Hacker News: twbarr

New comment by twbarr in "How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?"

twbarr — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 22:07:07 +0000

Yes, this algorithm is called JBIG2.

New comment by twbarr in "Can we have the day off?"

twbarr — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:54:44 +0000

Fiduciary responsibility also requires long-term thinking. If AI is writing the code, I need the smartest, most well-rested supervisors I can get.

New comment by twbarr in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

twbarr — Fri, 15 May 2026 04:28:36 +0000

As much as I would have loved to get out in sooner than six years, I tend to agree. In hindsight, if I'd treated it like a job and just done the coding and writing necessary to get the projects I published out the door, I could have done it in three, maybe two. But that would have missed the whole point.

New comment by twbarr in "AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip"

twbarr — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 03:39:43 +0000

Intel's platform, at the very least, use cache-as-ram during the boot phase before the DDR interface can be trained and started up. https://github.com/coreboot/coreboot/blob/main/src/soc/intel...

New comment by twbarr in "UTF-8 is a brilliant design"

twbarr — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 19:08:22 +0000

It should be noted that the final design for UTF-8 was sketched out on a placemat by Rob Pike and Ken Thompson.

New comment by twbarr in "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work"

twbarr — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 07:01:25 +0000

IPv6 is arguably a good example of what happens when you don't do the simplest thing possible. What we really needed was a bigger IP address space. What we got was a whole bunch of other crap. If we had literally expanded IPv4 by a couple of octets at the end (with compatible routing), would we be there now?

New comment by twbarr in "The Lost Art of Logarithms"

twbarr — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 07:23:54 +0000

We could really take a page from this style for teaching advanced computing. We try to imagine that architectures just kind of come out of nowhere. Starting with mechanical computing and unit record equipment makes so much make more sense.

Plus, unit record equipment was cool.

New comment by twbarr in "UC Berkeley will delete all alumni email accounts with >5GB stored"

twbarr — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 22:28:58 +0000

They're in the process of doing this for alums @hmc.edu too. Google baited us into moving the whole infrastructure into the cloud and now are switching us to something the alumni association can't afford.

Meanwhile, the self-hosted mail server for the CS department @cs.hmc.edu still hosts accounts for all the alumni and will for the foreseeable eternity. I can still SSH into the current department cluster and read two decade old (or two second old) emails using mutt. If their cluster somehow ever runs out of disks, I'm happy to donate a terabytes worth, but like hell I'm giving money to big-G for cloud storage.

New comment by twbarr in "Ask HN: Do you also marvel at the complexity of everyday objects?"

twbarr — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 19:40:26 +0000

I'm always amazed by Crispix. It's not a heterogeneous material, it's not a poured mixture of two parts, it's not a coated material, it's an assembly. And you can eat it by the handful.

New comment by twbarr in "Python 3.13 Gets a JIT"

twbarr — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 19:46:55 +0000

Ultimately, most good ideas were first implemented by Fabrice Bellard.

New comment by twbarr in "I Vote on Plagiarism Cases at Harvard College. Gay's Getting Off Easy"

twbarr — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 02:26:35 +0000

By comparison, if you steal as an infant, you get off easy. If you steal as an adult, you don't. Screwing up parallel parking is a mistake, plagiarism is not.

New comment by twbarr in "Most 16-year-olds don't have servers in their rooms"

twbarr — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 19:22:57 +0000

My first real "server hardware" was a Sparcstation 5 I bought under a bridge at the Dallas first Saturday swap meet. I was maybe... 15? Before that, it was Linux on whatever commodity PC my dad had passed down to me. Running Linux on that Microchannel-based PS/2 was a bitch and a half for a 5th grader.

I had _absolutely_ no idea what I was doing, but I feel like my general comfort with diving into things where I still have no idea what I'm doing started then and there.

New comment by twbarr in "The Sega Hitachi HiSaturn Navi Console"

twbarr — Sat, 04 Nov 2023 02:08:26 +0000

Would be awfully fun to emulate this. With new maps from OSM... On Android Auto...

New comment by twbarr in "Machine Unlearning Challenge"

twbarr — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 03:14:05 +0000

Lord Mayor of Cologne: "You've damaged your brain, Universe, but no more than a week of binge drinking or five minutes on a cell phone."

- Futurama, Parasites Lost (2001)

New comment by twbarr in "GPT-4 API General Availability"

twbarr — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 23:52:27 +0000

No, but what is it? Not your lawyer, not legal advice, but it's not a trade secret, they've given it to researchers. It's not a trademark because it's not an origin identifier. The structure might be patentable, but the weights won't be. It's certainly not a mask work.

It might have been a contract violation for the guy who redistributed it, but I'm not a party to that contract.

New comment by twbarr in "Plane crash rates by model"

twbarr — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 21:11:25 +0000

One of the three 777 accidents is being shot down by a Russian SAM.

New comment by twbarr in "Plane crash rates by model"

twbarr — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 21:10:43 +0000

The NG has been produced since 1997 and there are essentially no pre-NG aircraft in Western service. The NEO is equivalent to the MAX.

New comment by twbarr in "Plane crash rates by model"

twbarr — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 21:09:12 +0000

The 737 has also been around a lot longer. The 737NG has a rate of 0.07 compared to the A32x's 0.09. The A330 is 0.19 while the 777 is 0.18. But even this is kind of misleading. All but three of the fatalities (total fatalities, not accidents) due to the 777 come down to intentional acts that would have destroyed any aircraft.

New comment by twbarr in "Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering"

twbarr — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 21:15:21 +0000

There's a middle ground between "hardware store crap" and "custom." The aviation industry has plenty of standard interior lighting and environmental control system that's known not to light people on fire or short out or otherwise fail and kill somebody.

https://www.collinsaerospace.com/what-we-do/industries/busin...

These are still COTS products.

New comment by twbarr in "The legend of “x86 CPUs decode instructions into RISC form internally” (2020)"

twbarr — Sun, 18 Jun 2023 23:43:42 +0000

It's still Load/Store, but ARM Thumb2 uses gnarly variable-length instructions.