HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

pitherpather

53 karma · joined September 4, 2023

submissionscomments
pitherpather··on Rhyme as Reason
In driver's ed class we were give the assignment to come up with safety-related rhymes.

I remember one from a friend named Roger.

"Keep your eyes off the foxes, or your car will end up like boxes."

pitherpather··on Only walking for exercise?
Given the current style, if the book were published today would it be titled BAREFOOT?
pitherpather··on Does Reality Have a Surprising _Lack_ of Detail?
We live in a simulation. Dark energy corresponds to a memory leak. A reboot is specified when this proportion reaches 2/3 (66.6%). This is all written in The Runbook.
pitherpather··on Swirling Forces, Crushing Pressures Measured in the Proton
It is true in general that the "binding energy" of a nucleus is reflected in the measured mass or atomic weight, exactly as mc^2.
pitherpather··on Moore on Moore – The past, present and uncertain future of Moore's Law
> This shows how easy it is to end up with two opposite conclusions by using Ngram Viewer slightly differently.

Hence the commonly-encountered phrase: You believed a naive ngram reference? Oh my sweet summer child.

pitherpather··on CD Demagnetizer
I have taken my CD player/decoder made with discretes and turned it end-over-end while slowly backing away from a strong magnet.
pitherpather··on CD Demagnetizer
Stay tuned. I will let you know.

I hope this doesn't turn out like the CD-rewinder I wasted my money on last year.

pitherpather··on How Should We Think About Race and "Lived Experience"?
> (Probably there's some principle of standpoint theory that says that I as a white person am not allowed to judge Mi'kmaq Indians. Fine, far be it from me to challenge standpoint theory. But many of Elizabeth Hoover's ex-friends who turned against her are white, and I judge those people.)
pitherpather··on Show HN: Quantum Coin Flip - The most random coin flip on the internet
Also, modulo a successful coin-in-the-middle attack.
pitherpather··on Does offering ChatGPT a tip cause it to generate better text?
Watch out if the AIs start to say: I can help you, but there is one little real-world favor I need to ask for.
pitherpather··on Show HN: Real-time image generation with SDXL Lightning
> a game

Competitive prompting?

pitherpather··on The Ten Rules of a Zen Programmer
Well-enough written. A good reminder.

Miffed that they are numbered 1-10, not 0-9. Something to work on in my next lifetime.

pitherpather··on Wirebonding is here to stay
> The automotive industry, with its increasing reliance on advanced electronics for everything from engine control units to driver assistance systems, demands materials that can consistently perform under challenging conditions with defects under one part per billion, which translates to one defect per billion kilometers. Copper’s inherent properties, such as its high melting point and excellent electrical conductivity, make it particularly suited for these requirements.
pitherpather··on Why so many people in Hacker News do not use their real names?
> We will protect the confidentiality and privacy of clients by:

Perhaps add h: keeping the therapist's cell phone in a sound-isolated enclosure.

pitherpather··on Why so many people in Hacker News do not use their real names?
If the comment history is considered sacrosanct, it could be nice to be able to go back and retroactively change the username for an account, at least.
pitherpather··on Bard is now Gemini, and we’re rolling out a mobile app and Gemini Advanced
> naming things is hard

Of tangential interest: I recently heard that Faraday, while discovering new electromagnetic phenomenon, then turned to either a linguist or classicist for help in assigning/inventing terms for them. (I cannot find a link for this just now, so consider this heresay.)

pitherpather··on JavaScript in SVGs
I have seen immediate-mode SVG for GUIs.

Is parsing and rendering SVG well-pipelined at this point? Offhand it might be cache-friendly. I have not tried a simple elapsed-time-in-loop test, but to me geometric screen-painting happens instantly enough.

I can imagine a separate branch in computer evolution, if PCs had not happened, where graphical terminals would have evolved to render something SVG-like, support a mouse, and send back simple mousedown/mouseup/x/y data.

pitherpather··on Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
Also, is there any workflow option in current Kicad for importing a component-naming netlist (of the kind so many existing schematic packages can output), without having a live Kicad schematic?

One lesson of this thread could be: There is enough interest in text-based "schematics" -- aka netlist import -- for Kicad layout to add support for the approach, if it does not currently exist.

pitherpather··on TCC RISC-V Compiler Runs in the Web Browser (Thanks to Zig Compiler)
Scrolled all the way through; very impressive.

> We have implemented (fully or partially) 48 POSIX Functions from above. ...[however] These 24 POSIX Functions will Halt when TCC WebAssembly calls them…

I was just wondering this evening: I have seen WASM described as an environment for selectively subsetting interfaces, in part for security. Is the following sometimes done?: Compile and link to a "glibc" which implements only a subset of calls, again for runtime security?

pitherpather··on SeaweedFS fast distributed storage system for blobs, objects, files and datalake
I am aware of some research into operating systems with a database rather than filesystem as a base layer. If SeaweedFS serves a middle-ground between databases and filesystems, could it also suggest a middle-ground in conceiving of research operating systems??
pitherpather··on Aerugo – RTOS for aerospace uses written in Rust
I have not read the ESA document, but in their defense one possibly applicable principle is this:

If you get too far from understanding/practicing implementation, soon enough you will not be competent enough to produce a specification.

pitherpather··on Compiling a Lisp (2020)
> like an affine transformation between lisp code and algol family stuff like c

I wonder how far one might go introducing common lisp with parallel examples in javascript and python -- something like a Rosetta Stone approach, also likening ')' and '}' and <dedent>.

pitherpather··on Making a PDF that's larger than Germany
Hackaday soon: Synchronizing a treadmill to a pdf the size of Germany.

Obligatory?: The pdf is not the territory.

pitherpather··on Scientists report asymmetry between heating and cooling
My last sentence there, about a caveat, was silly of me, beyond mere HN affectation.
pitherpather··on Moddable DIY displays with built-in dev boards
Nice. And under $50 for a professional display and case.

> Moddable created the XS JavaScript engine specifically for IoT products. It is the only JavaScript engine that supports the modern JavaScript language standard on the embedded microcontrollers that power most IoT products. It is designed to be efficient, secure, standard, and extremely reliable. And, of course, it makes it possible for IoT products to allow users to customize them.

pitherpather··on Harvard Teaching Hospital Seeks Retraction of 6 Papers by Top Researchers
In relation to both the quoted sentence and your addition, I have seen speculation that where once "being in the clergy" was esteemed and attracted predators and psychopaths seeking cover, today that attraction is toward a position in science work as cover.
pitherpather··on Self-contained Linux applications with lone Lisp
Given your pursuit of elegance, I imagine you could ultimately have a --clone or --cloner command-line switch which would allow any executable instance based upon your interpreter to create a new executable instance, but encapsulating newly-supplied source code. In this sense your interpreter could go viral. (In tcl/tk context, freeWrap might be an example for study.)

Relatedly, I don't know whether, given argv[0] and your targets, one can at least copy the named file, even if one cannot open it directly for reading.

pitherpather··on Self-contained Linux applications with lone Lisp
I don't know how clean or simple or portable you wish your build environment to be, but would it be worth embedding at compile-time?

Thinking of the general need in these situations to produce a custom-named interpreter/executable, could it be worth accessing the program name itself to find a paired source file? E.g., in invoking ./foo2.o it would look for ./foo2.code -- a two-file distribution allowing to double-click on the executable??

Could there be a non-unicode flag at the end of a special elf file which allows arbitrary unicode data to be concatenated after that? I.e., an agreed loader-ignore-hereafter convention or similar? (Asking with no knowledge of ELF internals, besides hints given in the OP.)

pitherpather··on Self-contained Linux applications with lone Lisp
> In this article I will demonstrate this capability [lisp code directly embedded], explain how it works and the journey to implementing it. Every script bundling tool I've ever seen unpacks the code to some file system location and then reads it back in. I came up with a different solution.

> The lone-embed tool copies the lisp code into the ELF and then creates a LOAD segment for it. Linux then maps in the embedded code automatically at load time before the interpreter has even started.

And the discussion which follows I found very informative.

pitherpather··on Scientists report asymmetry between heating and cooling
> I wasn't aware that people considered there to be a symmetry between heating and cooling

Same here. By analogy, while any chemical reaction is in principle reversible, the kinetics "forward" and "backward" are unlikely to be equally favorable.

Likewise, with atomic nuclei, fission and fusion tend to be favored under distinctly different conditions.

The article does mention "far from equilibrium." Could this be a caveat similar to "in mice"?

Page 1 of 2Next →