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Slix

167 karma · joined June 5, 2012

Peter Kowalczyk

peter+hn@slix.io

https://github.com/slix

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/slix; my proof: https://keybase.io/slix/sigs/gXMKqsF2yb9CoCoCch9JVOHAVJqTRga-tDNC3lcBeCY ]

submissionscomments
Slix··on Local AI needs to be the norm
Chrome did this, and there was a huge outcry. Even though local AI is much better for privacy.
Slix··on Amazon Makes You Pay More for Everything (2023)
I'm very thrown by the "hidden Buy box" argument. I thought Amazon did that on purpose to hide overpriced items from the wild west that is Amazon's marketplace/sellers. So a t-shirt for $100 gets no Buy box because it's overpriced.

The video argues that this creates a monopoly.

Slix··on Ditch banks – Go with money market funds and treasuries
What kind of features?
Slix··on Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out
Microsoft Edge has had this for some time. I was surprised, but Edge is pretty modern.
Slix··on Roku update turns on hated motion-smoothing feature, with no off switch
Isn't higher frames per second good? You wouldn't want a video game to intentionally limit itself to 24 fps. Isn't motion smoothing more realistic?
Slix··on Edit PDFs for Free with Firefox PDF Editor
Does anyone have a suggestion for PDF redacting? It's the only thing I need Acrobat for. And when I need it, it's very important.
Slix··on OpenAI plans to announce Google search competitor on Monday
Too bad Discord can't be searched. There's lots of information trapped on Discord.
Slix··on Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe
I gave up on it during season one. Is it really worth continuing it? It started to not hold my interest.
Slix··on TypeScript: Branded Types
This is also useful for having a type that needs to be verified in some way before being used or trusted. UnverifiedLoginCookie vs. VerifiedLoginCookie
Slix··on The Performance Impact of C++'s `final` Keyword
This optimization option isn't on by default? That sounds like a lot of missed optimization. Most programs aren't going to be loading from shared libraries.

Maybe I can set this option at work. Though it's scary because I'd have to be certain.

Slix··on How QUIC is displacing TCP for speed
I don't think this article is very well-written. It gets confused about whether QUIC has a handshake or not (it does). And it conflates zero round-trip time with combining the TCP/TLS handshakes together.
Slix··on Decompilation of Paper Mario for N64
Paper Mario: The Thousand-year Door is being remade by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch.
Slix··on Ask HN: Has the tech recession affected you?
I've struggled to find a Software Engineer job for many months, even with FAANG on my resume. It's nowhere as easy as it was when I graduated college 7 years ago.

I send out my resume and barely get any answers. I don't even get a chance to interview.

That being said, I had a good luck streak in December! I'm waiting to hear back from several companies right now.

Slix··on Understanding Deep Learning
If I start now and start reading up on AI, will I become anything close to an expert?

I'm worried that I'm starting a journey that requires a Master's or PhD.

Slix··on Understanding Deep Learning
Are deep learning and neural networks just curve fitting? I thought those were significantly different.
Slix··on Understanding Deep Learning
I came here with the same question. After reading and learning these materials, will I have new job skills or AI knowledge that I can do something with?
Slix··on Dive into Deep Learning: Interactive deep learning book with codes and maths
OpenAI Gym looks incredibly interesting. Aren't those games supposed to be solved using neural nets?
Slix··on Dive into Deep Learning: Interactive deep learning book with codes and maths
I'm running through Andrew Ng's "Machine Learning Specialization" course on Coursera right now. I plan to do his "Deep Learning Specialization" immediately after.

There's not a lot of formulas and math so far, which concerns me because I eventually want to understand papers.

Slix··on 25 years of bcrypt password hashing: a retrospective on password security
David Mazières added adaptive hash difficulty? 25 years ago?!

He helped with Stellar's consensus protocol and is still involved now. https://stellar.org/

Slix··on Windows on Btrfs
> `docker build` is weirdly slow on btrfs, I always set up a separate ext4 `/var/lib/docker` volume.

I'm currently doing this for a different reason. My docker builds started failing after some Ubuntu upgrade. I gave up and used ext4 for that docker directory to fix everything. https://serverfault.com/q/1127148

It unsettled me because now I'm not sure whether btrfs (or docker with btrfs) is production-ready.

Slix··on Show HN: Meteosource Weather API: current, forecast and historical data using ML
I was disappointed by Accuweather's "local" weather during this spate of Midwest storms. It didn't correctly tell me whether it was raining at my current position.

I miss Dark Sky.

Slix··on U.S. home prices are the most unaffordable they've been in nearly 100 years
What kind of hedge would protect against this?
Slix··on JPEG-XL vs. AVIF and Others: 27 Images Compared
Is there a patent, copyright, or royalty reason why JPEG-XL isn't championed for the web? It would be awful to have another format that can't be used in certain Linux distros or browsers.
Slix··on The early 90s tech scene that created L0pht, the legendary hackerspace
Are there any online/remote hackerspaces? Seems like a good idea. Being physically together is too much time and energy sometimes.
Slix··on Assertions are pessimistic, assumptions are optimistic (2014)
Rust has unreachable_unchecked and intrinsics::assume. And a clever crate that provides an assume!() macro for stating assumptions.

I toyed with them while learning some unsafe Rust by calling unsafe Windows APIs. Sometimes there were obvious relationships between function parameters and return values that my code couldn't know because the Windows API was an opaque FFI to C. Like if I ask a Windows API to fill an 8-element array, my code can assume it returns an int <= 8 instead of considering INT_MAX as a possibility.

But anything more advanced like assuming that an array's values are sorted seemed questionable. At worst, it looked like LLVM preserved expensive assumes even if they weren't useful to the optimizer.

Since it was a toy project, I didn't care. It's neat to tell my code facts about the world and imagine that a perfect code optimizer can use all those facts. Even if there's a C API in the way.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/core/hint/fn.unreachable_unchecked...

https://doc.rust-lang.org/core/intrinsics/fn.assume.html

https://crates.io/crates/assume

Slix··on Artist feeds childhood diary into GPT-3 to have a chat with herself
I thought he was rudely telling the novice to leave.
Slix··on WSL 2: Why you should use real Linux instead
I like WSL2 because I get to share my GPU with Linux. Great for Plex transcoding and Stable Diffusion.

I have a real Linux install with Hyper-V. Other than some Hyper-V guest integrations, there's no Windows specific customizations. No GPU access, but only very specific software needs that.

Slix··on EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers
This doesn't sound right to me. Cloudflare also protects web APIs. This text file is an extremely simple web API, but it is still a web API.
Slix··on Camera Lucida
What is the modern equivalent when drawing on a PC or tablet?
Slix··on Ask HN: What's Happening at Cloudflare?
Does anyone know what it's like to work there? I'm interested.
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