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cpascal

811 karma · joined October 28, 2019

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cpascal··on Ukraine's autonomous killer drones defeat electronic warfare
Machines have been making kill-or-no-kill decisions for decades, and they were a lot more indeterminant. Heat-seeking missiles largely kill whatever is hot. Proximity fuses in WW2 detonated whenever they got near something. Anti-personal mines kill whenever pressure is applied. A CIWS will target things that get too close to it that don't identify IFF. Naval mines kill if something magnetic is near them.

At the end of the day, it's still humans deploying these weapon systems and accepting the risk that they might cause unintended casualties.

cpascal··on Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal
So how would this work? Does this mean Microsoft will build a directly connected data center nearby?

Or is Microsoft just buying power from the plant's owner on the energy market?

cpascal··on Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
This isn't always possible, though. You could grow up with parents and teachers who do not push you to study. Perhaps you are malnourished or abused. Having the environment and support to study hard is something not all students have. You cannot hand wave studying as the solution to the disparity in educational outcomes.
cpascal··on Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
I think universities can probably come up with a different set of non-protected criteria to lift underrepresented communities out of social/financial oppression. This might even provide greater access to some equally needing students that are looked over by racially-based criteria. In a perfect world, everyone would have equal opportunity and support throughout their primary education, and college admission could be much more merit-based. Unfortunately, that is not the country we live in and there is little appetite to invest in ensuring all Americans have access to high-quality primary education.
cpascal··on The teens behind the Mirai botnet
I was a Rutgers student when this was happening. I recall some final assignments and exams getting canceled when they attacked the Rutgers network.

When the news broke about the perpetrators behind Mirai and specifically the Dyn attack, I was shocked that such a high-impact attack originated from one of my classmates in the CS department.

cpascal··on Graviton 3, Apple M2 and Qualcomm 8cx 3rd gen: a URL parsing benchmark
There's probably some virtualization overhead on the c7g.large, right?
cpascal··on U.S. proposes 56% vehicle emissions cut by 2032, requiring big EV jump
I really want an EV, but they don't work for me. I live in an urban area and park on a city street. EV ownership would add a lot of complications to my life due to the current state of charging infrastructure.

I think EV adoption will eventually plateau until we solve overnight charging for cars parked on city streets or there is a large increase in rapid charging availability and speed.

cpascal··on The 83B Election
What's the reasoning by the IRS to not refund you if for some reason you do not receive the shares you are paying taxes early on?
cpascal··on Maersk/IBM to discontinue TradeLens, a blockchain-enabled global trade platform
You still have to trust that data was recorded into a blockchain correctly/faithfully.

So you can never truly remove trust. I'm not sure a immutable ledger is any more useful than a database if there is still some sort of required trust component.

cpascal··on Everything in Tech Seems to Be Collapsing at Once
> Ten years from now, looking back on the 2022 tech recession, we may say that this moment was a paroxysm of scandals and layoffs between two discrete movements.

The author is suggesting the first "movement" was the "browser era, the social-media era, and the smartphone-app-economy era".

It seems they think the next era will vaguely have something to do with AI.

What do HN'ers think the next "movement" will be (if any)?

cpascal··on Ask HN: Anyone go through Montessori education until age 12 (end of grade 6)?
I was in Montessori through kindergarten. I do remember feeling a bit disadvantaged socially when I entered 1st grade in a conventional school.

Most of the other students had done kindergarten at my new school and already knew each other. I did eventually make friends, but I always felt like a bit of an outsider since I didn't have that shared kindergarten experience with my peers.

I imagine this would only get worse the longer a child stays out of the conventional schooling system.

cpascal··on Plastic recycling remains a 'myth': Greenpeace study
I often wonder if it is currently more environmentally responsible to dispose of plastics in the trash rather than the recycling. If we can't recycle plastic or it ends up in the ocean/waterways, then landfill seems like a better alternative.
cpascal··on A man’s lonely fight to ban private jets
Air travel contributes to about 2.5% of greenhouse gas emissions and is responsible for about 3.5% of anthropogenic warming [1]. In my opinion, there is an outsized amount of public outrage going on and we should be directing this outrage toward larger sources of anthropogenic warming. There is only so much people can take before they get fatigued. "Spending" this outrage on something that is only 3.5% of the problem seems wasteful.

[1]: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-the-growth-in-gr...

cpascal··on Rust on Espressif chips – 15-07-2022
There's also the ESP32-C3-DevKitC-02 [0] which you can do the trainings with albeit making sure you mind that the pinouts are slightly different.

[0]: https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32c...

cpascal··on Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
> The solution is always, always, having (building) more supply than the demand, yet nobody seems to get it.

It is easy to hand wave "more building supply", but that's a medium to long term solution. What do we do in the short term?

Are we supposed to just allow landlords to hike people's rent anywhere between 10-40% year-over-year forcing them to be displaced?

There needs to be some middle ground.

cpascal··on Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
Seems pretty easy to enforce. Fine Airbnb for each listing in violation of the law.
cpascal··on Ask HN: What are you using to manage in your team the projects/features?
We do a similar thing. Engineering tracking is done through AZDO, but roadmap management is done in another tool with some sort of integration between the two.
cpascal··on Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2022
I probably take more guidance from blog articles and GitHub issue comments than I do from StackOverflow. I think this started to happen for me around 2015/2016. I'm not sure though if that's a function of me requiring more niche/targeted guidance, or StackOverflow no longer capturing as much knowledge as it once did.
cpascal··on Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
It might be the Pi wearing out the SD card. The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 [1] actually has a PCIe Gen 2 x1 socket.

Jeff Geerling (who's active on HN) has actually gotten SATA working [2] through the Compute Module 4 and the Compute Module 4 IO Board [3].

If you go his route you could potentially set up a Pi with more durable storage. Although, if you watch Jeff's video its a PITA getting SATA working as he had to recompile the kernel with SATA support. Also its pretty hard to get the Compute Module 4 and the IO board at the moment.

[1]: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-4-io-boa...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSx1BRwz1bs

[3]: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-4/

cpascal··on Campbell Soup turned New Jersey into a tomato-growing state
It is really a shame that most people's experience of NJ is only the Turnpike and the refineries around EWR.
cpascal··on More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
I'm glad that there is much more awareness and consideration around cost.

When I was in high school and applying to colleges around 2011, the advice given to us was to not take cost too seriously. Many authority figures (like high school counselors) told my peers and I to, "follow your heart" or "go where you think you'll fit in best".

On top of that, student loans and interest rates where not explained to us very well. Very few of us understood that borrowing 160k-200k to go to an out-of-state/private school could very well mean you were signing up for a lifelong debt.

Looking back, its insane we could make such a life altering/hindering decision with so little oversight from the "adults".

cpascal··on Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
Yes, the live-stream showed a MacBook Pro connected to many monitors
cpascal··on MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch
It seems the era of few ports, gimmicky keyboards, and thinness over function in MacBooks is over.
cpascal··on The 5-Hour CDN
> DNS: Run trick DNS servers that return specific server addresses based on IP geolocation. Downside: the Internet is moving away from geolocatable DNS source addresses. Upside: you can deploy it anywhere without help.

Can anyone expand on how/why "the Internet is moving away from geolocatable DNS source addresses"?

cpascal··on PG&E will bury 10k miles of power lines so they don't spark wildfires
I'm interested what would cause underground cables to break more often. Is it people not "calling before you dig" and accidentally severing them or is it something else?
cpascal··on River Runner: drop a raindrop anywhere in the USA, watch where it ends up
Depending on where you placed that drop in Colorado it also could've ended up in the Pacific. The continental divide is in Colorado and all water west of the divide will eventually drain into the Pacific and all water east will drain to the Atlantic.

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

cpascal··on 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning
It's the "frunk".

Here's a picture: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/dTXcXTNslbGIJam0Wy9BRhk_I80=...

cpascal··on The Nixon Seminar with Peter Thiel
This is unrelated to the actual content of Thiel's remarks, and perhaps I'm just oblivious/ignorant.

Why would anyone want to associate themselves with anything to do with Nixon? It's surprising prominent figures would want any association to Nixon and his disgraced legacy. I think overall its peculiar how much influence and esteem Nixon managed to retain after his resignation.

cpascal··on Popular Intel WiFi card broken on Linux (AX200)
I have a NUC10 that experiences very similar Bluetooth issues, but it has the AX201. I wonder if this isn’t just contained to the AX200.
cpascal··on 50 Years of Pascal
Pascal was the first language where programming clicked for me. Pascal also happens to be my given last name, which makes it just a bit more special to me.

Funnily enough I learned Pascal using Turbo Pascal which makes me sound older than I am, because I learned Pascal around 2010 and my high school's CS department was just way behind the times. By that point we were using a nearly 20 year-old 16 bit compiler in Windows XP.

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