HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

earthboundkid

6,536 karma · joined May 1, 2007

A beach bum based primarily out of Waikiki, the earthbound kid has cleverly deceived friends and acquaintances into believing her self-stylings as a would-be philosopher and raconteur at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
submissionscomments
earthboundkid··on The Rich and Powerful Want to Live Forever. What If They Could?
We don't even know how to get someone to be 130, but sure, let's waste time talking about this.
earthboundkid··on Operational issue – Multiple services (UAE)
In terms of deliberate attacks on a DC, an adversary that can bomb a blast resistant bunker can easily bomb the data lines going in and out, to say nothing of external power supplies. I guess you can at least repair the lines after the attack, but it's pretty easy to knock it offline if that's your goal. I just don't see the value in making a DC blast resistant compared to the huge costs.
earthboundkid··on Egyptian Hieroglyphs: Lesson 1
They are pretty well founded. You can read old rhyme dictionaries and see how the words evolved eg when borrowed by Japan at one time and then when borrowed again a couple of hundred years later. We can’t ever know 100% but it’s not idle speculation either.
earthboundkid··on Egyptian Hieroglyphs: Lesson 1
Different field, but it drives me crazy that people talk about Chinese philosophy and insist on using Mandarin pinyin for it. Mandarin is language that evolved from Classical Chinese thousands of years later! There are other, equally valid contemporary derived pronunciations like Cantonese or even Japanese and Korean. The reason to use Mandarin is because it is the most widely spoken language derived from Classical Chinese, but it's 100% not how Confucius or any of them spoke!
earthboundkid··on AI for my 10-year-old son
I've seen this movie. It's long and boring and ends with the blue fairy resurrecting Haley Joel Osment.
earthboundkid··on Why does target="_blank" have an underscore in front? (2024)
The main problem with frames is that you need to use JS to get it to be responsively sized. If they would fix that, frames would be perfect. They actually do what people just think Web Components do. I.E. they are actually isolated from the styles of the host page and have an actual security boundary preventing malicious execution.
earthboundkid··on Marsha P Johnson: A Chrome extension to highlight trans erasure
Impersonating a woman/man was a crime. See the intro to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X__VKNw0XiI&t=234s
earthboundkid··on All Kindles can now be jailbroken
My Kindle was bricked by an Amazon OTA update. Checkmate, atheists.
earthboundkid··on Do any languages specify package requirements in import / include statements?
You can do it using gofmt, by writing

gofmt -w -r '"github.com/abc/def" -> "github.com/abc/def/v2"' .

That won't do subpackages though.

earthboundkid··on Do any languages specify package requirements in import / include statements?
Python has None, which frequently caused me problems in production, so that's not different, except Go can at least tell between a string and nullable string pointer.

Reversing a string is not a basic operation. A) why would you ever need to do it in the real world? B) reversing Unicode is non-trivial due to composing characters. There are packages available for Go that implement grapheme segmentation. If you need it, you can import one.

earthboundkid··on The Myth of Bananaland
The Dole who took over Hawaii (Sanford Dole) was cousin to the pineapple company guy (James Dole). So, not the same guy, but also not unrelated either.
earthboundkid··on The two factions of C++
It's really important to be clear about the lessons to be learned from Python 3.

1. Forward compatibility is more important than backward compatibility. 2. Automated refactoring tools don't help with 1.

The problem wasn't that they broke a lot in Python 3. It was that you couldn't write your Python 2 in such a way as to be compatible with it until well into the transition process as the six package got popular and the devs fixed needlessly broken things in Python 2.

earthboundkid··on Hyrum's Law in Golang
I wrote "// Due to Hyrum's law, this text cannot be changed." AMA.
earthboundkid··on How gophers brought Mount St. Helens back to life in one day
> The Greek theoria (θεωρία) meant "contemplation, speculation, a looking at, things looked at", from theorein (θεωρεῖν) "to consider, speculate, look at", from theoros (θεωρός) "spectator", from thea (θέα) "a view" + horan (ὁρᾶν) "to see".

"Theory" should refer only to the beatific vision or its analogical precursors in temporal existence achieved through mystical union with the Uncreated Light!

earthboundkid··on Using SQLite as storage for web server static content
I'm continually going through this thought process:

1. I should make blog engine using flat files. That way I can diff the plain text.

2. But flat files are hard to read/write structured data from, so I should use SQLite instead.

3. But SQLite is hard to diff. GOTO 1.

earthboundkid··on Scientists working to decode birdsong
Yeah, I don't necessarily buy the whole Chomskian program. I'm willing to be persuaded that the reason kids learn to speak despite their individual poverty of stimulus is that there was sufficient empirically experience stimulus over evolutionary time. The Chomskian grammar stuff seems way too Platonic to be a description of human neuroanatomy. But be that as it may, it's clear the stimulus it takes to train an LLM is orders of magnitude greater than the stimulus necessary to train an individual child, so children must have a different process for language acquisition.
earthboundkid··on One Plus One Equals Two (2006)
She.
earthboundkid··on One Plus One Equals Two (2006)
一 + 一 = ニ.
earthboundkid··on One Plus One Equals Two (2006)
It could be Japanese beeper slang and mean Q.
earthboundkid··on One Plus One Equals Two (2006)
Wait, am I crazy for thinking relations are not sets? Two sets can be coextensive without the relation have the same intension, no? Like the set of all Kings of Mars and the set of Queens of Jupiter are coextensive, but the relations are different because they have different truth conditions. Or am I misunderstanding?
earthboundkid··on Scientists working to decode birdsong
Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument is, if anything, strengthened by LLMs. You need to read the entire internet to make statistical methods work at producing grammatical texts. Children don't read the entire internet but do produce grammatical texts. Therefore &c. QED.
earthboundkid··on Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations
I have hired for many positions over the years and never once asked for grades.
earthboundkid··on How do HTTP servers figure out Content-Length?
When I started my first job, I was like "Hey, these files don't have a closing ?>!!" and then my boss sighed.
earthboundkid··on The Lurker's Guide to Babylon5
When I lived in Hawaii I knew a person who was a recovering drug addict with unstable housing who had gotten enough money to come to Hawaii at one point but not enough to leave. It can happen.
earthboundkid··on Htmx, Raku and Pico CSS
You can’t remember a time that never existed.
earthboundkid··on 2.9B hit in one of largest data breaches; full names and SSNs exposed
If they aren't doing a credit pull, it's fine. If they are, you unfreeze for the month, but credit pulls hurt your credit. You shouldn't just do them randomly.
earthboundkid··on 1970 Clean Air Act was intended to cover carbon dioxide
The Constitution does not mention judicial review at all. Since it's ambiguous, it must be unconstitutional; therefore the Supreme Court must stop doing it. This is the same logic.
earthboundkid··on 1970 Clean Air Act was intended to cover carbon dioxide
If there's ambiguity, the Supreme Court should defer to the executive and let Congress pass a new law if they disagree. It doesn't make sense for the tie to go to inaction. We elect Presidents exactly so they can steer the executive in the direction we like! Requiring all three branches to agree (Congress passes the law, Executive actually does it, Court says it's okay) is a recipe for national paralysis.
earthboundkid··on 2.9B hit in one of largest data breaches; full names and SSNs exposed
You freeze your credit by making an account on TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax's websites. It sucks, and they suck, but it's free. Unless you take out loans quite frequently, there's no reason not to do it. My credit has been frozen for years, and I only ever unfreeze it for a month or two at a time when I need to refinance a mortgage or something like that.
earthboundkid··on Why is it so hard for the U.S. to build quality transit?
For Skyline, I don’t think you can discount all of the years of political effort to try to cancel it. All that work did was just to slow it down and make it more expensive and risky for the companies involved.

In theory, starting in West Oahu made sense because it’s cheaper to build out there, and TOD will grow the tax base to support the urban stations, but you have to actually build something for that to work.

Page 1 of 34Next →