HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

gurtwo

189 karma · joined February 6, 2009

submissionscomments
gurtwo··on A liar who always lies says "All my hats are green."
Casual sentences and mathematics/logic don't go very well together, and lead to ambiguities and interpretation if there are no clear rules defined beforehand. This reminds me of those silly problems that circulate on TikTok with a series of additions and multiplications. The "correct" result depends on how you assume the operations precedence. Here, does "being a liar" mean that we have to take as a true statement the negation of "all my hats are green"? If so, is that "NOT all my hats are green"? How does that translate back to the mathematics realm? Is it {total_hats>0, green_hats>=1}, or is it {total_hats>=0, green_hats>=0}?
gurtwo··on Amber: Programming language compiled to Bash
> Why would I ever use this instead of just using perl5

Because the syntax in Amber is way easier to grasp. For me that's a very strong selling point

gurtwo··on People tricking ChatGPT “like watching an Asimov novel come to life”
Some things that do work:

> write a haiku about a toaster

> write a haiku, then criticize it

> pad thai recipe

> can you korrect the spleeing errors in this sntence?

gurtwo··on Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)
AC is annty-christ
gurtwo··on Ask HN: Why is everyone here so obsessed with Lisp?
Lisp is like the Latin of programming languages. Powerful, archaic, well-thought, elegant, venerable.
gurtwo··on Can a Person Learn While Sleeping?
I believe it was Dali
gurtwo··on Self-solving Rubik's Cube
I find it strange that people here are fixated with the solving software part. What's really cool to me in the project is the mechanical solution; fitting all the motors, axles, MCU, sensors and battery inside a customized cube.
gurtwo··on From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth
Why don't we see the Moon's shadow projected over the Earth in the pic? I guess it has to do with the relative distances of the 2 bodies to the Sun and the Moon's penumbra or something. Can someone make a digital image simulation of this to verify?
gurtwo··on A man who was jailed on the fantasy evidence of a single hair
So what are the real success/failure figures of the technique?
gurtwo··on The town that banned Wi-Fi
Might be enough to just pretend they did
gurtwo··on Regin: Nation-state ownage of GSM networks
The BSC has several interfaces. One of them is the APG, used for Operation & Maintenance. It's a Windows module, accessible by IP. The APG serves as a gateway to the node's core via MML (Man-Machine Language), the instructions to operate the node.
gurtwo··on Coffee naps are better than coffee or naps alone
As a spaniard myself, I can confirm this is an accurate description of what siesta looks like on most cases. Short nap on the couch after a coffee, for those who take lunch at home, or just on the weekends otherwise.
gurtwo··on How can an introvert Asian engineer like me make friends?
Join a meetup.com group of movie lovers (or whatever you enjoy, but avoid too-geeky groups). Slowly get to know people attending the meetups. Just be nice. Don't be afraid to politely express your opinions. When you see someone that seems alone or new to the group, be the first to approach them. You can meet tons of interesting people this way.
gurtwo··on Donut math: how donut.c works (2011)
I've ported it to Python:

https://gist.github.com/reeesga/8580649

gurtwo··on Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
I wonder, what should we do as individuals? Shall we refuse to take prescribed antibiotics for "minor" things, and let the body heal itself at the cost of some extra discomfort? Would that make any difference in the long run? Does the resistance apply to any kind of antibiotics?
gurtwo··on The plumber programmer
At the telecom company I work for, this is called 'System Integration'. It takes most of our time.
gurtwo··on World's Thinnest House is only 4 ft wide
This reminds me of Flatland
gurtwo··on Programmer salary in mainland Europe?
In Madrid (Spain), an engineer with 10 years of experience in a technical role can expect an average of 55k€ per year, before a 25% tax cut. Similar (or a bit lower) for a programmer. I won't call it a crappy salary. You can make a pretty decent living with that. Welcome to southern Europe!
gurtwo··on Dubai on Empty
I've worked in Dubai. I found the article pretty accurate. So much, that I was surprised to read on it the same analogies I've been doing myself to describe the country to my friends (an adult Disneyland, a soul-less country, a spoiled generation of young locals).
gurtwo··on 8.9 earthquake hits Japan
I strongly suspect this is not due to an outage in the network, but rather intentional. Some years ago I worked on a project for a Japanese mobile operator to implement a system that prevents "normal" mobile phones from making calls to avoid overloading the network. When activated, only emergency services (fire fighters, police, medical, ...) are allowed to call. At regular intervals, a batch of the "civilian" phones are allowed too for a while, then a different batch, etc, so everyone gets its chance to call if they wait long enough.

The system was a government requirement for events such as yesterday's quake, but I can't confirm all phone disturbances reported were/are due to it.

Technically, it relies on a bitpattern called "accessClasssNBarred".

gurtwo··on Fon has decided to open our WiFi network in Japan to all for free
Yesterday's news said the mobile phone didn't work, whereas wireline network was still functioning. I strongly suspect this is not due to an outage in the network, but rather intentional. Some years ago I worked on a project for a Japanese mobile operator to implement a system that prevents "normal" mobile phones from making calls to avoid overloading the network. When activated, only emergency services (fire fighters, police, medical, ...) are allowed to call. At regular intervals, a batch of the "civilian" phones are allowed too for a while, then a different batch, etc, so everyone gets its chance to call if they wait long enough.

The system was a government requirement for events such as yesterday's quake, but I can't confirm all phone disturbances reported were/are due to it.

Technically, it relies on a bitpattern called "accessClasssNBarred".

gurtwo··on Rock-Paper-Scissors: You vs. the Computer
I picked the seconds on my digital wrist watch, modulo 3, as a 'random' choice. 16-16-20. Far better than when I made the choice myself.
gurtwo··on The blind man who taught himself to see
I suspect we commonly underestimate blind people mental capacities.

One can argue that 'seeing' goes beyond the perception of lights and colors. It's also about shape, so I guess a blind person can perfectly 'visualize' a rectangle, a cube, etc. And probably do geometry, or even 3D-object rotations.

Can anyone confirm this?

gurtwo··on The physics of Angry Birds
That's what I hoped to see when I clicked in the link; an explanation of the collision model when the bird hits the blocks. The initial parabolic flight is just basic physics.
gurtwo··on What people want (according to Google Suggest)
Probably meaning 'how can I better search in Google'. Can the users be trained into making better, more specific queries? At school, maybe?
gurtwo··on How 5-year Wikipedia hoax fooled even the subject's own company
Exactly. The whole story only proves no one really cared about the Julius Freed article in the first place.
gurtwo··on Unanswerable multiple choice question
I say B. Now prove me wrong.
gurtwo··on Ingenious Chinese Army shovel (video)
Is that spam, at 4:55 ?
gurtwo··on Android – Now Ported On The iPhone
How technically feasible is it to get iPhone OS running on Android HW? I just purchased my Google Phone yesterday. I would think twice now.
gurtwo··on WePad
What so hard about building these kind of devices nowadays? It seems to me that all the components are readily available (there is no technological breakthrough in any of them, excepted maybe the screen), and the size of it should make it easier to pack more features or cheaper ones. Unless it's all about the software.
Page 1 of 3Next →