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madars

5,185 karma · joined July 27, 2009

https://madars.org/
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madars··on Calculator Forensics (2002)
arcsin(arccos(arctan(tan(cos(sin(9)))))) = 9 (in degrees mode - when regular trig functions output pure numbers, those numbers get interpreted as degrees for the next function and similar for inverses - calculator style), because each intermediate lands in the principal-value domain of the next inverse (e.g., arctan(tan(x)) = x when x \in (-90°, 90°) and the intermediates happen to be in those ranges). Specifically, sin(9°) ≈ 0.156434, cos(0.156434°) ≈ 0.999996, arctan(tan(0.999996°)) = 0.999996°, arccos(0.999996)≈0.156434°, arcsin(0.156434)≈9°.
madars··on FFmpeg moves to Forgejo
Anubis is MIT licensed so you should be able to modify it freely: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/blob/main/LICENSE It would be very funny if they did that though.
madars··on SIMD Binary Heap Operations
By the way, you can also construct heap in linear time - instead of doing n consecutive insertions, at least half of which require log n work, you can apply sift-down operations from bottom up, beginning with the last non-leaf node and working backwards to the root.

That way, roughly half the nodes are leaves (requiring no work), a quarter are at the second-to-last level (requiring at most 1 comparison/swap), an eighth at the third-to-last level (requiring at most 2 comparisons/swaps), and so on. Summing up 1 n/4 + 2 n/8 + ... gets you O(n) total complexity.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heapsort?useskin=monobook#Vari...

madars··on Debian 13 “Trixie”
Integrated Intel GPU and no graphical system, just KMS VT (text console). That's what made it so frustrating - only displaying a console should not result in kernel panics under CPU load! Admittedly, the experience was anecdotal and years ago and I heard Debian is doing less of a RHEL-style "frankenkernel" now.
madars··on Debian 13 “Trixie”
>I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way.

Debian is great but I can't say this is a shared experience. In particular, I've been bitten by Debian's heavy patching of kernel in Debian stable (specifically, backport regressions in the fast-moving DRM subsystem leading to hard-to-debug crashes), despite Debian releases technically having the "same" kernel for a duration of a release. In contrast, Ubuntu just uses newer kernels and -hwe avoids a lot of patch friction. So I still use Debian VMs but Ubuntu on bare metal. I haven't tried kernel from debian-backports repos though.

madars··on GPU-rich labs have won: What's left for the rest of us is distillation
The blog kept redirecting to the home page after a second, so here's an archive: https://archive.is/SE78v
madars··on Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market
You don't even need to import foreign doctors: just increase the number of residency slots.
madars··on Visa and Mastercard are getting overwhelmed by gamer fury over censorship
All modern Zcash wallets are shielded-only.
madars··on What went wrong inside recalled Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks?
The article doesn't show pictures of the unit itself, focusing on the CT scan, so here's the recall notice: https://www.anker.com/a1263-recall
madars··on Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with a VIC-20, an Abacus, and a Dog
A great resource for visually seeing progress is https://sam-jaques.appspot.com/quantum_landscape (click "Prev"/"Next" to see other years) - it makes very clear that incredible progress is happening - this is a log-log plot.
madars··on YouTube's new anti-adblock measures
The second Chrome drops uBlock Origin (as part of their "Manifest V3 without blocking Web Request" plan), I'm off to an alternative browser. Enough is enough.
madars··on Bruteforcing the phone number of any Google user
A bit more context: BuyVM is a legitimate business, popular with hobbyists, and has features that are hard to get elsewhere (e.g., BGP sessions). They do take a pro-free speech stance but they are a far cry from bulletproof hosting ("shady operators"). An imperfect comparison at a massively bigger scale would be Cloudflare's prominence in certain contexts.
madars··on Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)
This comment (currently downvoted to hard-to-read grey-on-grey) is an excellent example why you should always enable "showdead" in your profile, use user CSS to make downvoted comments readable again (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41514726), and browse https://news.ycombinator.com/active instead of the homepage once in a while.
madars··on Why not use DNS over HTTPS (DoH)?
You can opt out of it if you use API to register your WireGuard public key. Specifically, you pass in hijack_dns=false https://schnerring.net/blog/use-custom-dns-servers-with-mull...
madars··on The Man Putin Couldn't Kill
https://archive.is/aq6KS
madars··on Reducing Cargo target directory size with -Zno-embed-metadata
TLS does this with GREASE (Generate Random Extensions And Sustain Extensibility) - https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8701.html . HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39416277 (19 points, 8 comments)

Go's implementation of JSON format for protobufs also does this: https://protobuf.dev/reference/go/faq/#unstable-json

> To avoid giving the illusion that the output is stable, we deliberately introduce minor differences so that byte-for-byte comparisons are likely to fail.

madars··on De-anonymization attacks against the privacy coin XMR
This reads like standard AI slop. A giveaway is structured Attempt/Methodology/Efficacy pattern repeated all the way through the article, while top level categories are overlapping. (ZeroGPT: "Your Text is Likely generated by AI/GPT".)
madars··on Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives
This comic is evergreen https://i.redd.it/d3423w2g5ur21.jpg (source: https://old.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/bcdlbf/hello_old_fr...)
madars··on Semantic search engine for ArXiv, biorxiv and medrxiv
They have RSS feeds for new/updated papers: https://eprint.iacr.org/rss/
madars··on Semantic search engine for ArXiv, biorxiv and medrxiv
Looks great! Could you add eprint.iacr.org (Cryptology ePrint Archive)?
madars··on Moody’s strips U.S. of triple-A credit rating
All those promises are "parchment guarantees", to use Madison's term. For example, social security distributions were promised to be tax exempt, and they were from the institution of the program in 1935 up until 1983 - talk about reliance interest!
madars··on MIT asks arXiv to withdraw preprint of paper on AI and scientific discovery
Yeah, replace x.com with xcancel.com or nitter.poast.org, e.g., https://xcancel.com/Robert_Palgrave/status/18562734059656934...
madars··on Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
This is fantastic. One rarely discussed use case is avoiding overzealous "alignment" - you want models to help advance your goals without arbitrary refusals for benign inputs. Why would I want Anthropic or OpenAI to have filtering authority over my queries? Consider OpenRouter ToS - "you agree not to use the Service [..] in violation of any applicable AI Model Terms": not sure if they actually enforce it but, of course, I'd want hardware security attestations that they can't monitor or censor my inputs. Open models should be like utilities - the provider supplies the raw capability (e.g., electrons or water or inference), while usage responsibility remains entirely with the end user.
madars··on How a Pipe Organ Works (2020)
Oxford Music Online has a great article that goes into a lot of detail - https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.44010 and fittingly remarks that

>The organ is, together with the clock, the most complex of all mechanical instruments developed before the Industrial Revolution. Among musical instruments its history is the most involved and wide-ranging, and its extant repertory the oldest and largest. Despite its essentially indirect and therefore relatively inflexible production of sound, no other instrument has inspired such avowed respect as the organ, ‘that great triumph of human skill … the most perfect musical instrument’ (Grove), ‘in my eyes and ears … the king of instruments’ (Mozart, letter to his father, 17–18 October 1777).

Stephen Malinowski's famous YouTube channel of animated graphical scores has a great selection of organ pieces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXaCmhAMnHs&list=PLA20FE13E9...

St. Cecilia, pray for us!

madars··on Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model
Neat! As a human one can recognize that this question embeds a computation and use a standard trick - explicitly ask the LLM to use a program to generate the answer. LLM's are great at generating code but not necessarily that great at executing it "in head" (e.g., "what's the numeric integral of foo?" vs "write a Python program that computes foo"). Some instances of this are noticed by models themselves (I guess by now all know that they are bad calculators so would whip out code to do multiplication) but still a lot of them remain. Concretely, Claude 3.7 with "How is ahnentafel number 67 related to me? Use a program to help you." gets to "your father's father's father's father's mother's mother", whereas without the hint it indeed trips up in arithmetic and logic errors.
madars··on New ChatGPT Models Seem to Leave Watermarks on Text
For those unaware of the reference, a famous example was Tesla. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33621562 (Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks), see also a general discussion of related techniques: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap
madars··on 15,000 lines of verified cryptography now in Python
After seeing "Jigar Kumar" cognitive exploits on xz mailing list a maintainer would be excused (and I'd even say, encouraged) to just ignore pressure tactics altogether. It's an open source project - if it works great, if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.
madars··on Finding Signal in the Noise: Machine Learning and the Markets (Jane Street)
Why would it be wasted? I like apples and I like being able to buy them any day of year, even out of season. The only reason I can do so is because there is an entire industry of people who manage the inventory, distribution, try to predict supply and demand, and take on a risk doing that. The principal reason why I can buy and sell equities at very small spreads any day of the year is similar: traders are competing to take the other side of the bet.

I also encourage everyone to read CFTC response to the Vatican's (!) Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/SpeechesTestimony/giancarlore... It talks about about the social utility of derivatives and refutes the narrative that they are basically tools of "speculation." Traders take on risks others can't bear, creating massive economic value that ripples through the entire system.

madars··on The Lost Art of Logarithms
Toeplitz wrote "Calculus: The Genetic Approach" and his approach of explaining math via its historical development is apparently more widely used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_method . Felix Klein remarked: "on a small scale, a learner naturally and always has to repeat the same developments that the sciences went through on a large scale"
madars··on Show HN: Tov – a minimalist Bible app for distraction-free reading on iOS
Thanks for the insight! There's definitely value in keeping app focused and not overburden user with too many choices. Very interesting that Berean translation connects each translated word with the original Greek or Hebrew text -- I'll need to check it out.
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