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gralx

242 karma · joined November 18, 2017

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gralx··on Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title
The list of sound defeats is kind of a who's who from back in the day: Black, Hawk, Robison, Klein, Leo the Jap, Price, Stein.
gralx··on Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title
> ... it is hard to think of a competitor in all of history more dominant over his sport or game than Tinsley.

I've got another one: famous hold 'em poker player Stu Ungar never lost a game of gin rummy. Utterly dominant.

gralx··on Napoleon Was the Best General Ever, and the Math Proves It
Commenters excoriate the methadology. First thing I checked was for comparisons with Aleksandr Suvarov, who "never lost a single battle he commanded."¹ Glaringly absent from the exposition.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Suvorov

gralx··on Video Investigation: Russia Is Using a Secret Network to Steal Ukraine Grain
YouTube link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLQiIhrutmA

gralx··on Bitpanda said no mass layoffs, three weeks before axing one-third of staff
The darkest Sesame Street skit I ever saw had a muppet jumping up and down on a manhole cover, gleefully repeating "99! 99! 99! ...". A second muppet shows up wondering what it's all about, and the first muppet concedes his spot. The second jumps up once, saying "Ninety---", the manhole cover slips out of place, and the muppet falls to its doom. The first resumes his jumping: "100! 100! 100!"
gralx··on Linear Address Spaces: Unsafe at any speed
Link didn't work for me. Direct link did:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3534854

gralx··on Cory Doctorow on unfair contracts for writers
Right! Didn't think to look it up as a term of art.

That means the missing information is temporal: the subsitution in point III narrows indemnity to only those claims which satisfy finally settled at the moment the contract binds.

gralx··on Cory Doctorow on unfair contracts for writers
Does anyone know the meaning of "all finally settled claims" in point III?

> III. Blanket indemnities. I'm not wealthy, and my insurer won't cover claims that you settle without their consent. Asking me to indemnify you against "all claims" exposes me to the risk of bankruptcy – and still doesn't protect you. I change this to "all finally settled claims."

A claim not finally settled leaves nothing to indemnify against. I'm missing something here.

Edit: Maybe "I indemnify Publisher against all claims which at the time of contract signing are finally settled"?

gralx··on Adding Modules to C in 10 Lines of Code [pdf]
> ... you are abusing OOP and think it's the only way of doing things

> ... when you then say you decided to stick with C, you contradict with yourself

Figments of your imagination.

gralx··on Speeding up this site by 50x (2014)
> Denying people information ... on-brand for Dan Luu.

Just to be clear, he does not deny the information. Chronology matters a lot, danluu knows this, and he does make it available. He also made finding it a personal journey for any first-time visitor looking for a date, costing about 60s per user lifetime.

He's unduly sensitive to bad criticism by ignorant people and admits as much. Reducing his exposure to them helps get him through the day, and so all the power to him.

As for the arrogance, I love this site and would keep coming here even if danluu were Pol Pot himself. Users and moderation make the site.

gralx··on Sshfs Is Orphaned
You mount the remote file system as a volume and traverse it as part of the local file system. Super convenient for comparing contents of a local folder to a remote in the command line, using local tools on the remote FS, batch copying both ways, all that good stuff.

The hung file systems can be a buttpain, enough that I wrote a Bash script that calls `mount` to get the hung FS IDs and `umount` them with the results. After that easy peasy.

gralx··on Three Arrows Capital reportedly facing insolvency
Holy crap I had no idea this was Galbraith's insight. I've heard William K. Black talk about Gresham's dynamics a few times, but always wondered why his use of the term didn't comport with Wikipedia's article on it. It's because he's using it in Galbraith's sense. I'll be checking out the book for sure. Thank you.
gralx··on Ask HN: What news subscription is worth it?
Seconded. I subscribed to Financial Times for a year, whose prose, editorial balance, and coverage insight are noticeably inferior to The Wall Street Journal's. I also subscribed to The Economist and feel it is also inferior, but it is a weekly, so that's kind of comparing kettles and fish.

I subscribe to Noam Chomsky's opinion that the best journalism is found in the financial press because businesses need a more accurate and timely view of what's going on.

And yes, the op-eds are a blemish on the paper's outstanding journalistic reputation. It got jammed full of cronies after News Corp purchased the paper. Its workaday editorial staff remain fiercely independent, however.

gralx··on Hertzbleed Attack
You missed this part:

> Only mentioning this here just in case the PR spin doctors threaten the researchers into removing mention of Intel on this one.

gralx··on Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
Politicians sometimes do the wrong thing is a truism, no?
gralx··on Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
Knock-on effects can just as well be ascribed to alternative targets for those Apollo funds. Those don't take much imagination to come up with, e.g. reducing the student-teacher ratios in schools.
gralx··on Tim Hortons app violated laws in collection of ‘vast amounts’ of location data
On the face of it, no politician wants to risk tanking an org that employs a significant part of their jurisdiction. Providing even minimum wage employment to thousands is an objective public good and hard to do, even for scoundrels. Big employers are not above the law, but they sure get more leeway.
gralx··on Canadians Unable to Afford Safe Housing Are Turning to Medically-Assisted Death
It seems you missed the point of the OG article? It's not about MAiD or the ethicality of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms but about systemic, community-wide failures to help those in need across Canada. The MAiD anecdotes just show how bad it can get.
gralx··on Learn the logic of great typography
I agree, and I'll go further. Jan Tschischold didn't think we should use serifs unless text is justified. That convention was one of Wikipedia's main reasons for settling on sans-serif for body text.

The page's creator should be giving reasons why his "great" example defies a basic typographical convention. This webpage seems to be all headline.

gralx··on Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?
The turning point for me was when they canned Victoria from r/ama. My experience with it got progressively worse thereafter. I might sign in to it once a year now (using old.reddit.com when I do). When I read posts there, I first convert the link to teddit.net.
gralx··on Leslie Lamport revolutionized computer science with math [video]
Easter egg: at one point you can hear him typing on an IBM buckling spring keyboard. Something for the keyboard enthusiasts :)
gralx··on Leslie Lamport revolutionized computer science with math [video]
Lamport's early Paxos papers are interesting for a lot of reasons (I particularly like his simple textbook definition of equivalence classes in "Generalized Consensus and Paxos" (2005)), but I agree that the Paxos algorithm gets lost in all the fluff.

In 2016 some researchers at Stony Brook published the full (Multi-) Paxos algorithm using TLA+, including a couple of nice extras:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.01387

The spec is succinct enough to commit to memory and way easier to comprehend than Lamport's prose descriptions (Lamport has never specified the Paxos algorithm in TLA+, although you can find his TLA+ spec for Paxos consensus). The paper also includes a mechanically checked proof and an interesting overview of other related work.

gralx··on Donald Knuth on work habits, problem solving, and happiness (2020)
Yeah, TAOCP's casual style puts me off too. Side by side with high watermarks in technical writing like The C Programming Language, Specifying Systems, or Loney's Elements of Coordinate Geometry its shortcomings are pretty obvious. But that's an opportunity for a clever editor to make an actual reference manual out of TAOCP sometime in the future.

Knuth's a good, engaging writer, but TAOCP's content and typography are definitely better thought out than the prose.

EDIT: Just remembered a BBC interview with a philosophy professor about Kant. Apparently Kant is criticized for being really verbose. The professor's retort was he sensed Kant had so much to say and so little time to say it that he didn't edit very carefully, giving it a similar kind of bloated, meandering quality. Even so, Kant is held up as one of the GOATs, because in the end it's the content that counts.

gralx··on Big Reasons Not to Upgrade to Windows 11
For me it was Windows 10 forcing itself onto user machines for months after launch, even permanently destroying user data to do so.¹ Oh, and the 260 character NTFS path limit, which bit me in surprising ways (MS published a reg hack to get around this on Windows 10², and I used rsync on MSYS2 to recover inaccessible data on Windows 7). I had been optimistic about W10 until then.

¹https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/27/12046738/microsoft-pays-1...

²https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/maximu...

gralx··on Ask HN: Is it possible to train and improve your memory and recall?
Once you read a little deeper, you'll discover that Johnny's father had him tutored privately from early childhood by some of the greatest minds in Hungary at the time, and during a real golden era for academia in that country. He literally practiced memorization.

The alternative explanation is magic. Take your pick.

gralx··on Ask HN: Is it possible to train and improve your memory and recall?
Yup! And it was no genetic accident. He practiced hard.
gralx··on Ask HN: Is it possible to train and improve your memory and recall?
Yes, it is. John von Neumann memorized math formulas. Keats memorized Shakespeare. The whole of Homer's work is oral story-telling passed down through generations of memorizers. There is a World Memory Championships.

You would probably like Joshua Foer's book Moonwalking with Einstein.

Developing memory is not a panacea for intelligence or a replacement for sound thinking. Some elite memory athletes assert that they're not that smart and attribute their success only to working very hard at memorizing.

gralx··on Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?
ya i aint never heard the term b4 neither. colorful. wonder if middlebrow refers to furrowing between teh browz??>
gralx··on The great VC pullback of 2022
That's certainly an idea.
gralx··on Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights
I suspect it went into the settlement payment. Wouldn't it be ironic if so many principled advocates of open source and supporters of the GNOME project had their funds paid directly to a patent troll by GNOME themselves?
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