Hacker News: hyperpallium

New comment by hyperpallium in "Questions to help people decide what to learn"

hyperpallium — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 04:32:42 +0000

To me "learning" means understanding, not memorization on flashcards. Knowing stuff is part of it, but for me, the knowing comes from the understanding.

> people dislike questions that don’t match their mental model

> “what are the 4 parts of a HTTP request?”

I would describe this as a non-injective function. Unambiguous in one direction, but ambiguous in the other. It seems to be very common in lecturers who (1) have forgotten what it was like to learn it (2) aren't precise enough to ensure clarity as a matter of rigour.

Criticism aside, learning something is infinitely better than learning nothing. And finding a way to make it enjoyable and satisfying is a worthwhile end in itself.

New comment by hyperpallium in "12 Billion-year-old signal from the end of the universe's 'dark age'"

hyperpallium — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 06:00:21 +0000

In A Fire Upon the Deep, the Skroderiders' cargo was a one-time pad.

New comment by hyperpallium in "High doses of ketamine can temporarily switch off the brain, say researchers"

hyperpallium — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 02:18:52 +0000

Sounds like depletion of something, perhaps in the energy metabolism pathway, such as thyroxine.

New comment by hyperpallium in "Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming"

hyperpallium — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 05:07:21 +0000

> The PS5's SSD can supply data at 5.5 GB/s. The RAM runs at 448 GB/s, 81 times faster. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15848/storage-matters-xbox-ps...

SSD is compressed (by "Kraken"), giving 8-9GB/s typical.

You could compress RAM too, but not worth the latency penalty.

New comment by hyperpallium in "Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming"

hyperpallium — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 03:34:31 +0000

"SSD as RAM" is a good way to reason about it.

It means you have a lot more RAM, e.g. thus, PS5 has 825GB of RAM. RAM in the TB, soon.

Would a couple of orders of magnitude make a difference? If software is designed with terabytes of RAM in mind?

New comment by hyperpallium in "Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming"

hyperpallium — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 03:27:33 +0000

Ratchet & Clank is the only demo with new gameplay based on the SSD.

But it's overused, giving each game world less weight. The technological imperative, preoccupied with whether they could, etc. In contrast, artificial constraints add depth to gameplay, e.g. limited movement speed/duration ("sprint").

All that said, keeping processors fed with data is a central problem of CS. The innovations here are not just the SSD itself, but elimination of bottlenecks in the architecture (e.g. direct placement in GPU RAM).

Typically, storage is 1000x slower than RAM. On PS5, it's 50x. That has got to be a revolution in algorithmic space-time tradeoffs... which has got to be reflected in gameplay, somehow, somewhen.

New comment by hyperpallium in "‘Collapse of Civilisation Is the Most Likely Outcome’: Top Climate Scientists"

hyperpallium — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 14:25:48 +0000

For covid19, some countries didn't take it seriously until they saw what happened in Italy.

This could happen for global climate change, if we have dozens of Earths.

New comment by hyperpallium in "How Birds Evolved From Dinosaurs (2015)"

hyperpallium — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 14:20:56 +0000

> early birds looked very much like infantile or even embryonic raptors

Sounds like neoteny, the retention of juvenile characteristics in adulthood. See: domesticated foxes, dogs (esp toy breeds), people. Seems like a particularly easy evolutionary path, perhaps take a step back, then forward.

New comment by hyperpallium in "Bill Thurston's answer to “What's a mathematician to do?” (2010)"

hyperpallium — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 00:14:35 +0000

closed as interesting

New comment by hyperpallium in "Anders Tegnell defends Sweden's virus approach"

hyperpallium — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 06:52:51 +0000

  Sweden's economy, which relies
  heavily on exports, is expected to
  shrink 7% in 2020

  [neighbours] dropping mutual border
  controls but would keep Sweden out

Sometimes it's better to go with the crowd, even if you're right.

New comment by hyperpallium in "Programming as Theory Building (1985)"

hyperpallium — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 05:51:58 +0000

geometry and visual proofs

New comment by hyperpallium in "Idea Generation"

hyperpallium — Fri, 29 May 2020 06:13:12 +0000

From a VC's point of view, for early startups, only pre-chasm matters. If many don't cross, well, it's a numbers game.

New comment by hyperpallium in "Tools for Better Thinking"

hyperpallium — Fri, 29 May 2020 05:58:54 +0000

New comment by hyperpallium in "The Chiral Puzzle of Life"

hyperpallium — Mon, 25 May 2020 00:03:09 +0000

> A similar mystery is why DNA chose a base64 nucleic coding system for 21 amino acids and a few punctuations.

This implies a kind of Cambrian explosion of coding systems for nature to "choose" from. Maybe xenogenetics will help us recognize its remnants.

New comment by hyperpallium in "Avantek's Arm Workstation: Ampere EMAG 8180 32-Core Arm64 Review"

hyperpallium — Fri, 22 May 2020 19:08:01 +0000

Clash of ecosystems? At interfaces: ARM is far more customizable than x86 - but on chip. And at targets: ecosystem revolves around low-power.

e.g. (21 TOPS) Xavier NX is for devices "constrained by size, weight, and power budgets."

New comment by hyperpallium in "The unreasonable effectiveness of declarative programming"

hyperpallium — Tue, 19 May 2020 17:14:38 +0000

I meant in math.

BTW, pedantry: -2 * -2 = 4 too

New comment by hyperpallium in "The unreasonable effectiveness of declarative programming"

hyperpallium — Tue, 19 May 2020 16:15:07 +0000

Can we say the difference between imperative and declarative is ordering or associativity?

New comment by hyperpallium in "The unreasonable effectiveness of declarative programming"

hyperpallium — Tue, 19 May 2020 16:13:34 +0000

Is f(g(x)) imperative? There's an ordering... and it works in terms of mappings, not outputs...

New comment by hyperpallium in "Termux and Android 10"

hyperpallium — Mon, 18 May 2020 18:55:13 +0000

nvm

New comment by hyperpallium in "Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself"

hyperpallium — Mon, 18 May 2020 14:53:51 +0000

Dual licensing: for an open source library that some businesses will want to distribute with their closed source product, use GPL 2 which doesn't allow that. Then businesses will pay for a commerical license from you that does allow it.

It doesn't affect open source users; though Stallman doesn't like it. Projects using this kind of idea are berkleyDB and ghostscript.