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cdirkx

446 karma · joined December 31, 2017

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cdirkx··on Show HN: How far do I have to go to run into 100k people?
Somehow I was able to place a pin in Quebec, which resulted in a ray of 2058 miles to the USA northwest
cdirkx··on Show HN: A site where people pay me money for no reason
I did immediately consider setting up a prediction market willpayfornoreasonpayout.com
cdirkx··on 1k Data Breaches Later, the Disclosure Lag Is Worse
It doesn't even need to be government-run, we just need the right incentives. I've seen proposals for making some kind of data loss insurance mandatory to compensate victims. The insurance companies would then conduct audits which determine the premiums for the company, and investigate for negligence after a breach.

Edit: Thinking more about it, this would probably also be positive for security investigators. If a company is stonewalling you and ignoring a legitimate bug report, you now have the option to escalate this to the insurer. Maybe they could even facilitate bug bounty programs for smaller companies

cdirkx··on Embedded Rust or C firmware? Lessons from an industrial microcontroller use case
Yes, they are immutable. It's only possible to "yank" a specific version, which will prevent new dependencies, but it will still be available for download for existing dependencies.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/commands/cargo-yank.html

cdirkx··on Fire Shuts GTA 6 Developer Rockstar North, Following Report of Explosion
The argument is that Silksong will completely absorb any potential market for you new indie game had during that period. People will be too busy playing another game, leading to poor numbers during launch. It's hard to recover from that.
cdirkx··on You are the scariest monster in the woods
The problem is that technology exponentially increases the negative effects of bad actors. The worst a sociopath could do in the stone age was ruin his local community; while today there are many more dystopian alternatives.
cdirkx··on Ask HN: Code should be stored in a database. Who has tried this?
I don't think this is unique to code, but a limitation of filesystems in general. You could make the same argument for photos: I want them sorted by date, by tag, by person in the image, by location.

I can do this in Lightroom or my "Photo" app, but then you are always reliant on some third-party tool. It would be nice if there was some native way for files to not have to commit to a single hierarchy, but able to switch views on the fly (without it being insanely slow for larger amount of files).

cdirkx··on Scammers Steal $1T a Year – Mostly from Americans
By explicitly being obviously a scam, scammers can preselect for the most gullible people
cdirkx··on What makes code hard to read: Visual patterns of complexity (2023)
Quite some years back I worked with JetBrains MPS which used a "projectional editor" instead of a text editor. It was pretty neat to be able to enter "code" as mathematical expressions, or even state machine tables or flow diagrams with actual nodes instead of a text representation.

Sadly not much has happened in that space since then, but it was cool to think about what our tools of the future might look like. (of course ignoring all the practical reasons why we're probably still using regular text files in 100 years)

cdirkx··on Nuclear fusion: WEST beats the world record for plasma duration
As a secondary effect it kind of is; the general assumption still is that the slop-generating AI will need a lot of power to train, so there is surprisingly a lot more private investment into fusion and fission innovation in recent years.
cdirkx··on 'Shoe doping' changed marathon times in ways we still don't understand
Training was considered to be "bad sportmanship" in the early days of soccer, when it was amateur gentlemen sport clubs playing against each other.
cdirkx··on Show HN: ts-remove-unused – Remove unused code from your TypeScript project
The "install -y" pattern is kind of similar. Various tools have as a default that it gives a list of packages that would be installed, and then ask for confirmation.
cdirkx··on Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla
A couple of years ago there were news articles that the pentagon has a "lasers that can identify people in a crowd from 200m away based on their heart rate signatures".

No idea if that's true or overblown, but it doesnt seem unlikely that such technology becomes possible in the future.

cdirkx··on Compile-time JSON deserialization in C++
Nah I've seen this happen IRL. In this system "configuration" was read out of tables in a word document, processed via XSLT transformations and eventually it would spit out a huuuuge single C# document (recent "improvement", before that it was some obscure licenced language). Builds happened overnight because they took so long, and there was no way to test something locally.

The "advantage" of this system was that there was no need for programmers, as there was "no code", just configuration!. This was supposed to allowed "domain experts" without programming knowledge to work with the system. However a month long training by the creator of the system was still required, as he had to explain which of the 7 boolean types you should use if you wanted to add a new column 0.o (for those who want to know, there was true/false, 0/1, yes/no, true/false/unknown, true/false rendered as a toggle, true/false rendered as a checkbox...)

cdirkx··on Effective Rust (2021)
I agree LaTeX has it's uses, but... markdown can also do this trivially. See for example the Rust Book [1], and `cargo test` automatically runs example code in markdown doccomments.

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/ch01-02-hello-world.ht...

cdirkx··on Chick Fil A's Edge Enterprise Architecture
It sound a lot better than what we had when I worked at a fastfood restaurant: every location remote desktoping to some overloaded server in the regional office, so simple things like printing an inventory list would involve a lot of waiting.
cdirkx··on Ask HN: What games are you having fun with?
I have put a ton of hours into Crusader Kings III. It is less complicated than other grand strategy games, but the real fun is leaning into the generative story aspect and roleplaying as your family throughout generations.

It also has a great modding scene, as most of the game logic is defined in text files in a custom scripting language. If you learn a bit about the language it is very easy to get into, you can just edit files in a text editor and the game will automatically live reload and apply your changes.

cdirkx··on After 50 years, Michael Heizer is finally ready to unveil City, his life's work
One of the reasons 'City' is notable, is because it is just so big.

The first time I heard about was in a video "Monumentality" [1], which explores why humans throughout history have tried to make monuments; big things, skyscrapers, pyramids etc.

Michael Heizer will die one day, as will we all. But by its nature of being a huge complex made of rocks and dirt, 'City' will continue to stand for thousands of years probably.

[1]https://youtu.be/bwGKqiOyIAM&t=46m43s

cdirkx··on Old jokes
"What is yellow and if you get it in your eye you die?"

"A train" (context, in the Netherlands all the large intercity trains are yellow)

cdirkx··on Olbers' Paradox
From a mathmatical perspective: does the assumption that "any line of sight from Earth must end at the surface of a star" hold? There are countable infinite number of stars, and uncountable number of places in the night sky (I think?). Can a sphere be covered by a countable infinite number of points?
cdirkx··on It looks like you’re trying to take over the world
Your body and genetics, it takes a really long time to evolve a different body (thousands of generations), but it takes very little time to update culture (couple of generations).
cdirkx··on Mojang to Require a Microsoft Account to Play Minecraft
I'm in a similar situation. From what I could find the easiest way to resolve the issue is to report the original transaction ID [1], if you still have access to it.

They list the instructions for PayPal:

> The PayPal transaction ID is a seventeen-character alphanumeric code: 1AB23456C7890123D

> To locate this transaction ID, log into your PayPal account and find the ID in your transaction history. If you no longer have access to your PayPal account, or if you made a purchase that doesn’t appear in your transaction history, you must contact PayPal to request the ID.

[1] https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360029977371-Wh...

cdirkx··on Scotland's Hate crime bill: Hate talk in homes ‘must be prosecuted’ (2020)
Why doesn't it make sense? I believe emotions do play a role in the courts. A criminal doesn't get punished for nothing, they get punished _so they don't commit the same crime again_.

Judges take emotions into account to determine how likely the criminal is to repeat the offence. Was this a one-off incident, or are you ready to start assaulting disabled people again the moment you get out of jail.

cdirkx··on An unsolicited streaming app spec
I agree with almost everything, but was curious about

> Skip to the beginning or the end of the video.

What critical use does skipping to the end of a video have?

cdirkx··on German gov plans software company's liability for damages caused by vulns
How is this different from saying "We shouldn't cross bridges that we haven't vetted as structurally sound."? I don't expect everyone to have an architectural degree, as well as the time and resources to verify everything without access to the building plans.
cdirkx··on In defense of flat earthers (2020)
With flat-earthers, anti-5G, anti-vaxxers etc. I have always thought about it like the efficiency-stability tradeoff: From a "survival of the group" perspective, it is usefull risk-spreading to have a small percent of your population act different from everybody else, against the current wisdom. It is of course not the most efficient, but if some unforseen catastrophe happens (e.g. the new 6G update accidentally makes everyone sterile) not everything will collapse and at least a few contrarians might survive.
cdirkx··on €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP
> Because the book remains on-chain, the book does not die, but crosses the boundary of physical to digital.

It reminds me of the video game SOMA, where people upload a brain-scan of themselves to live on after some catastrophe, essentially making a digital copy of their consciousness. But because they are also still physically alive, they see the digital version of themselves as a clone, someone else. To "complete the transition", they decide they must end their lives at the exact moment the scan is complete.

cdirkx··on _Application.Run(Object, Object, Object, Object, Object, Object, Object, Object
Knowing who is related too closely to you can be a problem on a small island, the comment was possibly referencing the Icelandic dating-app that tracks if you share a grandparent with someone you meet in a bar[1]; a feature the app itself calls a "Sifjaspellsspillir", or "Incest Spoiler".

Interestingly the article mentions that this is a problem precicely because of the Icelandic naming scheme:

> Neither patronymic or matronymic, instead each person's father's first name becomes the child's last name. Each new generation has a completely different name to the name of the generation that preceded it. Cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews -- all could have very different names.

[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/iceland-incest-app

cdirkx··on A single line of code made a 24-core server slower than a laptop
The code shown in the article isn't Rust, but Rune [0], which has similar syntax, but is a dynamic scripting language. It has template literals [1].

[0] https://rune-rs.github.io/

[1] https://rune-rs.github.io/book/template_literals.html

cdirkx··on Italy fines Amazon record $1.3B for abuse of market dominance
The parent probably meant that Amazons market share is much higher in the US than in the EU [1], meaning that in the EU there is thus more competition.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1183515/amazon-market-sh...

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