Hacker News Reader

daniel-son 8k years ago, 17 women reproduced for every 1 man

If that were the case why did humans not evolve to have 17 times more female babies than male?

The chance of a billionaire having a son is 65%. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161014-why-billionaires...

daniel-son How (not) to apply for a software job

Isn't Canonical famous for having one of the worst candidate selection processes?

Also, there's a lot of superstition and nonsense about how to succeed at interviews and job applications.

daniel-son Why and when the Sahara Desert was green: new research

Same story for the Aral sea. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

daniel-son Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

Short answer:

A lot of desktop applications are built on web frameworks that ship with their own individual instance of Chrome to run.

On Windows 95 they were C/C++ (or equivalent, Delphi, etc.) and executing on the chip.

daniel-son Intel shows 8 core 528 thread processor with silicon photonics

https://youtube.com/@ServeTheHomeVideo?feature=shared

The YouTube channel for those who like me are too impatient to ever read.

daniel-son I am afraid to inform you that you have built a compiler (2022)

For those that needed to Google like me:

"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

daniel-son Tor is not just for anonymity (2022)

Is there any mechanism to control this in the UI? It seems like something users would want: exit from XYZ country.

daniel-son Generate RSS feed for any website using CSS selectors

You just need to use the same logic, syntax as CSS' selectors to pick out can ntent from the page. That's something a little different to CSS to style.

daniel-son Open Letter to Tim O’Reilly to Free the Perl Camel

Just draw a new camel and call it a day.

daniel-son Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)

Two sides to this. Author uses everyday life to describe the multiple layers of abstraction in software engineering. That's precisely the advantage of software: that abstraction is easier to construct—by simply writing down rules in text files—than mechanical engineering or other fields.

That said, author is not wrong. Reminds me of talks from Bob Martin about frameworks and software architecture. Summarised and linked (shameless self-plug) here: https://www.compilatrix.com/docs/framework-there-to-screw-yo...

daniel-son Ignore Microsoft’s whines about the Activision takeover. The CMA did its job

I don't mind the complaint about CMA being undemocratic because it's a council of unelected bureaucrats, it's just trash-talk from someone that didn't get what they wanted; to be expected.

IMO the reason why this decision is really dumb is because the reason given was cloud gaming.

I think that people are missing this.

This isn't a market. Almost nobody plays on cloud gaming platforms, like Stadia which recently closed down, or similar.

The idea of blocking a deal because maybe this technology will become much more popular one day and maybe Microsoft will be the success is IMO dumb. It's just a dumb argument.

Concerns about CoD and PlayStation at least make sense, but not given here.

daniel-son Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

I this similar to some of the smart mirror projects that exist?

daniel-son Ask HN: What questions do LMMs fail with?

New ideas

daniel-son XML Appliance

Is the reason because it made data exchange basically universal between languages?

Before XML you had random binary or text formats, so APIs were a lot of work?

Everything is Json now, but XML->Json is not that remarkable.

Why was it such a big deal?

daniel-son EA is laying off 6 percent of its workers

Surprise workplace mechanics.

daniel-son Big Business’s relentless push to equate the free market with freedom

Most people leave school able to perform basic arithmetic and to read and write. Almost nobody has a basic understanding of economics.

Go here and learn more about economics in 30 minutes than 99% of people.

https://mises.org/economics-beginners

daniel-son Britain’s biggest skills problem is that many firms don’t value them

Basically this. Companies go bankrupt or shrink in size if they do things like undervalue staff skills.

Stop rewarding bad behaviour with bailouts.

daniel-son Oracle is targeting users on Java compliance

Can someone ELI5 why people have to pay for Java licences if it's a free software product.

Is this only for Oracle's distribution of Java and would not apply if people are using OpenJDK?

daniel-son I_suck_and_my_tests_are_order_dependent

I think that your ordered tests are the setup.

daniel-son China’s police are ensnaring thousands of suspects abroad

One way you can push propaganda as an agent is not to promote something obviously bad, especially if you would never get away with it, but to criticise it less than it deserves.

Not saying it's happening in this case, but suppose you're the Economist and want to win favour with the Chinese. You might consider an article criticising this activity as infringing on the sovereignty of the west and others in the pursuit of justice, rather than in the pursuit of destroying political opposition.

daniel-son Gibson Research Corporation's Ultra-High Entropy Pseudo-Random Number Generator

What's wrong with Shieldsup? My experience is that it works perfectly fine.

daniel-son Why are online recipes so long-winded?

https://based.cooking/

The best recipe website on the internet.

Is the best and doesn't rank on Google specifically because it doesn't do what this article talks about.

daniel-son How does it know I want CSV? – An HTTP trick

The author uses Pandas as an example, but Pandas also has a great, built-in API to download and read HTML formatted tables in one line.

https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.read_htm...

daniel-son A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage – also found in backup system

Now if their ATC software ran on Emacs lisp they wouldn't have had any problem.

daniel-son So, what can you do with a process ID?

For a moment I thought the topic was about PID controllers. That would have been cool.

If the blogging gods take requests I just made one.

daniel-son Smartphones wiped out 97% of the compact camera market

Aren't all the things you described signs of good hardware?

daniel-son Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden

Stockfish variant that always plays the 2nd best move.

daniel-son The $205.4B Gulag

If employees hate their job so much, can't they just quit?

daniel-son My professor says I would not graduate my PhD, but I fulfilled all requirements

Murray Rothbard waited a decade to get his PhD. His supervisor didn't like his politics and never let him graduate. Rothbard had to sneak in and graduate after his supervisor left to join the Eisenhower administration.

I'm surprised that PhDs aren't further abused. Your multi-year investment can be taken away at any time on a whim at your supervisor's discretion. It's a great deal of discretionary power.

daniel-son In the 1990s a piece of Germany’s air traffic control software ran on Emacs

Also, IIRC Excel only ever had 256^2 max rows before .xlsx.