<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: namibj</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=namibj</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 11:12:22 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=namibj" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Why is Google Maps back to showing old satellite images of Altadena?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In Germany it seems to have moved to the 3D photogrammetry data for anything with pixel sizes smaller than a car; is that maybe also the case for Paris?<p>I do understand that it's sad they don't calculate orthographic images from that to replace their satellite views in these areas though; full 3D is severely more resource intensive on the client after all.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 10:09:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177475</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177475</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177475</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "CUDA Books"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's actually little that changed in a way too fundamentally to matter other than _perhaps_ getting the async load-from-global-to-shared-memory DMA memcpy that avoided blocking register file space as target buffers for in-flight read-from-global operations. 
Shared after all is just a partition of L1d$ since iirc Volta (since they offered non-fixed/at-launch-requested expanded shared capacity support), so it made sense to provide this not-just-a-hint "prefetch into this user-managed slice of what is otherwise L1d$": it's AFAIK basically just some special load-like units that ask special L1d$-miss-fill units to deliver to a now-explicitly-specified target location in the non-automatic-cache partition of the local SRAM and signal completion in otherwise fairly normal local semaphore/barrier fashion.<p>The major difference is that this doesn't have a natural moment to transform/touch the values after read from global and before storage to shared.<p>Otherwise, tiled MMA (gemm) kernels where normal even in Maxwell days (after the classic K80, before the P100; Maxwell is when H.265 support landed).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 10:04:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177445</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177445</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177445</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>IMHO there should be extra incentives for BIPV just to the amount that would offset the classic shingles underneath because not just doing a simple barn roof (single gable, two pitch) or triangle roof (single pitch) with the slope entirely covered by solar glass of usual 400~800 Wp size modules is where a big part of the excess wasted cost is from.
Just make sure to allow structures that allow module-sized parts of the grid to be replaced with human occupancy windows in a nice and simple way.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 09:46:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177347</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177347</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177347</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Do you have any pointers like that solroof that don't bother trying to be inactive anymore?<p>My benchmark there is a ventilated attic with insulation between attic and house, using traditional glass roof structure filled with frameless glass-glass panels instead of human-below rated laminated safety glass.<p>Like, it can't be that hard to do better when you're not trying to be substantially fancier than a classic gable roof, it's just that the panels need to not be shear-loaded much, and the structure doesn't have to be so pretty from underneath as traditional glass roofs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 09:23:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177176</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177176</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177176</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Solar is REALLY CHEAP.
And provided you keep existing central European gas heating infrastructure around for a while, you can basically just wait out the really good energy storage by using existing caverns you pre-fill with methane to keep your people from freezing.
If you're not curtailing a substantial fraction of PV yield (yearly) in central Europe that's a sign there way not enough capacity yet.<p>Built facades and roofs out of glass-glass PV laminate.
We have the technology from glass roofs/facades; you just add glass-catching-mesh/insulation below because you can't use the insulated multi-pane window glass construction with safety lamination and solar cells all three together.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 17:56:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47966016</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47966016</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47966016</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Says electrically 3x2.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Apr 2026 05:00:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907516</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907516</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907516</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What they mean is that the cost per bit both capex and opex/power is worse for 10G than 25G for a while now as long as you talk about new hardware.<p>We're at the point where 25GBaud PAM4 is being replaced by 50GBaud PAM4.
That's 50 to 100 Gbit/s.<p>But iirc the use of PAM4 for the faster ones than "only" 25Gbit/s lanes is a hindrance to managing bottom-barrel price-per-bit.
PCIe 3 was 8, PCIe4 was 16, and PCIe 5 is 32 GBaud with a line code basically like the 10+ Gbit/s Ethernet links (well, it's 66b/64b for Eth and 130b/128b for PCIe).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Apr 2026 04:58:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907508</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907508</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907508</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>10m is extended reach copper, you can do about triple the range of 100m with approximately the same transceiver analog prowess.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Apr 2026 04:44:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907419</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907419</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907419</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "3.4M Solar Panels"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Modern cable trenching at least if you're not hitting rocks is to take a wet vac and a pressure washer and just cut a slit, make sure you got ergonomics sorted and a place to dump the sludge for drying (c.f. kiddie pool, or one of those pools that rely on the top inflated ring to keep the otherwise loose bag of water from spilling...except made from geotextile or something rock/dirt friendly that'll filter the sediment letting the water seep past) before you backfill.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 25 Apr 2026 02:09:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897998</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897998</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897998</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "3.4M Solar Panels"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Use simple roof geometry.
Use frameless panels in rails/frames made for keeping the building dry under exposed glass roof.
Put regular insulation underneath, don't just expose it.<p>Profit.<p>Just hard to get the stuff it seems, mostly because the market has a fetish for early-gen retrofit/independent solar panels, as far as mounting goes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 25 Apr 2026 02:03:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897975</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897975</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897975</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Fusion Power Plant Simulator"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Look at where the Barmen gas power plant is in Wuppertal, Germany to see....</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:45:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47862794</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47862794</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47862794</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "How a subsea cable is repaired (2021)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They are like bulbs on an old-school Christmas tree light string, all in series with just one insulated conductor between.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:15:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47852387</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47852387</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47852387</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "What are skiplists good for?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>B(+)Trees do actually admit a fast intersection (they offer a way more powerful projected-to-shared-keyspace mutual index join, technically it's even able to do antijoin but that'll actually modify iteration more than a very genericalized inner join; basically whenever you look at a key in any one of the involved indices you project it to a shared keyspace before doing the comparison-based-search things):<p>You get cache locality from the upper layers, and for navigation basically  `let mut head = keyspace.min(); 'outer: while(!cursors[0].finished()){ for(&mut cursor in cursors.iter_mut()) { let new_head = cursor.seek_to_target_or_next_after_if_none_match(head); if (head != new_head) {continue 'outer; }} /* passed all without seeking past target on any one */ output_fun(head, cursors.iter().map(|x| x.val())); }`. If you want you can do the inner loop's seeks concurrently, which helps if those are IO latency bound and you can afford to waste absolute IOPS on eagerly doing that. You'll want to locally compute the max() of those returned and assign that to `head`. Imagine the cursors are lambda-parametrized to feel like they operate on the projected shared keyspace.<p>If the keys are a bitstring prefix suited to a binary prefix trie you can actually intersect that way, it's beyond worst case optimal when multiple key columns are involved. Sadly any simple implementation strategies of those algorithms have prohibitive external-memory-machine coefficients for their nominally poly-logarithmic IOPS, due to involvement of combinatorial explosion / curse of dimensionality in search tree/trie structures. They do work though. C.f. "Tetris-LoadBalanced"/"Tetris-Reordered".<p>The latter even tames one index containing "all" even numbers and the other "all" odd numbers, well, matters more if you involve 3+ columns :D</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:23:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47831970</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47831970</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47831970</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Speculative decoding is already gambling.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:55:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806626</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806626</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806626</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Optimization of 32-bit Unsigned Division by Constants on 64-bit Targets"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There is one for the f64 FMA recycling IFMA from AVX512 they have for bignum libraries;it's a 52 bit unsigned multiply and accumulates either the low or the high output halves into a 64bit accumulator.<p>It's surely no 64 bit but it's much more than 32 bit.
And it's giving you access to the high halves so you can use it to compute 32x32->64 on vector even if only half as packed as that could be.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 11:24:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47750498</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47750498</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47750498</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No they isolate L and N not PE.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Apr 2026 12:46:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730118</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730118</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730118</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "RAM Has a Design Flaw from 1966. I Bypassed It [video]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>None of the DDR2 and onwards memories have anywhere near enough bandwidth to meet refresh frequency on each bit by you even just reading it in a loop.<p>The refresh that we do is run in parallel on the memory arrays inside the RAM chips completely bypassing any of the related IO machinery.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:01:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716228</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716228</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716228</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>First reaction to warning tone should always be to (safely!) stop and assess.<p>Considering that the persons involved can't be expected to not be deaf, or functionally so via e.g. headphones, and thus you always have to be able to brake anyways. Running onto a driving lane (be it bikes or cars doesn't matter) without looking especially if the direction you didn't look just gave an audible warning is always reckless.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:11:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47694853</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47694853</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47694853</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In Germany it's illegal to drive bikes that assist beyond 28km/h (about 20mph) in what are true bike paths (which can be built as lanes! And, notably, they can be marked as virtual-lane-shared (pictogram side by side with a vertical divider) or as true shared (pictogram above and below at a horizontal divider), if pedestrians are also allowed to use them.<p>An ancient gas-e-bike rating is allowed on them outside city limits but iirc those bikes are exceedingly rare since even before e-bikes became truly mainstream.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:08:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47694807</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47694807</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47694807</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "An open-source 240-antenna array to bounce signals off the Moon"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>RTL-SDR-grade fleet doing passive radar (using radio/TV OTA broadcasts) isn't actually that new; but pretty much any detailed reports have caught self-censoring after TLA visitors came by.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Apr 2026 05:19:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47671006</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47671006</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47671006</guid></item></channel></rss>