summa_tech

9 ms·

1.
by summa_tech 11d ago
Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper.
2.
by summa_tech 1mo ago
Then you take an illegal instruction exception, and you have a choice to request a rebuild, patch it, or emulate it. (Yeah, sometimes the vendors just don't cooperate.) Incidentally, emulating opcodes is quite often practical (unless t
3.
by summa_tech 1mo ago
One hopes that a hypervisor would not expose hardware control registers directly in the first place, except ones deliberately designed for virtualization support. Otherwise, the guest is running effectively at the same privilege level as th
4.
by summa_tech 1mo ago
I, too, had wondered; this seems particularly common in the US. My best theory is that in rough handwriting, n and u/μ can look pretty similar, and everyone sort of agreed to only use u to reduce ambiguity.
5.
by summa_tech 1mo ago
Laminated wood veneer for legs, plywood for seat. Not as disposable as the eternal LACK, but also not bent wood.
6.
by summa_tech 2mo ago
It certainly tarnishes the shine to have a per-OS-version table of offsets to patch ;(
7.
by summa_tech 2mo ago
It always feels a bit like lost magic. But at the same time, it's also something that was only enabled by the very high determinism of these old home systems. The design relies on having fixed RAM locations, no multiprocessing, etc. In
8.
by summa_tech 2mo ago
Excellent explanation. I'd like to add that no light source can lie outside the horseshoe of the CIE xyz diagram: pure wavelengths are points on the curved line, everything that mixes them moves towards the inside of the space. So you&
9.
by summa_tech 2mo ago
Well, it's complicated. As I understand, one of the polio vaccines - the oral one - has an unusual quirk. The live virus used in it can reproduce and spread in low-vaccination communities. While the vaccine version of it will not cause
10.
by summa_tech 2mo ago
Imagine a power splitter + phase shifter that produces a correct phase shift for each element in a phased array to produce a directional beam from one radio transceiver. Now this clever arrangement, instead of having only one radio transcei
11.
by summa_tech 2mo ago
Right! I think a lot of people, who have not done a lot of "things you can kick" engineering, have a very romantic view of it. Especially the relationship with whoever is nominally setting the goals of the project. The physics wor
12.
by summa_tech 3mo ago
As a matter of fact, Nature does regularly publish papers about wetting properties of water. In fact, it just published one last week, from Nature Physics: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-026-03299-z Scientists
13.
by summa_tech 3mo ago
If you can read more than one language, try reading translations into two or three different ones. It'll give you a different view of a book you enjoy: the translations will all have a different feel, in my experience.
14.
by summa_tech 3mo ago
On most modern Apple SoCs, including these two, there's an IOMMU dedicated to the USB complex (called the USB DART, perhaps DMA Address Remapping Table). However, Boot ROM on these two chips does not program it; Apple probably felt tha
15.
by summa_tech 3mo ago
Sure, StarCraft is kind of a hybrid when you think about it. The guaranteed-hit model, the extremely simplified low vs high ground approach to determine if a shot is possible, etc. are pretty deterministic. But in more complicated situation
16.
by summa_tech 3mo ago
Chess presents a comparatively small and, importantly, discrete set of choices at any moment. So it feels like it's a solvable logic puzzle: like it should be possible, at any moment, to make an optimal move. You can predict if you los
17.
by summa_tech 3mo ago
He's basically repeating his mistake - underestimating the relevance of technological progress - from 28 years ago, except now it's explicitly in service of his political bias. For your information: Paul Krugman is a Nobel memoria
18.
by summa_tech 3mo ago
It's difficult to consider Krugman's takes seriously after his very flawed 1998 predictions. Perhaps he's uniquely poorly suited to understanding the role of technology in economic development, and is best described as an eco
19.
by summa_tech 3mo ago
It became obvious / accepted wisdom that a moderately successful startup exit is the only way to have a decent future as a living person. This used to be only one of many paths available to a nerd, but now: (a) academia is dead thanks
20.
by summa_tech 3mo ago
Neat! What do you think about adding a "-2, -1, 0, +1, +2" agreement scale to each quote and showing the average instead of votes? I think many of those are pretty subjective, and maybe not always right for everyone or for all tim
21.
by summa_tech 3mo ago
Once you understand how a program works, get someone else to write it for you. Then, you will quickly find out your understanding was insufficient.
22.
by summa_tech 3mo ago
I don't think I've seen anything sufficiently RAM-like. The classic sense amplifier architecture tends to make this impractical. I guess modern Flash can store a few levels but that's a far cry from actual analog storage. For
23.
by summa_tech 3mo ago
Tubes can also just be very _clever_ in a way that transistors generally are not. For instance, counting tubes that would contain a decimal counter in a single glass bubble (that's quite a few transistors even in TTL, and about twice a
24.
by summa_tech 3mo ago
Pretty good detail in this article! But what really surprises me is how some ideas just keep coming back. When I wrote a binary translator, I ended up having to keep a translated return stack to optimize RET opcodes. That put me in exactly
25.
by summa_tech 3mo ago
That was a fun site to browse. I really enjoy fixing / hacking on non-disposable equipment (lab, test, optics, etc.) and there are some well-done write-ups in there.
26.
by summa_tech 3mo ago
USSR, yes. But the ISS was launching during a time when USSR no longer existed and Russia was fairly isolated. Hence, "obviously": US at that time had many close allies, but Russia had only a few, and not as technologically advanc
27.
by summa_tech 3mo ago
I think it's an attempt to express that the station consists of only two segments: Russian (ROS) and US (USOS), but the US invited its allies to work together on its segment. So parts of the USOS are made in Europe, Canada and Japan, a
28.
by summa_tech 4mo ago
Good point. Or repair rows (like Virage/Synopsys STAR).
29.
by summa_tech 4mo ago
Hacker News is still skewed towards people interested in programming languages (as opposed to actually programming). Probably some sort of Y-combinator Lisp heritage. There's also a persistent minority of CS grads who think that develo
30.
by summa_tech 4mo ago
If you don't have space for a microscope, you can also get yourself the long-range (~400mm) 2.5-3.5x magnifiers that you may have seen your dentist wear. They're easily available on Amazon, not too expensive, and comfortable for h

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