Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now ser...

How is it that Brave managed to build an indexer and remove dependence on Bing in less than two years but DuckDuckGo hasn't been able to do it in a decade.

IceWreck, 21 hours ago

Re: NASA Power Hack Extends 45-Year Voyager 2 Mission ...

Everything about Voyager is just mind-blowing. These are 45 year old electronic devices, using 70's tech, with zero maintenance, operating 22 light hours away.

At that range they can still send messages detectable on earth. 9 out of 10 instruments are still working. People just leaving school when they launched are already retired.

This is one time when the adage "they don't make them like they used to" is well applied.

Hat tip to all involved.

bruce511, 19 hours ago

Re: Check if your IKEA chair is compatible with your s...

I once had the problem that running make with too many parallel jobs (-j) would change my keyboard layout.

The machine was some laptop mainboard glued to the backside of my monitor, and the USB socket came out at the top of the mainboard. On its way down, the USB cable for the keyboard passed across the whole mainboard. On high load, the mainboard created enough interference to cause the connection to reset, re-hotplugging my keyboard, so the previous setxkbmap call was not effective anymore and i was back to the standard US qwerty layout.

blueflow, 2 hours ago

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just y...

My grandmother has dementia. About twice a day, she calls my parents every 5 minutes, forgetting that she just hung up. The calls are always the same: "You live there now. Yes you have money. We came to visit you yesterday." This can go on for an hour or so.

My parents are incredibly patient, but after a couple of these calls, they'll just leave the phone to ring. The soundtrack of the phone constantly ringing in the house, and the guilt associated with not picking up, is unbearable.

My brother and I built a system where her calls get re-routed to a rotation of relatives to answer her calls, to spread the load. After a call with her, each person gets a 2 hour break (customizable). If no one is available to answer, or if everyone is on break, she gets a voicemail that my dad recorded that explains that we love her, that she lives there, all the usual stuff.

It's working beautifully.

pigcat, 4 hours ago

Высшая алгебра, смысл жизни и ниндзя. Кино смотрится на одном дыхании. Трезвым смотреть с осторожностью.

https://youtu.be/NgNRRI9s7uk

Re: Beautiful branchless binary search

“Those spikes for std::lower_bound are on powers of two, where it is somehow much slower. I looked into it a little bit but can’t come up with an easy explanation. The Clang version has the same spikes even though it compiles to very different assembly.”

I saw this and immediately went “oh, those look like Intel hardware”.

Intel uses 12-bit memory port quick addressing in their hardware, resulting in an issue known as “4K Aliasing”. When addresses are the same modulo 4K, it causes a collision that has to be mitigated by completing the associated prior memory operation to free up the use of the address in the load/store port system, effectively serializing operations and making performance very dependent on the data stride.

I first bumped up against this when running vertical passes of image processing algorithms that got very slow at certain image sizes, a problem that could be avoided by using an oversized buffer and correspondingly oversized per-line “pitch” to diagonally offset aliased addresses (at a small cost to inter-line cache line overlap).

chaboud, 1 day ago

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just y...

My townhome complex had one of those call boxes at the front gate. When Doordash/FedEx/the cleaners/the in-laws/etc arrived they would have to call me from the call box and I'd have to answer it and listen to garbled audio to figure out who it was and press 9 to open the gate. It was kind of a pain, so I made a Twilio app to answer calls from the call box.

I set up custom entry codes that I could hand out to anyone. Everyone got their own code, and it would text me whenever someone used a code so I'd instantly know who was coming. The text conversation was my timestamped access log. I also put time constraints on some codes so e.g. Doordash couldn't open the gate in the middle of the night, or I could set up a temporary access code for a party, and I rotated codes too, with text notifications if an outdated code was used.

I thought about making a paid app out of it, but it just didn't seem worthwhile. I didn't expect that many people would want to pay for it. For a while I was excited about a YC startup called Doorport that was going to make a hardware device that you'd install inside those dumb call boxes and make them smart with all sorts of cool features, better than my Twilio hack. But I think they pivoted to a much less interesting pure software thing and then got acquihired.

modeless, 1 day ago

Re: Just Simply – Stop saying how simple things are in...

Or maybe -- controversial opinion here -- people shouldn't be such babies. I'm looking around the HN discussion here and can't quite believe how personally offended people are by these words.

Yes, at the beginning of the first semester at university, hearing a math professor say a step is "trivial", when it was quite hard, was a bit grating. One month in, I realised that the intended meaning of the word was that no special clever trick was required to make the deduction, just a lot of perseverance.

Similarly, when documentation mentions to "simply" do something, and I don't get it, isn't that a clear hint that I'm still missing a concept somewhere and need to look around for an explanation?

What I wonder is: Why is this so personal? Are people really shamed into quitting their career over a misplaced "simply" in a piece of tech writing because it triggers their impostor syndrome? Is that the reason why tech documentation has slowly been evolving into 50-minute step-by-step YouTube tutorials that start with installing the IDE? What happened to the expectation of people being adults?

codeflo, 7 hours ago