Hacker News Reader

ahazred8taon Simplest Hash Functions

A perfect hash function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_hash_function has to be specially constructed for each desired set of inputs. Generic hash functions cannot be 'perfect'.

ahazred8taon The oldest known evidence of stitched clothing

Original paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aec2916

ahazred8taon The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV's Ambassador with the Avignon Papacy

Many people who switch religions are not completely tacked down around the edges.

ahazred8taon Lunar Flyby

It can be any colour you like.

ahazred8taon Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

Every 20 years, Jupiter and Saturn are in position for a gravity assist, which allows you to reach half the outer solar system. In the 1970s, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were all in the right half.

ahazred8taon The Cognitive Dark Forest

Yes, there are quite a few anti-AI projects. https://old.reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/wiki/index

ahazred8taon Ask HN: Looking for a link to a short story I read in a comment here

The hive mind never sleeps. ;-)

ahazred8taon Ask HN: Looking for a link to a short story I read in a comment here

The classic Slow Tuesday Night (1965) by R. A. Lafferty. Sort of post-singularity. I liked the part where they use an AI-assisted ghostwriting machine to spit out a scholarly text in seconds. (People who buy it just read the quick summary.)

https://www.ralafferty.org/works/stories/slow-tuesday-night/

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Slow+Tuesday+Night

Vaguely similar but slower: Vernor Vinge's Fast Times At Fairmont High and Rainbows End. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5393037-fast-times-at-fa...

ahazred8taon "Kai su, teknon" Caesar last words were probably a curse, not a farewell (2018)

He may have been saying Quaeso Te, Non! -- plain vanilla latin for "I beg you, no!"

ahazred8taon Spaceflight Started 100 Years Ago in a Massachusetts Cabbage Patch

March 1926 to October 1957 -- It only took us 31 years to get to orbit. And 5 more years to get to Venus.

ahazred8taon Animated 'Firefly' Reboot in Development from Nathan Fillion, 20th TV

If only ST:TAS hadn't given us the Holodeck... IMHO TNG would have been better without the holodeck episodes.

ahazred8taon AI Gets Wrong Woman Jailed for Six Months, Life Ruined

Ditto the 1982 Lenell Geter case -- he was sent to prison based on a faulty witness ID. https://www.LenellGeter.com/Content/About/ -- https://exonerationregistry.org/cases/4406

ahazred8taon Innocent woman jailed after being misidentified using AI facial recognition

In different states, police use cognitive aptitude tests such as the Wonderlic -- https://jobdescriptionandresumeexamples.com/10-important-fac... -- https://www.practice4me.com/lst-police-exam/ -- these are not strictly 'IQ' tests, but they're very similar.

ahazred8taon The Bovadium Fragments: Together with The Origin of Bovadium

> The Automobile makes cities less pleasant to live in

In 1900, there was a major manure crisis in all large european and north american cities. The swarms of flies were inescapable.

Although certainly the new roads required by increased population caused disruption.

ahazred8taon AI-generated passwords aren't random, it just looks that way

Dilbert's take on 'random' number generators: https://www.random.org/analysis/dilbert.jpg

ahazred8taon Let's Get Physical

There's an outfit in DC that social engineers government buildings. "Who are you, and what are you doing here?" ... "We've got chocolate cake!" "Oooo!!!"

ahazred8taon Sewage-filled Potomac river risks ruining America's birthday

Pete Seeger - "We're filling up the seas with garbage (garbage, garbage, garbage)"

ahazred8taon Four Decades of Inquiry into the Genetic Bases of Specific Reading Disability

TL;DR -- No obvious genetic differences associated with reading disability / dyslexia.

ahazred8taon Be the Village Rome Can't Read

https://web.archive.org/web/20260301183332/https://abiawomos...

ahazred8taon Show HN: Brainrot messed up my kid's attention span, so I built a tool to fix it

If it would work in schools, please explain it to the K12 sysadmin forum https://reddit.com/r/k12sysadmin

ahazred8taon Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers

The "Young Patriots" in the 60s were a white far-left anticapitalist antiracist group, part of the Black Panthers' Rainbow Coalition. They flew the confederate flag. The Panthers were okay with it, go figure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Patriots_Organization

ahazred8taon Blood test boosts Alzheimer's diagnosis accuracy to 94.5%, clinical study shows

Sloppy wording. -- Fortea (2024) -- Over 95% of people with two copies have amyloid beta in their cerebrospinal fluid. (not full-blown Alzheimers symptoms, just early detection)

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/may/06/scie...

ahazred8taon Record-breaking Antarctic drill reveals 23M years of climate history

Notably this is an under-ice SEDIMENT sample rather than an ice core.

ahazred8taon Blood test boosts Alzheimer's diagnosis accuracy to 94.5%, clinical study shows

[testing positive for the disease but it's not progressing] -- Yes, exactly this. There are people with two copies of the bad APOE4 gene. 95% of them develop early-onset Alzheimer's in their 50s. The medical community is now very intensely studying the remaining 5% to find out what's causing them to NOT get sick.

ahazred8taon Catherine of Braganza, the Queen Who Brought Tea to England

It's 'cha' in northern Mandarin, but 'tê' (茶) in southern Hokkien, so it depended on which trading port you bought from.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tea#/media/File%3ANames_for_t...

Also, 'oo long' is black dragon.

ahazred8taon Is NIST's Cryptography Backdoored?

Argon2 has been standardized by the IETF, but has not been endorsed by NIST/FIPS. So USGov developers have to run a password through PBKDF2 before they can use Argon2.

ahazred8taon ASML unveils EUV light source advance that could yield 50% more chips by 2030

Gates are about 30-50 nm wide, even though they're called '3nm' for marketing reasons.

ahazred8taon One day, a computer will fit on a desk (1974)

At the first conference on microprocessors, someone said "We're not going to have one in every doorknob." A few years later their hotel had electronic locks. Now we've got cpus in friggin' charger cables.