Hacker News: jpecar

New comment by jpecar in "NUMA: Cores, memory, and the distance between them"

jpecar — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 14:02:30 +0000

I'm baffled by the fact that NUMA is still an issue in 2026. My impression is that this was all solved back in dotcom era already on those big SUNs. At least in HPC we solved this already in mid 2000s. Why is supposedly modern world still wasting time on this? Kernel these days exposes just about everything you would ever want to know about a system topology and every runtime should be making use of that information. If it does not, I cannot consider it ready for this century.

New comment by jpecar in "Gallium oxide electronics withstand extreme cold"

jpecar — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:02:58 +0000

Cool (literally ;)

Now they just need to find something that will work on Venus.

New comment by jpecar in "30 Years of HPC: many hardware advances, little adoption of new languages"

jpecar — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:37:01 +0000

To add on this, what I see gaining traction are "workflow managers", tools that let people specify flow of data through various tools. These can figure out how to parallelize things on their own so users are not burdened with this task.

So from what I see actual programming language doesn't matter as much as how the work is organized. Anything helping people simplify this task is of immediate benefit to the science.

New comment by jpecar in "Reflections on 30 years of HPC programming"

jpecar — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:28:41 +0000

All these fancy HPC languages are all nice and dandy, but the hard reality I see on our cluster is that most of the work is done in Python, R and even Perl and awk. MPI barely reached us and people still prefer huge single machines to proper distributed computing. Yeah, bioinformatics is from another planet.

New comment by jpecar in "The Thinking Game Film – Google DeepMind documentary"

jpecar — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 07:58:37 +0000

DB of known proteins is not where the money can be made, designing new proteins is. This is why AlphaFold3 (that can aid in this) is now wrapped in layers of legalese preventing you to actually use it in the way you want. At least that's what my lifescience users tell me. Big Pharma is now paying Big Money to DeepMind to make use of AF3 ...

New comment by jpecar in "Nvidia is gearing up to sell servers instead of just GPUs and components"

jpecar — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 14:19:57 +0000

Servers? I thought they left even racks behind, they're now selling these "AI factories".

New comment by jpecar in "ChkTag: x86 Memory Safety"

jpecar — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 21:28:19 +0000

Afaik Intel's first foray into this territory was their i960mx which ended up in F-22.

New comment by jpecar in "Analog optical computer for AI inference and combinatorial optimization"

jpecar — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 07:55:27 +0000

In performance per watt? One ;)

New comment by jpecar in "Bad UX"

jpecar — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 19:35:09 +0000

Wow, google suddenly looks much better. How do we make this change permanent? (not a joke)

New comment by jpecar in "Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024: WebAssembly SDK"

jpecar — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 08:37:07 +0000

VR situation was much worse. On the hardware where 2020 was OKish, 2024 was unplayable.

New comment by jpecar in "Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024: WebAssembly SDK"

jpecar — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 07:29:20 +0000

Yeah ... by now 2020 reached a beta quality, still plenty of bugs left to squash but most of them are minor. 2024 on the other side ... is just transitioning from tech demo to alpha quality. It needs a few more years to reach beta and then by 2035 or so it might actually become a reliable product.

New comment by jpecar in "Fast and cheap bulk storage: using LVM to cache HDDs on SSDs"

jpecar — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 21:24:35 +0000

Been using lvm cache since about 2017 in high performance storage environment. Didn't like it much as it was too much of a blask box back then and didn't have any knobs to tune to adjust its behavior to the workload and we had plenty that didn't fit its logic. Ended up going full flash.

New comment by jpecar in "What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?"

jpecar — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 16:19:03 +0000

Hedgehog's dilema. Interacting today with random average human being leads in 99% to such a painful disappointing conclusion that I got PTSD from it. Just being within a line of sight of another human being makes me nervous and looking for a place to hide.

New comment by jpecar in "ASCIIMoon: The moon's phase live in ASCII art"

jpecar — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 21:35:17 +0000

Reminds me of ACME phoon ... I used to have this in my .bashrc ;) https://acme.com/software/phoon/

New comment by jpecar in "Visualizing environmental costs of war in Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä"

jpecar — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 21:54:15 +0000

And if you want an anime series that you can classify like this, check out "Now and then, here and there".

New comment by jpecar in "ZX Spectrum graphics magic"

jpecar — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 09:56:53 +0000

And how does that lead to colorful flashing pattern that "collapses" some 30 seconds after it appears?

New comment by jpecar in "ZX Spectrum graphics magic"

jpecar — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 08:13:15 +0000

Yes, this makes magic on real hardware and I see it do nothing on emulators. So something really funny must be going on here ...

New comment by jpecar in "ZX Spectrum graphics magic"

jpecar — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 07:55:12 +0000

I still don't get what

POKE 23641,194

RUN

does on zx spectrum. And you get different patterns for different values, say 197. And wait for a minute or so to see something even more interesting.

New comment by jpecar in "Show HN: Wetlands – a lightweight Python library for managing Conda environments"

jpecar — Wed, 28 May 2025 15:34:43 +0000

Why not just call it swamp? It would better describe the python ecosystem mess ;)

Jokes aside, this feels very meta: package manager for a package manager for a package manager. Reminds me of the old RFC1925: "you can always add another layer of abstraction". That RFC also says "perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away".

And as a hpc admin, I'm not offering my users any help with conda and let them suffer on their own. Instead I'm showing them the greener pastures with spack, easybuild and eessi whenever I can. And they're slowly migrating over.

New comment by jpecar in "Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative"

jpecar — Tue, 06 May 2025 08:59:45 +0000

Indeed, sound mix is rather amazing. Incredible stereo picture and depth, something you seldom hear in modern movies.