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fbdab103

4,595 karma · joined October 9, 2022

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fbdab103··on Injuries with Electric vs. Conventional Scooters and Bicycles
It is not obvious to me that this is correcting for the differences in bicycle vs escooter users? Or the total number of users over time.

By and large I expect someone riding a bicycle to be fitter than the average bear. In contrast, someone using an escooter could have any possible composition: slim/obese, young/old, safe/reckless. The increasing popularity of scooters also means that the absolute number of people has likely risen from a decade ago.

fbdab103··on Show HN: Semantic Grep – A Word2Vec-powered search tool
I might have a work use case for which this would be perfect.

Having no experience with word2vec, some reference performance numbers would be great. If I have one million PDF pages, how long is that going to take to encode? How long will it take to search? Is it CPU only or will I get a huge performance benefit if I have a GPU?

fbdab103··on Texas woman gets 15 years for stealing $109M from Army to buy mansions, cars
Fraud against private companies happens all the time as well. There was an infamous case about a guy who sent fake $100+ million total invoices to Facebook, Google, etc[0]. If they had just stopped after a single interaction, probably would have gotten away with it free and clear.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2019/03/25/706715377/man-pleads-guilty-t...

fbdab103··on Managarm: Pragmatic microkernel-based OS with asynchronous I/O
Is the kernel really the differentiator there? seL4 is a Proven microkernel that is some 9000 lines of C. This ancient SO post[0] claims Linux is 140k lines. The kernel is just a tiny component of the many things required to get an OS up and running. I suspect most projects just peter out as the enormity of the complexity becomes apparent.

[0] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/223746/why-is-the-l...

fbdab103··on The secret of Minecraft (2014)
Especially when the goto gaming wiki site host is straight-up internet cancer.
fbdab103··on The secret of Minecraft (2014)

  Nah. Microsoft did a great job handling Minecraft imo.
I am still peeved that my lifetime license "mysteriously" broke during Microsoft's account transitions. Trillion dollar company lacks the manpower and technical capability to handle it? Or someone cannot be arsed to maintain "freeloader" customers.
fbdab103··on Adobe exec compared Creative Cloud cancellation fees to 'heroin'
Every F500 company with historical Oracle installations built before the open source offerings were actually competitive. Even if every one of those decided today they were going to ditch Oracle, you are talking about multi-year initiatives.
fbdab103··on Maglev titanium heart inside the chest of a live patient
Why does the article not say how much that thing weighs? It looks hefty, though I suppose a human heart is also probably dense.
fbdab103··on Courts Close the Loophole Letting the Feds Search Your Phone at the Border
Is this then a done deal? Or can the Supreme Court somehow decide there was a half-sentence in a Federalist Paper which argued the opposite and invalidate the ruling?
fbdab103··on US solar production soars by 25 percent in just one year
You were not kidding. On the front page of this moment is "14,000 3v Lithium CR2032 Coin Batteries" held in two barrels with a weight of 200 pounds. A tremendous bargain, if you can snatch it at the current bid of $20.
fbdab103··on Applied Machine Learning for Tabular Data
For 4, I would always start with RF. You have fewer knobs to turn (aka degrees of freedom with which to hang yourself), but still get within spitting distance of XGBoost.
fbdab103··on US solar production soars by 25 percent in just one year
One company is trying the approach of placing the panels flat on the ground[0]. So long as you put a fence around it to stop local wildlife from crushing them, seems easy enough. Maybe give it a monthly sweep if it is more prone to collecting debris.

[0] https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/texas-solar-farm-flat-on-the-...

fbdab103··on US solar production soars by 25 percent in just one year
Half of the US voting population is still cheering cries of, "Drill baby drill". There are significant entrenched interests who are fighting renewable development wherever possible. It is only because the economics of solar panels have gotten too good to ignore that things are proceeding.
fbdab103··on Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
That the oven timer is oven adjacent seems a must.
fbdab103··on Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
Incredibly common in the US as well to use different units per item. All the better because our garbage measuring system can make unit switches significantly trickier.
fbdab103··on Bubble Sort: An archaeological algorithmic analysis (2003) [pdf]
I do not understand why people act as if demonstrating bubble sort is going to forever taint minds and lead to disaster. When I was sitting in CS101 (or...probably data structures?), the professor was asking how you would sort an array. I "invented" bubble sort on the spot. Doubtless I was one of many who would have done the same.

Is it useful for any scenario? No, but you have to start somewhere, and might as well teach an algorithm that students are naively going to attempt on their own so you can note how terrible it is.

fbdab103··on A (not so) small library for terminal based game development
Games are notorious for vendoring a dependency and never upgrading it again. If you use an internal API, it is not like you are forced to be on the upgrade treadmill where the sands suddenly shifted and the secret API does something different.
fbdab103··on Linux Hardening Checklist
From the link, suggestion to set hostname to `localhost`

That is probably fine, but it makes me feel uneasy. Something has to break if you do that, right?

fbdab103··on Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
Practically nothing in Latex comes out of the box. Sure, you can bang out markdown-esque formatted text, but the moment you need something more complicated, say URLs, graphics, resize the margins, etc you are likely going to be pulling in a package.

No true scotsman and all that, but I suspect few documents in the wild are bare Latex.

fbdab103··on Why didn't Rome have an industrial revolution?
Better than that, the printing press is a stupid simple idea that could have been invented basically as soon as you had writing. Wooden printing blocks were used for hundreds of years before the press. As soon as someone had the idea to use it for letters, you could have a functional (if crude) press after a few iterations. Bootstrapping widespread literacy with cheap reading materials.
fbdab103··on Radxa X4 low-cost, credit card-sized Intel N100 SBC goes for $60 and up
The article shows a related model with a passive heatsink bolted onto it. The heatsink roughly doubles the volume of the thing, but passive seems possible. If nothing else, the spec sheet says it can go up to 60C.
fbdab103··on Vulnerable transistors threaten to upend Europa Clipper mission
On one hand, it must be baller to work on assembling spacecraft. On the other, wearing those gowns all day must be terrible.
fbdab103··on China installing the wind / solar equivalent of 5 nuclear power stations a week
From the sustainability link:

  High coal prices mean that most coal plants in China are operating at a loss. In 2018, almost 50% had a net financial loss.2 Things have only gotten worse: data from the China Electricity Council suggests that more than half of its large coal firms made a loss in the first half of 2022.
  ...
  China is offering ‘capacity payments’ to power plants to keep them online. This provides plants with a source of income even when they’re not being used. Some project that by the end of the decade many coal plants will be making more money from not running than actually producing power. This seems credible if we look at the tumbling capacity factors expected from S&P over the next few decades.
If this were America, I would say this is a grift that an enterprising VC was trying to lock in as many government fixed price contracts as possible to secure guaranteed income for a plant that nobody wants to run. Build plant without any intention of running it just to collect the capacity payment checks.
fbdab103··on How do jewellers capture every last particle of gold dust? (2017)
It is a global market, why in the day of the internet, would someone cut you a 30% margin? There might be some hassle crossing international borders, but gold is not generally illegal where there is an outsized risk in moving it.
fbdab103··on How do jewellers capture every last particle of gold dust? (2017)
So, resale market on stones is trash. What is to stop an intrepid jeweler from purchasing grandma's/ex-spouse's/whatever's precious jewelry for 10 cents on the dollar, and reselling it back into circulation as "new"? Maybe with a perfunctory shaving off a face to make a "new" item. Or is this already regularly done (as I would assume)?
fbdab103··on How do jewellers capture every last particle of gold dust? (2017)
I am intrigued at how much thought went into "copper". Was the thinking that everyone's eyes would glaze over at such a common material? My initial reaction would be to use a different rare element. However, a rare element might draw more scrutiny to the casual observer. Then again, the potential for confusion is incredibly high. Interesting spycraft.

Supposedly the opsec at the Manhattan Project was so good, significant portions of the workforce had no idea on what they were laboring. Post war interviews thought the facility was all a sham, dedicated to nothing but medical testing.

fbdab103··on New insights into transcription factors and chromatin remodeling
It is a really fair question, and I do not think it is totally clear cut. There are some cancers which are significantly more treatable than previously, but the numbers are also getting juiced from other directions.

We are detecting cancers earlier than before. Which can mean that, without any change in treatment efficacy, people are "surviving longer" with the disease. Another biggie is that people are smoking significantly less than 20+ years ago (both smokers and secondary exposure). While we are continually finding new ways to slowly poison ourselves (eg PFAS), we have also reduced exposure to other environmental toxins: lead paint/gas, DDT, etc,

fbdab103··on Rye: A Hassle-Free Python Experience
The author's resume already stands above most. I think this is solving a real problem.

Even the PSF, which frustratingly does not take a stance on the matter, is somewhat considering a very similar idea in PyBI.

fbdab103··on Making my own wedding rings
In 2014[0], someone stole the German Defense Minister's fingerprint from a picture. We are well past the point where you can assume your biometrics are secure.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2014/12/29/german_minister_finge...

fbdab103··on First anode-free sodium solid-state battery
Not sure it is a 1:1 equivalent, but this site[0] claims global chromium production is at 41 million metric tons while lithium is 180,000 metric tons. So, the supply chain already exists.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/598320/mine-production-o...

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