I still haven’t seen a good comparison between Futex and Benaphore. Benaphores I understand, it predates Futexes by almost a decade, but what do Futexes add to the equation since hardly anyone talks about Benaphores (or is it a case of not invented here)?
Readit Newssmallstepforman commented on Without the futex, it's futile h4x0r.org/futex/... · Posted by u/eatonphil
smallstepforman commented on We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes pavpanchekha.com/blog/9bi... · Posted by u/luu
The elephant in the room nobody talks about is silicon cost (wires, gates, multiplexirs, AND and OR gates etc). With a 4th lane, you may as well go straight to 16 bits to a byte.
Yep. Nukes for Taiwan is the only solution.
Nuclear proliferation and subsequent war is inevitable imo.
North Korea doesnt have nukes pointed at South Korea, they’re family. Likewise, Taiwan would never nuke China even if invaded.
China is being smart, it is modernising and growing amazingly fast, and Taiwan will be foolish not return to China peacefully in our lifetime.
smallstepforman commented on Bulgaria to join euro area on 1 January 2026 ecb.europa.eu//press/pr/d... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo
If abandoning your own currency and adopting Euros was such a big deal, the UK would have done it decades ago (while it was still a part of the EU).
This benefits the bigger economies, at the expense of the smaller economies. Any fiscal policy is dictated by the bigger countries, and with identical currencies, the only policy left for Bulgarians is to cut wages in public sector. This will impact local economy, and ripple through their society becoming poorer. And the bigger foreign corporations can ransack the place. Brilliant.
Google search is giving us a taste of AI summarised results, and for simple things its passable, but ask a serious question and you get good looking garbage. Yes, I know its early days, but looking at the current output quality we have nothing to worry about. It will be used as calculators, offload some menial repetetive task which can be automated, but the next gen of developers will still be tasked to solve complex problems.
The best anti malware on any version of windows has always been to make your default account you use everyday a non admin account.
You also need to create a separate account (can just be a local account) that is a full administrator. Make sure you use a different password.
Anytime you need to install something or run powershell/CMD as admin it will popup and ask for the separate login of the admin account. This is basically the default of how Linux works (sudo). It's also how any competent professional IT department will run windows.
If an admin elevation popup happens when you haven't triggered it then you probably know something is wrong. And most malware will not be able to install.
Another benefit is that you can use a relatively normal (but obviously not too short) password for your regular account and then have something much more complicated for the admin login. This is especially great on something like "Grandmas PC" or anyone who is at higher risk of clicking on the wrong thing.
Its easy to reinstall the OS. Its a lot more damaging if you lose your childs birthday photos, tax documents and anything you actually care about. This is where the entire PC security fiasco breaks down, since I want my docs directory protected FROM any system installed app/driver. I want an OS that asks for permission when accessing doc directory.
When I see UI radio buttons, I often think about old radios, dishwashers, or washing machines, where you had two or three buttons aligned, and when you press one, the other(s) pop up (if they are already down).
I actually had a radio with circular radio buttons, which would pop back when you selected another option. It had switches instead of check boxes.
The one that drives me crazy is slider based checkboxes. I never know which side is on/off. Bad UI convention.
And speaking of checkboxes, I want an actual tick mark (checkmark), not a X cross. Its called checkbox, not Xbox or crossbox, it has to be a checkmark. Also, its a square, not a box. Disaster.
smallstepforman commented on Show HN: Do you know RGB? maxwellito.github.io/do-y... · Posted by u/maxwellito
Great, now we need a 12 bit BGR game for engineers on little endian systems ;)
Every simple code base / API is faster than mature API’s due to the fact they do less. A simple string handling library which isnt biderectional, doesnt cater to people with accessibility, doesnt take locale formatting into account, doesnt cover 100% unicode spec will always be faster than complex code that does.
Code and kernels that target known hardware doesn’t need dynamic conditional code to handle unpredictable hardware. This will be faster.
General purpose operating systems handle printing events, background updates, periodic online checks, network discovery, maintenance jobs etc, all these operations consume resources and time.
Yes, Steam deck on Linux will run faster than equivalent games on Windows. But Steam deck on a smaller OS like Haiku will run even faster than Linux.
Engineering is a compromise. A F1 car can corner faster than a passanger car. But it probably sucks to reverse park. Also, I cannot imagine using a sports car for grocery shopping and hauling furniture from Ikea.
I'd have loved to live through 10 years of the Commodore 64, 10 years of the Amiga, 10 years of the NES, 10 years of the SNES...