Hacker News: greenpenguin

New comment by greenpenguin in "When we get Komooted"

greenpenguin — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 13:53:31 +0000

In the UK a CIC (Community Interest Company) is an option, which can legally oblige the company to act in the interest of "the community they serve". I think in the USA a benefit corporation might be similar.

Alternatively if Komoot was a worker co-op a sell-out would only be possible with consent from the employees. Consumer co-ops (where users can vote too) are also an option but with more caveats.

New comment by greenpenguin in "A Linux kernel syscall implementation tracker"

greenpenguin — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 10:55:35 +0000

There's a few of these floating around that are generally missing something - recent syscalls, types, etc. Thank you for such a complete one!

New comment by greenpenguin in "Intel Starts Publishing Open-Source Linux Driver Code for Discrete GPUs"

greenpenguin — Sun, 17 Feb 2019 14:59:35 +0000

I can confirm I don't have that installed. I'm using this: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm-OpenCL-Runtime

Edit: actually Blender performance is decent, but the kernels take ~10 minutes to compile.

New comment by greenpenguin in "Intel Starts Publishing Open-Source Linux Driver Code for Discrete GPUs"

greenpenguin — Sun, 17 Feb 2019 14:30:44 +0000

I'm using RocM OpenCL right now, which I believe is the approved option, or will be. Personally I've not had any issues with it - I can certainly use Blender with it, although the performance right now is so-so (I only have a cheap APU though, so hardly surprising).

I don't believe I have any blobs, other than the firmware one, which is true regardless - can you tell me what blobs you mean?

New comment by greenpenguin in "The dangers of AVX-512 throttling: a 3% impact"

greenpenguin — Thu, 16 Aug 2018 09:41:21 +0000

Not via CPU heating, but a theoretical AVX Spectre attack popped up on HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17711823

New comment by greenpenguin in "Reasons to Switch from Windows to Linux"

greenpenguin — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 12:11:20 +0000

Conversely, I also do embedded development, and our environment is entirely Linux-based, even the RTL tools.

New comment by greenpenguin in "Seaweed in Cow Feed Reduces Methane Emissions Almost Entirely"

greenpenguin — Thu, 10 May 2018 11:04:12 +0000

From the article you link: - Sea star disease: probably linked to increased sea temperatures, see https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2018.0007... - Warm blob: nobody seems quite sure to what extent climate change is involved here, see: https://phys.org/news/2015-04-wedge-seawater-blob-blamed-mar... but to be clear, this is literally an increase in ocean temperature

I'm not saying "hey this is definitely due to climate change", but ridiculing the suggestion that an event apparently linked to increased ocean temperatures might have something to do with climate change seems a little off.

New comment by greenpenguin in "AV1: A new general-purpose video codec"

greenpenguin — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 11:03:07 +0000

Most DSPs I've worked with have an assortment of really specific extra instructions added for the particular application. I suspect these DSPs are similar - adding a new codec probably means adding a few more instructions, or even the odd hardware block dangling off the side.

New comment by greenpenguin in "Breaking the x86 Instruction Set: how to find undocumented x86 instructions"

greenpenguin — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 09:43:42 +0000

I'm not really qualified to answer this, but I suspect the instruction decoder(s?) would be decoupled from register state as much as possible (unless x86 is even weirder than I thought).

Given this, I suspect wiring in a path all the way from the relevant versions of the relevant registers might be quite expensive. Plus part of the decode logic now needs to block on a register value - so a timing based attack might find these.

More qualified comments welcome...

New comment by greenpenguin in "Pilot-wave quantum theory gains experimental support"

greenpenguin — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 09:36:25 +0000

I think this is the paper, which is very briefly mentioned: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/2/e1501466.full

New comment by greenpenguin in "Many of the best Scrabble players are Thais who don't speak English (2014)"

greenpenguin — Mon, 24 Jul 2017 09:52:21 +0000

This article appears to originally be from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/06/scrabb...

The site also features several other Guardian articles by the same author. Seems a little iffy?

New comment by greenpenguin in "To become a good C programmer (2011)"

greenpenguin — Tue, 03 May 2016 10:23:57 +0000

This sounds like a good way to learn, but I would worry about picking up bad habits. Do you have any recommendations of (C) projects etc. that are particularly well written?

New comment by greenpenguin in "Sample programs in the Piet programming language"

greenpenguin — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 10:29:46 +0000

I had an interesting time writing a JIT for Piet some time ago. Piet is a pretty weird language in a few non-obvious ways. From what I remember:

* Execution moves between blocks of colour. Flood fill algorithms are a valid compiler optimisation!

* Execution can move left/right/up/down. You can't necessarily tell what will be executed without doing it. The 'codel chooser' stuff means you can exit a colour block in two different ways depending on program state (plus left/right/up/down, so 8 ways total...).

* Instructions are encoded in the difference between colour blocks.

* Piet is otherwise a fairly straightforward stack machine.

New comment by greenpenguin in "News is bad for you"

greenpenguin — Thu, 12 Dec 2013 13:45:44 +0000

I've been wanting to do something like this for a while. I'd quite like something that collects commentary about the state of countries around the word, but I'm lacking decent sources, especially for outside of the west. Have you found any particularly enlightening sources of such things you'd care to share?