Hacker News Reader

dzolobon What John von Neumann did at Los Alamos (2020)

I wonder where in the fascist scale is an atomic bomb that actually got thrown to innocent people.

dzolobon A simple dice game shines a bit of light on the psychology of regret

But you also remove risk and regret (to some extent, at least).

dzolobon Learn CSS layout the pedantic way (2015)

In spanish, current translates to actual.

dzolobon 23andMe is reportedly turning the blame back on its customers

This “it’s their fault for sharing information” is a terrible externality/unaccountability argument. As a company, you are responsible for the safety and privacy of all your direct and indirect users. I don’t have a facebook, but I’m in there for sure, and it’s the company’s responsibility to protect my privacy.

I know this is not 23&me’s case, and sure, the front door keys weren’t stolen from them, but they allowed the whole museum to be robbed without triggering one alarm. If a bad actor gained access to my account, he/she would still need my device to deobfuscate card info or make transactions.

I mean, it’s a solved problem!

dzolobon 23andMe is reportedly turning the blame back on its customers

If you can be massively scraped while holding very sensitive data, you have a problem.

dzolobon Balancing engineering cultures: Debate everything vs. just tell me what to build

This is a great take.

In my limited experience, you have a real problem if the dev team hijacks what will be done and how it will be done. There is a good chance your product is going to be over-engineered, difficult to steer and all the minor but important details will never get done/corrected because hey, lets build another mammoth worthless (in business terms) functionality.

dzolobon Against Normalcy: Why Being Normal Can Be Dangerous

When I decided that I didn’t want to be normal. I didn’t do it intentionally. I didn’t wake up one day declaring, “I’m an idiot surrounded by other idiots!”

No, I started with identifying behaviors that were corrupting my life and then made a conscious decision to replace them with alternative activities. Activities that were meant to contribute to my life progression, instead of persisting in current endeavors that have confined me in a wretched abyss of mediocrity.

Oh, boy! An idiot among idiots? “corrupting” your life? Life progression? “Wretched abyss of mediocrity”?

I’m sorry to break it to you, but while you might have moved from “statistical normality”, you have become a linkedin meme, which is, in fact, the pinnacle of normal.

Long life to the struggles of the soul and the search of the heart. Beware of those who claim to have found a solution for the human condition based on such vain things as fitness, money or turning off the tv. Sure, take care of your body and your mind, find a more holistic way of being, but don’t be fooled into thinking that happiness or fulfillment is behind empty accomplishments that make you feel better than your friends, family and many other worthy human beings.

dzolobon Encouraging students to understand the 1D wave equation

Mathematician here, but I can also speak for the physicists in this regard. When we say “1d”, “2d” or “3d”, we refer to “space”, i.e. space dimensions. Those diagrams you refer to are called “space-time” diagrams, and reflect the situation in space (y-axis) at a given time (t-axis).

A first remark can be made here: the wave equation is not symmetric in space and time; as a consequence, space and time are fundamentally different (this is even more clear on the heat equation, where not only do we have space-time asymmetry, but also irreversibility). A second remark is that the wave equation is hyperbolic, meaning it has underlying geometrical objects called “characteristic curves”.

This “characteristics” are quite special, as are trajectories in space-time where the solution of the wave equation (the wave profile) looks constant. In the simplest of scenarios, this characteristics are straight lines in space-time (i.e. x-ct=const), and have the remarkable property of separating space-time.

For the wave equation, there are two characteristic curves: x-ct=const and x+ct=const. The first one represents a wave traveling forward in space and the second one represents a wave traveling backwards. Together, they form a “light-cone”, and break space-time into two: “space like” space-time (up and down regions of the cone) and “time like” space-time (left and right region of the cone). For every event in space-time, there is a light cone, and nothing “space like” can communicate with something “time like” without sending waves traveling faster than the wave equation’s propagating speed (commonly called “c”), but any wave traveling faster than “c” would break uniqueness of solutions (information paradoxes). Geometrically, this means that no two places, A and B, in space-time where t_A > t_B can communicate without sending signals traveling faster that the speed of propagation “c” and thus breaking uniqueness, hence no point in the future can speak with a point in the past, and this implies causality.

Adding more space brings even more structure: 3d wave equation “averages out” information, and 2d wave equation solutions lead to saturation of information.

It is remarkable that such a “basic” equation (linear, 1d, second order) can have so many properties, and that such properties go along very well with our experienced reality.

dzolobon Encouraging students to understand the 1D wave equation

The wave equation is a beautiful object. It gives rise to a transparent geometrical solution and within its simplicity it holds the secret to causality, even in 1d.

dzolobon Mixtral of experts

This wasn’t status quo. In fact, it can serve as an example. Why wouldn’t google or microsoft follow the same path with mistral? Being open source, it serves their purposes well.

dzolobon YouTuber sentenced to 6 months in prison for obstructing probe into plane crash

Plus, and I’m speculating here, there might be a breach of contract or tos here and there due to illegal activities, so he might even have to return some or all revenues.

dzolobon Infants understand language via rhythm and tone rather than individual sounds

I just sang, sang, sang anything that came to my mind. About mountains, clouds, courage, poo… It was just love pouring out of my heart, and I don’t know if it had something to do with it, but my kid started talking very early on and very well.

The best thing is was that I got to know him very soon, while my peers and their daughters/sons still were kind of communicating.

dzolobon How to ripen and store avocados

You just need to press it gently with all your fingers around the principal axis, not on the poles (as if your hand were a spider). If it feels hard, is not ready; if it feels soft, but not too soft, is ready. Also the color and the texture of the skin. Green means green, black and clear/bright + soft means ripe, black and opaque/wrinkled + too soft means overripe.

Source: I’m from Mexico.

dzolobon The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers

Legislative majority doesn’t mean government.

Why are you trying to justify occupation?

dzolobon Operating on a minimal two-core Postgres instance: Query optimization insights

These optimizations should be done regardless of db power. You don’t need an extra eng to do them, you just do them. They are part of the job.

dzolobon The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers

Hamas is not palestinian government, and whatever inhumane and condemnable actions they did does not justify the indiscriminate targeting of civilians.

While you’re trying to find equivalence, please don’t forget which people are being colonized and live in apartheid.

dzolobon The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers

Sure your existence is at threat.

Specially when your land is being taken, your houses are being bulldozed, your hospitals and schools bombed, and you deserve it because “you didn’t do anything to prevent becoming a human shield”, or should I say, because you are “an animal”.

dzolobon Why do people still use VBA?

You make very good points, but I think you miss the mark on shutting down intent.

You wouldn’t ignore an excel produced by a competent ceo or cfo (those that know all the shortcuts), so why, instead of helping ppl refactor and release their work properly, you gaslight them as incompetent just because they are not IT?

dzolobon IGN Top pc games of all time (2000)

I was nostalgic about X-COM: Ufo Defense, and I ran into part of my childhood.

25-21: https://www.ign.com/articles/2000/07/21/the-top-25-pc-games-...

20-16: https://www.ign.com/articles/2000/07/21/the-top-25-pc-games-...

15-11: https://www.ign.com/articles/2000/07/21/the-top-25-pc-games-...

10-6: https://www.ign.com/articles/2000/07/21/the-top-25-pc-games-...

dzolobon PostgreSQL Encryption: The Available Options

As for now, we only need equality operator, so we use deterministic encryption for deks and handle keks in vaults. Kek rotation is kind of a pain, so we index edeks in order to improve our queries, which basically build dynamic UNION ALL or IN statements.

I’m sure is not the most secure schema in the world, but it makes retrieval fast and most analytics can be worked out with dynamic query building, while making the db a scrambled mess for those with partial access.

I guess you could call it “Security by insanity.”

dzolobon PostgreSQL Encryption: The Available Options

We use traditional envelope encryption on a highly normalized base. At the end, only a few sensitive columns on a few sensitive tables get encrypted.

It’s kind of like a sparse matrix of encrypted vs. plain data, and works great for our scenario.

dzolobon Othello Is Solved?

Someday there might be a theorem. Something on the line of “for all nxn boards, a perfect game ends in a tie”.

dzolobon Othello Is Solved?

For those of you who think Othello is trivial, try Zebra.

Original author’s website: http://radagast.se/othello/

A github source: https://github.com/hoshir/zebra

dzolobon Othello Is Solved?

The thing I love about Othello is the contradiction between action and territory. While the game develops, playing your turn is in some sense against you, yet you must. Hence, you need to remain compact and inner while you occupy, until space becomes too small and its time to reclaim definite influence.

dzolobon 13 States join the IRS direct-file test after tax prep firms dropped the ball

In Mexico we have a quasi-blockchain quasi-smart_contract that gets signed and sent to the taxman every time an invoice is created.

This “contracts” are in xml format, require a private key to be signed, and are incredibly rich in catalogs and features.

They are massive: just last year, over 10^10 generated documents were reported.

Sure there is still a lot of informality, but in a matter of years not only will tax returns be automatically calculated for you to pay (this is already happening), but also p&l’s and balance sheets of small and big companies.

This all happens on almost real time, by the way.

dzolobon Psytrance Guide

Hallucinogen/Shpongle/AnyPosford is always top, along with Astral Projection and other household names, but at this time (I’m talking 99-04+, when I was knee deep) there where plenty of efforts by so many people that somehow ended as cds and were sold on psyshop [0]. Some acts got to release two or three records in one year, all full of original songs and an hour+ long.

Around that time, I became aware of 0day mp3 “scene”, and for some reason I became obsessed with getting all my psy/goa from scene releases. My day went back like this: check for weekly new releases on psyshop; monitor mp3 scene releases log dumps leaks on sites like mp3kings and others, and once the record was released, go hang on dc++ psyside, psyhub and other psy hubs and hit the search until someone appeared with the files. Then you could queue the files and idle until it got spread sufficiently or some “connected” user or admin was kind enough to grant you a slot.

My method worked so well that I started getting requests from top users and admins to grant slots to get the latest stuff. I guess xkcd describes it better [1].

Some of the acts that got my attention or i can remember are:

* Blue Planet Corporation * Phoney Orphans * Ticon * Son Kite * Flying Buddhas * Penta * Minilogue * Shiva Chandra * Shiva Shidappu * Astrix * Vibrasphere * Green nuns of the revolution * GMS * Talamasca * Total Eclipse * Astralasia * Cosma

…and I could keep goin.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200929135452/https://www.psysh...

[1] https://xkcd.com/1095/

dzolobon Psytrance Guide

Try finnish psytrance. Texas Faggott, Flying Scorpions,OOOT…

Suomisaundi psytrance is carzy.

dzolobon Psytrance Guide

Try Hallucinogen’s In Dub, and In Dub Live.

I once saw Simon in a massive rave as Hallucinogen from 4am to 8am and Shpongle from 12pm to 3pm. Those Gamma Goblins still travel trough my spine.

dzolobon Psytrance Guide

Oh, boy. This post sent me way back in time, and I just realized psyshop closed its doors in 2021.

It used to be my catalog for 0day psy mp3 to hunt in dc++ channels, where I used to hang for days, waiting for a slot to open.

I think I still have some of those releases, and I sure was able to get a good chunk of Psytopia catalog.

Dimension 5, Astral Projection, Infected Mushroom, Analog Pussy, Blue Planet Corporation, Mistery of the Yeti, Shiva Chandra…

I miss my Spirit Zone Records shirt.

dzolobon Developmental costs associated with early maternal withdrawal (2022)

First of all, cograts!

As father of a 4yo and a 2yo, the only thing I can confidently say is that if available/possible, they need their dad to be around as much as possible. With this in mind, try to find a solution that works for everybody in both the family front and the financial front, but that doesn’t mean they get cut off of your presence.

My 4yo wakes up very early in the morning just to be with me, and my 2yo stays late at night (for her hours) just to be with me.

I’m very happy for you. Having kids is a wonderful experience :)