Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | cheschire's comments login

Carmack is always a genius, but like most people he requires luck, and like most people, the house always wins. Poor Armadillo Aerospace.

HDDs use much simpler electronics than SSDs. The controller in a hard drive mostly just moves the read/write head and spins the motor. It doesn’t need to do much processing. These chips are built on older manufacturing processes that are cheaper and less energy intensive.

SSDs though need a fast processor to manage the flash memory for wear leveling, error correction, and keeping track of where everything is written etc. This requires more advanced chips, built on newer process nodes, which take a lot more energy and resources to make.

And SSDs also need extra chips like DRAM and obviously the flash memory itself.


Is the controller really going to be that much simpler on a HDD? On HDD you still have things like command queuing, caching, checksumming and bad block remapping just as with SSD. Sure you don't have the flash translation layer, but I'd expect processing of the analog signal going to/from the heads to be a processing headache too. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to do temperature compensation and factory and/or runtime calibration of the analog path. Of course much of that will be done in fixed-function custom hardware blocks, but almost certainly so would a SSD for eg. ECC calculations.

https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=3 has some data points on a 10+ year old HDD - 3 ARM9 feroceon cores + Cortex-M3 core. Doesn't sound too simple.


HDD controller calculates and checks ECC either and en/decodes the user's 0/1-bits to the 0/1-bits actually to be written on the platter but at much smaller speed (0.3 GB/s vs 14 GB/s SSD max). HDD has an extra servo controller. HDD has an extra 512 MB - 1 GB DRAM.

WD HDDs 20 GB+ have some FLASH inside for metadata offload.


DRAM is optional on NVME SSD's which can use host memory instead. DRAM-less SATA SSD's sucked.

It’s not just construction company resistance to change.

The regulatory landscape around home building is intense. Especially for fire code. You basically have an entire industry of inspectors whose job is to fail things that don’t match any known pattern, so getting new patterns established is quite difficult.

There is likely also some resistance to it in the home insurance space where they are incredibly data driven, so until you have data built up to justify the statistically supported lower prices of stone houses, the insurance companies will keep premiums higher resulting in non standard materials being limited to the wealthy or fanatics willing to eat the cost.


It is also coincidentally the prefix for all license plates in the city of/region around Hamburg, as HH stands for Hansestadt Hamburg.

Haha, good one. So in California you can say whatever neonazi shizz you like and buy Hitler's books because of the 1st ammendent but you can't have an 88 on your state issued vanity license plate (what about randomly issued ones?) But in Germany where all that is forbidden by law you have the short form of the hitler salute on a whole city's plates. Looks like no one died from those in German so can we just reinstate the 1st on license plates California and save a few millions in review costs? It's not like things were fast at the DMV anyways..

Ah that makes sense. I saw this subthread and was quite confused because WSC was clearly and obviously defined in the first sentence.

Now I see why. Thanks for incorporating the feedback! It had a positive impact for me coming later to this article.


I’m not entirely sure this form of satire lands the same way it used to now that screaming and insults are considered a normal form of discourse, especially in TV politics.

This form of banter reminds me of Maddox from the early 2000s, which funnily enough is still active at https://maddox.xmission.com/

I agree its relatively played out at this point. Really this page is just a showcase of HTML features for web developers who don't have much experience with HTML, and I think the insulting attitude and comedic approach may hold reader's interest than a more dry technical presentation of the content.


There’s ways to work your way up with dedication. Quite a lot of folks go for their abitur[0] and then on to university. Classism in Germany is perpetuated by cultural conservatism far more than whether you went to gymnasium or not.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abitur


You don’t get invited to the right meetings, I see.

You mean with people who have more paranoia than sense?

It’s not a complete replacement for JS transpiling. It has some advantages for specific use cases. A couple benefits I like are:

Not having the JS GC randomly pausing your process unpredictably.

Sandboxing untrusted code, i.e. you sell a SaaS and you also want clients to be able to run untrusted plugins from a marketplace.


You can use fixed data structures like Uint8Array in JavaScript just like you can (have to?) in Wasm. Then you won't have the GC do stuff, right?


I hope one day we can turn this on for coma patients and see if they're dreaming or otherwise processing the world.


Using these techniques, never. The electrode methods can only see a tiny section of processing and are missing all the information elsewhere. fMRI is very low resolution. Because of this they are all very overfitted- they cue off very particular subject-specific quirks that will not generalize well.

More importantly, these techniques operate on the V1, V4 and inferior temporal cortex areas of the brain. These areas will fire in response to retina stimulation regardless of what's happening in the rest of your brain. V1 in particular is connected directly to your retinas. While deeper areas may be sympathetically activated by hallucinations etc, they aren't really related to your conception of things. In general if you want to read someone's thoughts you would look elsewhere in the brain.


He did say “one day”


One day using different techniques. Not these techniques.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: