Hacker News: andreer

New comment by andreer in "Lisp-powered laptop with a battery life measured in years"

andreer — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 08:11:11 +0000

Using the Adafruit breakout board, I had no problems other than an SPI bug in the Arduino core. Be warned that they are fragile when not protected, I sheared off the flex cable on one which was not fun.

Official refresh rate is ~25 hz, unofficially they seem to be able to go a lot faster (2-3X) if you don't mind increasing power consumption. And it's faster if you update only some lines. But by then you have run into a limitation in how fast the liquid crystal can respond.

New comment by andreer in "Low Power Challenge: The PotatoP Runs Lisp for Months Without Recharging"

andreer — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 18:29:41 +0000

Yeah that would be another few orders of magnitude smaller power budget. But I love the idea.

My project so AMA (although this doesn't seem to be blowing up here on HN :-)

New comment by andreer in "Moore’s Law is dead – Long live the chiplet"

andreer — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 08:33:34 +0000

IPC is still improving, so single thread performance is still increasing, even if clock speeds are not (at least not at the same as before). And new instructions (AVX ect) also help, especially if you can optimize and recompile your code.

It's at least enough that we have to take it into account:

We run our workloads across multiple Intel cpu generations and to be able to optimize utilization we have a "speedup factor" which is currently up to 1.7 for the latest generation we've tuned it for. And the base 1.0 performance is from Ivy Bridge, launched 2013.

New comment by andreer in "Ask HN: Would you buy a modern Toshiba Libretto?"

andreer — Sat, 02 Apr 2022 08:42:03 +0000

There is a forum dedicated to devices like this at https://forum.ei2030.org/ - also a zulip chat linked there which is more active.

New comment by andreer in "The VT-69 portable data terminal"

andreer — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 16:07:18 +0000

Reminds me of the recent Lisperati1000: https://www.hackster.io/news/the-lisperati1000-is-a-cyberdec...

I think these personal terminals are really cool, and might foster some interesting innovation in the near future.

Vespa.ai 5x faster than Elasticsearch at nearest neighbor ranking

andreer — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 13:27:31 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/jobergum/dense-vector-ranking-performance

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21354668

Points: 8

# Comments: 1

New comment by andreer in "Bontrager’s WaveCel material more effective at preventing concussions than MIPS"

andreer — Thu, 29 Aug 2019 08:12:28 +0000

There's much in this thread about the helmet absorbing the energy of the impact, but that's far from the whole benefit of wearing one.

The helmet, by conforming to the shape of your head, distributes the energy from the point of impact to a much larger area. So instead of having your head cracked open at the point it hits the tarmac, or pierced by a pointy rock, the force will be evenly distributed across your head.

The helmet also has a low-friction shell that will slide across a surface, which helps avoid head rotation, snapping your neck or getting whiplash, and will protect you from cuts and abrasions.

I've been saved by my helmet many times.

New comment by andreer in "Ask HN: Are Lucene/Solr/ES Still Used for Search?"

andreer — Sun, 21 Jul 2019 20:06:23 +0000

Just an FYI to your last paragraph: The core indexing/ranking/storage components of Vespa are C++, and run in a separate process (no jni).

In my own attempt to compare the two, I found the memory consumption of Vespa was easier to predict and understand (there are formulas for it in the documentation).

New comment by andreer in "Household radar can sense a person’s breathing and heart rate, even emotions"

andreer — Sat, 01 Jun 2019 15:22:59 +0000

Here’s a sensor that’s already used by the local police to monitor the breathing of those locked up over night - to be able to respond asap if someone stops breathing after excessive drinking or drugs. Seems benevolent to me. https://www.xethru.com/x4m200-respiration-sensor.html

New comment by andreer in "MakerLisp Machine"

andreer — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 15:27:25 +0000

I find this to be an interesting question. Given a modern, high-performance compiling lisp implementation on a modern CPU, say SBCL on x86_64.

What modification or addition to the CPU (or wider computer architecture) would be most effective in making typical lisp programs run faster?

New comment by andreer in "Employees at Amazon's New NYC Warehouse Launch Unionization Push"

andreer — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 12:39:58 +0000

Technological innovation can also arise as a consequence of the minimum wage being high. By increasing the cost of human labor, automation becomes relatively cheaper / more cost effective.

Here in Norway this has led to the near complete elimination of classes of jobs. As a very visible example, we have no toll booth operators or garage attendants, these have been universally replaced by automatic license plate recognition.

Thankfully we have a (relatively) good social safety net to take care of those who lose their jobs to such things.

Vespa Meetup in Sunnyvale

andreer — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 10:00:21 +0000

Article URL: http://blog.vespa.ai/post/167698023296/kimomarjohansenyahoono

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15822972

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by andreer in "Apple's new gender neutral emojis"

andreer — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 20:10:49 +0000

Are these in unicode already, or are they really Apple specific?

New comment by andreer in "Open-Sourcing Vespa, Yahoo’s Data Processing and Serving Engine"

andreer — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 20:53:56 +0000

It could be a replacement for the 'E', but the APIs are different enough that there's no drop-in replacement for the 'L' and 'K' and creating or making those compatible would be a significant effort. Would be great if someone did though :-)

New comment by andreer in "Open-Sourcing Vespa, Yahoo’s Data Processing and Serving Engine"

andreer — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 13:47:25 +0000

In our tests, vespamalloc has simply been faster. I don't know how in-depth the analysis has been as to why, but obviously vespamalloc is written and tuned for Vespa so that is a likely factor.

New comment by andreer in "Open-Sourcing Vespa, Yahoo’s Data Processing and Serving Engine"

andreer — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 13:27:40 +0000

The reason is simply, for performance. To avoid having to go to the kernel every time we need to allocate memory for a query, and avoid having to clear memory on free/reuse. It is made for Vespa, but also used for other programs.

Similar in purpose to Google's TCMalloc: http://goog-perftools.sourceforge.net/doc/tcmalloc.html

New comment by andreer in "The open big data serving engine: Store, search, rank and organize big data"

andreer — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 12:05:05 +0000

It's based on "VErtical Search PlAtform". A bit of a contrived acronym perhaps ... it's been known as Vespa internally in Oath/Yahoo for a long time.

New comment by andreer in "Open-Sourcing Vespa, Yahoo’s Data Processing and Serving Engine"

andreer — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 11:28:41 +0000

That would be Apache Pig, a scripting language for Hadoop. Some scripts are included to feed data to and query Vespa from Hadoop.

https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/tree/master/vespa-hado...

New comment by andreer in "ACM ICPC 2015 World Finals Results"

andreer — Thu, 21 May 2015 10:13:05 +0000

Solving all of these in 5 hours is truly awe inspiring. It would probably take me months, if not years :-)

New comment by andreer in "Seneca: On the Shortness of Life"

andreer — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 12:36:28 +0000

Skip to Chapter XIV, if you must.

"Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they alone really live; for they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only".