Gains were even more impressive when adding some simple loop unrolling: https://jtsylve.blog/post/2022/12/24/Blazingly-Fast-er-SIMD-...

That's very much a means-tested program to prevent farmers from being driven into bankruptcy by tariffs on things they've already produced. It's not a magic money fountain.

Note that the same report says that excluding subsidies, farmer net income increased in 2020 over 2019, so I'm not convinced the Covid pandemic is a good reason.

That type of info should be a whole lot easier to access and digest than it currently is.

    x3 = alpha * alpha
    beta8 = beta << 3
    // beta8 %= curve.P
    x3 -= beta8
    while x3 < 0 {
        x3 += curve.P
    }

    beta8.Mod(beta8, curve.P)
    x3.Sub(x3, beta8)
    if x3.Sign() == -1 {
        x3.Add(x3, curve.P)
    }
    x3.Mod(x3, curve.P)

    beta8.Mod(beta8, curve.P)
    x3.Sub(x3, beta8)
    x3.Mod(x3, curve.P)

    x3.Sub(x3, beta8)
    x3.Mod(x3, curve.P)

  beta8 := new(big.Int).Lsh(beta, 3)
  beta8.Mod(beta8, curve.P)

http://bfy.tw/C1Mr

Sorry to offend.

That's not a purely hypothetical point; I already create custom types to do this. Not every 8-bit type is a character, nor is it necessarily an integer. I always found it frustrating that the default stream output was a character when using numerical quantities; now we can specialise raw output accordingly.

std::byte still seems pretty useless, though. There already is a built-in type for designating bytes: unsigned char.

(http://open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2017/p0298r3....)

Motivation and Scope:

Many programs require byte-oriented access to memory. Today, such programs must use either the char, signed char, or unsigned char types for this purpose. However, these types perform a “triple duty”. Not only are they used for byte addressing, but also as arithmetic types, and as character types. This multiplicity of roles opens the door for programmer error – such as accidentally performing arithmetic on memory that should be treated as a byte value – and confusion for both programmers and tools.

Having a distinct byte type improves type-safety, by distinguishing byte-oriented access to memory from accessing memory as a character or integral value. It improves readability. Having the type would also make the intent of code clearer to readers (as well as tooling for understanding and transforming programs). It increases type-safety by removing ambiguities in expression of programmer’s intent, thereby increasing the accuracy of analysis tools.

My reaction to that can be summed up succinctly as "WTF!?" The whole point of uint8_t or (signed/unsigned) char is an 8-bit quantity that you can do arithmetic and bitwise operations on. To put it more bluntly, "have C++ programmers forgotten how computers work?"

The proposed solution is to add yet another same-yet-subtly-different type, with its own set of same-yet-subtly-different rules? If anything that would cause even more confusion due to the complexity it causes in interactions with all the other parts of the language.

IMHO this "let's do everything we can to stop people from even the very slightest change of possibly doing something wrong" line of thinking is ultimately unproductive... and actually rather dystopian. The end-result is quite scary to contemplate.

(The fact that an 11-page, text-only PDF somehow turns out to be over 800KB is somewhat less disturbing, but still notable.)

The problem is rampant and while not new, the recent election cycle has highlighted it greatly.

Propaganda does not spread just from 'fake news' or a heavily biased corporate media. It is co-ordinated & perpetuated online. The links and comments on Reddit and HN are prime mediums to infiltrate and carry this out.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bYAQ-ZZtEU

I don't know about Reddit but we see comparatively little on HN that appears suspicious once we look at the data (e.g. which users have voted on a post). Anyone who suspects astroturfing on HN is welcome to email us so we can look into the matter—which we always do—but not to accuse other users directly, because both the odds and the cost of an unfair accusation are much higher than people realize when they do that.

I listened to that talk you linked to. At the end the speaker mentions four "hallmarks of astroturfing": (1) use of inflammatory language; (2) use of charged language to "debunk myths"; (3) attacking an issue by controversializing the people around it rather than addressing the facts; (4) reserving all public skepticism for those exposing wrongdoing rather than wrongdoers. It seems to me HN is in pretty good shape here: the first three violate the site guidelines, and the fourth seems rather rare and is not received well by the community.

Maybe there are astroturfers getting away with it on HN. If they exist, though, they're being clever about it, so we'd be interested in anything the community can figure out. Just please don't accuse each other directly without real evidence.