heja2009 · HackerTrans

heja2009

قبل 4 أيامdiscuss

Around 1990 I had the fortune to learn Parallel-C - a language that was designed during the Transputer hype and was essentially C extended by a few features to support easy parallel programming.

My favourite feature was

  par(<start expression>; <end expression>; <loop expression>)

essentially a for loop that will be auto-parallelized by the compiler - some boundary conditions apply.

heja2009

قبل 10 أشهرdiscuss

I worked with QNX 4 at uni and we built a robot system based on 2-4 networked 486/Pentium CPU cards in a rack with it [1]. We fully used the OS to make our robot system both hard real-time and completely network based using QNX's native capabilities. This gave me a deep understanding of those issues in my later career in robotics systems and I basically recreated - tediously - most of its features with UDP, TCP/IP and various IPC (inter process communication) features on vxWorks, SunOS and Linux.

One feature of the OS I fondly remember was that the most basic system calls (send/receive/reply) were implemented as about 3 inline assembler instructions each directly in the header file (qnx.h ?).

[1] https://herbert-janssen.de/paper/irini97-12.pdf

heja2009

قبل سنتينdiscuss

AND no dust, grime, etc. These tiny wheels get dirty and clog up pretty fast in human environments and then stop to work and need a good cleaning. Nice for demos but unsuitable for even normal research lab work. I hate them.

heja2009

قبل سنتينdiscuss

Hmm, Kalkar, the only nuclear power plant I ever protested - in the late 70s when I was still in school and construction had just begun. It was finished in 85 but never even fueled due to safety concerns (liquid natrium is nasty, state government did not authorize operation), protests and significant doubts about its purpose (breeders are most suitable to produce bomb material and nuclear fuel).

Chernobyl happened 1986 and probably put the last nail in the coffin, when its radioactive material spilled over Germany and people were recommended to stop eating mushrooms, game animals and homegrown salad. I was doing my nuclear physics practical at the Uni at the time and our lab offered food measurements as a public service, so people brought their homegrown vegetables, fruits and milk. Highest measurements were always the grass in front of the institute though. Much higher than in the "neutron lab" I was working in at the time.

1991 Kalkar was finally officially abandoned and later sold to a private investor.

heja2009

قبل سنتينdiscuss

> Philosophy at the end of the day is about arguing a point; it isn't about producing an aesthetic experience.

I'd argue that point. Nietzsche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) comes to my mind first. Art contains and conveys truth.

Nietzsche's work is also a good example about why it's foolish to argue too much about what an author meant. He wasn't always clear in his thoughts - just like us all - and his thinking changed considerably anyway.

heja2009

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Erm, no, I don't think so. Can you give a source for that claim?

Medieval wars were in general shorter, more regional, used much smaller forces and affected the civilian population less than in later ages. Of course it is very difficult to give any numbers, but various infection diseases, childbirth and infant death were major causes of death. (E.g. women life expectancy overtook that of men only in the 19th century.) Also at least in the 13th and 14th century in Europe main reasons for a significant temporary population decline - during a time of general population growth - were black death and hunger, the latter being partially caused by limitations to agriculture technology and available land.

heja2009

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Athens-Sparta would be the Peloponnesian War, Punic wars were between Rome and Carthage. Sorry for the nitpick.

heja2009

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Hmm, but this is a very common problem particularly in history and archaeology and one that requires highly specialized expertise. Therefore almost always a modern unified calendar is used in new publications and the problem of dealing with historical dates as written is left to specialists. I don't think every article about per-modern events and events outside Gregorian-based calendar usage should mention that.

heja2009

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

The term was also new to me. From [1] I understand it is a class of cryptocurrency scams starting by building a cordial relationship via social media or dating apps and then suggesting financial investment.

[1] https://www.michigan.gov/ag/consumer-protection/consumer-ale...

heja2009

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Interesting. I didn't notice the side notes at all because I immediately zoomed my view to only see the main text as I do with all web pages in this day and age.

heja2009

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

best OS I ever had the pleasure to work with

heja2009

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

To the contrary there is very good evidence that we pull arbitrary explanations whenever needed. See Gazzaniga's split brain experiments where people gave all sorts of reasons when asked why they did something and just could not know.

heja2009

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

Since it is tidally locked around a low mass star, axial tilt should be near 0 and seasons should not exist [1]. Tidally locked also means much higher temperature than the estimated average (231K or -42C for the hotter one) on the sunny side and much lower ones on the dark side.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_tilt#Extrasolar_planets

heja2009

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

Actually Apple had to find solutions to some of the problems you mention when they transitioned to OS X:

* multiple resource forks can be presented as files in a directory, the directory having the name of the multi-stream file and the files in it named after the stream, e.g. "resources"

* for transfering data to other mediums/computers etc you can use container formats such as zip or tar, but with the unpacker having the ability to unpack them properly to a multi-stream file

* since on modern systems such as windows you can seamlessly file-browse into container formats such as zip so this is even less of a problem

* actually OS X to this day uses something like this for "Apps" as they are a special container/directory that you can browse into when you know the magic incantation

heja2009

قبل 5 سنواتdiscuss

C programming - luckily in my opinion - has a culture of very rigorous evaluation of programming techniques especially towards memory-unsafe programming, arguably the biggest weakness of C as a programming language.

This book uses gets() which is a function that can not be used safely. Any input that exceeds the buffer length will corrupt memory. The conventional wisdom in the C community is to NEVER use gets. I personally stopped reading in chapter 4 where this is done.

Unfortunately strictly avoiding memory issues is somewhat involved und thus often ignored in C beginner books. It is also hard to see unless you are pretty familiar with C's pitfalls. IMHO this is why this list of bad books is desperately needed.

heja2009

قبل 5 سنواتdiscuss

Yes, it is even pretty much a design principle for newer board games [1]. It started to become popular with games like Settlers of Catan.

[1] https://boardgamedesigncourse.com/making-a-comeback/

heja2009

قبل 5 سنواتdiscuss

Backpropagation was probably the most important step, but there was also the issue of workable training methods for many-layer networks. Fukushima did some very important - but rarely mentioned - work about this starting in 1979. He trained layer by layer, proceeding to the next only when the current stabilized. The main practical issue were the enormous training and execution times with the computers of the day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocognitron

heja2009

قبل 5 سنواتdiscuss

that's the way some embedded control systems are designed. with some (many) errors (can't read/write) being fatal and shutting down the system after an alarm is sent.

heja2009

قبل 6 سنواتdiscuss

Yes, it is derived from the saying.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabellumpistole

heja2009

قبل 6 سنواتdiscuss

The programming language Occam, in its time the primary language to program Transputers, did not have operator precedence, so you had to use parentheses for anything. It was a huge pain, but probably still better than avoiding the edge cases of what you describe...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam_(programming_language)

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