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filmfact

59 karma · joined July 8, 2017

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filmfact··on Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?
I just stared at a globe, and it’s possible, but not from a geostationary orbit.

Think about a hemisphere projected onto a 2d circle - you can see all points on the surface of the hemisphere on the projection.

Logically it must be possible to select a hemisphere, such that any two random points on a sphere lie on that hemisphere, and would thus be visible in the projection.

The only edge cases is two points that are diametrically opposite - i.e north and south pole, which would only both be visible at infinite distance.

Points nearly diametrically opposed would only be visible from extreme distance.

This doesn’t take into account inconvenient mountains, but they can easily be moved.

filmfact··on FBI used Etsy, LinkedIn to make arrest in torching of Philadelphia police cars
But do you agree it would be a bad shooting if you subtract the taser?
filmfact··on FBI used Etsy, LinkedIn to make arrest in torching of Philadelphia police cars
>>> If anyone else had done the same, I have no doubt it'd end the same way.

But isn’t that the problem though? Shouldn’t police only use deadly force in the face of an imminent objectively reasonable deadly threat?

Someone running away from you with a taser doesn’t constitute that threat.

The reason the cop shot was pure ego. Him and his buddy just had their ass handed to them, and now the guy was getting away.

filmfact··on My adventures in random data compression
Lets restructure the problem slightly, so the objection is clearer.

Instead of binary data, think of decimal numbers. We’ll take a five digit number and compress using function f to a four digit one.

We could come up with many different ways of doing this, but lets just throw away the most significant digit.

F(00123) = 0123 F(01234) = 1234

Great - but now what happens with a five digit number?

F(12345) = 2345

We lose information. We can’t encode the fifth digit in any of the other digits because that would change their meaning.

It should be evident that there is no scheme where you can encode a five digit number as a four digit number without either being lossy:

For some X: F’(F(X)) != X

Or having undefined ranges i.e. F’(F(X)) = X, only where digit 5 = 0

Increasing the number of digits just obfuscates the problem by moving it from the realm of numbers, where it’s clear there can be no 1-1 bi-directional mapping between two sets of unique numbers where the cardinality of the sets is not equal, to the realm of ‘data’ where we can confuse the issue.

At the end of the day, a function that only takes 2^(1015 * 8) Unique input values can have at most 2^(1015 * 8) unique outputs. And while thats a lot of outputs, it’s far fewer than 2^(1024 *8) that you need to represent to be able to compress any random input.

Ill leave you with a quote from Oscar Wilde: “A true friend stabs you in the front, not the back”

filmfact··on My adventures in random data compression
Exactly.

A more specific objection is that the ‘pigeonhole principle‘ applies.

Another way of looking at it is reducing it to absurdity: if it worked, you could repeatedly apply such a compression scheme until you are left with just a single bit representing the original data.

filmfact··on Christopher Tolkien has died
Checkout this talk by Brandon Rhodes - it explains the context in which the Hobbit and LoTR were written in. I won’t spoil it, but I think it’ll answer your question.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qVlqBxpCG24

It’s also, coincidentally, the best talk I’ve ever seen on code reviews.

filmfact··on Ask HN: What do you know about bitemporal databases?
Thanks - I hadn’t come across the exclusion ranges in postgresql before - I’d need to take a look at how it works in practice.
filmfact··on Ask HN: What do you know about bitemporal databases?
Best to use a database with native bi-temporal support, a query planner can get very confused about tables with bi-temporal columns and few constraints, to the extent that it always fails to push the temporal conditions up through the joins resulting in massive unnecessary materialization.

Also - start thinking about archiving now - n lg n is fast at the start - two years later, not so much.

Good luck

filmfact··on The falling price of a TV set
Blooms 2 Sigma problem [1] suggests that while it is cheaper to get access to the material, you’ll do better if taught by an expert tutor.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

filmfact··on Nebraska farmers vote overwhelmingly for Right to Repair
>>> Windows 7 was supported with security updates for over 10 years (2009-2020). Second to only Windows XP (13 years)

So basically forever = 10 years as far as you are concerned? I have an elixir of immortality that you might be interested in.

filmfact··on U.S. Supreme Court keeps ruling barring prosecution for sleeping in public
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_asylum
filmfact··on Invaders game in 512 bytes
Well to be fair to the 2600 - the ibm bios brings a fair few kilobytes of code to the fight.
filmfact··on The Bloom Clock
Isn’t this a hyperloglog?
filmfact··on Serenity: x86 Unix-like operating system for IBM PC-compatibles
Quick and dirty
filmfact··on Gameboy Emulator for Emacs
It’s an okay operating system, but it could use a good text editor.
filmfact··on Before 1948, LA's Power Grid Ran at 50hz
Actually it has to do with how film is shot. Lightbulbs pulse at mains frequency, shoot indoors at 24fps in 50hz land and you'll get a horrible 1hz strobe effect.

There are tricks you can do with shutter angle that negate this, but they are beyond the scope of this comment.

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