Hacker News Reader

amanwithnoplanon Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://ecraven.github.io/r7rs-benchmarks/

For the onlookers, this bunch of microbenchmarks suggests Racket is faster than Guile, but the fastest is Chez (which Racket uses as a substrate).

amanwithnoplanon Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

The candle that burned twice as bright was really adequacy.org, which sourced their trolls from Kuro5hin.

(Archive here: https://www.inadequacy.org/)

amanwithnoplanon Literate programming tool for any language

Another interesting implementation of literate programming with _bidirectional sync_ between documentation and source code is Entangled (https://entangled.github.io/). This allows you to use all your normal tooling on the normal source code files, and the changes are reflected back to your Markdown documentation files.

amanwithnoplanon Canada considering charging for road access from USA to Alaska

If you don't like Angus Reid (from last week), here are Ipsos from January and Leger from December.

https://www.ipsos.com/en-ca/43-percent-canadians-would-vote-...

https://leger360.com/canada-51st-state/

Note that despite the headline, The Ipsos poll also says 80% polled would never vote for Canada to become part of the United States, while the Leger poll says 82% would not like Canada to become the 51st state. These are 3 of the standard pollsters that regularly get commissioned by TV and newspaper to do polls for them, and I have no reason to suspect that the polls are "cooked". 338 rates Angus Reid as B+, Ipsos as A, and Leger as A+.

https://338canada.com/pollster-ratings.htm

amanwithnoplanon Canada considering charging for road access from USA to Alaska

https://angusreid.org/trump-carney-51st-state-canada-usa/

~10% support overall. However, that's 21% of Conservative voters and 1-3% everyone else. So it's beyond fringe for everyone else, but maybe not as much for Conservatives.

amanwithnoplanon Dedekind's Subtle Knife

> So there must be an equal number of them.

(Pretending to dig out my imaginary high school/freshman hat.)

If you said between every two reals there's one rational (and between every two rational there's one real), I'd assume you meant exactly one (i.e. in the conversational sense), and then there's an equal number of them. But you said at least one, so it could be two or three, so now I'm not sure. And if there are infinitely many of them... but infinity is not even a number, so who knows?!

amanwithnoplanon Oh Shit, Git?

Please kindly write one for a jj-specific issue: "my build vomitted out a bunch of files and I used any jj command before editing my .gitignore"

I've found myself using git to fix the mess in this particular instance.

amanwithnoplanon U.S. Ambassador says Canadians are consuming 'unhealthy' amount of American news

I have no idea what "a military conflict between what would become Western Canada and what used to be Upper Canada" refers to unless you meant the northwest and Red River rebellions, in which case it really stretches my (anglo) mind how that has more to do with Quebec separatism than any of the other grievances.

amanwithnoplanon ERNIE, China's ChatGPT, cracks under pressure

Chinese characters being unsuitable for QWERTY typewriters and early computers' limitations didn't "almost kill character-based Chinese", it just meant Chinese computing lagged behind. Inputing Chinese characters with a limited key set wasn't even conceptually novel, given the long history of structural decomposition and phonetic representation of Chinese characters, but it just couldn't be implemented before computers were powerful enough.

amanwithnoplanon Is infinity an odd or even number? (2011)

I think "countably infinite" makes no sense to you because you have a different idea of countable than a mathematician (disclaimer: not a mathematician).

A mathematician compares the size of two sets of stuff by pairing off items from each set, but this is not a mechanical process taking a finite or even unbounded amount of time: they just need to show such a mapping exists or that nonexistence would lead to a contradiction; they don't need to actually carry out the process mechanically. By definition (according to mathematicians), something is countable if it is the same size as the set of natural numbers {0, 1, 2, ...} or smaller, and "countably infinite" just means it is the same size as the naturals (and not smaller, which would make it finite).

A small minority of mathematicians hold the position that proof-by-contradiction is not good enough, and that you really do need to positively prove something. They are called intuitionists.

Presumably, an even smaller minority of mathematicians hold the position that this proof must (theoretically) be able to be carried out in a mechanical manner. They're some flavor of constructivists, but maybe they're better called programmers. <- This is where you are.

amanwithnoplanon Make JDK source code UTF-8

What's wrong with just wrapping UTF-8 text in lang spans? Browsers and Electron will just do the right thing, no?

amanwithnoplanon Valve bans 40k Dota 2 accounts using honeypot patch

> if I have a good match where I did better than expected, the system responds to that by putting me in a much harder game, where I'm expected to lose

No, the system puts you in an easier/harder game, where you're expected to play _with and against_ people of your skill level (including if you want to play strictly meta or if you want to play with only one hand or whatever).

I've been playing one of the most popular (for PC anyway) online game for 10+ years now and it only has skill-based matchmaking, in both ranked and casual mode. While plenty of people rail against the fairness of its matchmaking, I've rarely heard anything against the concept of skill-based matchmaking. It's the only kind of matchmaking that makes any sense to me. Why would I want to play against people that are way better/worse than me where I have no chance to have a good game either way?

While my friends no longer play it regularly, when they used to play we'd just... play however we wanted in casual mode. Why does it matter if some people are better/worse or meta/casual? You can play the most random stuff you want and you eventually get matched against people of your skill level. Or if you don't enjoy the current match for whatever reason (winning/losing too much, or trying too much/little), just go next and let matchmaking do its thing until you get games at your level, wherever that level happens to be.

If anything, your complaints sound to me like the developers care too little (rather than too much) about competitive balance/integrity across the entire playerbase.

amanwithnoplanon History of Lisp Parentheses (2019)

But why (+ 1 2 3) and not +(1 2 3) since the head is special? Or (1 2 3 +) so nested trees are built bottom up?

amanwithnoplanon The Queen’s Coup

>someone outside of politics [...] holds the final red line about whether or not an election must be called

This seems like only a theoretical red line. If/when the GG does anything against the advice of the PM it's a crisis moment. There was a bit of a media fuss in 2008 but then the GG just did as she was told, no?

amanwithnoplanon Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened

Not only is it nonsense, you can look at GNOME's own wiki and various blog posts for its (publicly stated) design history: https://wiki.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/DesignHistory

The TLDR is that nothing was ever said about implied threats to sue, and it was all about "windows/virtual desktops are hard, let's _simplify_ everything!" Also, netbooks/iPhones were all the rage then, so you see where the modal design (for small screens) and giant padding (for touch input) came from in order to accommodate any possible convergence in the future or whatnot.

amanwithnoplanon Sunsetting Atom

VSCode already does that as of some versions ago.

https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2021/11/08/custom-notebo...

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/datascience/jupyter-noteb...

amanwithnoplanon An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

I'm not aware of any schools teaching multiplication tables in kindergarten, but I did memorize the 9x9 table when I was in kindergarten because my older siblings' Big Kids Notebooks all had the times table on the back and it formed a rhyme/ditty in the local language. After it was explained to me that multiplication was repeated addition, that made perfect sense.

But don't ask me about division, my siblings/parents/whoever tried to explain it as "the opposite of multiplication", which was complete nonsensical gibberish and I didn't learn division until years later.

amanwithnoplanon Debian and firmware

As a long time non-contributing Debian/Ubuntu user (I hop between the two whenever one of them annoys me too much), I've had a lot of issues locating and using non-free firmware when required.

For the longest time (since fixed), trying to use Wi-Fi in debian-installer simply didn't work, regardless whether I used the unofficial image or dumped the firmware debs on disk. Can't complain about that anymore since it's fixed.

Now that Wi-Fi works when available at install-time, let's try to install a bog standard desktop system. Did you run the text installer or the graphical installer? If you used the text installer, you might be surprised to get an unescapable gray screen on an otherwise fully working booted system! Your video out doesn't work properly because kernel modesetting doesn't work without firmware or some mumbo jumbo like that. Your options are:

- Run the graphical installer in the first place so that the GPU firmware is used/installed by the installer

- Run a shell in the text installer and do "apt-install firmware-blah", a command which is only documented in a dusty unstyled html in a file cabinet hidden by a beware of leopard sign copyrighted 2010

- On boot up, use some relatively arcane GRUB magic (I'm just a user, so I have to look it up every time, okay?) to boot into some kind of safe non-graphical mode and install the GPU firmware

(Bonus: the unofficial firmware-included disc image symlinks the firmware debs, so the image only works when you DD it. The most popular Windows disc writing software Rufus recommends writing disc images in ISO mode (file-by-file) so that you can use excess free space. If you're wondering why the firmware directory has a bunch of 0 byte files, that's why, and you need to switch to DD mode.)

amanwithnoplanon New research highlights the damage caused by processed food

As someone that eats (maybe I should turn that into "used to eat") a lot of cereal, knowing that they're pretty unhealthy for me, I did an experiment just now: I poured a large but not exceptional (for me) amount of cereal into my cereal mug, half an inch from the rim, and then poured it into a measuring cup. It came out to 1 3/4 cups.

Then I looked at the labels in my pantry: Store brand muesli - 330 kcal per cup / Kashi GOLEAN - 176 kcal per cup

I also looked up cereals I ate as a kid (I find them too sugary now): Frosted Mini-Wheats - 210 kcal per cup-ish / Cap'n Crunch - 150 kcal per cup / Froot Loops - 113 kcal per cup

These numbers are surprising to me but they probably shouldn't be. Despite Froot Loops being subjectively the most sugary cereal I've eaten and the muesli having a proportionally low amount of sugar, the density of the muesli (82g per cup!) compared to the Froot Loops (29g per cup) means that it's crazy calorie-dense per volume (which is how most people eyeball their cereal, I think).

Having eaten 600-700 kcal worth of cereal with milk just before I typed this, and not thinking that amount particularly remarkable (but the calorie count was surprising!), I'm starting to wonder how my weight has remained stable and well below average my entire adult life. I pretty much only drink water (and the cereal milk), so at least I have that going for me.