Live coding an assembler for CP/M

Live coding an assembler for CP/M

As part of this, I’ve just written a mostly-functional clone of the original which was shipped with CP/M — a simple 8080 assembler. It’s missing a few features, like error recovery and transcript, but is functional enough to compile the original Digital Research CCP source code into an almost byte-for-byte copy of the original (Digital Research’s own assembler isn’t deterministic, leaving random garbage in uninitialised areas, where mine writes zeroes, hence the ‘almost’). The resulting binary is about 5.5kB vs the 8kB of the Digital Research hand-tooled original, which is probably due to it being Z80 machine code rather than the bigger and slower 8080 — I have an 8080 compiler but I just hadn’t bothered to get it set up.

Source: cowlark.com

Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology

Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology

A baker came in and had the kids decorate cupcakes. A FBI agent came in and let the kids try on a bulletproof vest & an FBI windbreaker. I’d love to hear what ideas you all might have to totally wow some kids, get them excited about science/tech… And obviously out-wow any firemen, FBI agents, that might be presenting.

Source: news.ycombinator.com

Taiwan’s digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

Taiwan’s digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

The preferred term is “disinformation” because, Tang says, it has a legal definition in Taiwan: “That is to say, intentional, harmful untruth, and most importantly, harmful is to the public, to the democratic system, not harmful to the image of a minister,” she says, laughing, “That’s just good journalism, right?” Tang, a software programmer who emerged from the hacker community, sat with CPJ last week in Taipei to talk about how Taiwan tries to maintain the integrity of its media and democratic system in the face of a much larger adversary – China – that severely controls its own media and has the means potentially to sow havoc in Taiwan’s open system. We’re developing a very similar system here where people online and other instant message systems, they can forward a suspicious disinformation to a bot.

Source: cpj.org

Up to 25 cups of coffee a day still safe for heart health, study says

Up to 25 cups of coffee a day still safe for heart health, study says

But a new study, funded in part by the British Heart Foundation, found that drinking five cups of coffee a day was no worse for the arteries than drinking less than one cup. “What we found was that drinking more than three cups of coffee a day did not significantly increase the stiffness of blood vessels compared to people who drink one cup or less a day,” Kenneth Fung, who led the data analysis at Queen Mary University of London, told CNN. Although some participants in the study drank 25 cups a day, the average intake among the highest coffee consumption group was five cups a day.

Source: lite.cnn.io

Mental illness: is there a global epidemic?

Mental illness: is there a global epidemic?

There are dozens of different kinds of mental illness, from common disorders that affect tens of millions of people such as depression and anxiety, to rarer afflictions like paraphilia (sexual compulsion) and trichotillomania (a compulsion to remove hair). But insofar as data exists, the most reliable time series curated by the Institute for Health Metrics Evaluation (IHME) appears to show that in 2017, just under 300 million people worldwide suffered from anxiety, about 160 million from major depressive disorder, another 100 million from the milder form of depression known as dysthymia. Depressive disorders, which may affect as many as 300 million people worldwide, account for about one third of mental illness DALYs.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Remote working – Bringing sanity to mind and lessons worth learning

Remote working – Bringing sanity to mind and lessons worth learning

“I live on the East Coast, while the rest of my team lives on the West Coast – the time difference means I’m often not wrapping up work until 8:30 at night, which negatively impacts my sleeping patterns and productivity. Emma also says:

“It wouldn’t be that depressing at first but when it’s all you do and the situation did not change for a long time, it does affect mental health. I sort of develop a routine or ritual around all of the activities I knew really helped me manage my mental health from all angles, and approached it the same way I would a project at work.

Source: blog.quuu.co

What do I want in a doctor? (1964)

What do I want in a doctor? (1964)

In 1964, following the retirement of his regular physician, 62-year-old novelist John Steinbeck was asked by his new doctor to complete a routine medical questionnaire for his records. Steinbeck did exactly that, and on reaching the last of its many pages, the Grapes of Wrath author discovered, and left blank, a small space reserved for “any other data you think may be of importance.” Instead, he wrote a letter.John Steinbeck passed away four years later.

Source: www.lettersofnote.com

Essential Rust Tools

Essential Rust Tools

The Rust community helps each other through effective narrative documentation and attention to error messages, and the robust tooling around Rust drives momentum, overcoming some of the natural hurdles when diving into a new language. After getting familiar with file which streamlines development and enables reproducible builds, I found command line management easier with cargo-edit:

The Rust Wasm tooling has improved dramatically over the past year — wasm-pack is the “one-stop shop for building, testing, and publishing Rust-generated WebAssembly.” For many uses of Rust, compiled code size doesn’t matter, but for Web apps, it is important to keep an eye on download size:

Interesting to note that Web Assembly isn’t just for client-side browser code.

Source: www.ultrasaurus.com

Random Forest vs. Neural Network

Random Forest vs. Neural Network

First of all, Random Forest (RF) and Neural Network (NN) are different types of algorithms. I will train Random Forest and Neural Network on 9 datasets from OpenML.org data repository. You should use the Neural Network for:

If you are going to work with tabular data, it is worth to check the Random Forest first because it is easier.

Source: mljar.com