Hacker News: icodestuff

New comment by icodestuff in "Efficient Computer's Electron E1 CPU – 100x more efficient than Arm?"

icodestuff — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 03:35:50 +0000

Yep, that’s definitely the question. The article says that there are caches of recently used graphs for use in large loops. Presumably those are pretty fast to swap, but I have to imagine programming a whole new graph in isn’t fast. But maybe the E2 or E3 will have the ability to reprogram partial graphs with good AOT dataflow analysis.

New comment by icodestuff in "Show HN: Skip – Build native iOS and Android apps from a single Swift codebase"

icodestuff — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 21:03:51 +0000

For sure. Pretty similar problem space, very different implementation and target market. Apportable wasn’t a transpiler (and boy were we proud of that); it was a reimplementation of the iOS frameworks on top of a replacement NDK (Android’s libc was bad-mediocre at the time. Real nasty behaviors in its (dl)malloc for instance). Similar to WINE. It was always targeting games, so there was never a lot of effort to port any of the UIKit controls, but OpenGL CoreGraphics were supported. It also had a compiler extension that let you access the whole Android SDK in ObjC, and a tool for generating ObjC APIs from JARs. The goal was to make ObjC the one true mobile dev language. I applaud the effort to do something similar for Swift, even if it does involve transpilation.

New comment by icodestuff in "Emulsifiers linked to increased diabetes risk"

icodestuff — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 19:39:25 +0000

While the large sample size and many controlled variables are good, and make the results statistically significant, the effect sizes are awfully small. Only two of the emulsifiers, tripotassium phosphate and guar gum, increased the hazard of an individual developing diabetes by more than 10% (11% and 15% respectively, with very large error bars in the latter case). These are much smaller effects than previously known Type 2 diabetes risk factors.

For instance, the HR for family history of diabetes is 4.46 (vs 1.03-1.15 here, where 1.0 is no change in hazard).

New comment by icodestuff in "Emulsifiers linked to increased diabetes risk"

icodestuff — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 19:10:56 +0000

No. None of the ones with an increased Hazard Ratio are or contain them.

The researchers also did not control for PUFA consumption, only SFA consumption.

New comment by icodestuff in "Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges"

icodestuff — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 09:11:30 +0000

> Even Super Mario World[10] got the treatment (I can't remember slowdowns but I was only twelve can then).

Yoshi’s Island 4 has a slowdown in some circumstances (have Yoshi, get Starman and hit P-Switch), as does another level I can’t recall, exactly… it has a bunch of Monty Moles that explode all at once. I think it’s on Chocolate Island. I think there might be a third with two Sumo Bros. and an Amazing Flying Hammer Bro. onscreen.

New comment by icodestuff in "[dead]"

icodestuff — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:38:11 +0000

This again? Last time this came up, it was calculated that in order to get to the levels (mg/kg body weight) found to affect fertility in study rats and pigs, you’d have to eat something like between 2/3 and 2x your body weight/day, every day (because it’s easily excreted), of chlormequat-contaminated oats. The studies on rats and pigs used much higher concentrations than are found in oats.

New comment by icodestuff in "Built-in workaround for applications hiding under the MacBook Pro notch"

icodestuff — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 19:22:30 +0000

The notch is what it is: a compromise between webcam quality, branding, and thin bezels. But it’s hard to argue but that Apple’s software integration with it is mediocre at best. None of the extra space is usable except by anything but the awkwardly tall menu bar and the status items or menu extras it holds, and the system not being aware of the notch —sometimes— like letting status items pile up underneath, or being able to put the mouse pointer underneath it but not when a mouse button is held down (this behavior was removed in a late version of Ventura), or putting the picture-in-picture window partially underneath the menu bar (like it expects only a regular-sized menu bar to be there)… is symptomatic of a larger quality and integration problem at Apple, I think.

New comment by icodestuff in "Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?"

icodestuff — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 22:13:55 +0000

EV: Nova was the first shareware game I ever paid for. Also how I learned to use ResEdit. The Ship Variants mod was the best! There was nothing quite so overpowered as a Type IV Modified Valkyrie, a ship that was basically impossible to capture in stock without a massively larger ship or small fleet. It had most of the cargo capacity of a stock (Type I) Mod. Valkyrie, but about 3-4x the weapons mass, filled with missile launches and an ion beam (unheard of on a 2-day jump ship), and with room to spare for a medium laser.

New comment by icodestuff in "Japan's Hometown Tax (2018)"

icodestuff — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 22:17:32 +0000

More, even, since ridings don’t all have to have the same population, unlike Congressional districts.

New comment by icodestuff in "A Threat to the U.S. Budget Has Receded, and No One Is Sure Why"

icodestuff — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 22:33:38 +0000

They don’t mention falling life expectancies. If people are dying before they use as much care as expected, small wonder costs would rise less.

New comment by icodestuff in "Ask HN: How to Focus Again?"

icodestuff — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 16:55:39 +0000

Are you burnt out? I watched that happen. They also have ADHD, but once they burned out, even interesting worthwhile things couldn’t hold their focus for more than a few minutes, and they were constantly procrastinating several levels deep. That lasted months.

New comment by icodestuff in "Flying Toasters Screensaver After Dark in CSS"

icodestuff — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 05:50:14 +0000

SETI@Home was fun, but it was kind of a trash screen saver because of how many fixed elements it had. Definitely ended up burning in a monitor with the yellow afterimage of its purple section divider bars.

New comment by icodestuff in "Show HN: PC Builder AI"

icodestuff — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 17:27:00 +0000

Not sure where you’re getting pricing data, but it’s clearly out of date. A Ryzen 5 3600 is $97 on Newegg ($92 after rebate), not $350. Tools like this absolutely must have up-to-date pricing to be useful.

New comment by icodestuff in "Is NGC 1277 a problem for MOND?"

icodestuff — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 22:43:47 +0000

I think something like the bullet cluster, where you have gravitational lensing consistent with a collision-less fluid, leading a baryonic colliding gas (which we know is present from X-ray emissions), was a prediction of CDM. So it hasn’t predicted nothing, but yeah, I want to see more.

New comment by icodestuff in "LK-99"

icodestuff — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 19:04:31 +0000

Huh. The second paper listed different vacuum pressures than the first. 10^-3 torr instead of 10^—5.

New comment by icodestuff in "The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?"

icodestuff — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 18:07:29 +0000

My first thought was “I really hope this is real and not someone having left the data collection software in simulation mode.” If this reproduces, it’s historic. If it doesn’t, it’s either cold fusion or faster-than-light neutrinos.

New comment by icodestuff in "Douglas Adams was right about telephone sanitizers"

icodestuff — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 07:45:20 +0000

I seem to remember the end of the telephone sanitizers story was that you shouldn't get rid of them no matter how annoying, lest a plague spread via telephone handsets.

New comment by icodestuff in "Mozilla restricts extensions on some domains on Firefox 115"

icodestuff — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 21:45:30 +0000

Ad blockers and password managers are primarily what I’m installing, and they interact with all sites.

New comment by icodestuff in "Mozilla restricts extensions on some domains on Firefox 115"

icodestuff — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 20:24:27 +0000

Looks like there will be a UI to control this 116, and the block list is empty in 115.

I’m pretty stoked for this. Every time I install an extension I wonder what’s going to happen to my banking info if an update ever gets hijacked. This is a much better solution than turning all my extensions off and on when I visit financial websites.

New comment by icodestuff in "An app can transform smartphones into thermometers that accurately detect fevers"

icodestuff — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 03:38:01 +0000

The pulse is probably doable but difficult, at least on an iPhone. The noise in the accelerometer data from just holding it is pretty substantial.