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salamanderman

395 karma · joined April 21, 2016

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salamanderman··on A software engineering interview question I like: computing the median
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quickselect
salamanderman··on A software engineering interview question I like: computing the median
I almost tanked an interview, and luckily turned it around, when the interviewer had never heard of QuickSelect and thought I was insane when I started writing it.
salamanderman··on White House alters arrest photo of ICE protester, says "the memes will continue"
Hey fellow nerds, never forget that your inventions will be turned into a weapon. We must always consider how dangerous that weapon will be. And there you go, generative AI being used by an authoritarian government to slander and defame political opponents. It's not the first time, I'm sure, and they've been using it for propaganda memes and NFT trash for a while, but this is the most blatant I've seen. It's not obviously altered, it's very believable, and it's for a minor dissident, a protest organizer. I'm really scared.
salamanderman··on Draig, a Welsh Programming Language
Da iawn!
salamanderman··on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
"A 100% Rust kernel is now upstream in Linux 7.4" paired with "Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig?" is great.
salamanderman··on These Men dove to the Edmund Fitzgerald shipwreck decades ago. Their stories
Yes, after the ship was already screwed, they moved the ship to the far side of a small island where the winds would be slowed and the waves would be smaller. Unfortunately, their depth maps were inaccurate and the water wasn't deep enough such that they bashed the hull. If it weren't for the extreme winds, they wouldn't have moved the ship to try to get out of them.
salamanderman··on Zig and the design choices within
I think the post gives an answer to this with "due to Zig's fairly minimalistic nature; it lacks a lot of features that one would otherwise use to solve problems. Of course, this is the appeal for many, but still". I have a lot of C/C++ experience, and they're what I reach for, but I often want C to be a little more like C++, and I often want both to have slightly better memory management, and I've never liked the different syntax for the main language, templates, and pre compiler macros. I also agree with Zig's dogmatic stance on no hidden control flow; I have been bitten by "magic" too many times.
salamanderman··on These Men dove to the Edmund Fitzgerald shipwreck decades ago. Their stories
I assume you thought the "hurricane west wind" line from the song was exaggerated. The winds down the middle of the lake, in certain seasons, are 80mph.
salamanderman··on New lab-grown human embryo model produces blood cells
I'm pretty certain I read of people doing this in cycling tournaments.
salamanderman··on I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens
I've heard parents say they "got a 504 and then had to pay a lawyer to enforce it" so many times. I just hate the idea of being forced into such an adversarial relationship with the school. In my life, any time we start talking about needing a 504 I think "we might as well just say screw it, because what good will come of this?" Like, in your story, I assume that while they complied, the way they interacted with your kid was tainted in some other from that point forward because your kid got them in trouble. Hopefully I'm wrong, but it's that kind of thing that I worry about for my own situation.
salamanderman··on Show HN: Draw a fish and watch it swim with the others
Nice, I got my upside down penis fish past the filter! Although, once it was swimming it did look very much like a fancy guppy. I don't think anyone would recognize it, but I still feel smug about "beating" the machine.
salamanderman··on Show HN: Draw a fish and watch it swim with the others
As hard as I tried to add fish characteristics, it knew what I was doing.
salamanderman··on What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?
Agreeing with you, and connecting it to the link, my parents talk about their childhood as basically being feral. You had multiple kids in the house who entertained/babysat each other (possibly by beating each other up, but whatever) and you also had streets filled with kids doing whatever (baseball in a dirt field, playing in traffic). The rule was to be home by the time the streetlights came on. Organizing and transporting to playdates etc. was not a thing.
salamanderman··on Introduction to the A* Algorithm (2014)
Breadth-first is a queue. Depth-first is a stack. A* is a priority queue.
salamanderman··on Show HN: MidWord – A Word-Guessing Game
Bisection search the game, but honestly was fun to play with my partner multiple times.
salamanderman··on Push Ifs Up and Fors Down
Moving preconditions up depends what the definition of precondition is. There's some open source code I've done a deep dive in (Open cascade) and at some point they had an algorithm that assumed the precondition that the input was sorted, and that precondition was pushed up. Later they swapped out the algorithm for one that performs significantly better on randomized input and can perform very poorly on certain sorted input. Since the precondition was pushed up, though, it seems they didn't know how the input was transformed between the initial entrance function and the final inner function. Edit - if the precondition is something that can be translated into a Type then absolutely move the precondition up and let the compiler can enforce.
salamanderman··on Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room
UC Berkeley does this too. Nobody told us freshman, and in my very first class we were all dutifully early, wondering where the professor was, and at 8 minutes after the hour the whole lecture hall was wondering if we needed to bail. Then the lecturer came in and asked what we were all doing there, didn't we know classes don't start until 10 minutes after the listed time?
salamanderman··on An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip
If I were doing this, I would have the system generate the image, and then I would have it run a secondary estimate saying "probability that this is a picture of [list of characters that Disney has given us reference input for]". If the picture has a "looks like Spiderman" score greater than X, then block it. EDIT - To answer the question, I'm guessing Disney provided a reference set of copyrighted images and characters, and somehow forgot Indiana Jones.
salamanderman··on By the end of today, NASA's workforce will be about 10 percent smaller
Well, the answers are simple. Congressmen and senators, and sometimes presidents (Orion was George W's baby), demand that NASA spend money on stupid shit that NASA doesn't actually want to spend money on, and also demands that NASA spend that money in specific districts around the country to maximize the dollars they claim they brought to their district while minimizing NASA's efficiency.
salamanderman··on Why Blog If Nobody Reads It?
So, journaling, which is already known to be a healthy practice. It begs the question, though, why publish it if it's just for you? Just write it.
salamanderman··on Xkcd 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today
I can't tell for sure if the "ironically" refers to it feeling ironic that Facebook didn't collude, or that Pixar did collude. If it's the latter, it's because Jobs was CEO and primary shareholder of Pixar and orchestrated it's purchase by Disney to get himself a seat on the Disney board. Ironically, if I'm recalling the biography correctly, Jobs made significantly more money from Pixar than he did from his first phase at Apple.
salamanderman··on Business Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era
Peter Pauper Press is my go to notebook. They aren't elegant in their simplicity like a Moleskin but they are lovely and very functional.
salamanderman··on PID Controller Explainer (2022)
It really is mostly empirical, especially since any real system has limits on the amount of proportional, derivative, or integral control authority you can apply. Still, every controls student is taught Zeigler Nichols, and are simultaneously told by their professors that nobody uses it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziegler%E2%80%93Nichols_meth...
salamanderman··on Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
My recollection when trying to find a Google Reader alternative was that there was no free alternative. Everything at the time that I found had been a premium alternative to Reader before it shut down.
salamanderman··on The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same
The author should check out the 2013 Edgar Wright movie The World's End, pointing out the growing uniformity of local pubs. Also, it has awesome fight scenes.
salamanderman··on The real realtime preemption end game
I had a frustrating number of job interviews in my early career where the interviewers didn't know what realtime actually was. That "and predictable delay" concept from the article frequently seemed to be lost on many folks, who seemed to think realtime just meant fast, whatever that means.
salamanderman··on The real realtime preemption end game
me too [EDIT: and I totally empathized]
salamanderman··on Halfsies
I'd guess SVG. It's not a complex integral. They can do a boolean intersection in SVG.
salamanderman··on The Role of Diet on the Gut Microbiome, Mood and Happiness
This should be the top comment.
salamanderman··on Give babies peanut butter to cut peanut allergies, study says
Maybe at first it was a sane reason like this. When we were having a kid, though, we were definitely told by reputable sources (like an obgyn) not to feed the kid peanuts in any form until 3 years old. We decided that the bureaucracy of what advice to give hadn't caught up to the science we'd read, and just tried small amounts of peanut butter when we moved to solids.
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