Hacker News Reader

Verbing weirds language.

fred256on Google DeepMind Paper Argues LLMs Will Never Be Conscious

“The question of whether Machines Can Think is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.” — Dijkstra

fred256on Tailscale's new macOS home

https://tailscale.com/docs/integrations/identity/passkeys

fred256on Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut

The full list is at the bottom of their press release: https://corporate.vanguard.com/content/corporatesite/us/en/c...

fred256on Abusing Go's Infrastructure

No inside information, but presumably this means Delivery to other organizations, which, among other things, includes maintaining outbound IP reputation, which is closely related to Spam and Abuse.

fred256on Peter Norvig: New Python Operators (2023)

Semi-related, in a past life, I used ... to indicate "not implemented yet":

    def not_implemented_yet():
      ...

fred256on IDEs we had 30 years ago

> MS-DOS shipped with a TUI text editor since version 5 (1981)

MS-DOS 5 came out in 1991, not 1981.

fred256on Implementing Tic Tac Toe with 170mb of HTML – No JavaScript or CSS

A long, long time ago I also implemented tic-tac-toe in HTML. But just as a set of HTML pages with links for each X move (and an implied O move by the "computer" player). Total size of all the pages combined is about 60 kilobytes.

fred256on Google's Green Light project retimes traffic lights for 30% fewer stops

The middle light in a traffic light is called yellow in the US, and orange in (some parts of?) Europe.

fred256on Reverse-engineering the classic MK4116 16-kilobit DRAM chip (2020)

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25093933

fred256on Google Deprecates Google Domains, Sells It to Squarespace

Didn't this happen a few weeks ago already?

fred256on MyNOR – The yet minor computer. No CPU, no ALU, one NOR-gate is enough

And you can buy a modern reimplementation: https://www.thefuturewas8bit.com/shop/tynemouth-products/min...

fred256on Understanding DeepMind's sorting algorithm

This reminds me of challenge 28 from the game Human Resource Machine.

fred256on Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer

Unless I misunderstand, it's less than a frame at 60 Hz (= 16.7 ms per frame).

fred256on An Aperiodic Monotile

From the paper:

> A single hat is asymmetric, and so in any patch we can distinguish between “unreflected” and “reflected” orientations of tiles.

fred256on FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/420_(cannabis_culture)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/69_(sex_position)

fred256on Map of the Internet

I thought this was going to be a link to https://xkcd.com/195/

fred256on Key staff driving Apple search engine leave to rejoin Google

> He is reportedly the company's new vice president of engineering.

Google has dozens of “VPs of engineering”.

fred256on Toyota patents plans for EV with manual transmission and clutch

As an owner of both a manual transmission car and an EV, I enjoy driving them both, but I don’t want the manual transmission experience with an EV power train.

fred256on DALL-E 2 generates images of Kermit The Frog in various films

These are so good I am scared.

fred256on Resurrecting an Old Plotter (2019)

No first hand experience, but perhaps vpype with this plugin: https://github.com/zxsq-cc/hpglpype

fred256on NeoPixel Christmas Tree Lights Controlled by a Raspberry Pi

Here's Matt Parker's video from last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvlpIojusBE

And he ran a bunch of viewer-supplied programs on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7eHTNm1YtU

fred256on Happy birthday Vim (2020)

What blows my mind is that vim is now twice as old as vi was when vim was released.

fred256on All 16,777,216 RGB colours (2005)

It appears to be interlaced:

    all16777216rgb-scrambled.png: PNG image data, 4096 x 4096, 8-bit/color RGB, interlaced

fred256on Serving Netflix Video at 400Gb/s on FreeBSD [pdf]

The content is already encrypted anyway for DRM.

I'd assume TLS is used in large part for privacy reasons (so ISPs can't sell info on what shows are popular)

fred256on Larry Page: “I think we should look into acquiring YouTube” (2005)

"adopted Google's [...] CDN"

Google's CDN was largely written for YouTube.

fred256on The Drunken Bishop Algorithm

I think it might work if you display both the hash and the image, and ask the user to compare both.

If the hashes are very different, it doesn't matter that the images are similar (assuming the user indeed verifies both).

If the hashes are similar, another round of hashing before producing the image, might make the images very different.

But maybe I misunderstood?

fred256on Positions, Profit and Loss

> What technically prevents them to run away with all stocks?

SIPC insurance is supposed to protect you in case they run away anyway.

fred256on Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?

What I meant was that I thought any system that required some form of distributed locking or consensus, did so by building on top of Chubby (which does Paxos), not by implementing Paxos directly.

fred256on Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?

> The Paxos, paxosdb, and related libraries (despite the name, all are multi-paxos) are solid and integrated directly into a number of products (Borg, Chubby, CFS, Spanner, etc.).

Maybe things have changed, but I thought the bottom turtle for pretty much any infrastructure system at Google was Chubby. I didn't realize Borg now directly does Paxos.