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Varriount

549 karma · joined May 1, 2014

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Varriount··on So Much Produce Comes in Plastic. Is There a Better Way?
Beware of the Nirvana fallacy! While banning plastic bags isn't perfect by any means, it's at least a start.
Varriount··on Tick-killing pill shows promising results in human trial
Well, there's a difference between something entering your body through your digestive tract, and something entering your body directly through the bloodstream. Additionally, different substances have different bioaccumulation characteristics - some substances may accumulate in only in specific tissues (fat, muscle, etc.), a combination of tissues, or none. How an insecticide bioaccumulates in cattle would affect their suitability for beef.
Varriount··on Z85: Format for representing binary data as printable text
Good to know I'm not the only one who has done this! I once wrote a template generation tool that embedded its input configuration into its output files as base64-encoded gzip'd JSON. Worked quite well at allowing template regeneration.
Varriount··on Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation
I still mourn the disappearance of the game development and distribution scene that Flash made possible. It seems like all we have these days are walled-garden app stores filled with pay-to-win, ad-filled games.
Varriount··on A DisplayPort Port That You Can Plug HDMI into [video]
Which makes me wonder why HDMI seems to be the default for laptops, etc. Is it just a matter of one industry (HDMI forum) pushing other industries to adopt one standard over another?
Varriount··on EVs won over early adopters, but mainstream buyers aren't along for the ride yet
> Most people wouldn't even bother with public charging, since they can just top up at home overnight.

Unless, of course, you only make enough to live in an apartment.

Varriount··on SeaweedFS fast distributed storage system for blobs, objects, files and datalake
Which is annoying, as there are various GC systems that are near, or even equal to, performance of comparable non-GC systems. (I personally blame Java for most of this)
Varriount··on OpenBSD System-Call Pinning
Does Go use direct syscalls on Windows? Last time I looked, I could have sworn Go's source used the standard Windows system DLLs.
Varriount··on Nobody Cares About Your Git History
If your PR is that big and has that many interconnected pieces, then it should probably be broken up and serially merged anyway. Otherwise it becomes a pain for the reviewers to read, and a pain to make any large changes to.
Varriount··on Samsung Joins Apple and Adobe in Supporting JPEG XL
From a technical perspective, what are the differences between the two?
Varriount··on Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
What kinds of noise do the trains produce? Do you think there are any ways to lessen it, and/or have any been implemented? (I'm thinking something like sound barriers).
Varriount··on Hertz to sell 20k EVs in shift back to gas-powered cars
This was the situation I found myself in recently. I would have been more than happy to rent an electric car, but charging infrastructure was a big, unknown variable.
Varriount··on Drawing.garden
Might want to put an epilepsy warning next to "ribbon", those patterns were really trippy.
Varriount··on Evolving the Infinite Canvas
If I recall correctly, Lego Mindstorm's GUI-based programming application (along with its various iterations) did something similar too, starting at a "leftmost" side of an infinite canvas.
Varriount··on Chemical reactions fuel crises at LA County's two largest landfills
I've heard about oily rags, but not about green hay - what happens?
Varriount··on Inko Programming Language
I know this is a purely subjective opinion, but I feel that Inko looks a lot nicer than Rust, from a syntactic perspective. I could never get over how many symbols and keywords Rust has, not to mention how it requires semicolons (despite them being unnecessary in all but a few cases).
Varriount··on Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
Huh, I never knew Unity used its own CLR implementation. Any idea why?
Varriount··on Google Proposes New Mseal() Memory Sealing Syscall for Linux
Doesn't OpenBSD have an API that has this kind of functionality too, albeit in a slightly simpler form?
Varriount··on Google Proposes New Mseal() Memory Sealing Syscall for Linux
Are the Android APIs that bad? (I've yet to develop an Android app)
Varriount··on Scrollbars are becoming a problem
This is something that's always puzzled me - why is searching in Windows always so gosh darn slow? You'd think with an entire background service dedicated to file indexing, I'd be able to quickly find files in a directory tree with the word "foo" in their file name or contents, but even with a modern SSD it still takes at least a minute on any remotely populated directory.
Varriount··on The Egg
Sounds like me and the Magic Thread[0]. I read that story when in elementary school, and it's still something I think on semi-regularly.

[0] https://www.davidgaultiere.com/the-magic-thread/

Varriount··on Numbered block parameters in Ruby

  Surprisingly few attempts even seem to get over the bar of understanding what currying is, and why it isn't just partial application. 
Huh, what is the difference between currying and partial application? I always thought the terms were interchangeable.
Varriount··on Snmalloc: A Message Passing Allocator
I found this design decision rather odd:

  Allocators may send messages to any other allocator. In a naïve implementation each allocator would keep a queue of batched messages for each other allocator. The number of queues would then either be the dynamically known number of existing threads, or the statically known maximal number of possible threads. The former would require allocation of a dynamically sized structure when handling remote deallocation and slow enqueueing, while the latter would lead to significant wasted space and hard-coded limits. Instead, we adapted ideas from radix trees. Allocators keep a fixed 2k size array of buckets of pending messages, where k in our implementation is 6. Batched messages are inserted into the bucket which corresponds to their destination’s address, modulo the number of buckets. Dispatch of messages takes place by sending all the messages from the same bucket to one allocator, which then responds to those messages for which it is the final destination, and forwards the rest, again according to their destination allocator address, but now shifted right by k bits.
I would think that the overhead of message passing would mean that minimization of the number of messages sent. I wonder how well this technique scales.
Varriount··on SQL reserved words – An empirical list
Could you expand on the declarative schema features? Isn't SQL more or less declarative by default?
Varriount··on The rent is too damn algorithmic
At least one of the claims in the suit[0] asserts that it's lower vacancy that lessers want:

  As a former industry executive explained, the market structure is "a classic prisoners’ dilemma."  Since residential real estate is a perishable resource (if a unit sits vacant for a month, a Lessor can never monetize that lost month of rent), Lessors favored a strategy of keeping "heads in the beds," a term for offering sufficiently attractive lease pricing to maximize physical occupancy levels in multifamily residential real estate properties. Thus, that industry executive opined, while all Lessors "would be better off limiting their rent reductions [discounts]," if any Lessor "lower[ed] their rents while the others don’t, then that [Lessor] would outperform"
I'm personally doubtful as to how intentional the collision actually is/was, but intentional or not, it would still have negative effects from renters' points of view.

EDIT: Nevermind, it's likely intentional:

  As one Lessor explains, while "we are all technically competitors," RealPage "helps us work together," "to work with a community in pricing strategies, not to work separately."
And wow:

  One Lessor said that the net effect of raising rents and “pushing people out” of the residential real estate leases they could no longer afford, was “10 million in income.”

[0] https://www.hausfeld.com/media/550bhzyp/realpage-complaint-f...
Varriount··on Make your own pyramid salt crystals

  > But I did find a study published in the World Salt Symposium where researchers successfully grew pyramid salt from waste salt water in large, steel crystallizers.
Wow, I never knew that there was an entire symposium dedicated to salt.

From https://www.bolton-menk.com/salt-symposium/:

  This event celebrates the optimization of salt use to improve community sustainability and protect vital freshwater systems and infrastructure.
  The Salt Symposium brings together leaders from diverse economic sectors to learn about the impacts of chloride and reduction methods. Professionals from across the world will share their expertise on current research initiatives including water softening, wastewater, fertilizer, snow and ice management, and more.
Varriount··on Lockheed CEO Pitches Pentagon on Subscription Software
What occurred with the F35's logistics backend?
Varriount··on Ask HN: Does your microwave interfere with Bluetooth? Mine does
I wonder if building a faraday cage around it would do anything.
Varriount··on Amazon used algorithm to test how much it could raise prices: FTC
Do shareholders actually act as a substantial check on companies though? And it's this a check towards positive behavior, or negative behavior (for the company, society, etc.)?
Varriount··on California’s math misadventure is about to go national
Believe me, if it were that simple, I wouldn't have spent 3+ months looking for a job.

In any case, what check boxes are you specifically referencing? Appearance?

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