HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

sonofgod

750 karma · joined September 25, 2016

submissionscomments
sonofgod··on You can't just rename your IT Ops team and call it DevOps
I'm assuming it's GregOps, because GreggsOps is HugOps with bonus vegan* sausage rolls. :P

* vegan optional

sonofgod··on The Penguin Book of Oulipo review – writing, a user's manual
You might also find this apt: you must omit all fifth glyphs on this mastodon social forum

https://oulipo.social

sonofgod··on Researchers have identified 100 mysteriously disappeared stars in the night sky
From the paper: https://sci-hub.se/10.3847/1538-3881/ab570f

"We show that these objects are redder and have larger proper motions than typical USNO objects." -- Interesting, not sure what that'd imply.

"A particular focus is given to USNO objects that have several detections before vanishing" -- implies that these at least some of these objects are not just detector glitches or scratches or similar, although "Visual checks confirm that indeed the most interesting cases, about 100, are mostly one-time detections in the red band."

"In a separate paper by K. Pelckmans et al. (2019, in preparation). we propose a new tool for handling a large number of images using methods of machine learning." (since people were talking about ML in astronomy)

sonofgod··on Researchers have identified 100 mysteriously disappeared stars in the night sky
Should be a relatively simple matter to cross-reference against other photographs (potentially from other observatories) to identify whether the same star appears multiple times.
sonofgod··on Gov.uk content should be published in HTML and not PDF (2018)
There's a whole pile of different gotchas.

* identifying characters that won't actually print [white text; zero-size font; beneath another layer; not in printable space]. Once this lead to every letter aappppeeaarriinngg ttwwiiccee..

* text in fonts where a != aa [leaving the text as a complicated substitution cypher; caused by font embedding for only the characters in the document]

* text in images

* no spaces: have to infer from gaps in letters

And these are generated by a whole host of different software with different assumptions, and you never know if there's something else you're missing.

sonofgod··on Fast
Related: The Duke Nukem Forever list.

Written in the aftermath of Duke Nukem Forever finally being canned, twelve years after being announced. (It did finally ship, to a poor reception)

http://duke.a-13.net/

sonofgod··on The Silurian Hypothesis
We are pretty sure KT was caused by a giant asteroid. Maybe the space Silurians redirected it into Earth? (Not serious)
sonofgod··on 'Hijacked' Bank of England audio sold to hedge funds seconds ahead of broadcast
I wonder if it's a room with no connectivity otherwise, because I imagine if you're in the room live, sending [UP] or [DOWN] with human latency would give you 6 seconds of relative exclusivity of the information.
sonofgod··on Illusion of the Year 2019 Winner
I'm really not seeing fluid motion in any direction. I'm seeing a fish explode to disassembly and reassemble pointing the other way.

I see the rotation when there's the great big opaque cylinder in the middle of it, but it doesn't last after the cylinder is removed -- it reverts to explody fish.

sonofgod··on DepHell – Project Management for Python
My thoughts on the website:

I don't expect to have to click through to Github to get a summary of what your project's about. Consider putting some of the text from your readme onto the main project page, it's good copy and I think wants to be front and centre.

I went to the docs first to try to find this, but bounced off the terse three word descriptions and lists of verbs.

Good luck with the project!

sonofgod··on Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
yay, blockchain. :(

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766085037248512

"Finally, new technologies have emerged to make a decentralized approach more viable. Blockchain points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and durable hosting, governance, and even monetization. Much work to be done, but the fundamentals are there."

sonofgod··on Intentionally Blank Page
Tangentally related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Achievements_of_the_...

"The Political Achievements of the Earl of Dalkeith was a political pamphlet that was published and circulated in Edinburgh during the 1880 United Kingdom general election. It was well presented but inside the neatly printed cover there were just thirty-two blank pages, making it an early empty book."

"The 32 blank pages of the pamphlet have been digitised by the LSE Library."

sonofgod··on Medieval Price List
Yes, it's a weight of silver, around this era.

One Troy pound (373g) [of silver] divided into 240 pennies (making a penny about 1.55g). Exactly what a shilling is varies, between 4 and 6 pennies. [ https://regia.org/research/misc/costs.htm ]

sonofgod··on Paradoxical Geniuses: “Let us burn the ships” (2017)
There's an example based on that work -- the game of Chicken, where you drive a car at another car, person who swerves loses.

Payoff table: Both swerve: both lose face Neither swerve: both die They swerve, you don't: you gain face, they lose it You swerve, they don't: you lose face, they gain it

So: you make it abundantly clear that you can't control your car, even if you wanted to. Tear out the steering wheel, or lash it down and jump onto the roof of the car. Now it changes your opponents options to:

Swerve: lose face Don't: die.

(It's a trolley-problem-like scenario, don't ask too many questions about the practicalities of tearing out the steering wheel)

sonofgod··on FAQ: The “Snake Fight” Portion of Your Thesis Defense (2010)
This sounds like the "I bring a bomb onto the plane, which I don't explode. The odds of there being two bombs on a plane is so tiny it's insignificant, so I'm safe from terrorism" plan. Seems sound to me!

Other potential safety precautions involve bringing a polka-patterned snake-catching device: specifically, an ASP.NET

sonofgod··on Drop Table “Companies”;-- LTD
Deliberately so: the company owner didn't want to ACTUALLY drop somone's tables, because that'd be rude (and possibly illegal).
sonofgod··on Drop Table “Companies”;-- LTD
SQL injection is a problem with well-known solutions, but it still relies on everyone knowing not to do it and not doing it quickly "just to get it working" and accidently leaving it in.
sonofgod··on Call-A.P.P.L.E. – Complete 1980 Set
Or get a quick fix now (probably not complete) ttps://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Call-A.P.P.L.E.%22el
sonofgod··on Can you solve it? The four points, two distances problem
1) is answered in the article

Clarifications: The four points must be distinct. That is, no point is allowed to be superimposed on another point.

sonofgod··on Show HN: ALL_CAPS => sudo all_caps (Bash)
This is hideous. Congratulations! :D
sonofgod··on Google Announces Nest WiFi
Just need another two-hundred and fifty three wrongs...
sonofgod··on New Device Harvests Energy in Darkness
I love this concept.

Sure, it'll never be a significant source of energy [if we plastered literally the entire earth's surface with them at maximum theoretical efficiency, we'd provide 1% of our electricity consumption].

But the sheer concept of "you know what, lets generate energy from THE VOID OF SPACE, the ABSENCE OF HEAT" is deeply entertaining.

sonofgod··on Ken Thompson's Unix Password
circa 1995:

Teacher had password written on the BACK of the clipboard they carried around everywhere.

Said teacher's password was 'qwerty'.

(Yes, it worked)

sonofgod··on A maze puzzle hidden within an Atari 2600 video game
It's Cellular Autometa Rule 15, with some of the options changed to be random. (ie: "be the opposite of the cell to your top left"). This generates unbroken continuous wiggly lines varying between horizontal, diagonal and vertical within one quadrant.

Other than the random elements, there's one exception: 11001 -> 0, which directly leads to a nice downward branching structure.

sonofgod··on Why the Amazon Basics Keyboard Is My Favorite Keyboard
> Your rollover is the worst possible value you get.

> With the Amazon Basics keyboard I’ve seen as high as a 6 key rollover when pressing spui<space>c

"As high as" implies that you've also seen lower. Which isn't the rollover of the keyboard.

My crappy two-key rollover (QWA fails) keyboard supports that specific keystroke combination.

sonofgod··on Show HN: A few simple games not only for kids
Some minor issues:

Hangman:

"REH" is not an english word, "LAMA" should be spelled LLAMA "FAULT" is the only non-animal.

Maze: Typo: "comming" should be "coming"

sonofgod··on What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community
And I feel that might well be an improvement for all involved.
sonofgod··on What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community
I think this is an important lesson for an awful lot of online communities -- in a public forum* some mild, warranted criticism is then published to your friends and they are then encouraged by the algorithm to put in their tuppence-worth. Should any of those be inclined to comment -- perhaps less sensitively, slightly more inflammatory -- then the cycle begins anew, with more fuel added to the fire.

* Mostly looking at Twitter and Facebook with their explicit "engagement means my friends will see this" algorithm

sonofgod··on How to Convert a PDF to Excel
If you're looking for quick and easy, rather than an OSS solution, https://pdftables.com/ might be of interest.

(Disclaimer: I was working at the company when they were developing this)

sonofgod··on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages
Thanks, was wondering what was up.
← PreviousPage 3 of 7Next →