Hacker News: rdc12

New comment by rdc12 in "You can't fool the optimizer"

rdc12 — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 21:34:47 +0000

Matt Godbolt's talk on ray tracers, shows how effective that change can be. Think it was that talk anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG6c4Kwbv4I

New comment by rdc12 in "COBOL to Kotlin via Formal Models (IR and Alloy and Golden Master)"

rdc12 — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 01:39:38 +0000

With C in the embedded world it is very common to write entire applications that never only use static memory and the stack. Sometime programmers will allow dynamic memory during init only, other times not even then (I tend to favour the never approach, as I can verify that malloc is never called anywhere).

New comment by rdc12 in "Delimited continuations in lone Lisp"

rdc12 — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 23:06:21 +0000

Looks like this other article goes into the details. https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/self-contained-lone-...

New comment by rdc12 in "Drought in Iraq reveals tombs created 2,300 years ago"

rdc12 — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 01:08:21 +0000

It's very common that both historical artifacts and natural wonders have been consumed by reservoirs, I suspect it would be almost impossible to avoid this.

New comment by rdc12 in "I wasted weeks hand optimizing assembly because I benchmarked on random data"

rdc12 — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 03:55:51 +0000

Do you have a link to that paper?

New comment by rdc12 in "Joining Sun Microsystems – 40 years ago (2022)"

rdc12 — Thu, 01 May 2025 01:38:39 +0000

Do you have a link to that podcast?

New comment by rdc12 in "Find the oldest line in your repo"

rdc12 — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 02:48:31 +0000

For the codebase I was working on today (in C). At first it was just } so filtered those out, then it was /* (no comment detail on that line) so again filter them. Then it was a bunch of #includes.

Not surprising but not insightful at all unfortunately

New comment by rdc12 in "SVC16: Simplest Virtual Computer"

rdc12 — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 02:51:19 +0000

FPGA's also have billions of transistors now, but adding more block memory means removing transistors from something else, such as LUT's, registers, DSP blocks etc.

As always it is a tradeoff, and given many designs don't need much block memory, or need so much memory that external memory is a better choice anyway.

New comment by rdc12 in "I sent an Ethernet packet"

rdc12 — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 01:10:57 +0000

Recently at work I developed a small suite tools (in a mixture of python and shell, running in WSL) that left my boss impressed when he saw me debugging a customers system (IOT).

Then he started asking me to make them accessible to non programmers, and suddenly those tools seemed a lot more than I bargained for.

New comment by rdc12 in "Why Mount Rainier is the US volcano keeping scientists up at night"

rdc12 — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:41:44 +0000

Different volcano, but back in the 50's the natural tephra damn on the crater lake of Mount Ruapehu (New Zealand) collapsed triggering a lahar, that ultimately took out the piers of rail bridge near Tangiwai minutes before a passenger train tragically attempted to cross the bridge, resulting in mass casualty's.

So certainly possible for non-expulsive activities to trigger a lahar and for consequences that sound like they are more from a disaster movie then real life to occur.

New comment by rdc12 in "Scientists find wreckage of ship that tried to warn Titanic of iceberg"

rdc12 — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 06:38:49 +0000

And the collision of the RMS Olympic (the first of the three in that family) with the HMS Hawke. As did the coal stoker Arthur Priest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_John_Priest

New comment by rdc12 in "Some statistics about BTRFS compression"

rdc12 — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 07:40:30 +0000

That is correct, if the first few records (a virtual block size sorta) (not sure how many off the top of my head) don't compress well, it assumes that the file is not compressible and just writes the data out skipping the compression step.

New comment by rdc12 in "Caring for the only known full kākāpō feather cloak in the world"

rdc12 — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 09:01:38 +0000

That quote doesn't contradict what mkl said, towards the end of the article it does say this thou, "The cloak will be on display in the new museum developed in Perth, set to open in Spring 2024."

New comment by rdc12 in "Caring for the only known full kākāpō feather cloak in the world"

rdc12 — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 08:57:13 +0000

That clip never gets old, Sirocco (the birds name) sure has some attitude.

New comment by rdc12 in "YouTuber builds his own x-ray machine after $69k hospital bill (2021)"

rdc12 — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 03:42:06 +0000

Well most of the politicians don't have a clue that any of that stuff is possible either.

New comment by rdc12 in "Old imageshack images have a 1:5 chance of showing a Ukranian flag"

rdc12 — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 02:13:43 +0000

3 attempts to get a hit for me, in NZ

New comment by rdc12 in "Hot-code reloading on macOS/arm64 with Zig"

rdc12 — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 10:44:17 +0000

Can hot-code reloading coexist well with inlined functions?

New comment by rdc12 in "ZFS on a single core RISC-V hardware with 512MB"

rdc12 — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 04:12:20 +0000

It isn't required (in the strict sense) to keep the dedup table in memory, the problem is that performance is dire when it doesn't. It would be pretty similar to virtual memory thrashing, when the table is not fully in memory.

New comment by rdc12 in "Predicting the tide with an analog computer made from Lego"

rdc12 — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 09:21:39 +0000

Solid plastic might, but would moving water and impacts result in the bricks separating?

New comment by rdc12 in "Brussels battles old prejudices as it frees unloved river from its vault"

rdc12 — Sat, 28 Aug 2021 12:57:52 +0000

What happened to Germany (territory shrinkage and economic sanctions) after WW1 incidentally shows this story pretty well.