at_a_remove

I have a checksum, uh, dream for lack of a better word, but I fear I lack the talent to pull it off. The problem with a checksum is that it only tells you that an error exists (hopefully), but it does not tell you where.

Imagine writing out your stream of bytes in a m x n grid. You could then make checksums for each 1 through m columns, and 1 through n rows. This results in an additional storage of (m + n) checksum bytes. A single error is localized as an intersection of the row and column with bad checksums. One could simply iterate through the other two hundred fifty-five possibilities and correct the issue. Two errors could give two situations. The most likely is four bad checksums (two columns, two rows) and you could again iterate. The less likely is three bad checksums because the two errors are in the same row or column.

I ran the math out for the data being rewritten as a volume and a hypervolume (four dimensions). I think the hypervolume was "too much" checksum, but the three-d version looked ... doable.

Someone smarter than I has probably already done this.

Although I had started programming when I was nine, in high school I was fortunate enough to have a computer science teacher with a PhD in the field. Among one of the habits drilled into me was extensive commenting.

Every function (or procedure) starts with a comment block. It first talks about the what and why. Then, a line for the inputs and another for the outputs. Next -- and this is done closer to the end of the writing -- I describe what it calls and what it is called by. The comment block optionally finishes with room for improvement.

The function itself probably has other comments. Usually for anything which is not blindingly obvious. Because I write code like a caveman, wherein only one thing happens on one line, most everything is quite clear. If there's anything weird or magical that has to happen, it gets a comment.

Elegance and cleverness is reserved for data structures, algorithms, and so on, rather than doing a lot of stuff in as few lines as possible. I do this for Future Me, who might be having a bad day, or for anyone who wants to adapt my code to something else.

One of the last steps in a finished program is going through and making sure that my comments match my code. I am a very boring kind of programmer.

I am unsure about that last bit. From website design (style) to UX to how a given application works, I have found the people who want these things to be unable or unwilling to articulate what it is they actually desire, nor are they likely to go anywhere but the Happy Path. Instead, one ends up looking at the actual logged usage of previous or similar software, doing interviews with a multitude of different people who will use the application in different ways, and finally a deep contemplation of How This Will Actually Need to Work (and Break) to get anywhere.

It really depends on the chemical.

I advise anyone interested in pharmaceuticals to read The Old Vegetable Neurotics: Hemlock, Opium, Belladonna and Henbane, Their Physiological Action and Therapeutical Use Alone and in Combination, from the 1860s, I think. If you read between the lines, it is the story of a doctor who is immensely frustrated with the impurities of some common medicines, not knowing what you were getting, was this the actual chemical doing the job, and so forth. He proceeds to examine each part of the plant (leaves, stems, roots, flowers, and so on) to see which gives the best concentration. He then works at extracting exactly what he wants, very carefully. Then he tests tiny amounts of various rodents, then his dog, then himself, working to determine an appropriate dosage.

It's quite impressive and hardcore. You can feel this man's annoyance at the state of things and his passion to declare, "I'd rather just find this out now instead of waiting for everyone to keep fiddling about." With a small room and some glassware you could also do this. Now, it wouldn't be simple, and to be honest the various units used are a hot mess, but the basic principles are there.

Now, automatable is a matter of degree. Real chemists have whole flowcharts of "do this, do that next, now this other thing" to detect the presence of a particular sought-for thing, but that does not prove a negative, you do not know what else might be present. That's the real rub and why the focus of so much chemistry is on extraction and purification.

This is interesting. The abortion section doesn't seem to mention ye olde menstrual extraction. Some decades ago, I believe the early seventies, some feminists figured out how to basically get the whole "eject the sloughed menstrual tissues" part of the cycle over with in a simple procedure, rather than enduring the days of cramps, which I know make some women quite miserable, even debilitated. This can also serve as a first trimester abortion.

Someone with more examples and a greater understanding, not to mention eloquence, than I ought to come out with a book going over, in tremendous detail, how much of our chemical engineering "miracles of science!" were created to replace mechanical processes or reduce power requirements. Polish regularly? No, we will just manufacture a coating! Filtering? No, flocculating agents! More insulation on that refrigerator? No, here's this new refrigerant! Sugar cane makes the vats hard to clean ... but high fructose corn syrup, that's the ticket. And that while a non-trivial portion of these chemical replacements are effective at what they do, we just have not considered the escape of these miracles into air, water, and soil. It just wasn't on anyone's horizon.

While I love science as much as anyone else does, I am wondering if a distant human future civilization (assuming we have one), will have switched to a "this new molecule is by default dangerous until proven otherwise, over decades." Chemical engineering would grind to a halt, but might perhaps be replaced by ever-finer mechanical processes for similar results.

Not good with people, I had developed a facade full of weird coping mechanisms as I attempted to fake not being tremendously shy and avoidant of rejection. I was just into my twenties, working at a dating service as a kind of factotum (data entry, but also shooting and editing videos, networking, and reception). Inadvertently, the relevant details of all of our members just ... grafted themselves onto my hapless brain. Names, height, weight, job, member number, video number, and so forth. Employees began to call me rather than look people up in the directory, but I liked to greet people when they came in rather than having them fumble for their card. One conversation went like this:

Me: Hello, $Firstname! No need for the card, I know your number is seventeen forty-two. It's been about six months since you've been in, let me get into the computer and get your activity printed.

Him: You know me?

Me: Just by your picture. [idle chatter mode initiated as I wait for the printer]. Say, you've lost about ten pounds. That's down to one-sixty, right? I'll make a note to update your profile.

Him: [shifting uncomfortably] I was really one-eighty but I fudged it, so now it is accurate.

Me: So, how's the insurance business?

Him: You remember that?

Me: [continuing on like a chipper but oblivious robot] Our members are important!

Him: I'll buy you a steak dinner if you can tell me my birthday.

Me: July thirty-first, nineteen forty-four.

I let him off the steak dinner thing.

I am not good with people and it took me a long time to learn that, although people like to be recognized and known to some degree, huge amounts of detail retained over long periods, or remembering even singular encounters with high fidelity freaks some folks out. Somewhere along the line, I had mechanically applied the "remember people's names" advice from books like How to Win Friends and Influence People and must have figured if some is good, more is better, then used the few strengths I had, but instead ended up setting off people's "information asymmetry" threat detection and/or Who Is This Freak.

Now I clamp down and try not to blurt out recognizing someone from decades back, even though I am, like a puppy, happy to see a person from long ago once more. When I make jokes that I am like a golden retriever, I am kidding on the square.

It certainly could be helpful, as it is a reminder that the people making the observations also have functioning brains and, being more expert in the topic than the naive querent, would most likely have already considered the obvious. After some contemplation of the rather mild rebuke, the querent might ask better questions, or at least refrain from asking bad ones.

Many folks on HN, when encountering non-"tech" articles in the sciences, have a somewhat distressing habit of plunging toward assumptions which suggest that the people in the article have failed to look for the obvious and/or are decades behind in what the subjects know. This is especially sorrowful, because who among us hasn't suffered through someone asking us, in our specialty, "Why don't you just hit the EASY button? It's around here somewhere! You're making this sound hard!"

I would like to see more instances of this kind of thing going on, the fallout, and so on.

I wonder if there is a good list of these kinds of incidents going on in open source. It might be helpful in trying to figure out exactly what kind of clauses and verbiage, precisely, invite these kinds of takeover attempts like some kind of demon-summoning invocation.

Aaaah, once again community guidelines and codes of conduct reveal their nature as the thin edge of the wedge, the camel's nose in the tent.

A bit like trying to find steel made before all of the atomic testing started, I suppose.

You know, the Hathi Trust might not be a bad way to collect that data as a start.

I will step a bit to the side of "censorship" and just talk about "misinformation."

The trouble with labeling something "misinformation" is that you also need to be one hundred percent right, forever or you need to be ready to make prominent retractions and groveling mea culpas. With this is mind, one ought to tread lightly on topics such as fast-moving science (especially the softer ones) and matters of policy recommendations. COVID was both of these. Yes, masks! No, don't use masks! Yes, masks. Yes, masks, haha you caught us we just didn't want you to buy up all of the masks. Yes, masks, but they really only prevent you from giving the virus to others.

My undergraduate was in the harder sciences, so it is not like I am some anti-science loon. I just think that acting with Total Certainty and If You Don't Agree You Are Killing People, on certain classes of topic, is a recipe for eventually being as believable as the numerous food pyramids which, once taken as gospel, now are simply shrugged aside.

Somewhat adjacent, I have been interested in generating mazes of the "cave" form. Many algorithms exist here, even some cellular automata approach for a more realistic simulationist approach. However, I have been kicking around ideas to take the very irregular results from that sort of tack and then abstract them back to a nodes-and-edges parallel data structure. Which is to ask, in this grid of filled in or empty cells, which gaps are the caves, and which are the twisty little passages?

At least for games, I am starting to lean toward the idea that humans like the simulationist approaches as "feeling right," but the abstract graph is better for the machines, and that the ability to start with one and then produce the other is where we will eventually go.

Well, protons beat out electrons for at least keeping the divergence down, any volume of lightsaber with a net charge is still going to be vulnerable to fridge magnet attack. Also, I have a strong feeling that it wouldn't look very lightsaber-ish. More like a rapier, although I guess for aesthetic purposes you could have scores of little emissions tubes and switch between them on the order of milliseconds and hope that persistence of vision would create an illusion of thickness.

I have a feeling that the sudden stop could be nasty for even the person holding the hilt, just tons of energy spraying wildly around, a big enough radiation vacation that even the Hulk might blanch at soaking up the gammas. It would still technically qualify as handheld melee arm, but it would be so indiscriminate as to be an inelegant weapon of a more uncivilized age.

Exploring this, I think lightsabers would be Really Hard. Not transporter-level hard, but still tough. I see two paths:

1) Using actual photons in something laser like. The problem here is that your lightsaber would go on forever, photons won't just peter out after a meter or so. So, you would need, well, something to "cap" the lightsaber, both as a cap in terms of ending something, and a cap as in "capture" or possibly even "reflect." So you would need a teensy something floating at the end of your lightsaber, perfectly synchronized with the positions and velocities of the hilt. Also, small enough not to make a viable target for hitting with some other light saber in your duel. It would either be suspended by antigravity or as some kind of tiny drone.

2) Your other alternative is that your lightsaber is really some kind of plasma bottle, a hideously distorted ellipsoidal electromagnetic confinement field. This has its own problems, like your blade not wildly changing shape near metal or if someone throws a refrigerator magnet at your odd Jedi or Sith. You might be able to compensate with some kind of high-speed computations accounting for the magnets and such on the fly and "fixing" the distortions as they occurred. The plasma would be quite different from the plasma you might see in hopeful fusion projects. It would have to be quite hot and dense, eager to dump energy. This might also benefit from the "cap" in the first one.

I could see blasters being a little more likely. Your plasma packet could be self-propagating and you would not have to worry about its stability over multiple seconds and such. Each plasma packet might also benefit from the aforementioned caps, one on each end, zipping toward the target and simply destabilizing when the target is reached, releasing all of the energy at once, rather than the buttery-smooth slices of lightsabers.

3) Circling back, perhaps some esoteric corner of yet-to-be-discovered physics might allow for temporary bosons (the boson nature of photons is what allows for lasers to really do their thing), so perhaps there is some unknown cousin of the photon which could be coaxed into lasting for roughly three and a third nanoseconds (or one meter, take your pick), And hopefully it can come in green, blue, purple, and red.

I used to keep a text file on hand back when people had some irritating Markov chain bots on IRC. Fed enough of the lines, the bots veered off into some new valley of chatter, appearing quite mad. Used to get some "What did you DO to my bot?" indignant messages. I wonder if I still have that file somewhere.

I despair thinking about this. I long for a world where I could be upfront about my strengths and weaknesses, then receive honest answers in turn, such that a great fit could at least be on the horizon. Instead, everything is saturated with game theory, HR weirdness, and the pettiest of politics.

I'd like to be somewhere that I work I can best do is what is actually needed, and that need is recognized.

Again, which items?

Google Sets? Ain't nobody gonna pay for that! Chromecast? Google Domains? I am scrolling through the list and not seeing much that would stand on its own two feet. Stadia? Google+?

I'm just not seeing much that can stand on its own, that people will pay for without it resorting to an ad model to support it.

I have no love for Google but, in light of the Google Graveyard, I am at a loss to see how to cut it up in a way where almost anything can remain profitable on its own.

Imagine chopping Search and Ads out to be their own things.

GoogAds turns into just another advertising company. Perhaps viable but uninteresting. GoogSearch, well, almost nobody wants to pay for search, so they seek some kind of way to get money, and the start up with the integrated ads, soon to result in what we have now. I used to run various Google Search Appliances, but they bailed out of that market.

Peel off GMail? More than zero people want to pay for email, so you might see something like a clunky Fastmail with a free tier and a pay tier. The free tier means ads again and you're evolving to a Yahoo model. Ummm, nobody really wanted that.

How about hardware? I dunno, are Pixels a loss leader for Google? I'll bow to someone else's insight on this, and I'm not really hip to the phone scene: are there a lot of "smartphones, we only make smartphones" companies?

Google Docs and various officeware might stand on its own as a distant second to Microsoft. I know some people pay for that.

Google Books, maaaaaaaaaaybe. It might stand on its own but here we just see people having to pay for what was once free.

I just don't see anything interesting or stimulating coming out of carving up Google. Almost everything they did (it has been a while since I was "into" them) seemed focused on making things that were almost byproducts, wherein their real utility was feeding the search <-> advertising cycle.

Again, and continuing with the flight safety, all of it was an iterative process, learned the hard way. Flight safety rules did not emerge whole and unchanged with the Wright brothers. Every change was prompted by one or more incidents during which the current procedure was not appropriate.

What then?

Consider the current thread on the whole "toaster in the dishwasher" topic, during which someone related an incident wherein an entire server site was immersed in water but still functioning (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41251234). The site manager followed procedure (wait a while, not cut the power, perform risk assessment) and it resulted in total loss, but the poster wanted to "cut the power, pump the water out of the bunker ASAP and immediately clean the whole lot with pure water." Here we have a tension between procedure and results. Procedure ended up causing total site loss, which was completely avoidable.

Similarly, a current thread on an ER doctor not following the usual procedures during a mass casualty event was lauded. A choice had to be made. Here, results won.

I just like to know this sort of thing about a work culture in advance. Letter of the law versus the spirit of the law, and so on.

An irritatingly overlooked issue is the tension between procedure and results. Obviously, a well-refined procedure learns from past issues and evolves, growing ever more adaptable and useful, the way that aircraft rules are "writ in blood." Still, every one of the adaptations was prompted by an event that was Not in the Script.

I think, for my next job, one of those questions I will ask when the time comes to ask if I have anything I am curious about in the interview is the choice, when a choice must be made, between procedure and results ... which am I expected to prioritize?

Probably won't win me any callbacks.

Sorry, I was being brief. I usually say "anything with a non-zero rest mass-energy" for anything for a photon, photons never being at rest. Briefly, some had thought that neutrinos might be little more than floating carriers of lepton number. Later that was amended to merely "massless" (in the sense that they would at least be like photons). I've never been in that crowd. My thoughts are that mass-energy is the coin of existence and gravitation the inevitable consequence, but I do not speak for everyone, just trying to give a kind of non-exhaustive overview of the history to respond to the for part.

Neutrinos were originally a kind of mathematical placeholder to allow for conservation of lepton number (electrons, muons, etc). Turns out that they're real! More to the point, you have six basic leptons (and their antiparticles) if you count the types of neutrinos and six basic quarks (and their antiparticles). It's an interesting parallel.

They react with very little, as it turns out. Chargeless, and so they care not for electromagnetic forces. Strong nuclear force is also a miss. Originally, it was thought that only the weak nuclear force was the way they could interact with matter, but with confirmation that they have a non-zero mass, they can also interact with gravity. This makes them both hard to detect, but also an excellent way to peer through things like clouds of interstellar dust, or through the Earth.

Easiest method is to simply take your idea at face value.

In our first version, imagine all of the stars at rest. Now, we emphatically know this not to be true locally due to all kinds of measurements, but let's go with it. What happens? The moment you let these stars "go," they begin to draw toward one another due to gravity. You would have gravitational collapse. We do not see that.

Next iteration: we throw the stars, and the galaxies, and the galactic clusters away from one another. No expansion required. Here we have two options. In the first, we did not throw with enough speed, they expand out ... slow to a halt ... and the gravitational collapse again. Again, unobserved. Option two, you have thrown at escape velocity and what you would see is an asymptotically decreasing speed, never quite hitting zero, since gravity works "forever away." Also unobserved.

What you're suggesting is basically the Steady State concept, a kind of static universe. This is a very old idea. So old it was given a kind of courtesy term in general relativity, which would eventually be set to zero.

Here is a rule for any armchair astrophysicists: whatever you think of, that was most likely an idea at one point and was eventually ruled out.

This is one of the reasons why, as an undergrad, I switched from nuclear engineering to physics: at the end of the day, we're still using heat and turbines, just with extra, more dangerous steps; although the materials engineering aspect is recognizably challenging, I found it not particularly thrilling.

At other, far end of the scale, if Hawking radiation does exist, black holes could be considered converters of mass to energy, skipping all of the conservation of baryon and lepton numbers ... although at very large timescales until you have a fizzy, spicy nano black hole on hand.

Controlled capture of the various types of radiation (sometimes I find that word to be sloppy) to extract the kinetic energies does not seem to be physically impossible, but I have oft wondered how as I think about various nuclear batteries which have existed. Indeed, the article doesn't even break it down enough: beta ought to be split into beta-plus (positrons) and beta-minus (electrons), and they skipped some 2p emissions. My guess is that not only will each need its own approach, but that each of those would be subdivided into different energy bands, not unlike having different compounds for chlorophyll-A and chlorophyll-B, only for, say, fast neutrons versus thermal neutrons.

And I think that's gonna be materials engineering again. Whoops!

They all seem so terribly expensive.

I have wondered if there is a cheaper, stopgap solution while I gather the money, something like aerating the soil along a path, the path that a drain would take, such that the water flows preferentially through the aerated soil.

I'm not sure if I have O'Reilly's System Administration book. I used to get pre-prints back in the early nineties when they were still quite new. In any case, yes, I have read and I have Been Around.

And I still think that we can improve. More over, we ought to improve.

The command line is king, but sometimes the king is mad. Which is to say, it can be difficult to work with the monarchy when the syntax is shit. And there's a lot of bad syntax out there: overly cute, so terse as to be cryptographic, the straight-up baffling ...

Outside of the syntax (which seems to live forever), you have things like non-sane defaults, obscurantist man pages ... the list goes on.

I used to work for a guy who was the exact opposite of the shock absorber, "crap umbrella" who can make for a good boss. Instead, this was the guy who was mixing up the Flavor Aid at Jonestown. I recall a bit where he was relaying how the organization was rolling out a new performance metric, and it was a full-on "Ratings of a full five out of five technically exist; you will never get a five, but you should strive for five and behave as if it were attainable" with a straight face and acted as if this were reasonable, not risible.

Similarly, I felt like I was being asked to try for that football.

At this point, I consider every performance review and self-evaluation to be an elaborate and shameful Kabuki routine I must execute while various entities in some star chamber play craps with my future.