NextHendrix
Re:How Lewis Carroll computed determinants
on Friday December 26, 2025 @07:12PM (#46397801)
Likewise, the monogram of the sitting english monarch (as seen on postboxes and so forth) is the "Royal Cypher".
Re:Tesla Normal Operating Sounds
on Sunday November 26, 2023 @01:29PM (#38423741)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCCXRerqaJI
The floppotron
Re:Tesla Normal Operating Sounds
on Sunday November 26, 2023 @01:26PM (#38423714)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRXwWbo_mX0
Maybe this is what you're referring to. There are similar examples where people do this with old disk drives and printers too.
Re:Scintillocartography
on Thursday November 16, 2023 @11:24AM (#38291527)
The speed of light in a vacuum is always the same, but not through dielectric media such as water or glass. In diamond it is less than half the speed.
Re:New BeagleV Single Board Computer Adopts Microchip's PolarFire SoC ...
on Sunday November 05, 2023 @08:03PM (#38157577)
You can generate yourself a free Libero Silver license, which needs regenerating every year, but yes flexlm is annoying.
Re:New BeagleV Single Board Computer Adopts Microchip's PolarFire SoC ...
on Sunday November 05, 2023 @07:58PM (#38157546)
Software engineers can sometimes find it difficult as with a HDL you (should) describe hardware that exhibits the intended behaviour, rather than just directly describing the behaviour.
HDLs have familiar syntax that makes it seem like you can just program algorithms imperatively (for loops, if statements, functions etc) but it's all just a mean trick to catch software people out, and generally won't give the results you expect.
On top there's then the fact everything happens at the same time, the faff of making everything synchronised and making sure it meets timing and fighting the frankly awful tooling every step of the way.
Once you get it, it's fine, but you have to unlearn a lot of software muscle memory and keep the actual design work (boxes and lines) almost entirely separate from the implementation (typing your boxes and lines into a text editor).
Re:Beej's Quick Guide to GDB (2009)
on Sunday November 05, 2023 @07:08PM (#38157175)
Have you tried the Emacs gdb mode?
Re:How to Store a Chess Game in 26 Bytes Using Bit-Level Magic (2022)
on Friday September 15, 2023 @02:12PM (#37527038)
It's possible to gain bishops via promotion which may scupper this plan
Re:Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
on Thursday August 17, 2023 @02:04PM (#37165687)
Airborne Electronic Hardware Design Assurance: A Practitioner's Guide to RTCA/DO-254 by Randall Fulton and Roy Vandermolen
Might sound a bit niche, and it is, but even if you ignore the stuff about actually certifying stuff to fly, it has some extremely useful and interesting tidbits about how to go about running very large and highly complex hardware/firmware projects in safety critical industries.
The chapter on requirements is especially useful, and the whole thing is written in a (relatively, for the topic) light-hearted way.
Re:Car Bloat: “Huge Cars Are Terrible for Society”
on Monday August 07, 2023 @02:58PM (#37039060)
Not immoral, just more culpable. Is it immoral not to kill oneself as being alive makes one more likely to kill someone?
Re:ChatGPT: Mayor starts legal bid over false bribery claim
on Thursday April 06, 2023 @01:45PM (#35471802)
>Except it was never claimed to be any of those things.
Not by its inventors, but by its management-type evangelists. Which do you think the mayor had in his ear?
Re:Humans have reclaimed ‘land size of Luxembourg’ since 2000
on Friday March 24, 2023 @05:34AM (#35286892)
I can only grok land areas in terms of the size of Wales.
Re:What Happens When Your Phone Is Spying on You
on Wednesday March 15, 2023 @01:14PM (#35171516)
He might've paired a bluetooth keyboard to your phone at some point.
Re:Reverse-engineering the electronics in the Globus analog navigation...
on Monday March 06, 2023 @03:43AM (#35038832)
I love seeing teardowns of old space tech. Having worked on safety critical projects I know that if something is proven and works it is generally not replaced unless something substantially better comes along, so I wonder if the soyuz still flies with these electromechanical wonders.
Re:Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money? (2021)
on Saturday February 18, 2023 @03:28PM (#34850744)
>$11,000 a month
Is this not quite a lot of money?
Re:ABC: A C compiler for printable x86
on Friday January 13, 2023 @02:08PM (#34372397)
Scrolling quickly through the .txt version of this paper on my phone feels like a visual expression of the internet dial up sound.
Re:Dinner for One: The Little-Known British Comedy Famous in Germany
on Saturday December 31, 2022 @11:03AM (#34197623)
We had German aupairs when I was younger who introduced us to it. They were surprised we'd never heard of it before, but it's excellent.
Re:Rigs of Rods: free and open source vehicle simulator that uses soft...
on Monday December 26, 2022 @10:06PM (#34144533)
Spent many hours back in the day messing about in this. Glad to hear it's still going, superb timesink.
Re:World record back at HZB: Tandem solar cell achieves 32.5 percent e...
on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @03:40AM (#34063243)
These perovskites are notoriously difficult to deposit at scale in a uniform enough layer to be effective, with small variances causing dramatic drops in efficiency.
On the cool side, it's theoretically possible to make them translucent (without the silicon substrate ofc) which could make for cool power generating windows in the future.
On the not so cool side you really don't want the materials anywhere near you or your water table in the event of a panel being damaged. Lead halide perovskites, methylammonium lead iodide, are insanely toxic and a race to the bottom on price if they become widespread could be an environmental disaster waiting to happen.
Not to take from the achievements described here, but there isn't any mention of it. There is some hope in taking the lead out (tin based perovskites) but that tends to result in a drop in efficiency.
Re:New Chip Expands the Possibilities for AI
on Friday November 11, 2022 @01:41PM (#33564860)
On the whole, at this point in time, I agree. For general purpose NVM stuff you're better off going with the less exotic, but SRAM isn't suitable for this specific use case. Some eNVMs are essentially analogue (CBRAM, OxRAM, PCM etc) whereby you can partially set a single memory cell much like a variable resistor. MRAM obviously had its specific two states so is unsuitable for neuromorphic computation, and SRAM is the same.
I disagree though that 22nm is the limit for (STT) MRAM and ReRAM, they both have excellent scalability.
SRAM scales nicely but is volatile, takes up lots of area and obviously isn't BEOL compatible. You can stack MTJs between metal layers just fine.
Re:New Chip Expands the Possibilities for AI
on Friday November 11, 2022 @01:29PM (#33564699)
That's partially true, there are other tradeoffs that can be made to optimise power and thermal dependence at the cost of something else but both specific use case and fab availability/reliability need to be factored in.
Re:New Chip Expands the Possibilities for AI
on Friday November 11, 2022 @01:00PM (#33564264)
It depends, with ReRAM the ion mobility in the dielectric layer can be tuned, lower mobility means a higher voltage is required across the cell for filament growth but a lower thermal dependence.
Re:The WhatsApp Architecture Facebook Bought for $19B(2014)
on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @04:39AM (#33327845)
Good timing, it appears to be down in the UK this morning.
Ask HN: How do you effectively predict how long a task will take?
Often when dealt a task by a client/project manager it's followed with a request for how long it will take. Also often, I find answering this request a considerably more difficult problem than the engineering task itself, especially when the response is taken as gospel on pain of death. Over time I've realised that my inability to accurately predict how long a certain task will take is a...
Re:GHC 9.4.2 regresses being able to do math on aarch64
on Wednesday October 12, 2022 @04:50PM (#33182908)
Are there significant projects that run Haskell on arm specifically? Smartphone apps or just new Macs?
Re:EU Passes Law to Switch iPhone to USB-C by End of 2024
on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @07:13AM (#33078777)
This gives me some cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, having a common connector will reduce waste and be much more convenient (eg "Hey have you got an iPhone charger?") and make losing a charger a cheaper mistake. On the other hand I'm not sure I like the idea of government mandating electrical connectors on devices, which could stifle innovation, or be very shortsighted in the typical government-rules-on-tech way (eg "banning encryption").
I don't know what to think.
Re:Baker's Math (2009)
on Sunday October 02, 2022 @10:27AM (#33056133)
Don't forget to multiply the result by 13/12
Re:Intel Failed Science
on Thursday September 29, 2022 @04:50AM (#33017963)
What are the reasons for Intel's delay?
Re:HDD Clicker – HDD Sound Simulator
on Thursday September 29, 2022 @03:50AM (#33017645)
If you sneak "eject" into a shell script somewhere then, permissions allowing, it will suddenly open the users optical drive if they have one. This works extra well with laptop drives that are spring loaded.