Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | lysace's commentslogin

Something like sync(2)/syncfs(2) for filesystems.

Seems like there's been a disconnect between users and kernel developers here?


Realistic racing sim games have taught me not to want a supercar for daily drives. Way too easy to f up.

Just one such example (1983):

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/10/business/corporate-triump...

https://archive.ph/gbrZv

> CORPORATE TRIUMPH, THEN DEATH IN A FERRARI

> The young president of a successful new computer company died Wednesday afternoon in a car crash in California's Silicon Valley, hours after his company had sold its stock to the public for the first time and he had become a multimillionaire.


supercars from 1983 are very different than modern cars. they have traction control now and are much tamer.

I think this understates just how fast modern performance cars have gotten and how unsuitable they are for public roads.

A Ferrari 296GTB sprints from 0-100mph in 4.7s. The 1983 Lamborghini Countach I had a wall poster of as a kid, took 12.1s (and a relatively leisurely 5.4s to get to 60mph). The Ferrari is pulling well over 1G longitudinally during this time, enough to induce tunnel vision in some people and warp your perception of speed and distance.

Compare someone accelerating at full throttle through that tunnel in the Countach versus the 296. The 296 would reach 2-3x the speed the Lambo did by the time they reach the curve where he crashed. Human brains can't process and react to surprises 3x as fast as they could in 1983. Even if they could, at 2x the speed your braking distance increases 4x. No amount of traction control or electronic nannies can make up for this. Nor can the electronics bypass the laws of physics - I think for many they provide a false sense of security.

And while there have been huge improvements in passive safety too, they are tested at speeds like 40mph, not the 90mph+ it is estimated Vince's car was going. This is why Teslas have the highest crash safety ratings there is, while also have the highest rate of fatal accidents.

Not to take away from the tragedy that is Vince's death. I enjoyed many hours playing MoH and CoD as a youth and this is extremely sad news. But as a car enthusiast, I am using this as a sober reminder of how quickly things can go wrong at speed.


> Nor can the electronics bypass the laws of physics

The only equation that really matters here is KE=.5mv^2

The difference in danger between two arbitrary speeds is not linear. It is quadratic.


If that crash video on X is accurate he was racing on public roads. If so, zero sympathies.

But of course there is a button to disable it.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/37353/driver-turns-off-tractio...


I still rather drive (get driven) a modern tank like suv. Or truck/bus conversion. I see these young/hip people spend countless hours in the gym, spending 1000k+/mo on supplements etc to 'live forever' only to wrap themselves around a tree at a young age on some superbike or car.

...or getting run over by a tank like suv with limited vision around the car (it's tank like after all) while cycling.

TIL/remembered GNSS satellites have onboard atomic clocks. Makes a lot of sense, but still pretty cool. Something like this, I guess?

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


Yes, either Rb, Cs, or H standards depending on which GNSS system you're using.

For the most critical applications, you can license a system like Fugro AtomiChron that provides enhanced GNSS timing down to the level of a few nanoseconds. There are a couple of products that do similar things, all based on providing better ephemerides than your receiver can obtain from the satellites themselves.

You can get AtomiChron as an optional subscription with the SparkPNT GPSDO, for instance (https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkpnt-gnss-disciplined-oscillato...).


> You can get AtomiChron as an optional subscription with the SparkPNT GPSDO, for instance (https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkpnt-gnss-disciplined-oscillato...).

That's one hell of a healthy profit margin there O.o

The SiTime MEMS oscillator is about 100€ for one single chip, the mosaic-T GPS receiver is about 400€. Add 50€ for the rest (particularly the power input section looks complicated) and 50€ for handling, probably 600€ in hardware cost... sold for 2.500€.

The real money I think went into certification and R&D for a low-volume product - even though most of the hard work is done by the two ICs, getting everything orchestrated (including the PCB itself) to perform to that level of accuracy is one hell of a workload.


> Signe Ratso, who is in charge of negotiating global access to the EU’s €93.5 billion Horizon Europe research and innovation programme

My thoughts after witnessing Horizon Europe in action when I worked at a hardware/materials research-ish company in Sweden:

- So much pork, so much product concept cosplay.

- All of these grandiose pointless abstract "projects".

- Gotta have like 10+ institutions/companies from lots of different countries involved in each grandiose project, leading to insane overheads.

Just give the institutions/companies (demand equity?) funds instead - stop with the stupid cosplay.

Europe needs to be smarter than the US in how to make this more efficient. Right now that shouldn't that hard.


Excel was completed at least a decade ago (probably two).

This is obviously 99% marketing. Microsoft/Waggener Edstrom tend to be really good at getting mainstream media to report on the marketing activities.

Example: For many Windows launches since Windows 3/95, there's been this media splash where Microsoft spends x million dollars on marketing and mainstream media then reports this, thereby getting (like) 100x millions worth of exposure.


Excel is not "complete" until they stop forcibly converting long strings of numbers into scientific notation - or at least give me a sheet-specific way to turn it off. I know how to stop it on my machine, but I have shared documents where if any one of the 16+ other users forgets, then it's messed up for everyone.

Let alone the date issues.

At one point I did a deep dive on one or the other of these "quirks", and the earliest request for exactly the fix I want is from nineteen-eighty-fricking-five. Unbelievable.


Yes, there will be edge cases. They need to balance historic compat vs one more fricking setting checkbox. I am thinking that you will never see this solved.

From 2020: "Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385)

Exactly. They couldn't really change it even if they wanted to. The implementation with all of its warts and quirks is now the standard.

They've now made a change in that at least when you open a csv it now asks you beforehand if you want your data transformed, eg converting strings to numbers where that loses leading zeros.

Excel has had huge changes that made it much more powerful a lot more recently than that.

> Excel was completed at least a decade ago (probably two).

What does that mean? Microsoft stopped developing new features? You think it was feature-complete?


The entire Microsoft Office suite pretty much had every feature that users need by 1997. It's just been UI refreshes ever since.

Wrong.

def 2 decades - 2023 was the best version and it has been downhill ever since

I'll admit, on occasion having more than 65k rows is helpful but generally that's the domain of a database, not excel and it wasn't a good tradeoff IMO


*2003, probably?

not OP, but yes - the limit was raised long time ago

Programming efficiency isn’t about typing/editing fast - it’s about great decision-making. Although I have seen the combo of both working out very well.

If you focus on fast typing/editing skills to level up, but still have bad decision-making skills, you'll just end up burying yourself (and possibly your team) faster and more decisively. (I have seen that, too.)


I interpreted the original comment totally differently - I thought they were saying that the programmers [who created these tools] should pay more attention to how productive [or not] power users can be with the tools [that they created]. And use that as an important metric for software quality. Which I definitely agree with.

The person you replied to stated:

> how productive power users in different [fields] can be with their tools

There are a lot more tools in programming than your text editor. Linters, debuggers, AI assistants, version control, continuous integration, etc.

I personally know I'm terrible at using debuggers. Is this a shortcoming of mine? Probably. But I also feel debuggers could be a lot, lot better than they are right now.

I think for a lot of us reflecting at our workflow and seeing things we do that could be done more efficiently with better (usage of) tooling could pay off.


Support for more than 7-bit ASCII characters. :)


It's written by a philosopher.

Here are some key sections from the article:

“The government blames the current crisis on changing climate [but] the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia,” says Keveh Madani, a former deputy head of the country’s environment department and now director of the United Nations University’s Institute of Water, Environment and Health.

...

While failed rains may be the immediate cause of the crisis, they say, the root cause is more than half a century of often foolhardy modern water engineering — extending back to before the country’s Islamic revolution of 1979, but accelerated by the Ayatollahs’ policies since.


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

Search: