HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

superjan

1,329 karma · joined July 16, 2017

submissionscomments
superjan··on Show HN: Beatsync – perfect audio sync across multiple devices
For those wondering: The rule thumb here is that light travels at one foot per nanosecond. 300 ns =0,3 μsec. Electricity is a bit slower but the same order of magnitude.
superjan··on Neutron Stars Hint at Another Dimension
That was a great watch, thanks!
superjan··on Neutron Stars Hint at Another Dimension
This is not consensus. There are lots of anomalies in what we observe in the cosmos. Here someone links two of those to a speculation about extra dimensions. It would get interesting if they have predictions that can be checked.

A promising new theory should fit known observations, explain previously unexplained phenomenon, and predict something testable. That will be difficult to judge as a layperson.

superjan··on What is an Ethernet cable? Here's how to connect to the internet without Wi-Fi
Coax ethernet was often deployed as a bus: 20something computers that must be directly connected to a single cable going from room to room. If one of the plugs was unplugged or not tightened correctly, everyone on that line suffered. This happened a lot, people moved computers around. And the tech looks simple.

That is a different situation than installing a fixed, point to point connection.

superjan··on Muons used to test the condition of a road bridge in Estonia
This story? https://www.jst.go.jp/EN/achievements/research/pdf/mitsuhiro...
superjan··on HTTrack Website Copier
A few years ago my workplace got rid of our on-premise install of fogbugz. I tried to clone the site with HTTrack but did not work due to client-side JavaScript and authentication issues.

I was familiar with C#/webview2 and used that: generate the URL’s, load the pages one by one, wait for it to build the HTML, and then save the final page. Intercept and save the css/image request.

If you have ever integrated a browserview in a dektop or mobile app, you already know how to do this.

superjan··on What makes code hard to read: Visual patterns of complexity (2023)
I agree. After compiling it is even quite likely that the compiler does not care you gave a name to a return value (assuming you let it infer the variable type). What you will see in practice is that the intermediate is explicitly “materialized” (e.g. into a list), because the author wanted to inspect it in the debugger. That will have some cost, mostly in the form of avoidable allocations.
superjan··on What makes code hard to read: Visual patterns of complexity (2023)
I do both. It depends on whether I can think of a concise variable name that faithfully describes the intermediate result. If you need more than 20-ish characters to describe it, then it is better to leave it chained.
superjan··on What makes code hard to read: Visual patterns of complexity (2023)
This is, by a large margin, the best article about code complexity I have read in a looong time. Thanks.
superjan··on Apple unveils new Mac Studio
So that means it can run with 4GB. Is there a way to block it from using more?
superjan··on We're Charging Our Cars Wrong
A battery can weigh up to half a ton. Because of the weight, you want to keep it at a low position in the car. That is not easy to swap. By contrast consider that you charge your car. For a daily commute, the most practical is to charge it on your driveway or at the office. In my case that means I only have to consider public charging on vacations and longer weekend trips. Now this means my net travel speed is lower then. But I can adjust to that.
superjan··on U.S. soldier charged in AT&T hack searched "can hacking be treason"
I don’t expect him to get convicted for just the google searches. They possibly matter in this case because they direcly relate to his personal circumstances. In his legal proceedings, they are used as an argument to keep him in custody due to flight risk. I find that understandable.
superjan··on ARPA is funding cheap community-owned gigabit fiber to neglected neighborhoods
The consumers that I know of don’t have a clue what they need. They don’t understand that the upstream network is rarely the bottleneck. They’re prepared to pay a 30-40% premium to triple their network speed. Smart ISP’s bundle their upgrade with new Wifi mesh routers, because that is more often the issue. This is in NL, not the US, so there still is some price competition here.
superjan··on Dust from car brakes more harmful than exhaust, study finds
They do. But if you brake too agressively, they switch to friction brakes. It pays off to avoid this: more mileage, marginally lower charging expense, lower cost on brake maintenance and fewer complaints from passengers.
superjan··on We were wrong about GPUs
The P4 was nothing to celebrate. Clock for clock it was slower than it’s predecessor. The subsequent generation was based on the Pentium M, which was more energy efficient.
superjan··on Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting
When you work with normal AC power, it is considered unsafe practice to use parallel wires to share load in a circuit. Reason: one might get decoupled somehow, you don’t notice, and when fully loaded the heat causes a fire risk. This problem sounds similar. A single fat wire is the easiest, but I guess it’s not that simple.
superjan··on We are destroying software
Well, why was the initial release insecure in the first place?
superjan··on If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric
Ok. I am clearly out of my comfort zone here. So NPS is not a proxy for organic marketing success, but for customer satisfaction. Is the article’s point then that the question is sometimes too hypothetical?

I still think that it is useful to track actual reccomendations when that is expected to happen.

superjan··on If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric
In stead of asking “would you reccomend”, shouldn’t you rely on “how did you learn about us?”, or “why did you buy our product”, the first one being the most reliable, as it is a neutral question about a fact.
superjan··on Microsoft cracking down people upgrading to Windows 11 on unsupported hardware
One explanation is that Microsoft is a collection of teams with different objectives. I suppose the security people would like something better than TPM to compete with Apple’s hardware security. OEM contacts will plead on behalf of their vendors to lower standards. And the sales people want to push end-users to buy a new PC that needs a new license. Ultimately everyone’s life at Microsoft will improve with users moving to Windows 11, to gain sales, improve the spying and to mitigate risks, and avoid bad publicity if problems arise with windows 10.
superjan··on Only 1 in 10 Oracle Java users want to stay with Big Red
I don’t disagree, but I was responding to a claim that the JVM has _all_ the advantages of fully native languages. Fully native allows you to choose to have no runtime, or a garbage collector, and in some environments (realtime, OS kernel, AAA games) that is overwhelmingly the preferred option.
superjan··on Only 1 in 10 Oracle Java users want to stay with Big Red
The JVM does not have ‘all the advantages of a fully native language’: fully native code does not need a runtime, or a garbage collector.
superjan··on The hidden complexity of scaling WebSockets
Assuming you control the client code, you can periodically disconnect and reconnect. This could also simplify deployment.
superjan··on Tensor Product Attention Is All You Need
I propose T-POT (Tensor Product attentiOn Transformer)
superjan··on Should we use AI and LLMs for Christian apologetics? (2024)
> For LLMs, “open source” is a bit of a misnomer.

This is an understatement: the “source” for an LLM or similar deep learned network is not the weights, but the training data and the scripts required to train it from scratch.

superjan··on TikTok goes dark in the US
According to wikipedia, China is blocking most of the sites you mentioned. I was surprised to see that Russia does not.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_i...

superjan··on Amazon's AI crawler is making my Git server unstable
Why work hard… Train a model to recognize the AI bots!
superjan··on I will never need to buy a new computer again
And, refurbished business laptops tend to have better keyboards than consumer grade laptops, as well as a better build quality (generally speaking).
superjan··on Using black magic to make a fast circular buffer (2017)
Don’t worry. It _is_ a neat trick, and it was nice to post complete instructions and benchmarks. And it wasn’t you who put it to the HN frontpage.
superjan··on Using black magic to make a fast circular buffer
There’s a great paper from the group of Emery Berger, where they merge memory pages that become sparse. A kind of garbage collection for C and C++ languages. There’s also a good presentation about it on youtube.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.04738

The presentation: https://youtu.be/c1UBJbfR-H0

← PreviousPage 4 of 19Next →