but it becomes a whackamole tax breaks game quickly---should we also exclude fuel/housing/educational expenses/etc.

h3lp

5 か月前議論

also:

gpg --gen-random --armor 1 20

or:

pwgen

h3lp

5 か月前議論

FWIW whisper.cpp with the default model works at 6x realtime transcription speed on my four-core ~2.4GHz laptop, and doesn't really stress CPU or memory. This is for batch transcribing podcasts.

The downside is that couldn't get it to segment for different speakers. The concensus seemed to be to use a separate tool.

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