Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

tinyletter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 182 posts

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#101

Post by foldr »

bsaul wrote: post #100
justinjlynn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I'm not aware of what pronouns they personally prefer, I fall back to using the singular, gender-neutral, "they/them/their". It's a fairly new usage in colloquial English but I find it to be common enough so as to not impair understanding.

completely off topic, but is this where we’re at now ? Calling someone « they » and thus create confusion, just in case he doesn’t belong to the 99.9% of the population who is just fine with his DNA, and eventhough he never expressed any kind of opinion leading you to think he isn’t fine with his gender ?

Singular 'they' is pretty well established usage by now, regardless of gender considerations. Even people who complain about it still use it: https://stroppyeditor.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/everything-yo...

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#102

Post by C1sc0cat »

justinjlynn wrote: post #93
vasco wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps out of place but why are you consistently calling Woz "they"? I'm not a native speaker and it sounds very weird.

As I'm not aware of what pronouns they personally prefer, I fall back to using the singular, gender-neutral, "they/them/their". It's a fairly new usage in colloquial English but I find it to be common enough so as to not impair understanding.

They can be plural as well which is why its a bit jarring

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#103

Post by peteri »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #83

He was 2nd author on the paper. No doubt, Woz has a well-deserved reputation for brilliance, but I wonder about the 1st author's contributions too. Anyone familiar with Roy Rankin of Stanford? https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal_vol_01/page/n20...

Roy contributed the log/exp routines. The code in the Apple II ROM are missing the log/exp routines and it's copyright just credits Woz.

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#104

Post by vidarh »

bsaul wrote: post #100
justinjlynn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I'm not aware of what pronouns they personally prefer, I fall back to using the singular, gender-neutral, "they/them/their". It's a fairly new usage in colloquial English but I find it to be common enough so as to not impair understanding.

completely off topic, but is this where we’re at now ? Calling someone « they » and thus create confusion, just in case he doesn’t belong to the 99.9% of the population who is just fine with his DNA, and eventhough he never expressed any kind of opinion leading you to think he isn’t fine with his gender ?

There is no implication that "he isn't fine with his gender". The implication is that the speaker doesn't know, and it doesn't matter enough to find out or make a judgement call.

Personally I still use he/she most of the time unless I have a reason not to, but I also try to get into the habit of assuming less, not least because online in particular it is increasingly noticeable how often we assume someone's gender even in situations we have no reason to.

It's not unsurprising that some choose to carry that over into discussing people they don't know the preference of when it doesn't otherwise matter.

One reason to do so may be to explicitly normalise the usage so it doesn't imply a value judgement e.g based on appearance.

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#105

Post by rswail »

dev_dull wrote: post #5

> They took the limitations of their computers as a challenge, sat down, and made these tiny machines do impressive things. Poets knew from long ago that using pentameter and constraints fosters creativity. Here we see the same principle applied in computing.

Q: Does the creation of Design admit constraint?

Design depends largely on constraints.

Q: What constraints?

The sum of all constraints. Here is one of the few effective keys to the Design problem: the ability of the Designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible; his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints. Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of balance, of surface, of time, and so forth. Each problem has its own peculiar list.

- Charles Eames

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#106

Post by mothsonasloth »

NonEUCitizen wrote: post #15
mothsonasloth wrote: post #12

As a senior Java / CPP developer, reading what Wozniak had written, it might have been some incantation in a forgotten language. I really wish I had done more embedded and assembly at school. I can't understand it or appreciate it. Maybe SW and HW shouldn't mix, bar a few visionaries who bridge both worlds?

Why should SW and HW not mix?

Well, my day to day job is writing applications that will be managed at runtime by a JVM on a Linux distro which is in turn virualised.

I am so far away from the bits...

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#107

Post by soegaard »

benj111 wrote: post #99
CraftThatBlock wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A keyboard is actually a good place to learn some hardware stuff. You can (relatively) easily build a keyboard from scratch and program the chip (excluding USB, which is another can of worms). They are lots of tutorials and documentation online to get you started on it

Did early 8 bitters actually have a keyboard controller, or was it shift registers hooked directly to the cpu or something. Tried googling and didn't turn up much.

Here is how the C64 keyboard works in great detail: http://www.c64os.com/post?p=45

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#108

Post by amelius »

redis_mlc wrote: post #10

Woz was scary good at both hw and sw (author of Apple BASIC.) If you have time, go through his various Apple documents online. I believe he was never the same after his small plane crashed. (Back then, wealthy people used small planes like ATVs, and had about the same safety record.) I worked with another hw engineer of similar ability back in the 80s. Mind-blowing watching him just pick up a pen and draw out a compl…

I'm trying to view your comment in perspective. Aren't there a lot of Chinese folks with similar skills, nowadays? I mean, there are a lot of cheap devices on the Chinese market, with an overall complexity greater than Apple ][. Yes, these systems are mostly glued together from SoC devices, but the Apple ][ was also built around a (then) sophisticated building block, 6502.

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#109

Post by DanielBMarkham »

bigred100 wrote: post #40
redis_mlc wrote: post #10

Woz was scary good at both hw and sw (author of Apple BASIC.) If you have time, go through his various Apple documents online. I believe he was never the same after his small plane crashed. (Back then, wealthy people used small planes like ATVs, and had about the same safety record.) I worked with another hw engineer of similar ability back in the 80s. Mind-blowing watching him just pick up a pen and draw out a compl…

I wonder why rich people have such a high urge to fly small airplanes. It seems to expose you to a lot of risk, which you could easily avoid (I’ve lived a considerable number of years without facing a single situation where I was likely to fly an airplane).

Airplanes are a great hobby for people who need to get out of the office, love traveling, and need a hobby that has a lot of little detailed things to stay on top of. Flying real IMC to minimums in a small plane is like solving a real-time fluid dynamics/trig problem, where if you fail, you die.

I guess there are people who do it for the danger, but the beauty of it is that you can get really down in the details and master things so it's not that risky. Once you really master the game, your biggest danger is yourself: get-there-itis, sloppy preflights, pushing things a little at a time, getting away with them, then pushing more, and so on.

I have done nothing in my life that I loved as much as flying. Mankind has been staring up into the sky for eons wishing we could fly. Now we can. Who wouldn't want to be part of that?

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#110

Post by rbanffy »

bigred100 wrote: post #40
redis_mlc wrote: post #10

Woz was scary good at both hw and sw (author of Apple BASIC.) If you have time, go through his various Apple documents online. I believe he was never the same after his small plane crashed. (Back then, wealthy people used small planes like ATVs, and had about the same safety record.) I worked with another hw engineer of similar ability back in the 80s. Mind-blowing watching him just pick up a pen and draw out a compl…

I wonder why rich people have such a high urge to fly small airplanes. It seems to expose you to a lot of risk, which you could easily avoid (I’ve lived a considerable number of years without facing a single situation where I was likely to fly an airplane).

It's mildly dangerous, but far less dangerous than speeding (I'm guilty of driving recklessly tuned/modded cars in my youth), and a lot more interesting. There is also the satisfaction of operating a complicated machine (to which, I guess, a lot of HN'ers will relate).

I can hardly wait for my electric VTOL PAV.

Post reply on HN