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ac42

111 karma · joined February 17, 2019

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ac42··on Hackers are spamming businesses’ receipt printers with ‘antiwork’ manifestos
Let's call BS.

It's inane to claim existence being the root of all evil, because, yeah, it's the root of friggin' _everything_.

Nothing is forced on "you" because without existence there is no "you". Or anti-natalists could just as easily be blamed of "depriving" the non-born of their chance to live. Ouch.

I, for one, enjoy life (and don't you dare tell me I just don't realise it sucks). I even like working on the hard bits, like underpaid shopkeepers and inhumane working hours, thank you.

ac42··on Save the planet Program in C, avoid Python, Perl
Does this factor in the wetware upkeep during the development cycle? Development in C generally is slower than in most of the other languages.
ac42··on Memory leaks are crippling my M1 MacBook Pro
> I also have never heard the fans

We all do now

ac42··on Why is Excalidraw so good?
The Python of drawing tools.
ac42··on Is this the simplest (and most surprising) sorting algorithm?
Oh crap, now I see it. Thanks!
ac42··on Writing a “bare metal” operating system for Raspberry Pi 4
And not to forget https://github.com/rsta2/circle
ac42··on Is this the simplest (and most surprising) sorting algorithm?
I am not clear why the proof is so long. By induction, the first i elements are already smaller than the A[i], so it's essentially an unoptimised version of

for i: 0..n-1 A[i] = min(A[i:n])

ac42··on Steve Jobs emails Eric Schmidt (2007)
> it's "Rochambeau", a name.

"Connections to the French surname Rochambeau are a folk etymology"

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rochambeau

ac42··on Light computes any desired linear transform without a digital processor
> Would it be possible to develop a computer from linear transformations?

Yes. The transition function of Turing machines and the working tape can be represented as linear transformations. For quantum computers, these transformations even need to be unitary.

This very standard construction does not conflict with the halting problem: you don't know how often you have to apply this linear transform to your state vector until you got your result.

ac42··on State of netbooting Raspberry Pi in 2021
The article has the wrong caption I would think ("running K3s on a bunch of PIs" would be more fitting).

Netbooting a bare metal environment is quite straightforward for the PI 3 (dnsmasq has it all) and takes around 15-30 secs.

ac42··on Ask HN: Inconsistent expression calculation between programming languages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend
ac42··on On Free Speech
Lol. Mr Lee really has the balls to opine on free speech! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27286628
ac42··on Are animals more conscious than we are?
Since there is no technical definition (not to speak of a measure of degree) of consciousness, we could assume that it is very likely, statistically. All life forms have undergone the same amount of evolution, after all. And even if we are wrong, this assumption would do this world great good.
ac42··on Generate a Git repository with 2^28 commits—one for every 7-character shorthash
I bet they later spoke about randomised algorithms like[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperLogLog

ac42··on Is one vaccine dose enough if you’ve had Covid? What the science says
If infection rates were double digit, the "think of what we could save" argument might perhaps deserve some consideration. But as it stands, I feel the only warranted concern is the well-being of Covid survivors.
ac42··on How to create an unfair coin and prove it with math (2011)
Lol, I thought this was going to be about crypto currency. Lovely article!
ac42··on Finding the Bottom Turtle
But to be fair, the components you use could be "spiked". Imagine resistors, capacitors, transistors that can find out when they are used in a particular configuration and change their parameters accordingly. /s
ac42··on America’s weirdest guidebooks were funded by the government
It felt a bit less obscure once I figured the relationship to "pecuniary".

Penniless!

ac42··on Her Lesson Plan Was Junk
"Nerium contains several toxic compounds, and it has historically been considered a poisonous plant."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerium

ac42··on The most copied StackOverflow snippet of all time is flawed (2019)
> It should be noted that on processors that do not support LZCNT, the instruction byte encoding is executed as BSR.

This. Boggles.

ac42··on Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
For me it's the "<Company I never heard of> is buying <Business I believed to be successful> for $<N>bn" type of headlines that seems to be on the rise.
ac42··on The Big Alien Theory
Using the same line of reasoning, men could argue that the majority of people are men. The whole argument is based on a crude form of survivor bias It's complete and utter bunk.
ac42··on On Smoking
I think one reason that quitting is so hard is that it is assumed to be a 100 to zero transition. I believe that just as getting addicted, weaning off is a process. Without having established a mindset of truly wanting to quit and without clearly understanding your very own reasons for it, it's way too easy to consider that occasional misstep a total failure of the project.
ac42··on Elliptic Curve Cryptography Explained (2019)
> Yes, a point adding itself holds the same rule, using the tangent line on the finite field to connect the third

How in discrete metric space do you create a tangent line on a set of points in a finite field?

ac42··on When scientific orthodoxy resembles religious dogma
> Finding extraordinary evidence requires a commitment of extraordinary funds

I would suggest that he answers to his own complaints. There is a great deal of prioritisation going on in science and fringe ideas require too large steps away from where we are today. The real break-throughs in science are ideas that massively reduce the size of the backlog. My guess is that these ideas will receive proper treatment them when the time is right.

ac42··on Belarus 'diverts Ryanair flight to arrest journalist', opposition says
Vladimir!
ac42··on Ask HN: Advices for Burnout and Depression?
> I simply don't want to see CMake anymore.

It's certainly not CMake. It could happen with Jupyter notebooks or Monoids.

That you wield tools with which you can do a lot doesn't mean you literally can do everything. The purpose of life is replication and you need to figure out how to leave your mark. As other commenters suggested, a family is a practical way to address this. Or write a book, or run classes in your community college, or contribute to OSS.

Keep on doing what you are good at, don't try to be a carpenter. Just don't do it for your ego, or you will end up lonely. Do it for real people (and no no no, don't do it for real people in order to feed your ego).

You're good, don't waste it!

ac42··on The flat assembler – an open source assembly language compiler
> This is a bare engine that by itself has no ability to recognize and encode instructions of any processor, however it has the ability to become an assembler for any CPU architecture.

This reminds me of the annoyances I encountered when writing an assembler for the TMS320C25 DSP using Microsoft's MASM a 100 years ago...

One of the beautiful features of machine-specific assemblers seemed that they could deal with stuff like short / long jumps or calling conventions for C. Wondering if this one can be tweaked to that level?

ac42··on GitHub repository for Sedgewick's Algorithms is taken down
Yes, like the parent says, don't overreact. This is totally not symptomatic for lopsided legislation. So please be quiet already, it will be easier for everyone. You are worried you might be next? Kid, grow up, this is life, nobody said it'd be easy. Here's your gun in case the tanks are coming...

/s

ac42··on Uncomputable Numbers
"This sentence is wrong."

If we could decide the halting problem, we can write a program P that receives another program x as input, such that P(x) halts if x(P) doesn't halt, and otherwise loops forever. What is the value of P(P)?

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