adrian_b

5 ms·

1.
by adrian_b 3d ago
Already since Intel 8086, x86 has the instruction "INT vector_number", whose purpose is to allow software to invoke directly any of the many kinds of exception handlers or hardware interrupt handlers that are specified by the ISA
2.
by adrian_b 3d ago
8" floppy drives were not compatible mechanically with IBM PC cases, but there were 8" floppy drives with their own enclosures and power supplies, which could be put on a desktop along the PC case. IBM PCs have never supported 8&q
3.
by adrian_b 5d ago
Both Hepburn and the fact that English is deeply embedded in modern Japanese make sense only because USA has won the War (which is a good thing otherwise, but some of its effects on Japanese are less desirable). Besides this historical moti
4.
by adrian_b 5d ago
Japanese could be written with the Latin alphabet very well, if a set of kanji radicals were retained and inserted before a part of the words, to disambiguate their meaning. This is a not a new method of writing, but this is how writing was
5.
by adrian_b 5d ago
Using doubled vowels instead of diacritics is just one more concession to Americans, who are unfamiliar with the use of diacritics and whose software frequently does not work correctly when text contains characters with diacritics. Hepburn
6.
by adrian_b 5d ago
When I was young, in Europe, there was some ointment made of cod liver oil and zinc oxide, which was extremely effective for the quick healing of non-infected wounds or burns. For some reason nowadays, that ointment does not exist any more.
7.
by adrian_b 5d ago
The cost is an extremely nonlinear function of the speed expressed in tokens per second. Throughputs of around 1 token per second can be achieved even for the biggest currently existing open-weights models with a mini-PC with 2 internal M.2
8.
by adrian_b 5d ago
> an unlikely new garment for injured penguins — snug red vests threaded with copper and zinc that they hope will help the aquatic birds heal faster. Ointments with zinc oxide and with basic carbonates of copper were already frequently u
9.
by adrian_b 5d ago
Saying that an application uses io_uring for input/output provides almost zero information. It provides about the same information as saying that an application is run on Linux. io_uring is an alternative method of invocation for a ver
10.
by adrian_b 6d ago
No, though even a hash like xxh3 can be useful when speed is more important than collision resistance. There are many hashes that use more thorough mixing functions than can be achieved with one or a few arithmetic operations (like in unive
11.
by adrian_b 6d ago
> Actually you aren't "saving money" at all; you're spending money. You are spending money, but you are spending far less money than the poor spend when paying for exactly the same products or services. If I want to b
12.
by adrian_b 6d ago
There are many kinds of universal hashing, many of which are not based on polynomial evaluation. However, the most common kinds of universal hashing, i.e. those which are used for computing message authentication codes (MAC) in the TLS and
13.
by adrian_b 6d ago
Looking now at that, it does a poor job of making a true refutation. What that article explains, is that the system of credit card fees and rewards that is used in USA is extraordinarily complicated, variable and obfuscated in comparison wi
14.
by adrian_b 6d ago
In modern computers, the throughput of an execution unit is the same for multiplications and additions, but multiplication frequently has a greater latency, by 1 or 2 clock cycles. Many CPUs, like the AMD Zen CPUs, have more execution units
15.
by adrian_b 6d ago
It is applicable, but it is not useful. Universal hashes use the input text as the set of coefficients. This method requires additional preprocessing of the coefficients, before starting to evaluate the polynomial. That preprocessing would
16.
by adrian_b 7d ago
I think that there was a recent HN thread that linked to an article which argued that the credit card system of USA has the purpose of taking money from the poor and giving them to the rich, and the estimated amount of the money transferred
17.
by adrian_b 7d ago
"Synthetic cell factory" seems a hyperbole, because what they make are not living cells, so there is no danger of their proliferation. What they make performs a small part of the functions of a living cell, i.e. they make assembla
18.
by adrian_b 7d ago
This seems to be an acceptable solution. This would not work with HDDs, because the time to seek between 2 partitions of the same device would cause abysmal performance, but on SSDs this should work fine, even if some SSD controllers might
19.
by adrian_b 7d ago
No matter how many external drives you gather, the data coming from them must be squeezed through the peripheral interfaces of the Apple SoC. So your CPU, made by Apple, Intel, AMD etc., has a number of PCIe lanes and a number of USB/T
20.
by adrian_b 7d ago
When you have heterogeneous SSDs, e.g. you mix PCIe 5.0, PCIe 4.0 and Thunderbolt interfaces, you can obtain a greater throughput by managing in software the distribution of data, than by using RAID0. RAID0 works fine only when all the inte
21.
by adrian_b 7d ago
Most desktops and mini-PCs can read simultaneously from only 2 internal M.2 SSDs, 1 of which is PCIe 5.0 and the other is PCIe 4.0. They may have more M.2 sockets but usually except for the first all the others share the same PCIe 4.0 path.
22.
by adrian_b 7d ago
Yes, you are right, once the VRM is erased it is gone for good. Though it is possible to test only a fragment of an object, but I do not know if the instruments that were used were sensitive enough to work with only a very small chip, which
23.
by adrian_b 7d ago
This was not about the magnetization during firing, but about the much weaker magnetization acquired later, while staying in the same position without being moved. That weak magnetization happens below the Curie temperature. Actually, any m
24.
by adrian_b 7d ago
From TFA: > “So it’s hard for us to be ahead of the forgers since they can read our papers and figure out ways to trick our methods.”
25.
by adrian_b 7d ago
Yes, looking at the current handbook, today you are right and my posting was wrong. However, this is because the policy of FreeBSD has changed. Decades ago, when I started using FreeBSD, STABLE was like I said, the recommended branch for pr
26.
by adrian_b 8d ago
No. For equivalent quality, even a high-order delta-sigma encoder will need more bits than PCM. The ratio between the sampling frequencies is greater than the ratio between the number of bits per sample. How much greater it is depends on th
27.
by adrian_b 8d ago
I cannot imagine any reason why somebody would want to use RELEASE for production. A RELEASE is good for installing FreeBSD on a new computer, or for upgrading from a previous major version of FreeBSD, e.g. from 13 to 14 or from 14 to 15. A
28.
by adrian_b 8d ago
In another HN thread about this AlphaGenome Atlas, someone has posted a link to: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mutate-em-all-and-... which comments the results of this study: https://www.bio
29.
by adrian_b 8d ago
And various dedicated AI models all made poor predictions of the results of that experiment, which casts doubts about the value of the AlphaGenome predictive map. A virus is much simpler than a human, but even for that simple virus the effe
30.
by adrian_b 8d ago
Depends on what you mean by "efficient". Delta-sigma modulation generates an inefficient encoding of the audio signal, with much more bits than necessary. Converting a delta-sigma encoded bit stream to a PCM (pulse-code modulation

More ›