News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

vHMtsdf

Re:Factorio that you can touch on Saturday September 26, 2026 @04:56AM (#49854561)
> except for maybe not being able to choose the output lane for inserters, but that limitation is as old as the game itself, and I don't know whether it's a misguided design decision or simply a limitation of their extremely optimized belt system.

I think I might have some good news for you, this was added this summer with the extension of the “flip” mechanic

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-442

Re:DIY triple-screen laptop based on the framework on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @09:02AM (#34595080)
My "laptop" only gets used on desks and my "desktop" sits under my table. Go figure..

He calls it a laptop since Framework calls its computers "laptops" and the whole setup is battery powered.

On my and my families windows machines, I try to follow the advice from Taylor Swift who seems to know what she is doing... https://decentsecurity.com/#/securing-your-computer/

In short: 1) secure bootup by locking up BIOS and encrypting your drive 2) set User Access Controls to the highest level 3) install up to date browser with appropriate addons (ublock)

Re:Startups are building with the Julia Programming Language on Thursday December 15, 2022 @05:35AM (#33997579)
I am not exactly sure what they were working on, but I am not convinced that any code can be made non-allocating easily.

For example, when you are building large trees with complex structures in the nodes and you need to both add/remove the nodes, the effort to make it non-allocating might be too much compared to just using C++ and writing things more naturally?

Re:Startups are building with the Julia Programming Language on Thursday December 15, 2022 @05:30AM (#33997552)
It was a talk by folks from this team: https://gradient.avast.io/people-behind/
Re:Startups are building with the Julia Programming Language on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @09:45AM (#33969506)
I heard a talk from a large cybersecurity company that was using Julia for research and is apparently in the process of dropping Julia due to: - difficulty in hiring, apparently it was too expensive/difficult to hire Julia programmers, - poorly performing garbage collector. If I recall correctly, they had issues when trying to process huge amounts of data.

Seems like small teams will not run into these issues at least initially.

I really like Julia and I hope it becomes huge, but stories like this make me wonder whether the whole Julia ecosystem will ever mature to a level of Python for example. And in turn, making it viable for large organizations that might be using e.g. Python + C++ combo that might be easier to hire for/more versatile/with better known drawbacks.

Essentially, I am not sure whether the potential of Julia is that much greater than the realized potential of the incumbents to warrant the "Julia is the language of the future".

Re:When Double Precision Is Not Enough on Saturday March 19, 2022 @04:21PM (#30737244)
I remember a class I had where we were shown a methods for exact PC arithmetic with integers, rationals (e.g., 1/2) and algebraic numbers (e.g., sqrt(2)). Only thing it couldn't deal with were transcendental numbers (e.g., pi)

I think it worked by representing the numbers by integer matrices, all operations were then matrix operations. Unfortunately, the matrices were gaining dimension when new algebraic numbers got involved, so it probably wasn't useful for anything :-).

Anyway, it it blew me away anyway at the time, one of the few things that sticked with me from school.

Re:Computers as I used to love them on Friday January 07, 2022 @07:57AM (#29838567)
I really wanted to love syncthing a lot, I loved the idea, the interface, everything. But I would always get a number of errors on some files for whatever reason that I would have to then manually fix and sometimes I couldn't even do that. But it has been a few years, so maybe it's time to try again...
To be clear, in my browser, no article appeared, I only saw a single blinking eye in the middle of the screen. Together with the title in the link, I was appropriately confused/amused.
I think this is what a first rickroll must have felt like.
Re:The Tourist: Philip Roth’s Czech KGB File on Thursday April 08, 2021 @07:32AM (#26737510)
Regarding uranium extraction in Czechoslovakia, the Soviets later mined uranium in other sites by pumping sulfuric acid into the ground. This has caused a lasting ecological damage which has to be managed to this day.

The acid was meant to dissolve the ore and was then sucked back out. The only issue was that they ended up pumping a more sulfuric acid into the ground than sucking out. This created an underground lake of sulfuric acid in an with other underground water "lakes". This sulfuric lake is threatening to spill into these water sources.

I heard about this from my teachers at the university who were involved in the modelling of the underground spill. Using a limited number of wells, they were supposed to predict how the spill is spreading and what actions to take to stop it.

I found some pictures from the site here: https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/domaci/pitna-voda-tezba-uranu-kys...

Re:Time to regulate AI that interprets human emotions? on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @07:20PM (#26732900)
Kate Crawford is a famous researcher who focuses on social implications and ethics of AI, so kudos to her for being able to get her work into Nature so reliably! As an aside, that would be a real feat to ONLY publish papers in Nature, I wonder if anyone ever was able to do that.
The linked discussion makes me wonder, how much of our existence on the internet is just an unintended consequence of some minor engineering decision? Whim of an unknown engineer creating or destroying million dollar industries down the line...
Re:Don’t use environment variables for configuration on Thursday April 01, 2021 @10:00AM (#26660598)
I don't have a strong opinion on this, but a comment in the article lead me to this discussion, which is just wild: https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/issues/1482 I get a sense that the maintainers hold a similar sentiment as the author of this piece, but it's never expressed, but the frustration feels real.
Re:The GPL-Violations.org Project (2016) on Friday February 12, 2021 @10:57PM (#26121276)
They have some in the news section: http://gpl-violations.org/news/