bvk · HackerTrans

Just to elaborate on this, the CPU performance of the T420 should not be a concern. The T420 (and T430) use 35 watt processors, whereas modern ultrabooks use 15 watt processors. A T420 from 2012 can beat today's base model Macbook Air handily in CPU performance despite the technology upgrades in the past 5 years; it will just produce more heat doing it. And that's before the possibility of a quad core upgrade.

bvk

11 lat temudiscuss

The NES's GPU generates sync pulses on the video line - one at the end of each line to make the electron gun's aim to return to the left side, and a long one at the end of each frame for the electron beam path to return to the top left. Circuitry in the TV uses these pulses to keep the picture stable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_television

bvk

12 lat temudiscuss

This story does not take into account the recent supreme court ruling in Riley v. California that the search-incident-to-arrest exception does not apply to the information carried in cell phones. Even if your cell phone is on your person and unlocked when you are arrested, police need a search warrant to look at the data it contains.

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-132_8l9c.pdf

I'd recommend that anyone with an interest in civil rights read Supreme Court decisions - they tend to be written in a much more understandable style than you'd expect.

bvk

12 lat temudiscuss

The case you cite, "the SR server was located by myself and another member..." is not ambiguous at all. For "by myself" to take on the "on my own" meaning, the sentence would need "I" as its subject:

"I located the SR server by myself.", not "The SR server was located by myself", which I don't think anyone, even those using this objectionable form, would produce.

I understand and sympathize with your distaste for the expression: it goes against previous rules of formal written English, and it signals the style adopted by people speaking for organizations attempting to convey power and control, which goes against the anti-authoritarian ethos of HN. But these sorts of judgments are usually motivated by deeply-held feelings and then rationalized as pleas for clarity and precision in language.

bvk

12 lat temudiscuss

Not only are Finnish and Hungarian related, but they are (as far as historical linguistics can tell) completely unrelated to every other language of Europe. Going by family resemblance, you'd expect English speakers to have an easier time learning Persian or Sanskrit than Finnish.

bvk

12 lat temudiscuss

The thing to note about this card is that it's a dual-GPU card - two chips with some sort of intra-card PCIE bus between them. You could get equivalent gaming performance by buying two of the GTX 780 Ti for about $1500. That level of performance is roughly what you want if you want to game at 4k resolutions at 60 FPS, so there are gaming applications for this card, even if it falls into "insanely high-end". The niche for this sort of card is in mini-ITX and similarly small computers, where there isn't enough room for a pair of cards and the builder wants "throwing money away" levels of performance.

That said, the selling point of the Titan cards is that their GPUs don't have the same restrictions put on their general-purpose compute performance as the standard gamer cards. NVIDIA locks this performance on their geforce cards in order to protect their lucrative GPGPU business, so this is really more of an entry-level card for scientific computing and other applications.

Cryptocurrency mining would be an obvious application, but a quirk of NVIDIA and AMD's differing architectures means that AMD cards are vastly more powerful at the specific functions needed to mine cryptocoins.

bvk

12 lat temudiscuss

A distro with enough options to satisfy the creators of every fork would be an unholy mess. 1,000 separate contributors are very good at adding every option under the sun to a piece of software. But reducing choices to the point where you can just burn a CD and "install Debian" is anti-parallelizable.

bvk

13 lat temudiscuss

The comparison is hardly disingenuous: the i5 may not be given Intel's highest branding designation, but it is an enthusiast processor and only a slight step down from the top-of-the-line i7-4770k, lacking only hyperthreading.

And this is completely irrelevant, since the i5-4670k ships with Intel's highest integrated graphics option for desktop chips, which is what is being compared to the A10-7850k.

At the moment AMD's processors can't compete with Intel at the high end. It makes no sense to berate a company for not doing what it can't.

bvk

13 lat temudiscuss

In general, Super Mario World is being played back on a Super Nintendo emulator using prerecorded inputs (a file exists that says which buttons should be held down on each frame). But these inputs aren't a recording of someone actually playing; these button presses were constructed frame-by-frame very carefully to produce these specific effects. Theoretically, if you could manipulate a Super Nintendo controller with perfect precision 60 times per second you could reproduce this.

Specifically, some objects in-game have pointers to code associated with them ("what to do if this block gets hit by a turtle shell", that sort of thing). The P-switch has one of these pointers assigned to a very special value by coincidence: its pointer points to the memory location where button presses are mapped. This pointer is never supposed to be followed, but by making a bunch of objects very carefully the authors can glitch the game into jumping to that memory address. Once execution is there, they can write a bootloader by making sure the button inputs on each frame correspond to the correct opcodes, letting them execute arbitrary code that they write in on the controller port.

I wasn't involved in the production of this TAS, so I'm not an expert, but that's my understanding of what's going on.

bvk

13 lat temudiscuss

Imagine the host doesn't know. If you guess right, he opens a door with a goat behind it and you find yourself in the classic situation.

But if you guess wrong, there's a 50% chance that the host reveals a car by accident.

So the probablities look like:

33%: you guess right, the host reveals a goat 33%: you guess wrong, the host reveals a goat 33%: you guess wrong, the host reveals a car

So, of the situations where the host reveals a goat, the car will be behind your door 50% of the time.

If the host knows and avoids the goat, the probabilities look like this:

33% you were right; the host reveals a goat 33% you were wrong; the host reveals a goat behind door B 33% you were wrong; the host reveals a goat behind door C

So in the situations where the host knows about and avoids the goat, 66% of them have the car behind the other door.

In the case where the host doesn't know about the car, picking the car on your first choice makes it more likely for the host to reveal a goat. That's the difference.

bvk

13 lat temudiscuss

Your analogy is inapt. What does the federal reserve produce when it prints a dollar? All that ink and paper, not to mention the increasingly-sophisticated antic-counterfeiting measures, are going into these useless bills. But that's the cost that we pay to sustain our currency. Likewise with the computing power devoted to bitcoin.

You're right that bitcoin completely lacks the properties of gold that give it use outside of being a currency. But is gold's use in electronics really why it became used as a store of value? It has other properties, too: it doesn't corrode, it's quite rare, it can be easily tested for purity. Bitcoin adds to those the ability to be stored on a piece of paper, the ability to be transferred in minutes anywhere, and a difficult-to-obfuscate ledger.

Of course bitcoin loses the price floor granted by its real-world applications, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's as doomed as dogecoin (the world's first internet-meme based cryptocurrency).

bvk

13 lat temudiscuss

The yard analogy doesn't work. You can't stand in a certain place in your yard when someone else is standing there. They are denying you the use of your property, however temporarily. The same goes for people standing in your house (which brings up privacy problems that are orthogonal to intellectual property). There are also maintenance costs - your yard might be ruined by hundreds of people walking over it, and you'd have to pay for its upkeep.

Those are both good reasons for protecting physical private property that don't apply to ideas.

bvk

13 lat temudiscuss

That's actually not the case. You can tell whether you're in an accelerating frame of reference (like a car stopping) or an inertial frame of reference (like a car cruising) by the forces you feel, so they're not really co-equal.

bvk

13 lat temudiscuss

The "unlimited" data on that plan is only 500MB of HSPA speeds. The 30-dollar T-mobile plan only starts throttling after 5 GB of data.

bvk

13 lat temudiscuss

The game can't run statistics on the player's style.

>Casino commissions, however, mandate that a gaming machine cannot change its playing style in response to particular opponents.

The algorithm is encoded in a neural net; there is no calculation of raw probabilities involved, at least in the sense programmers are used to.

bvk

13 lat temudiscuss

If we assume that $10,000 for every person would instantly cause exactly that much inflation (which I don't think is a settled question), then the net effect would be a transfer of wealth from people with more than the average amount of money to those with less than the average amount of money.

I don't think we can dismiss that out of hand. It seems like a pretty bog-standard social welfare program.

bvk

13 lat temudiscuss

In principle, I agree with you. Charities should be valued for their practical benefits and the return they get on their donations rather than the sentimental value they provide their donors. But the article Brooks is responding to makes note of the fact that the man making these donations did significant research about what charity he should give to and found that the most cost-effective way to reduce human suffering was to save lives by donating to a charity that gives away mosquito nets. He is explicitly eschewing the feel-good nature in charity in favor of the utilitarian viewpoint that human suffering should be reduced in the most efficient possible way. The cost, taking into account all the details you mention, is $2500 per life saved.

I don't think it's obvious that $2500 invested in a business does more to reduce human suffering than $2500 in mosquito nets. After all, business, which is always an investment, is more attractive when there is less fear of an early death by malaria.

bvk

13 lat temudiscuss

There has been.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-only_movement

It's generally seen to spring from anti-immigrant sentiment.

bvk

13 lat temudiscuss

AAVE speakers exist, and their dialect is not going anywhere anytime soon. If decades of schoolteachers telling black children to speak "correctly" hasn't eradicated the differences, another decade isn't going to make the difference. Our only choice is how to treat it.

What we do in schools now hardly works against segregation. We simply ignore that AAVE exists. The result is that we treat white students' English as "correct" and black students' English as "wrong", as if they are trying to speak Standard English and making careless errors rather than following the self-consistent rules of their own dialect. They're being told to follow rules that they never learned, but everyone seems to expect them to know.

The alternative is to acknowledge that these differences exist and do our best to help AAVE speakers learn Standard English as what it is to them: a non-native dialect that is the gateway to power in our society. And maybe, sometimes, when a black student says "he ain't got none" during a history class, the teacher might respond to the contents of the students words rather than their form.

bvk

13 lat temudiscuss

They both work in this context.

A disclaimer is a piece of text a person or company writes to avoid responsibility. In the GPL, there's text saying that the program is distributed without any warranty - that's a disclaimer. If someone sues you because the program broke, you can point to the disclaimer to show you never claimed that it would work.

Disclosure is just revealing information.

That parenthesized remark was disclosure (because the author revealed his affiliation with Microsoft) but it was also a disclaimer - because of that text, no one can claim that the author was astroturfing.

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