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hashingrollon Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?

This might a long read but it is well-written reader-friendly analysis of Tarjan's proof with chain of reasoning. https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/98275

hashingrollon The computers are fast, but you don't know it

Not all optimizations are more energy consuming. For an analogy, does a using a car consume more energy than a bicycle? Yes. But a using a bicycle does not consume more energy than a man running on feet.

hashingrollon Think of a Number. How Do Math Magicians Know What It Is?

Love this! Took a while to find the solution :)

hashingrollon Please Don't Say Just Hello in Chat

In the same vein, an auto-initiater would work like

Me: <Types question and hit send>

(Doesn't actually get sent yet)

My auto-initiater: Hi

Other person: Hi, <...>

(no chat notification, the original question gets sent now)

Other person: <Answers/Whatever>

(gets chat notification)

hashingrollon Pathways Language Model (PaLM): Scaling to 540B parameters

I would not discount NLP tasks just yet. In practice, they are still used to solve problems like spellcheck, autocomplete and even words and text rewrites.

hashingrollon SymSpell: 1M times faster spelling correction

The state of the art models these days would not be able to be bundled with browsers. These are typically neural models [0] and require specialized hardware to run, and also have high memory requirements. The models in browsers are light-weight to be able to run on most devices. Might be similar to those used in smartphone keyboards like GBoard [1].

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/speller100-zer..., https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/everyday-ai-b...

[1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/10/grammar-correction-as-you-...

hashingrollon SymSpell: 1M times faster spelling correction

Comparing the spellcheck quality of Firefox to Google (search, not Chrome) might not be completely fair. The browser most likely uses a client-side spelling model with tight memory & performance constraints. The suggestions from Google come from high quality models hosted on their servers.

hashingrollon Approved Cameras

Not sure about TV shows but for films (especially Netflix originals), that's partly due to the recent trend of films getting shot for TV viewing experience. These films tend to have fewer "wide" shots and more "character" shots compared to the earlier theatre release only films.

hashingrollon What =delete means

> no mutable reference parameters

Sidenote: The style guide (recently?) removed the ban on non-const references [0]. They are now allowed for non-optional output parameters. Though returning value is generally preferred over output parameters.

[0] https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#Inputs_and...

hashingrollon Google broke a conditional statement that verifies passwords on Chrome OS

The argument for tabs really goes that time is spent much more on reading code than authoring, so it should be optimized and customizable (tab width) for the reader.

hashingrollon GitHub Copilot

> Convert comments to code. Write a comment describing the logic you want, and let GitHub Copilot assemble the code for you.

I don't know if Copilot does it already but I would love if there was a tool that does exactly the opposite — convert code to comments and documentation.

hashingrollon GitHub Copilot

I don't see why. It is on Copilot to produce syntactically correct code that at least doesn't fail to run, even if we ignore the correctness.

hashingrollon Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11

I hope this will mean we can finally stream 4k content on Prime Video, Disney+, et al. in Windows PC.

hashingrollon Donation page "not compliant with Google Play Policies"

Apparently these apps have to integrate their billing systems with Google Play by September.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/09/listening-...

hashingrollon New study detects lottery-like behavior in cryptocurrency markets

Just looked at his twitter and interestingly his tweet ~4 hours ago [0] says "I was wrong about #Bitcoin.". Though it is likely an April Fools joke.

[0] https://twitter.com/PeterSchiff/status/1377626254619328524

hashingrollon Court Orders UK Man to Pay $571m for Operating Fraudulent Bitcoin Trading Scheme

This makes me curious that suppose value of bitcoin since then had dropped to say less than $1 for some reasons, would he still be fined the same amount?

hashingrollon Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/year

Have you tried switching to the ads model on Android (like suggested by your app's Android feedback/reviews)? I am curious if that would increase your revenue from Android users and somewhat lower piracy?

hashingrollon Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

Link to the Ruby on Rails demo for anyone wondering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY

hashingrollon Justice at Spotify

There has to be a catch here...

hashingrollon Popular YouTubers who are building their own sites

> There is no algorithm, they're going to be served everything you make.

I am not sure how is this (lack of) feature mentioned as an advantage over youtube. Afaict there's certainly a video tab on the yt channel that displays videos sorted with time uploaded (and probably is modifiable). I understand that the point must be that people may want to not see the recommended videos, but don't most such visitors directly visit the yt channel. At least I use it like that.

(mandatory: googler, don't work on youtube)

hashingrollon Accidentally quadratic: When Python is faster than C++

One reason would be because std::set guarantees O(log n) complexity for each operation on the worst case. std::unordered_set has average complexity O(1) and O(size) for the worst case (it being a hash table) which can be unexpected to debug in those rare cases.

hashingrollon ‘Deep Nostalgia’ can turn old photos of your relatives into moving videos

Interesting that the AI understands sunglasses but still "blinks" them like eyes.

hashingrollon Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

Video game industries kinda get away with lower salaries, longer hours than rest of the "tech standard".

hashingrollon Epic Games steps up Apple fight with EU antitrust complaint

Do you think it would be unfair to the users who bought an iPhone 3 years back considering sandboxed appstore as one of the main reason to buy it?

hashingrollon The computer revolution hasn’t happened yet (1997)

I guess he was still kinda right, Google and Facebook themselves are essentially multiple companies stitched into big giants they are.

hashingrollon Haskell is a Bad Programming Language (2020)

What's a real quicksort anyway? You could argue that a reasonably fast implementation of quicksort is much more convoluted, which it most certainly is, but that doesn't make this implementation any less real.

hashingrollon Rust is now overall faster than C in benchmarks

> but most people probably won't bother.

Most people who don't bother with that probably also don't bother with the performance of their hashmap.

hashingrollon Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium

TIL