Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | guenthert's commentslogin

> Everything in modern computing is slow

Nonsense. Embedded systems, often event driven, improved as did the rest of the computing landscape (perhaps at a tad slower pace). HST has been a major driver on low latency computing in the data center. And then there are of course robotics and military applications ...


I have 5 programs open right now - Firefox, Visual Studio, Word, Photoshop and a terminal.

Out of these 5, only Firefox loads faster than it did on a 512MB Windows XP machine 20 years ago, the other 4 are at least a few times slower.


Maybe it's a Windows thing? My M1 Air is way quicker than my XP laptop of years ago was.

Though Vista on a cheap laptop was an epic peak of slowness where you could wait a minute for a right click menu to appear.


VR is at the intersection of low latency, high throughput, high compute, flexibility and affordable prices.

Embedded systems are often not flexible. They are often designed to do just one thing, like driving an engine, and may run the exact same software for their entire life, which may be decades. They are often limited in term of general computing requirements too.

I don't know HST, but it seems to be similar to embedded: single, highly constrained application, maybe more compute, and I would guess that affordability isn't even on the menu.

Meta VR is consumer software, running on consumer hardware, it runs third party apps, with all the flexibility that is asked of PCs. You can't just put your own realtime OS and claim the entire system for your own specific application.


> .deb is a really good package manager, and is arguably more sophisticated than RPM.

Perhaps. I wouldn't argue either way, but dpkg still maintains its "data base" of installed and available packages/files as plain text files rather than using a DB format like sqlite (which one might chose for such today) or Berkeley DB (back when). The performance difference is negligible today on fast hosts with NVMe backed storage, but fairly annoying when using lesser machines with slower storage, e.g. RPi with root fs on a SD card.


I don't know the reasons behind the design decisions of apt. I know its workings up to a point, but not the history behind them.

On the other hand, I have been using Kingston Canvas Go SD cards on my Raspberry Pi boards for a fairly long time now, and these cards' random access speed is above and beyond of other, older cards while not being expensive.

Now apt works like it's running on an SSD.


> I (a)sync everywhere by pushing git lfs commits to my home server.

Don't let IT hear that unless you work on FOSS.


That's a funny (bad faith) angle you took it. I thought were talking about personal cheat sheets for general programming and tools, not work and proprietary stuff.

The alternative and typical options that nobody bats an eye at for doing this kind of thing (3rd-party big tech cloud) are much worse from a data hygiene perspective. If you're going to be that distrustful of personal phone usage by employees, you're running a prison instead of a workplace and replacing all thought with pointless checklists. That slippery slope never ends.

From your perspective, the best security posture is for employees to return to the office without any personal belongings so we can be extra super secure? It's too bad we can't erase their memories while we're at it since being a programmer is knowledge work.


Don't tell any authority that you are doing a thing, unless you have a good reason to tell them. It cannot possibly help you, it can only result in them telling you you can't do the thing any more.

And don't talk to police as a suspect. (I'm not sure if the rule still applies if you are the one reporting a crime)


"real-time GPS-driven moving map display"

Not the IMHO more interesting analog tech which lifts signals out of thermal noise.


That looks interesting, what technology "lifts signals out of thermal noise"?

I found this an interesting writeup on the technologies needed to receive GPS signals:

http://www.aholme.co.uk/GPS/Main.htm

The combination of RF electronics and then doing the signal processing in an FPGA for the timing critical stuff and the actual DSP with a raspberry pi, very interesting.


Thank you @squantor

DSSS, direct sequence spread spectrum, used for encoding GPS signal

Spread spectrum, it's pretty magical.

Thanks @FrankPetrilli.

GPS - look into Gold Codes [1] and auto-correlation. GPS arrives on your device at -128dBm, give or take, while thermal noise is -111dBm at the ~2MHz sampling bandwidth used. We use the processing gain from correlating against the ~1Mchip/s gold code to extract the lower bitrate signal, so you're pulling signals from approximately 20dB below the relevant thermal noise floor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_code


They could have said 3300 stones stones ...

That rocks.

It's the weigh I like it.

I thought that was an invention out of necessity during the WW times, but no, it's much older: https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Muckefuck

And the latest name is decaf. Coffee without coffee.

Holy cow, a 386 with VGA and SoundBlaster on a $1 MCU?

I recall VICE emulating the Brotkasten on 386 PCs some thirty years ago, later UAE doing it for Amiga. How long til my currently running system (anno 2016) is being emulated?


Maybe never with current technology? Looking just at the CPU and assuming you need comfortable IPC overhead for emulation, the 386 was from early in the Dennard scaling era and modern CPUs are 1000x or more faster single-thread. Since maybe 2012 that hasn't moved anywhere near that, certainly less than 10x.

Figure 6 in "A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture" is a good representation of that effect: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3282307.

For the GPU things are potentially looking better! But since distributed shaders/kernels are higher-level compiled for your specific device, there's less of a need for emulation.


Either "already" or "not any time soon", depending on how you count.

Already - because you have VMs and backwards compatibility. As long as you keep using Intel x86_64, your apps would run, no emulation needed. Or you can use the VM.

Not any time soon - because the computers are not speeding up that fast. 10 year old computers are still being used today, and even the latest CPUs are not orders of magnitude faster. So for a full-system emulation, the most well-known ones is x86 VM's on Apple Silicon, and according to reports, full-system mode is still not close to regular PCs.


16-bit x86 code dependent on interacting with real hardware under precise timing doesn't always work well in a VM.

> 16-bit x86 code dependent on interacting with real hardware under precise timing doesn't always work well in a VM.

This reminds me of the 8088mph demo - 1k colours in CGA, and a bunch of other impressive stuff.

8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators (oldskool.org)

319 points by drv on April 8, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 99 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338944

https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al...


true, but the question was about "my currently running system (anno 2016)" - which means intel core most likely. And at that generation, there requirements for precise timing is extremely rare, it's mostly PCI/PCIe devices and they can be shared with VMs just fine.

>Holy cow, a 386 with VGA and SoundBlaster on a $1 MCU?

The right software -- really does add value(!) to (let's-just-say-it-isn't-an-nVidia-GB300!) hardware, now doesn't it? :-)

I don't know about anyone else -- but I'm sold!

The value proposition on this one is truly awesome!


Well, the Budesamt für Verfassungsschutz (office for the protection of the constitution -- not generally known for their left-leaning point of view) classified the AfD as proven right-extreme. On that ground outlawing that party has been considered; this hasn't been done yet, partly due to the popularity of the party in some regions -- there's the danger to further alienate the populace there, many of which are already disenchanted with the earlier established parties. Some consider it best to let them govern for a while and thereby demonstrating that they can't solve intractable problems either. Others fear that they will cause irreparable damage even in their first days in office, e.g. cancelling the contract for public broadcasting service.


The BFV was forced to walk back that classification because, again, you can't call someone far right just because they have different opinions than you.


> prefer IRL service, viewing and touching actual hardware.

That did Fry's in, didn't it? People coming in viewing, touching hardware in store and then buy it on-line (elsewhere) so that they could save 2.5%. Or worse, buying it in store and returning it two weeks later when they found a better deal or didn't need it anymore.


> Or worse, buying it in store and returning it two weeks later when they found a better deal or didn't need it anymore.

Here a lot of places has a sort of price guarantee that I guess is supposed to work against this. Basically, if I know Media Markt sells something I want, but the very same thing is available for cheaper in other (big) store, I'll show them their competitors pricing and they'll lower their price to match it.

Assuming by the fact that the physical stores still exists, don't seem to be going anywhere soon, and these companies tend to get rid of stuff that doesn't make them profit anymore, I think it's safe to assume they at least are net positive on having the physical stores.


iiuc, this is differential GPS (DGPS) and not only airports are doing that. At least in Europe there are quite a few such transmitters, see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_DGPS-Sendern


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: