Hacker News Reader

coldnoseon E621, Pornhub, and others block North Carolina residents

E621 isn’t even mentioned in the article, but of course it comes before pornhub in the title on HN X3

Hmm, single life isn’t so bad

coldnoseon Blue Origin is a ‘toxic’ workplace, some current and ex-workers claim in essay

I’m wary of these kinds of stories, where someone PR-savvy with a grudge lobs nebulous complaints against a company. Can anyone at BO without a grudge substantiate this “toxicness”?

coldnoseon Are animals more conscious than we are?

This seems like a trivial case of Betteridge’s law of headlines.

coldnoseon Deserializing Binary Data Files in Rust

For integer primitives, all possible values are valid. Just allowing binary initialization for structs that consist of integer types would allow compatibility with C structure. As it is, I have to either resort to unsafe code or manually deserialize every struct

coldnoseon Deserializing Binary Data Files in Rust

I really wish there was a safe way to initialize structs with arbitrary binary data in rust. Perhaps I'm missing something, but it seems intuitively safe, especially if the struct only contains integer primitives.

coldnoseon A virtual Apple Macintosh with System 8, running in Electron

Hear hear

coldnoseon [dead]

I'd feel better if the mob cited his lifetime of shittiness, rather than focusing on exactly one incident. My favorite was when he gloated over Steve Jobs' death the day after he died: http://stallman.org/archives/2011-jul-oct.html#06_October_20...

coldnoseon [dead]

I'm no fan of RMS, but it does seem cruel to oust him for just one of his (innumerable) faux pas.

coldnoseon The left-cradling bias and its relationship with empathy and depression

N=50

coldnoseon Tim Cook may have just ended Facebook

What an awful headline

coldnoseon 1991 Macintosh Quadra with Mac OS 8.1 as an Electron App

Like that GAN that simulates Pac-Man, this is an exciting new level of inefficiency I couldn't even conceive of a couple decades ago.

coldnoseon The stable marriage problem and modern dating

This is not the same point addressed in the post. The post references the 80/20 attractiveness bias. YetAnotherMatt is referencing a different phenomenon - that men rate women similarly to each other, whereas women rate men with much higher variance. See https://www.marketingcharts.com/demographics-and-audiences/m...

coldnoseon Chris Lattner to Lead SiFive Platform Engineering Team

https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/877341760812232704

coldnoseon SpaceX Is Going to Blow Up a Falcon 9 Rocket Just After Launch

It’ll blow up some time after the abort sequence, due to loss of active control at a relatively low altitude and relatively high speed. It’s not simulating an explosion as part of the test, AFAIK.

coldnoseon Slimbook collaborates with the PowerPC laptop

Oh how I miss big-endian...

coldnoseon Uptime 15,364 days – The Computers of Voyager [video]

Voyager 2's computer was reset in 2010:

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/details.php?article_id=16

It suddenly started returning corrupted frames. So engineers had it slowly transmit a core dump, and found a single flipped bit. To fix the problem, they "reset" the computer, which I assume means they rebooted it.

coldnoseon Making a RISC-V Operating System Using Rust

Rust is build around the expectation that allocations happen automatically and can never fail. I’m curious to see how they deal with this in a kernel...

coldnoseon Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “The Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal

> “The Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal

Oh, I assumed that it'd be safe after a couple decades...

coldnoseon Tardigrades can live 30 years in a freezer&survive in space, and now we know why

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12808

(This paper/article are from 2016, btw.)

coldnoseon Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden

Men are toxic and evil, and women are noble and put-upon —- what a fresh and interesting idea, why haven’t I heard about it before!

coldnoseon The perils of relying on output streams in C (2011) [pdf]

https://linux.die.net/man/2/write

coldnoseon Leave Gmail in 10 steps

If anyone's gone through this trouble already, care to explain how you did it? I've been thinking about rolling a VPS with postfix/dovecot, but it seems like such a hassle to maintain, and I'm not super confident in my ability to secure it.

coldnoseon Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

AFAIK, the ability to tolerate oxygen is an advanced property of terrestrial life — the simplest, oldest life forms were totally unable to survive in the presence of oxygen.

coldnoseon Study shows massive insect loss

Does anyone else find spicing up ordinary words with new cognates amusing? Super-researchers are ultraconcerned about hyperalarming insect megaloss.

coldnoseon Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?

After spending about a month of concerted effort pouring through the zlib sources, looking for vulnerabilities, I can say that zlib is the most astonishingly bug-free code I've ever seen. But in the conventional understanding of "code quality", it's pretty bad.

coldnoseon Don't learn Dvorak

I make this same argument all the time. I switched to Dvorak 15 years ago, and though it did vastly improve my typing speed by teaching me to touch-type, I don't know whether it's intrinsically faster. Mostly it's just an impediment now: I can't type on other people's QWERTY keyboards, and other people can't type on mine. For any computer I sit in front of, I have to hunt-and-peck QWERTY keys unless I can switch the layout.

coldnoseon Pointers Are More Abstract Than You Might Expect in C

Another example of arbitrary pointer comparison I'm familiar with is for resolving lock ordering problems. If I have a big set of locks that I need to take to complete a particular operation, a simple way to prevent deadlocking is to acquire those locks in the order of their pointers.

E.g. if I have three locks I need to take,

  lock_t *a = (lock_t *)0x100;
  lock_t *b = (lock_t *)0x300;
  lock_t *c = (lock_t *)0x200;

then I'll take them in order a, c, b;

coldnoseon Researchers Find Herpes Viruses in Brains Marked by Alzheimer's Disease

>> "We mapped out the social network, if you will, of which genes the viruses are friends with and who they're talking to inside the brain," Dudley says. In essence, he says, they wanted to know: "If the viruses are tweeting, who's tweeting back?"

Finally, a relatable metaphor for millennials like me!

coldnoseon Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

I concede it's possible that saboteurs are operating within Tesla, but lashing out at invisible enemies sends a strong "crazy" signal. Elon has been sending a lot of crazy signals lately...