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fsckboy

8,216 karma · joined November 7, 2019

work-work balance is paramount
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fsckboy··on Entities enabling scientific fraud at scale (2025)
punishing failure is probably counterproductive? let me guess, participation trophies is the way...
fsckboy··on The Cost of Indirection in Rust
a ravioli is a b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶ beige box abstraction to which you pasta arguments interface usually after forking
fsckboy··on Entities enabling scientific fraud at scale (2025)
paid by the original authors if their study fails to replicate
fsckboy··on Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
if ad hominem attacks were of no value, humans wouldn't have evolved the strong tendency to engage in them.

they are not proofs in logic, hence the fallacy, but that does not mean they are irrational. it's irrational to think that human discourse can be capture by logic.

fsckboy··on Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
>irrational management, and that predates AI

actually, it's AI that will be doing the predating

fsckboy··on Agents that run while I sleep
>One test → one implementation → repeat.

>Because you just wrote the code, you know exactly what behavior matters and how to verify it.

what you go on to describe is

One implementation → one test → repeat.

fsckboy··on LibreOffice Writer now supports Markdown
libreoffice is written in C++
fsckboy··on Put the zip code first
there should be one text box with multiple lines and you enter your address the way you would write it on an envelope. works internationally, gets stuff delivered. If the postal service can parse it, so can a website. Typing in your address will go so much faster than having to read the tags and navigate for every piece they are asking for. any redundancy can be used for error checking which is a good idea.

the "fields", like the goggles, they do nothing

fsckboy··on Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues
>the contradiction of "law as something impartial" and "law bends to the whims of power" will need to be resolved

human nature will not change. the best change folks here could make is accepting that.

fsckboy··on Yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan
>Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic...

you're reading the title wrong, they aren't "trying to solve the loneliness epidemic," they are trying to sell yogurt at a profit. In so doing, their sales force is ameliorating some of the loneliness their clients feel as a side effect. You could say that they are monetizing loneliness if that's the reason people are buying their products, for the visits and not for the yogurt.

fsckboy··on The Brand Age
combining the previous two comments, I once heard that there are chips/french fries all over the ground in Belgium because if you ask a Belge the time, they look at their wristwatch, immediately inverting the container of fries they are undoubtedly carrying.

Not sure about Belgian potato or watch branding.

fsckboy··on Arabic document from 17th-cent. rubbish heap confirms semi-legendary Nubian king
>That was interesting, notwithstanding the editorialising comments by Tomasz Barański.

you are upset by these comments which this article's author chose to quote?:

As lead author Tomasz Barański explains, however, this transformation was far from sudden. "Nubia was not a marginal or isolated region of the Nile Valley, but a pivotal corridor connecting the Mediterranean world to sub-Saharan Africa. Rather than a civilizational dead end, Nubia functioned for millennia as a dynamic zone of movement for people, goods, and ideas. Through Nubia passed commodities such as gold, ivory, and enslaved people, but it also enabled the exchange of less tangible elements: technologies, religious beliefs, and political models.

"Moreover, Nubian communities were not passive recipients of outside influence; they actively shaped and adapted the flows passing through this corridor. This long history of exchange helps us understand later cultural transformations in the region, including Arabization and Islamization. These were not sudden ruptures, but part of a much older pattern of interaction, negotiation, and adaptation that has characterized Sudan throughout history."

Barański notes that further discoveries may yet follow: "Preliminary analysis of the letters from Building A.1 suggests distinct patterns in the circulation of correspondence, hinting at a coherent communication network. This network encompassed not only the city's religious and administrative elites, but possibly also the leaders of nomadic groups herding flocks in the surrounding regions."

Additionally, he adds, "the discovery of this seemingly inconspicuous scrap of paper, when situated within the larger context of gift-giving culture and traditional royal patronage navigating local micropolitics, provides a vivid example of how archaeological fieldwork continues to produce material that bridges the gap between material culture and written history."

fsckboy··on Was Windows 1.0's lack of overlapping windows a legal or a technical matter?
>"when Gates saw the Xerox machine, the display had no overlapping windows". So M/S cloned it as he saw it. Once M/S W1.0 was developed he saw the demo again and was surprised the windows overlapped.

Microsoft had Apple Lisa's in-house, and Charles Simonyi in person direct from Xerox PARC, and worked on pre-release Macintoshes in coordination with Apple to develop Microsoft Word for the Mac, all well in advance of any MSWindows development. There is no way the story is as simple as the above.

fsckboy··on Disable Your SSH access accidentally with scp
easy to remember, if you don't use trailing slashes ever, it will just work every time
fsckboy··on OpenAI fires an employee for prediction market insider trading
>Yeah, Polymarket is explicitly advertising this

no, they are not.

you might have been an insider working on the Apple Newton, and being enthusiastic about it you might have broken the rules and traded on your "knowledge"... and you would have lost your shirt. Same with your very knowledgeable enthusiasm about myriad other technologies. Ever wonder why Wall St doesn't show up at HN asking everybody's opinion about AI in order to leverage that info into billions?

an important element of "the wisdom of crowds" is many bits of microknowledge. How many Teslas will be sold next year is very dependent on how much the people who buy Teslas will earn next year (or how secure they will feel in their jobs) working in myriad other industries that have nothing to do with Tesla, along with the price of lithium, tires, and even ... wait for it... gasoline.

Polymarket's words you quote can just as likely refer to the wisdom of crowds. Or even, and this is the subtle part: Polymarket's insiders may believe, like you, that they are creating a market to trade on inside information, and yet they, like you, could be made wrong by the superior sum knowledge of the crowd exerting its invisible hands all together to tank your Apple Newtons.

fsckboy··on The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran
>I think wholesale genocide of an entire population by the Israeli state is worse

would be worse, but wasn't contemplated nor attempted so contributes no weight to the balance.

"from the river to the sea" on the other hand is a statement of genocidal intent.

fsckboy··on Open source calculator firmware DB48X forbids CA/CO use due to age verification
"Linux" is just the source code to the kernel, pure free speech, and it can't run by itself in order to ask anybody anything. Underage programmers will benefit from the education of reading it.
fsckboy··on Reading English from 1000 AD
>I wonder if there's a shorter history of English somewhere.

I don't know what's a good podcast for it, but learning "linguistics/linguistic theory" I think is a more rewarding experience. Then when you listen to the history of english you'll have more insights.

fsckboy··on Allocating on the Stack
you can do this in C, you just need to let its low level-ness be at the same level as everything else you do, just a setjmp longerjmp
fsckboy··on Banned in California
a plating company in San Jose dumped a plating bath into the sewer system. This was so toxic that it killed the bacteria that reduce organic sludge at the sewerage plant. This knocked the whole plant offline, releasing untreated sewerage into the bay. The lower bay was toxic for a week

toxic because of chemicals and toxic because of the release of untreated sewage (bacteria) are sufficiently different that I thought I'd point out that you kind of mix them here. Also, toxic because of high concentrations (e.g. pH) that will dilute vs toxic cumulative forever chemicals are different orders of magnitude altogether.

This incident you describe seems like a one-off and fairly benign compared to long term patterns that lead to superfund sites. Till this company dumped that batch, they weren't dumping batches, i.e. the system was working.

I'm not up on the latest, not a civil engineer or public health authority, but it is generally recommended in many seaside places not to swim at the beach after rainstorms. the influx of large volumes of water into the sewage treatment systems means that they overflow and raw sewage is released. These systems are being improved all the time, but it's a known problem and civilization hasn't collapsed. Some natural creatures like sewage outflow. When Boston moved their outflow pipe from the inner harbor to deeper water in Cape Cod bay, the lobster population collapsed. Maybe we should have called it the lobster poopulation.

fsckboy··on Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer
>musicians who play techno with analog instruments

just to be clear, Moog synthesizers (and a number of other brands) are electronic yes, but they are analog electronics.

fsckboy··on First Website (1992)
so you're saying that gopher was the web. i've heard it said before. if you are scared to discuss a chicken and egg problem, you are exactly who should hear it.
fsckboy··on The Misuses of the University
>Actual "quality of education" mostly comes from a low staff/student ratio and direct access of students to elite researchers: this difference in education mostly takes the form of better research labs to work in, with some spillover into office hours

I don't agree with this at all. Quality of education imho comes from being surrounded by fellow elite students so that the pace of the syllabi can remain high.

lower tier universities have excellent faculty, they are selected from applicants from the elite universities as well as excellent students from lower tier universities who have floated to the top. Their problem is, as the elite-ness of the students goes down, the pace needs to drop.

Not trying to be a jerk, but we see the same thing in athletics, elite athletes are significantly above the next tier, and so on. the worst professional team can beat the best college team, because the worst professional team is still made up of the cream of the college teams, with experience (i.e. more education) added on.

at a lower tier university, a dedicated student can still work in labs if they want, but as you move down the tiers you simply get fewer autistics and more partiers. University of Michigan is an excellent univeristy, but do you think the students are studying on weekends, like they do at MIT? no, they're not.

fsckboy··on US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives
>The rest of NATO has more soldiers than US. Would US win?

what are you even talking about? nowhere is anybody on any side even hinting that the problem with NATO is it stops the EU from having a war with the US.

the problem with NATO is that it shares a burden and some feel they don't want to pay their obligations and some feel their share is too much, and then it was based around invasion of the territories of western and then middle europe, and ukraine came along and it's a serious threat to middle europe but its not covered by NATO.

fsckboy··on Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid
>the Portuguese | Dutch - mastered wind to power their ships. the British mastered coal to power Industrial Revolution

the British were world-beating masters of sailing technology before they were masters of anything else, and that enabled them to leverage their advances in other areas (including mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun) to become a mercantile behemoth.

fsckboy··on Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer
The DX-7 FM synthesis opened the door to a pretty narrow but interesting range of sounds, bells and brass, which people loved and it was a ripsnorting success for a time, but it didn't displace subtractive analog synths and people aren't exactly playing FM synthesizers any more, while they are now heavily back into analog subtractive. of course there are also romplers and samplers etc. and those can achieve sounds that FM did, but it's hard to call the DX-7 any type of be-all end-all.
fsckboy··on First Website (1992)
declaring a website to be "first" introduces a definitional problem.

to put it in terms of a simple example, you need several HTML pages before one of them can link to another, but so far that's just hypertext. then you need pages spread out across plural sites to be able to create a web.

fsckboy··on New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
on HN, the problem is not LLMs, it's everybody talking about LLMs incessantly
fsckboy··on Why isn't LA repaving streets?
I don't know what you mean, but I belive we're talking about "wheelchair ramps" at street corners

some of the laws mandating that type of thing specify "if/when you renovate something, you need to bring it up to code, otherwise you can skate on the code"

this affects a lot of the little tiny shops in NYC. if you change your facade or bathrooms, they need to be made accessible. however, it's not the cost of renovation, it's that accessibility can entail many many square feet of space that is now inaccessible-to-make-any-money-from, making the rent much more unaffordable. so, renovations are still done, but meticulously match what any previous plans on file would look like.

fsckboy··on Uncovering insiders and alpha on Polymarket with AI
if you have no knowledge of any inside information and you are trying to make a buy/sell investment decision, your decision benefits from the price being as accurate as possible. That is what every individual is "trying to solve" so it's a net benefit.
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