rwallace

6 ms·

1.
by rwallace 1mo ago
Yes, I think that's what the paper is saying. The validation is the hard part, but the part that provides the value, because it's what makes the result actually useful.
2.
by rwallace 2mo ago
Eh. There are certainly things wrong with today's economy, starting with housing being treated as a financial asset, which encourages laws that create an artificial scarcity of it. I'm not saying there is nothing to complain about
3.
by rwallace 4mo ago
Ah! So let me paraphrase to make sure I understand. In your experience, the real use case of denormals is not that you want to compute with them. It's that they are a useful error signal, because they typically indicate that the equati
4.
by rwallace 4mo ago
The one way I know of for denormals to arise in real calculations is when you have a process that converges on zero. In which case, values will pass through the denormal range on the way from the normal range down to zero. And converting de
5.
by rwallace 4mo ago
Because they believed only a small fraction of customers would care a lot about a better Basic interpreter, whereas the vast majority would care about price. As for giving things away for free, Commodore was already engaged in a cutthroat p
6.
by rwallace 4mo ago
I didn't know about that event. What did he say to get booed that time?
7.
by rwallace 7mo ago
I looked into that, concluded the spoiler is Specter. Basically, you have to have out of order/speculative execution if you ultimately want the best performance on general/integer workloads. And once you have that, timing informat
8.
by rwallace 9mo ago
Happy new year from Ireland!
9.
by rwallace 10mo ago
Sure. If you feel the need to write "this is shitty code", fair enough, I'm fine with making allowances for that kind of language. But please leave it at that, instead of also insulting the people who wrote it. There are, unf
10.
Ask HN: Stories from Users of Minicomputers and Mainframes
2 points by rwallace 11mo ago|2 comments
11.
by rwallace 11mo ago
In general, if a program is not a Web browser, I do not want that program getting clever with displaying a URL as an active link. Just show it as the URL, https prefix and all, so I can see where it will be taking me if I copy it into the b
12.
by rwallace 11mo ago
Fair enough! If you ever have the time and inclination to write it up as a blog post or such, I would love to read it.
13.
by rwallace 11mo ago
I disagree with your second sentence above. I think it is shallow dismissals that are inappropriate here. Conversely, I have upvoted a number of long explanations of interesting topics. If you don't have time to write a detailed refuta
14.
by rwallace 1y ago
Or unless delete is a rare operation. So yeah, to make the best decisions here, you need to know expected numbers as well as expected access patterns. As far as I can see, you are indeed going to incur one extra memory access apart from the
15.
by rwallace 1y ago
No problem! As to what would be better - this is also a reply to your sibling comments above - I don't have a single across-the-board solution; the equivalent of std::vector everywhere is fine for some kinds of application code, but n
16.
by rwallace 1y ago
To clarify a couple of things: I'm aware of the reasons Linux uses doubly linked lists. I'm still of the opinion this design decision made a lot of sense in the 1990s, and would make less sense in a new project today. You may disa
17.
by rwallace 1y ago
Yes, that was exactly the reason. CJK unification happened during the few years when we were all trying to convince ourselves that 16 bits would be enough. By the time we acknowledged otherwise, it was too late.
18.
by rwallace 1y ago
I read that paragraph, but my reading of it was different from yours. As far as I can see, it only discusses training time and experience. No mention of time for sleep. Though yes, I do give it credit for going at least a little of the way
19.
by rwallace 1y ago
In several similar incidents, it was clear that the, or at least a major, cause of the accidents, was that the officers on watch had been forced to work overtime and deprived of sleep to the point of cognitive impairment. How many hours had
20.
by rwallace 1y ago
I predict that it will never make sense for artificial neural networks to directly generate machine code, for most of the same reasons it doesn't make sense for biological neural networks to do so.
21.
by rwallace 1y ago
That's an interesting question about the number of levels of address translation. Does anyone have numbers for that, and how much latency and energy an extra layer costs?
22.
by rwallace 1y ago
I'm not aware of any CPU invented since the late eighties that doesn't have paged virtual memory. Am I misunderstanding what you mean? Can you expand on where you are getting the 4x number from?
23.
by rwallace 1y ago
As I understand it, the philosophy dates from centuries before that, and was inspired at least in large part by the frequency of earthquakes there.
24.
Arenas in Rust(russellw.github.io)
4 points by rwallace 1y ago|0 comments
25.
by rwallace 1y ago
I'd like to apply, but the job pages just offer 'see open positions' in a loop, no clear way to get to an application form, and the 'contact us' page doesn't accept a Gmail address. Am I missing something?
26.
by rwallace 1y ago
I'm seeing quite a few people on this site recently talking about their Kagi subscriptions, claiming it is sufficiently better than Google to be worth the money.
27.
by rwallace 1y ago
I leave a handful of actually important notifications on, like the one that says 'someone just made a purchase using your bank account, making sure it was you', but most of them, I do indeed turn off.
28.
by rwallace 1y ago
Beware of concentrated benefit and diffuse cost. Sure, let a seconds clock be available to call up the 0.1% of the time when you want it. But it shouldn't be in the system tray presenting a small but ongoing attention drain the other 9
29.
by rwallace 1y ago
I hope so, because I actively want seconds absent from the system tray. Attention is a scarce resource; the fewer things on the screen constantly changing and thereby consuming my attention, the better. If saving power means we remain free
30.
by rwallace 1y ago
Looking through the latest 'Who's Hiring' thread last week, I noticed that a higher percentage of the remote jobs seemed to specify Remote (US). Could one of the causes of that, have been employers reading ahead and making de

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