2371
24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse
This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48 hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM an…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
2372
GPU Performance for Game Artists
Performance is everybody’s responsibility, no matter what your role. When it comes to the GPU, 3D programmers have a lot of control over performance; we can optimize shaders, trade image quality for performance, use smarter rendering techniques… we have plenty of tricks up our sleeves. But there’s one thing we don’t…
2373
2374
2375
Pruning spaces from strings quickly on ARM processors
Suppose that I give you a relatively long string and you want to remove all spaces from it. In ASCII, we can define spaces as the space character (' '), and the line ending characters ('\r' and '\n'). I am mostly interested in algorithmic and performance issues, so we can simplify the problem by removing all ……
2376
2377
Bitcoin mining on a vintage Xerox Alto: very slow at 1.5 hashes/second
I've been restoring a Xerox Alto minicomputer from the 1970s and figured it would be interesting to see if it could mine bitcoins. I coded u...
2378
Sorting 2 Tons of Lego, Many Questions, Results
The machine is now capable of running un-attended for hours on end, which is a huge milestone. No more jamming or other nastiness that causes me to interrupt a run. Many little things contributed to this, I’ve looked at all the mechanics and figured out all the little things that went wrong one by one and have come up…
2379
Improvements to the Xerox Alto Mandelbrot drop runtime from 1 hour to 9 minutes
Last week I wrote a Mandelbrot set program for the Xerox Alto, which took an hour to generate the fractal. The point of this project was to...
2380
Masahiro Kikuno, Japanese Independent Watchmaker
A Japanese approach to watchmaking, executed by hand.
2381
One-Hour Mandelbrot: Creating a Fractal on the Vintage Xerox Alto
I wrote a short program to generate the Mandelbrot set on the Xerox Alto, a groundbreaking minicomputer from the 1970s. The program, in...
2382
Is the x86 Architecture Sustainable?
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
2383
Another Case of Obscure CPU Nondeterminism
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
2384
Modifying Microsoft Flight Simulator 4 to run on three immersive monitors
How I modified DOSBox and the original Microsoft Flight Simulator 4 from 1989 to run on my immersive multi-display flight simulator set up.
2385
Is the keyboard faster than the mouse?
Which is faster, keyboard or mouse? A large number of programmers believe that the keyboard is faster for all (programming-related) tasks. However, there are a few widely cited webpages on AskTog which claim that Apple studies show that using the mouse is faster than using the keyboard for everything and that people…
2386
The Age of Nvidia
alexstjohn.com is your first and best source for information about alexstjohn. Here you will also find topics relating to issues of general interest. We hope you find what you are looking for!
2387
Can you figure out how this single part boost converter works?
If you think this is easy, then I think you are missing something. This is hard. You need to know your hardware intimately to figure this one out.
2388
The Wonderful WiFi232: BBSing Has Never Been Easier
Over the past year or so, I’ve been loading up SyncTerm and logging in to various telnet-accessible BBSs here and there — nothing too consistent. But, thanks to a piece of kit released by Paul Rickards, over the past month … Continue reading →
2389
Which GPU(s) to Get for Deep Learning
Here, I provide an in-depth analysis of GPUs for deep learning/machine learning and explain what is the best GPU for your use-case and budget.
2390
2391
Pushing Polygons on the Mega Drive
Write-up of the polygon renderer used for the Mega Drive demo “Overdrive 2”.
2392
VME Broken on AMD Ryzen
That’s VME as in Virtual-8086 Mode Enhancements, introduced in the Intel Pentium Processor, and initially documented in the infamous NDA-only Appendix H.
2393
Fearless concurrency in your microcontroller
A blog about Rust and embedded stuff
2394
Sorting Two Tons of Lego, the Software Side
All the software written for this project is in Python. I’m not an expert python programmer, far from it but the huge number of available libraries and the fact that I can make some sense of it all without having spent a lifetime in Python made this a fairly obvious choice. There is a python distribution called…
2395
Ryzen is for Programmers
Programing in Clojure and ClojureScript
2396
2397
VHDL or Verilog?
Blog about VHDL projects for FPGA. FPGA tutorials. FPGA free books.
2398
Reverse engineering the 76477 “Space Invaders” sound effect chip from die photos
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...
2399
Show HN: Sorting Two Metric Tons of Lego
One of my uncles cursed me with the LEGO bug, when I was 6 he gave me his collection because he was going to university. My uncle and I are relatively close in age, my dad was the eldest of 8 children and he is the youngest. So, for many years I did nothing but play with lego, build all kinds of machinery and in…
2400
Rust your ARM microcontroller
A blog about Rust and embedded stuff