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lorenzhs

5,080 karma · joined March 7, 2014

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lorenzhs··on I Won't Buy You a Coffee
4€ will get you two (pretty small by US standards) scoops of ice cream or three beers in a shop in Germany. In a cheap bar, you might get a beer for 4€ though the average is much closer to 5€ these days.
lorenzhs··on College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
If you can't transfer the course's material onto new, unseen questions, then you might have memorised it, but you didn't understand it. Getting an A requires understanding, not rote memorisation.
lorenzhs··on Report: Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet
Even if it was still a thing (and it really isn’t, imo), libimobiledevice does a decent job already, and given a little funding it shouldn’t be super hard to close the gaps and build a nice UI on top of it. But that’s not happening because very few people care about it at all.

Now, AirDrop support is a completely different beast. But it requires hardware support (promiscuous mode, iirc) that many common chipsets simply lack.

lorenzhs··on Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
Good news for you! 1.5 is in O(50) since they’re both constants! (It’s 1.50 because the author has the 58€-a-month flat rate ticket for all local and regional services in the entire country. If you buy a regular ticket, you get back 25% of the ticket price for delays over an hour and 50% for delays over two hours)
lorenzhs··on Rusty.hpp: A Borrow Checker and Memory Ownership System for C++20
Indeed: https://clang.llvm.org/extra/clang-tidy/checks/bugprone/unch...
lorenzhs··on Rusty.hpp: A Borrow Checker and Memory Ownership System for C++20
clang-tidy has a check for this -- it's not a compiler check but with clangd and LSP, almost every code editor can show an inline warning: https://clang.llvm.org/extra/clang-tidy/checks/bugprone/unch...
lorenzhs··on Rusty.hpp: A Borrow Checker and Memory Ownership System for C++20
Should’ve checked my own link instead of relying on memory — I might have some code to revisit on Monday. That’s insane, thanks for correcting me!
lorenzhs··on Rusty.hpp: A Borrow Checker and Memory Ownership System for C++20
There is no implicit conversion (except to bool, but that tells you whether the optional contains a value), and operator* / operator-> throw std::bad_optional_access if it’s empty. See https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/utility/optional
lorenzhs··on Germany explores 4-day workweek amid labor shortage
Making an argument about how people may want to work less based on a number most have never seen or care about is a flawed argument no matter how you approach it.
lorenzhs··on Germany explores 4-day workweek amid labor shortage
As an employee, the Arbeitgeberbrutto is a number you never see. You’re not saying that employing people isn’t worth it, you’re saying that working in Germany isn’t worth it. Then you have to take the employee’s perspective, not the employer’s. Nobody advertises the true cost to the employer in other countries either. How much do all those benefits to US employees cost? Do you include that when you list US salaries, or do those get magically excluded because health insurance isn’t mandatory?

Your premise just seems fundamentally flawed.

lorenzhs··on Germany explores 4-day workweek amid labor shortage
This is not the norm, as the employment modalities in that thread are super strange. If you’re employed by a German entity and your salary is 91.1k€, your take-home income would be around 53.8k€. Put another way - the $100k / 91.1k€ are the Arbeitgeberbrutto, they correspond to 75.5k€ Arbeitnehmerbrutto (the number you’d normally see on your contract). The difference exists because there are employer deductions and employee deductions, but the employer deductions don’t show up on the pay slip. Only in this constellation the employee has to pay both. It’s very much the exception, not the norm.
lorenzhs··on The Hyperloop was always a scam
Something like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-U-Bahn_M%C3%BCnchen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sihlpost#Post-U-Bahn
lorenzhs··on California PG&E joins proposal to set utility rates based on income
Your information is quite a few years out of date. The solar learning curve has continued in the meantime, reducing the cost every year. Especially in sunny places like California, unsubsidised solar pays for itself surprisingly quickly (I don’t have the numbers for CA, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the number was 10 years).
lorenzhs··on Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?
If you enjoyed XOR filters, you might also like ribbon filters, something that I had the pleasure of working on last year. They share the basic idea of using a system of linear equations, but instead of considering 3 random positions per key, the positions to probe are narrowly concentrated along a ribbon with a typical width of 64. This makes them far more cache-efficient to construct and query.

By purposefully overloading the data structure by a few per cent and bumping those items that cannot be inserted as a result of this overloading to the next layer (making this a recursive data structure), we can achieve almost arbitrarily small space overheads: <1% is no problem for the fast configurations, and <0.1% overhead with around 50% extra runtime cost. This compares to around 10% for XOR filters and ≥ 44% for Bloom filters.

In fact, I'm going to present them at a conference on Monday - the paper is already out: https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2022/16538/pdf/LIPI... and the implementation is at https://github.com/lorenzhs/BuRR/. I hope this isn't too much self-promotion for HN, but I'm super hyped about this :)

lorenzhs··on Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?
Indeed! Funny enough, I rewrote that article a few years ago, it previously contained an approximation of something like Algorithm L that some person with a blog came up with, having no idea that an even simpler and provably correct algorithm was published as early as 1994 :) Though others have improved the article a lot since then, adding explanations for how/why it works. Couldn't be happier to see it cited in this list!
lorenzhs··on Turn Photos into 3D Models
The App Store page says "Simply take photos of an object from all angles and upload them to our service, and we will create and send you a 3D model ready for 3D printing, Augmented Reality and our web app r3Dent." so not it appears to use some kind of server-side processing. So it's not even on-device.
lorenzhs··on The definitive guide that you never wanted: Backpack fabrics (2017)
Often it’s just the thing that goes up and down that needs to be replaced, that’s a 5$ fix
lorenzhs··on Google says iMessage is too powerful
https://signal.org/android/apk/ and it appears to work without Google Play Services (though push notifications drain more battery iirc because they can't use the google push notification service)
lorenzhs··on Nuclear fallout is showing up in U.S. honey, decades after bomb tests
Cosmic background radiation is a thing and water is really good at blocking it, so it's not complete bullshit. Of course, without knowing what dose the GP received, it's impossible to say whether it's a comparable dose to what they would have received on the surface - but it's plausible.
lorenzhs··on We will be retiring Alexa.com
Other companies do that, too - I think it's due to trademark law and how it's much harder to establish a new name than reuse an existing one. Cortana comes to mind.
lorenzhs··on Vegetable Oil for Lubricating Chainsaws (2008)
WD40 is a terrible choice of chain lubricant, it’s too volatile.
lorenzhs··on Yt-dlp – A YouTube-dl fork with additional features and fixes
You can just run “vlc https://youtube.com/watch/…”. There’s also YouTube-dl integration for mpv if I’m not mistaken.
lorenzhs··on New in Git: switch and restore
Did changing GIT_EDITOR to something else not cross their minds? Or did they not even bother to check if it can be changed?
lorenzhs··on PG&E will bury 10k miles of power lines so they don't spark wildfires
This is not some magical high-tech vision that only exists in Singapore. It's been this way for many decades in built-up areas of most of Western Europe -- mostly it's just overland high-voltage lines that are above ground. My grandfather used to tell the story of how his American visitors were always curious where the power in his house came from (this was probably in the 60s or 70s) and amazed when he showed them the connection in the basement. It amused him to no end.

82% of Germany's power lines are buried: https://www.iwr.de/ticker/lange-leitungen-82-prozent-der-str... (in German). This figure includes everything from low-voltage lines to houses to high-voltage distribution lines.

lorenzhs··on THW: Germany′s army of volunteers for disaster relief
Nitpick: THW has the capabilities (hydraulic spreaders and cutters) and trains for vehicle extrication, but it's true that the fire department usually handles these situations because they are far quicker to arrive. Since vehicle extrication is usually rather time-critical due to the injuries that are to be expected in such accidents, and the fire department has more experience with it, THW rarely does it. Some local chapters do on-call Autobahn shifts (Technische Hilfe auf Verkehrswegen), maybe there?
lorenzhs··on Police destroy Bitcoin miners with steamroller in Malaysia
Heat pumps are far more efficient than resistive heating, so this wouldn't be economical.
lorenzhs··on Paternity leave: The hidden barriers keeping men at work
Nah, the idea is not that it's the leave that sets any single woman's career back, it's that the expectation of the leave being taken by women causes them to not be hired/promoted/... before having children that the OP is concerned with if I understood them correctly. If suddenly all parents were to take leave, regardless of gender, then discriminating young people by gender would no longer make economical sense.

There should definitely also be mandated minimum vacation days in my opinion (where I live, four weeks of paid leave per year are the legal minimum for full-time jobs), but that's quite unrelated to the issue at hand.

lorenzhs··on Bring back menus, QR codes are terrible
You can most definitely bypass the invalid certificate warning on iOS (I also have a device that uses a self-signed certificate and listens on a local IP, I can open its web interface just fine on iOS)
lorenzhs··on Crypto is 'rat poison', a third of mainstream investment firms tell JPM
Or, you know, they were asked if they agreed with the view. Which is what the article states near the end.
lorenzhs··on Crypto is 'rat poison', a third of mainstream investment firms tell JPM
Well the answer to your question is in the article:

> Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has in the past characterised bitcoin as "rat poison squared". One third in the JPM survey agreed with that view. Another 16% thought it was a temporary fad.

The question was not "what are your thoughts on cryptocurrencies? Please write at least 100 words", it was more along the lines "do you agree with Warren Buffet's view that Bitcoin is 'like rat poison squared': [ ] Yes [ ] No"

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