HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

rpearl

2,114 karma · joined July 10, 2010

I work with glowing rectangles and other shapes.

hn masked email (temporary): clear.quilt6867@fastmail.com

submissionscomments
rpearl··on Jellyfin 12.0
Lyrion (fka Logitech Media Server ) does album shuffle
rpearl··on GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?
If you do the math, their numbers are something like 1000 commits per second. That's not pushes per second either, it's just the total number of commits summed up over a week, not all of which trigger much of anything to happen.

Yes, that is scale. And yes, that's not actual requests per second. But it's the sort of scale that big (and even mid-sized) tech has known how to deal with for decades. Microsoft doesn't have an excuse.

rpearl··on Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?
That is 455 commits per second. I know that's not qps over the system but it's not that huge of an input number either. Not for big tech like msft.
rpearl··on Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub
it is a simpler set of services at the expense of a more complex user experience
rpearl··on A Rant About “Technology” (2005)
Clockwork Rocket by Greg Egan is specifically about physics which does not exist here.

"Hell is the Absence of God" by Ted Chiang deals with a world in which god, heaven and hell are unambiguously real.

Both are definitely "hard sci fi"

rpearl··on Underwater oxygen loss threatens earth's stability, researchers warn
CFCs are responsible for the ozone hole. There are no known significant natural sources of CFCs. The ozone hole was caused by humans and its course correction was due to the political will to phase out CFCs.

> Climate scientists can raise the alarm or whatever but have no credibility

Climate scientists have credibility.

rpearl··on British runner Josh Kerr breaks world record for mile which stood for 27 years
these have made significant differences in some WRs recently. Cheptegei's 10000m in particular was set with rock steady even splits compared to the prior record.
rpearl··on California AB 2047 makes 3D printers off-limits to students, educators, business
Can you send me these models? I would like to print and bring them to the next committee hearing. My senator is on that committee.

I will also be bringing an ergonomic grip for my camera.

My email is in my profile.

rpearl··on Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation
> How would the "very small wealth tax" be calculated, that you propose?

It is possible to tax unrealized assets. We already do. For example, a property owner pays property tax based on the value of their property, even when they are not selling it.

It is possible for billionaires to borrow against their held assets. It is therefore also possible to calculate a tax on them.

rpearl··on Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged
it's clear that as of the time of this merge, no human has read any appreciable fraction of current mainline bun, so it's not particularly clear how much of a "mental model" exists anymore.
rpearl··on Days without GitHub incidents
It's not "unfashionable". Phabricator has been unmaintained since 2021.
rpearl··on Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race
it is a lot more challenging when running than when biking. The jostling is not your friend.
rpearl··on ChatGPT for Excel
Try https://rowzero.com ? We have written a much faster spreadsheet engine and regularly work with 10M+ row datasets
rpearl··on Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again
an article written by an AI about fonts, when the AI fundamentally does not look at rendered text, is inherently without merit
rpearl··on No knives, only cook knives
This niche hobby became https://bernalcutlery.com/ which is a fairly successful Bay Area knife store
rpearl··on Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character
rpearl··on Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
I do not know the market well; very interesting, thank you.
rpearl··on Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
perhaps when the clocks at https://clocks.brianmoore.com/ consistently make sense, AI could make a font.

Even then, I wouldn't want it making a kanji font. Consider 感 and 惑, both of which would be taught before high school.

rpearl··on New gel restores dental enamel and could revolutionise tooth repair
I do floss, but I genuinely don't see that this is obvious. You can do a lot of damage with mechanical force, to both teeth and gums! Starting a flossing regimen after not having one tends to cause pain--isn't that a signal to stop? etc.

Furthermore, correlation is not causation and it could well be the case that flossing is associated with better outcomes without causing it. For example, people who can afford to go to the dentist regularly are therefore regularly told to floss. People who care about dental health in general probably floss more, but also may be doing other things, consciously or unconsciously, to improve outcomes. Gut (and perhaps mouth) bacteria have behavioral effects; perhaps flossing is caused by having healthy mouth bacteria!

(at least one study says mouthwash is better than floss. That seems obvious to me! liquids are smaller than floss.)

rpearl··on ICE Will Use AI to Surveil Social Media
When someone is allegedly an il_legal_ immigrant, they are present but allegedly violating immigration _laws_.

That is to say, such a person has been accused of a crime.

Due process in the constitution guarantees that individuals (including non-citizens facing deportation) have the opportunity to defend themselves in court against such accusations.

rpearl··on Why SSA?
SSA form is a state representation. SSA encodes data flow information explicitly which therefore simplifies all other analysis passes. Including alias analysis.
rpearl··on Designing software for things that rot
The point of measuring is reproducibility. If you want to get the same result repeatedly the easiest way is to measure.

Obviously people have been making sourdough for a very long time; you don't have to measure.

rpearl··on Codex Is Live in Zed
I otherwise like Zed way more than the vscode-derivatives but yeah, the edit predictions are just not even close. And it's laggier feeling despite the lower quality.
rpearl··on Notes on switching to Helix from Vim
I've noticed a number of moderately sized companies "standardizing" on vscode tooling. You can use other editors, but they'll have extra special support for vscode: default project format settings or special tooling for debug integration specifically in the form of vscode config, that sort of thing. Recommended plugin sets.

I also took pause at the claim that LSP was the issue. Neovim + treesitter + LSP feels... fairly solved at this point? It was definitely a bit rough 5 years ago, but it's pretty smoothed out now. Not sure where that opinion is coming from (and it feels at odds with everything else I've read from jvns, to be honest!)

rpearl··on Binary Formats Gallery
https://doc.kaitai.io/user_guide.html#_relative_positioning
rpearl··on Is a movie prop the ultimate laptop bag?
Sure, it's just ...pretty odd? for OP to say "backpacks were marginalized as being associated with being too poor to own a car" when it's 65% of people who do not use a car in this context at all.

(aside: transit is up to 25% again recently, apparently; https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/remote-work-home.... And that graph has an even more interesting number which is that in 2019 transit was the plurality.)

rpearl··on Is a movie prop the ultimate laptop bag?
> backpacks were marginalized as being associated with being too poor to own a car.

The majority of all commuters in SF do not commute by car: https://www.sf.gov/data--vision-zero-benchmarking-commute-me...

This has been true for at least a decade. The trend, even ignoring COVID, is that a decreasing proportion do so.

rpearl··on Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"
> deserve [to be harassed by people in cars] no, they don't.

> You want to be on the road (outside of a bike line)? Act like you hold a drivers license then. Oh you don't? Get the hell off the road. A driver's license is not required to use a road. It's required to operate a car. Cyclists explicitly have the right to use the road, including outside of bike lanes. When cyclists act unpredictably it is very, very frequently a response to motor vehicle traffic and pressure, because drivers are seemingly incapable of understanding that their tons of metal can hurt people.

Cyclists would love separated infrastructure, but the vast majority of transportation dollars go towards car infrastructure in the US.

> [the sidewalk is] infinitely safer for all involved

no, it isn't. This creates a lot more points of conflict with both drivers (who do not expect fast traffic on the sidewalk) and with pedestrians. Sidewalks are also often not appropriate for wheeled vehicles moving with any speed; terrain is uneven and turns are too sharp.

You're driving? Act like you have a driver's license, which requires you to respond safely to other road users including cyclists. Can't do that? Get the hell off the road.

rpearl··on Type checking is a symptom, not a solution
> Instead of worrying about how changes in one module might ripple through dozens of dependencies, you can focus on the explicit contracts between components

That's a great idea! I'd like to suggest that we make programming languages have this as a first class concept: as part of writing a module, you write down a static description of the explicit contract. You might even encode effects and error states into that description!

Then, you know that if you stick to that contract, nothing ripples through the dependencies, but if you change it, there's things you need to go update elsewhere.

You can even readily swap in different components that have that same external contract! And since it's static, we can check it before the program even runs.

"external contract" is kind of clunky. What if we called it a "type"?

rpearl··on How we made JSON.stringify more than twice as fast
...Do you think that v8 doesn't have tests for what might be one of the most executed userspace codepaths in the world?
Page 1 of 14Next →