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ruds

49 karma · joined June 2, 2010

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ruds··on Hosting a website on a disposable vape
In most of the world, "liberal" doesn't mean the left half of the political spectrum. In many places it's the centerish part and in a few places it's the rightish part. In the US, until recently, almost all mainstream politicians were liberal in this sense (even while many of the Republican liberals used "liberal" as an epithet in campaign ads).

From wikipedia:

> Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law.[1][2] Liberals espouse various and sometimes conflicting views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.[3] Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history

ruds··on Enlisting in the Fight Against Link Rot
The security concerns were not addressed by not accepting new links. As the post you replied to said,

> The play was to scrape the web for old goo.gl links that went to expired domains, register the domain, and then you have a goo.gl URL that you can send wherever you want, indefinitely.

ruds··on What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
You are mistaken. Discretionary spending is spending that Congress allocates during the annual appropriation process, while mandatory spending is spending that is required by prior law. See https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
ruds··on It's not a crime if we do it with an app
Antitrust suits were filed against these four companies in November, alleging that they conspired to fix prices: https://archive.is/fp44d
ruds··on OpenAI's o1 Playing Codenames
I don't think this sort of communication from guessers to clue giver is in the spirit of the game (at least in my play group). However, inflating later clues is a reasonable approach! It's just that I don't think you're allowed to communicate the amount of inflation. Guessers must determine whether people 5 has slack to allow additional guesses on previous clues.
ruds··on A solution to The Onion problem of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (2021)
You would like to slice (half) an onion in a way that minimizes the variance in volume of the pieces. The problem is then simplified to slicing half an onion in a way that minimizes the variance in cross-sectional area of the pieces at the widest part of the onion.
ruds··on Supreme Court rules ex-presidents have immunity for official acts
But the immunity is only presumptive for acts within the outer perimiter of the president's official responsibility. For core constitutional powers, like giving orders to the military, the immunity is absolute.
ruds··on Google Sheets ported its calculation worker from JavaScript to WasmGC
Note -- AIUI the js and wasmgc are both produced from the same Java codebase. The problem here is that the developers on the Java codebase had started making changes based on their performance when transpiled to javascript (which is only natural -- it seems that they had been targeting js output for a decade).
ruds··on A study of Google's code review tooling (Critique)
Not only that, but a code reader can rely on this too. If you only use a raw for loop when you're skipping around, then the reviewer / future reader can slow down to understand what's happening here. If you use raw for loops for the for-each case, now the reader has to slow down on all your for loops. It's similar to the reasoning for "const everywhere": if you don't mark variables const, I need to figure out as a reader whether the variable is modified later, and that slows me down and increases the mental load of reading a function.
ruds··on Git rebase, what can go wrong
A clean history is one where there is a single commit, "big feature commit", that produces a worktree that is the same as the one produced by "fix 3" in the "unclean" history.
ruds··on Dream First Bank Assumes All of the Deposits of Heartland Tri-State Bank
In many of these bank failures, the problem has been that they are holding very safe loans at an interest rate that is too low for today's environment. In practice, if they are allowed to survive until the loans mature, they will get all the principal back, so there won't be a realized loss there. Unfortunately, the rate is so low that if you need to sell the loan today it will be at a substantial discount to face value.

The losses that the banks would actually realize are that the cost of deposits have gone up: People want a higher interest rate on their deposits. If they don't get that rate, people pull their deposits, and banks aren't allowed to hold their safe loans to maturity because they need cash now.

Historically, rising rates have been good for banks because deposits are sticky and the banks can raise their customers' interest rates more slowly than they raise the rates on the loans they make. It seems that customers are more fickle now, and many banks weren't prepared for that.

ruds··on Power companies fight Maine’s proposed non-profit utility
Here's what's balancing: I've traded assets worth X dollars for a company with Y dollars of tangible assets plus G, the fudge factor that makes both sides equal. I've traded X dollars of assets for X dollars of assets, where Y dollars is like real estate and cash in the bank and financial instruments and tools and stuff, and G = X - Y is some intangible/uncertain/something that caused me to pay $X for $Y of stuff.

Before the purchase, I had some pile of assets worth $A. After the purchase, I still have some pile of assets worth $A. The purchase balances.

ruds··on Power companies fight Maine’s proposed non-profit utility
The monetary number is not made up out of whole cloth. It's the difference between the book value of the tangible assets of a company as an accountant understands them, and the amount paid for the company. An income stream arising from the operations of a business doesn't count as a tangible asset.

You can absolutely assign a value to that stream. That's how you arrived at the purchase price in the first place! But that income hasn't been realized yet and it's not written in stone. The income could be higher or lower depending on what happens in the future.

ruds··on My Hardest Bug Ever (2013)
I suspect that it's "Adding Scheduler Activations to Mach 3.0", presented at the Usenix Mach III Symposium in 1993. https://dada.cs.washington.edu/research/tr/1992/08/UW-CSE-92...
ruds··on Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laszlo_Bock
ruds··on U.S. eliminates human controls requirement for fully automated vehicles
Coming in late, but I think you're misunderstanding the suggestion, which was to make pedestrian avoidance standard equipment on all new cars, not just autonomous vehicles.
ruds··on E-Prime – English without the verb “to be”
I still remember the mnemonic my 9th grade Spanish teacher gave for this: DONT BE LOCO DONT: Ser is for Description, Origin, Nationality, and Time. BE: these verbs mean "to be" LOCO: Estar is for Location and Condition.

Determining whether a sentence describes the subject or describes the subject's condition is the trickiest part.

ruds··on Reddit's GameStop, AMC surge is the new Occupy movement
A large component of the time value of money is the rate of return that a dollar today brings in vs a dollar in the future. With super-low interest rates, the time value of money is relatively low and future income is valued relatively highly.
ruds··on A Little Money Laundering Can Have a Big Impact on Real Estate Prices (2019)
If you're in New York City, this may be related to rules on rent stabilization. Rent stabilized apartments can only raise their rent by a small percentage each year. These landlords likely want to be able to raise rents quickly if the rental market heats up, so they raise the "actual rent" by the maximum percentage each year but then give a concession so that they can actually find a renter.
ruds··on A possible new back end for Rust
http://www.cppgm.org/ was a sort of experiment called "C++ Grand Master Certification." It seems to have died out, but the goal was to produce a self-hosted C++-11 compiler and standard library implementation. It took about a year to go from nothing to code generation in 9 programming assignments (I think I completed the first 6 before I got too busy to continue).
ruds··on IMF predicts worst downturn since Great Depression
How does this differ from gold-backed currency?
ruds··on Ask HN: I just wrote an O(N) diffing algorithm – what am I missing?
It's subseqence. For instance, in

ABXCDYEFGZ QARBCSTDEFG

You want to find [Q]A[R]B(X)C[ST]D(Y)EFG(Z)

ABCDEFG is the longest common subsequence, QRST are the additions and XYZ are the deletions.

ruds··on Berlin’s Popular Shopping Streets Will Go Car-Free
New York requires that you get a license from the Taxi and Limousine Commission in order to drive for Uber.

https://www.uber.com/drive/new-york/resources/ https://www.uber.com/drive/new-york/get-a-license/

ruds··on One night of telescope time rules out black hole/dark matter idea
I think the question is: given a 3-body system with objects A, B, and C, is C's gravitational effect on A altered in any way by the position of B, or are B's and C's effects on A independent?

The reason for the question, I think, is because of an intuition built up around EM. In the system

A B C

B can block and otherwise interfere with C's EM radiation so that its effect on A is different depending on B's location.

ruds··on Fatal Call of Duty Swatter Pleads Guilty to 51 Charges
I find that rule nowhere in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
ruds··on Bits in a Float, and Infinity, NaN, and Denormal (2012)
The complaint is about the text in the article, which reads "The hardware interprets a float as having the value:

    value = (-1)^sign * 2^(exponent-127) * 1.fraction".
"1.fraction" is nonsense that doesn't really mean anything, whereas (1 + fraction * 2^-23) does mean something.
ruds··on Trillions in Bad Loans May Sap World Economy for a Long Time
I think the cruel error is to (1) make something (nearly) necessary for a prosperous life, (2) make it ruinously expensive, and (3) offer to loan money to people who have little choice or financial sophistication (4) at terms that are highly favorable to the sophisticated creditor.
ruds··on Proposed New York Law bans encrypted smartphones
No, that was NYC's municipal government, not the state.
ruds··on T-Mobile’s Binge On Optimization is Just Throttling, Applies Indiscriminately
Well, it's one way to mitigate the tragedy of the commons. You don't get much direct benefit from YOUR bandwidth use being reduced, but you do get benefit from everyone else's bandwidth use being reduced.
ruds··on G is for Google
Shares of class B can be converted 1:1 to class A and sold.
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