News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

seventhson

Re:A few things to know before stealing my 914 on Tuesday July 18, 2023 @08:13AM (#36770987)
Switch to a Dvorak layout (with blank keycaps!) and you will have all the bases covered.
We already have an emergency messaging system called Amber Alert. Just generalize that infrastructure a bit and you're halfway there.
Re:Six times faster than C on Thursday July 06, 2023 @08:52PM (#36625542)
Linus' post is 15+ years old. Much has changed in Intel hardware since then. He was probably right on the money re the hardware available at the time.
Re:Flattening ASTs (and Other Compiler Data Structures) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @08:37AM (#36560901)
I once worked on a very large commercial application that was based on a home-grown I/O framework which operated on similar principles.

It was a complete pain in the ass. You were constantly future-proofing your data structures because you knew you were going to be stuck with them for all eternity because the I/O framework was going to serialize them verbatim whether you liked it or not. Those were dark days...

Re:Goodreads Has No Incentive to Be Good on Friday June 30, 2023 @08:35AM (#36533755)
Require reviews to show a substantial understanding of what the book was about? That means moderation which is always dangerous but probably better than the alternative.
Re:Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time on Thursday June 29, 2023 @12:58PM (#36523243)
The wavelengths are too large for LIGO. The wave measurements were correlated with data collected from many pulsars.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/06/nanograv-picks-up-si...

Re:Why There’s a Severe Shortage of Cancer Drugs on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @08:28AM (#36505410)
"Ooo, the drugs for this cancer are cheap and plentiful. I'll choose this cancer for my terminal disease."
Re:Exposing Floating Point on Monday June 26, 2023 @07:26PM (#36487193)
> floats really really want to be "near 1", to keep precision.

The number of significant digits is identical for (nearly) the entire range of FP values. There's no value to keeping it "near 1" for IEEE 754 floats - the precision is exactly the same regardless whether near 1 or near 1 trillion. This makes them ideal for general computation and modeling physical properties.

In contrast, posits, the unum alternative to IEEE 754, are highly sensitive to absolute scale. Posits lose precision as the magnitudes increase. Otoh, for small values, you get much higher precision which is why they getting some attention from the AI world where normalized weights are everywhere.

It might be stupid, or it also might just be naive, or a shift in priorities.

100x throughput improvement might just come from caching results from earlier computations (less naive) - at the cost of 10x memory footprint possibly (different priorities).