Hacker News Reader

kortexon Zb: An Early-Stage Build System

> The goal of supporting non-deterministic builds also seems to go against this.

I think this is actually a great escape hatch. Supporting non-deterministic builds means more folks will be able to migrate their existing build to zb. Postel's law and all that.

kortexon Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined

That's not what makes things artificial vs natural. Artificial vanillin is "more vanilla than real vanilla". A natural vanillin molecule is indistinguishable from fully synthetic vanillin from crude oil. The latter is still called "artificial flavor".

kortexon Unconventional Case Study of Neoadjuvant Oncolytic Virotherapy for Breast Cancer

Definitely eyebrow raising but I'm always a fan of a bit of "mad scientist" self-experimentation (within reason), whether it be Barry Marshall chugging H. pylori or Thought Emporium giving himself lactase gene therapy.

kortexon Iron as an inexpensive storage medium for hydrogen

> Rather, it's using the energy to deoxidize rust.

Exactly, really what they are storing is electrons.

Rusting the iron directly releases heat, which limits your efficiency to the delta-T of the process. Reducing steam to hydrogen and then converting the hydrogen in a fuel cell allows higher efficiency to produce electricity.

kortexon Iron as an inexpensive storage medium for hydrogen

Iron oxide is completely inert. You can store it in piles, under the elements. Iron powder less so, you need to keep it dry, but again you can just pile it up. The only tricky part is moving dense dry solids around at the huge scales required.

Edit: wait I forgot that direct reduced iron powder exothermically reacts with oxygen and water in the air, that's how single-use instant hand warmers work. So yeah you gotta isolate the iron powder a bit more than stick it under a tarp.

I've been playing too much Factorio lately so of course my mind goes towards rail systems (could repurpose coal plants) in combination with pneumatics.

kortexon Leader Election with S3 Conditional Writes

Provisioning a DynamoDB table is scarcely more effort than provisioning a bucket. And you get way nicer constructs (still not as nice as RDBMS) for locking like ConditionalUpdate and TransactWrite.

kortexon Degas: Detailed Expressions on Full-Body Gaussian Avatars

I worked on a DARPA anti-deepfakes project up until spring 2021, so just before the real tidal wave of generative AI. At that time, state of the art (of publicly known tech) required a few hours of target footage to train something passably deepfaked. Since then, there's been huge advancements in the generalizability of models. I don't know how little the threshold is, but it has gone from "only really feasible on celebs/politicians/folks with extensive video presence" to "feasible from a handful of videos". Like your average American's social media footprint.

You still need a pretty beefy rig (array of multiple 4090 gpus) to do convincing video generation in a non-glacial amount of time but it's totally possible with readily available hardware.

The bigger problem is actually "cheapfakes", so many people are so confirmation-biased that they will readily amplify even poorly put-together disinformation.

kortexon The Cryptographic Doom Principle (2011)

I think both need some workshopping. I tried search for "error oracle" and all I got were results about errors while using Oracle the database product. I gotta search "error oracle cryptography".

"doom principle" isn't great either since the first hit points to TFA, second to this very thread, and that article doesn't really use the actual term of art.

kortexon How the Totem Compass Works

> This seems very much like a solution in search of a problem.

My friends and I independently came up with this exact idea at the most recent regional burn event, specifically to better coordinate meeting back up after wandering, and then discovered this device, so it's very much a real problem in need of solving.

Concerts are usually pretty easy to find your friends after splitting up. They are usually at the bar, restrooms, or a handful of viewing spots or seats. Big raves, music festies, burns, and other large gatherings are spread over a much wider area.

kortexon Base 3 Computing Beats Binary

Binary is a local maximum in terms of entropy vs complexity. Going from one state per element to two states per element is an increase from 0 to 1 bits: an ∞% increase. Going from two to three states increases it to 1.585 bits per element, or a 59% increase.

Cheeky math aside, getting signalling logic to work with ternary, especially when clock rates go so high the signal starts to look less like square wave pulses and almost more like a modulated sine (due to slew), you now need much more sophisticated decoders.

kortexon Empathy for the user having sex with your software

I was expecting lulz but this was actually very well written and gets into a lot of the softer aspects of human-computer interaction.

Also the double entendre of "plug" in technology contexts, subtly brilliant.

kortexon Panic at the Job Market

> If you see people using requirements.txt in the wild instead of a poetry lock file or you see people using the decades-long broken python built-in logging framework instead of loguru you can see there’s opportunities for improvement everywhere

The irony of TFA mentioning the midwit meme.

50 iq - just use python's stdlib logger

100 iq - use loguru or some other custom log lib with fancy colors and formatting

150 iq - just use python's stdlib logger (with your own formatter)

Loguru is great for user-facing applications (especially when that user is a developer), it's pretty, structured out of the box, nice to use API. It's also pretty bloated and adds hundreds of ms of startup latency. Terrible for lambda/Faas cold starts.

Lately I've taken to just making a dict of the various field names and format strings, and json.dumps it into logging.basicConfig, boom, instant json structured logs. Middleware takes care of the rest. It Just Works(tm) and one of the most frustrating things is buggy loggers. The less overhead between `python3 /app` and getting some indicator everything is norminal, the better.

> don’t be bringing your outdated Python 3.7 sand castle to my Python 3.12 cathedral.

This is hilariously pretentious. Yeah 3.7 is EoL and if you're running it you probably need a kick in the pants to update deps, but it's far from the worst python sin.

kortexon Congress accidentally legalized THC six years ago

Yes, but actually no. If the DEA or local LEOs actually wanted to crack down, there is plenty enough wiggle room in the scheduled substances act and all the related add-on laws (esp. Federal Analogue Act), there is enough molecular similarity between the various cannabinoids, and insufficient sensitivity in most chemical tests, plus the tendency of THC-A to decarb (eject a carbon dioxide molecule to give THC) under heating, that these agencies could absolutely give you a hard time and make your life hell for a while. Even if charges didn't stick, you'd still have a bad time and be out thousands in legal feels.

What's actually happened is de facto, not de jure, legalization (in effect, but not in law), because of the unpopularity of cannabis prohibition. It's just not worth it in most situations to go after these products at this point.

There's still a strong need for actual legalization at this point.

kortexon Free-threaded CPython is ready to experiment with

That's just reflection. That's a feature of code, not language runtime. I think there are some languages which in fact have type checking in the runtime as a bona-fide feature. Most won't, unless you do something like isinstance()

kortexon Free-threaded CPython is ready to experiment with

Many uses. There's tons of situations where you are already accelerating most of your heavy compute with tensor libraries, but the data input/output parts are still in python. They would benefit from loading data in parallel before batching.

Multiprocess, OS threads, and asyncio all solve different problems. Threads are pretty heavyweight compared to async coroutines (aka green threads). The big win with coroutines is it is very cheap to put them to sleep waiting on io. So a web server on a 4 core vm might have 4 worker processes, several threads per process, and dozens/hundreds of coroutines.

> So perhaps you can use this for slurping other people's IP in parallel and train the "AIs" that are supposed to make us redundant.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the technical merits of async or threads. For one, the above two examples are taken directly from work I did to combat deep fakes by identifying various "tells" from the media. Some of us are in fact using machine learning for good.

kortexon Free-threaded CPython is ready to experiment with

s/will never be/already is/g

https://github.com/mypyc/mypyc

You can compile python to c. Right now. Compatibility with extensions still needs a bit of work. But you can write extremely strict python.

That's without getting into things like cython.

kortexon Free-threaded CPython is ready to experiment with

That's true of most compiled languages. Unless we are talking about asserts, reflection, I think type erasure, and maybe a few other concepts, language runtimes don't check types. C does not check types at runtime. You compile it and then rely on control of invariants and data flow to keep everything on rails. In python, this is tricky because everything is behind at least one layer of indirection, and thus virtually everything is mutable, so it's hard to enforce total control of all data structures. But you can get really close with modern tooling.

kortexon Free-threaded CPython is ready to experiment with

Nope. Type annotations can be executed and accessed by the runtime. That's how things like Pydantic, msgspec, etc, do runtime type enforcement and coercion.

There are also multiple compilers (mypyc, nuitka, others I forget) which take advantage of types to compile python to machine code.

kortexon Free-threaded CPython is ready to experiment with

https://github.com/python/mypy

> Python itself doesn't do that

The type syntax is python. MyPy is part of Python. It's maintained by the python foundation. Mypy is not part of CPython because modularity is good, the same way that ANSI C doesn't compile anything, that's what gcc, clang, etc are for.

Mojo is literally exactly the same way, the types are optional, and the tooling handles type checking and compilation.

kortexon An analysis of module names inside top PyPI packages

> when pip is only for Python

That's the neat part, it's not! You can distribute basically any kind of data with pip, within reason. Iirc Cmake can be pip-installed.

kortexon Malloc broke Serenity's JPGLoader, or: how to win the lottery (2021)

It probably started with Zipf's law in the 1930s and then Murphys law a few years later.

kortexon PostgreSQL and UUID as Primary Key

Has there ever been an attack/leak based on time metadata in UUIDs/ULIDs/Snowflakes/etc (not sequential), in a domain outside of sensitive ones (HIPAA/healthcare, defense)?

I'm skeptical that for the vast majority of uses, have time data in the IDs (and also not leaking it from actual timestamp fields) is an issue, and for the cases where it does, just use random IDs.

Even theoretically, is there a way to translate timestamps into a German tank problem? If I give you a sampled set of timestamps (with no other node identifiers), can you estimate the cardinality of the greater dataset?

kortexon Rounding Percentages

Many TUIs (text user interface) with multiple operations will show one bar reach 100% and move onto the next process (or show multiple in parallel).

If the UI automatically transitions to a totally new screen after completion, I'm never going to see 100% anyways, unless the app does the exact infuriating thing in TFA, which is render 100% (at 99.whatever) and then do some fsync/cleanup and actually be frozen showing 100% which is the contrapositive of oddly satisfying, it's unsurprisingly unsatisfying.

kortexon Show HN: Doggo – A powerful, human-friendly DNS client for the command line

What's stupid about it?

Dig was an early and widespread DNS CLI tool. "dog" is a logical name for a next-gen dns cli, and of course that exists. "Doggo" is both a pretty standard linguistic drift pattern of English slang (random -> rando, weird -> weirdo), a common internet term of endearment for "dog", and a logical derivation of *-go for go-based tools and software.

kortexon gRPC: The Bad Parts

Yes it was python but that has nothing to do with it. Same would happen in go, rust, R, or matlab.

Correct answers: 1.0, 0.0, 1.0

Confidence from algo: 1.0, 0.0, n/a

Confidence on the wire: 1.0, 0.0, 0.0

Score after bug: 66%

Score as it ought to be scored: 100%

It was enough to make several algorithms which were very selective in the data they would attempt to analyze (think jpg vs png images) went from "kinda crap" in the rankings to "really good"

kortexon Pompeii fixed potholes with molten iron (2019)

I believe this is the article:

https://www.ajaonline.org/article/3863

> In July 2014, we conducted a survey of Pompeii’s street network to document traces of iron that were observed on the stone-paved streets, which resulted in the identification of 434 instances of solid iron and iron staining among the paving stones. ... Pompeians were—in addition to using solid iron wedges—pouring molten iron and iron slag onto their streets as a method of emergency repair.

There's a huge gulf of difference between "a civilization is capable of melting iron" and "molten iron is so cheap and easy they used it to fill potholes".

Castable iron: Valuable, scarce, energy intensive, very hard to melt (comparatively), corrodes readily (especially on the coast)

Iron and other metal slag: Byproduct of iron smelting, basically waste, melts fairly easily, was used as ballast in ships, comparatively cheap, rusts superficially but is mostly a matrix of oxides which don't meaningfully react

I'm beyond skeptical that perfectly good cast iron was used to fill potholes. Using slag/dross/failed smelts/other byproducts of metallurgy makes far better sense.

It would be like far future archeologists unearthing rammed earth tire walls and concluding "the 20th century was so efficient at producing rubber they used excess tires as a building material" vs "they used a waste product which would have been landfill anyways".

kortexon FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

I think part of the confusion is that food anaphylaxis isn't automatic death sentence in all cases, but the risk is that it could be. I have a peanut allergy and carry an epipen. I've been exposed ~5 times in my life but it never was severe enough to deploy it, and instead took benadryl and closely monitored it with epipen in hand and 911 on speed dial. I also know people who eat their allergen occasionally because they just get hives and it's worth it as a treat, and I know people who had severe asthma in minutes after a cross-contamination and needed the epi.

It's just game theory. It's like asking how many metaphorical empty barrels do you want to add to your Russian roulette revolver before you are willing to risk it, the reward being basically "ordinary food". Oh and the risk can suddenly one day go from just causing hives to severe anaphylaxis at a much smaller dose.

Most people who learn of a sensitivity (I learned in elementary school after breaking out in hives from doing art involving peanut shells, the horror to think this is something schools just did!) just don't want to know that badly how dire their allergy is and assume it's life threatening, because it's not worth it to be cavalier.

kortexon gRPC: The Bad Parts

Any time you have a scalar/measurement number, basically any value with physical units, counts, percentages, anything which could be in the denominator of a ratio, those are all strong indicators of a "semantic zero" and you really want to tell the difference between None and 0. They are usually floats, but could be ints (maybe you have number_of_widgets_online, 0 means 0 units, None means "idk".)

kortexon gRPC: The Bad Parts

0 as a default for "no int" is tolerable, 0.0 as a default for "no float" is an absolute nightmare in any domain remotely related to math, machine learning, or data science.

We dealt with a bug that for weeks was silently corrupting the results of trials pitting the performance of various algos against each other. Because a valid response was "no reply/opt out", combined with a bug in processing the "opt out" enum, also combined with a bug in score aggregation, functions were treated like they replied "0.0" instead of "confidence = None".

It really should have defaulted NaN for missing floats.

kortexon I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Page I Visit (2020)

We also used to lock away basically any form of ASD or neurodivergence too far outside the norm (either directly via mental institutions, or indirectly via other harmful programs, mistreatment, or junk science). We also used to consider homosexuality a mental disorder. Moving forward is what society does.

Addiction is largely driven by neurodevelopmental disorders (ADHD, ASD, MDD, sleep disorders, and many more), psychological disorders (anxiety, OCD, and many more), or both in combination. Most folks don't want to be addicts. At the heart of addiction is executive dysfunction caused by the above conditions, exacerbated by stressors. You treat it like any other mental health problem: therapy, medication, support systems, and a society that cares for its populace.