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uKVZe85V

43 karma · joined November 14, 2017

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uKVZe85V··on Validation, Docs, tests, and database schemas from one source of truth
This is an example of a current trend: tools that help both humans and AI. Since both perform cognitive work, anything that makes that work easier benefits both.
uKVZe85V··on Smudging the game disc to make speedrunning 'SpongeBob' faster
The diagram showing where to smudge the disc looks so incredible, a kind of flower shape, no rotational origin. Seeing the video it makes more sense. All this is highly artisanal, the diagram is just a hint.

This give me an idea. Here's my smudge pattern that works better: (shows a diagram with blotches in the shape of Rick Astley singing).

uKVZe85V··on Why don't we just ask AI to write assembler?
Two reasons.

First reason, LLMs are modeled from what humans have been doing, and the have been writing software that way recently so it's easier to mimick that to get straight to results. This reason might fade away in the future.

Second reason, something related to impedance (mis)match, a signal processing notion (when the interface between two media is not well-suited, it is difficult to have a signal pass through).

Going through intermediate levels makes a structured workflow where each steps follows the previous one "cheaply". On the contrary, straight generating something many layers away requires juggling with all the levels at once, hence more costly. So "cheaply" above both means "better use of a LLM context" but also use regular tools where they are good instead of paying the high price (hardware+computation+environment) of doing it via LLM.

Interestingly, AIs are used to generate sample-level audio and some video, which may look like it contradicts the point. Still they are costly (especially video).

uKVZe85V··on [dead]
10 CVEs, remote code execution on platforms and individual developer's workstations. The public announcement is three days old and I couldn't find any mention here, which is kind of surprising.

Submission title here is the HTML title. Visible title in the article "The Mother of All AI Supply Chains: Critical, Systemic Vulnerability at the Core of Anthropic’s MCP"

uKVZe85V··on Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
You're defeating your own point. CSD in practice breaks a basic feature of the desktop : knowing at first glance which of the windows will receive whatever you type on the keyboard.

For eons the standard was: the only one with the title bar showing the theme accent color. That is consistent, predictable, keeps the user in the flow.

With CSD each app does whatever inconsistent thing they can fancy. You type and oops deleted something in the wrong window.

Alas now even many default SSD setups fail at this (selected and non-selected windows look pretty much the same) and keyboard-first workflow is much hindered.

uKVZe85V··on Ask HN: Dark Mode for HN?
Been there, done that. Then dropped dark mode entirely. Strong filtering of blue light (use redshift or whatever your OS provides) beats dark theme IMHO, without the downsides.
uKVZe85V··on You Don't Need Monads
Is early return poor man's monad?

(Nod to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2497801/closures-are-poo... yet real question.)

uKVZe85V··on Ask HN: What is in C-00000291*.sys?
I'm Not Sure.
uKVZe85V··on How to install Linux from a Windows installer
Probably a "compatible" card that would behave like the standard of the era only after being setup by a DOS driver. Linux, like DOS programs, would find it only after such a setup. Perhaps even the card setup would not survive a reboot.
uKVZe85V··on How I decide if your website is worth a revisit
> Then I personally don’t care about needing JS to view the site (it’s 2024…)

In 2024, shouldn't hacker news visitors get that receiving a passive document to display locally is a thing, and having to run unaudited code from random strangers on your machine all the time is quite another? Then reopen the conversation about browser security?

Or, instead, get that simplicity is our ally, but unneeded complexity is the root of much evil?

Visit e.g. any stackexchange site with script disabled and be enlightened.

uKVZe85V··on Docusign just admitted that they use customer data to train AI
Not even certain this will be enough. Hawking radiation encodes the information that was thrown in. Sure at present it's a perfect mess, but who knows?
uKVZe85V··on Why is Facebook unable to stop a wave of trojan infections through Facebook ads?
Not really aligned, but somehow reminiscent of this other dystopian future of what happens when a platform makes money not on products but on ads https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-01-12
uKVZe85V··on Show HN: Hacker News Outliers
TL;DR: on that site, 77% of first-party bandwidth is Javascript. Serving HTML instead of Json would cut the bandwidth by 4.4.

> It's minimal and most code is on the server. Also it's a small footprint and proven to be fast (Preact). This site has a 100 performance score on Google Pagespeed,

Yes, it's nicely minimal in a number of aspects. Good point.

> JS doesn't mean bad UX.

For those who run their browser with scripts off by default it is.

Disabling JS and cookies by default has another nice benefit: on a number of sites, the stupid content-obcsuring cookie banner just does not exist (as well as ads, of course). And pages load time is much better.

> Blocking third party scripts and cookies is one thing, but not wanting first party script just forces the developer to use server-side templating for their static content which means you either deliver everything from the same origin (bad for latency) or chain a CDN in front that picks out static content to cache (I don't think that's compatible with the web 2.0 ideology).

That doesn't hold.

If a server can format data into a Json, it can format the same data into HTML and serve it the same. In the specific case of this site, the generated HTML has the same lifetime as the generated Json.

From the site: "It is updated every 2 hours."

Ironically, because this site is nicely minimal in a number of aspects, one can play with statistics. Not counting cloudflare beacon js, I measure

1.16k HTML, 1.56k CSS, 18.44k JS, 1.05k favicon.svg, 1.61k JSON payload.

Therefore 77% of bandwidth used is Javascript:

    p=(1.16+1.56+1.05+1.61) ; j=18.44 ; 100*j/(j+p)=77
By serving HTML instead of Json (at the same price), the bandwidth cost would be divised by 4.4:

    p=(1.16+1.56+1.05+1.61) ; j=18.44 ; (j+p)/p = 4.4
Think about it: running custom code on each browser of each visitor to perform exactly the same computation and yield the same DOM each and every time is totally useless.

All in all, serving a full HTML page instead of a HTML shell + custom JS + Json totally makes sense.

The good news is, for the past year I have started to hear seasoned web developers complain more about the sad state web development has been for years, and longing for some simplicity. Wait and see.

Kudos to the author for embracing minimalism. You can go a step further.

uKVZe85V··on Show HN: Hacker News Outliers
> The UI is almost identical to the HN frontpage

Well, for one HN works without Javascript, while that URL yields just a blank page.

uKVZe85V··on Polish Hackers that repaired DRM trains threatened by train company
That was 2020. The case evolved in favor of the GPL, see e.g. https://www.april.org/violation-d-une-licence-libre-entr-ouv...
uKVZe85V··on Why is Ubuntu power consumption lower than non-free Debian?
The assertion lacks substantiation. I offered this URL to spark conversation on the topic, as is customary here.
uKVZe85V··on Show HN: CFR[]: Very minimal drawing language with 5 commands: C, F, R, [, ]
Which are not visible on a smartphone, and IMHO should appear right away without having to hover anyway.
uKVZe85V··on Bentham's Mugging (2022)
Fun fact: I asked ChatGPT to help me translate that to French for private use, pasting there the first part of the conversation.

It started answering, then within seconds my question was replaced with "This content may violate our content policy. If you believe this to be in error, please submit your feedback — your input will aid our research in this area."

Then, seconds after, the still-appearing answer was replaced with the same message.

Doh! The content filter got tripped because "obviously" it's not a philosophical thought experiment about utilitarianism but an evil text about mugging someone, which is an illegal activity. What a time to be alive!

uKVZe85V··on Recreating the THX Deep Note (2009)
Better audio at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYMpMcmpfkI
uKVZe85V··on The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”
Two important things:

1. From the first page:

> please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).

In other words, if a question is about some kind of vehicle that you think should be allowed to go, overriding this rule, the answer is "yes, the rule is violated".

2. There is a twist in this game and it's best to not tell which it is before you try the game. (The twist is acknowledged in the result page, 4th paragraph from the bottom, not counting the P.S. line at the end).

uKVZe85V··on The history and role of fashion in the software industry
From the title I thought it was about tools/frameworks/language fashion. Not clothes fashion. ;-)
uKVZe85V··on Unrecord – Official Early Gameplay Trailer
Wow. At first glance, I couldn't tell if this was a real game or a video of a real-life scene made to look like a game. The characters move in such a natural way.

But after checking out some Unreal Engine 5 demos and looking for glitches, I am now convinced that this is indeed a bona fide game.

The game plays off the fact that realistic flaws can trick our brains into thinking it's real-life, not CGI.

Right from the start, with the blown-out sky, wide-angle shot, and imperfections on the building, it's clear that this is a real-world setting. Yet it's not.

Around the 0:05-0:06 mark, you can see how a low dynamic range camera would react to range variation via exposure change. This is a departure from the usual method of processing high dynamic range in games, which involves pre-processing the world into a low dynamic range.

This news deserves more visibility on HN. I upvote!

uKVZe85V··on First early gameplay trailer for “UNRECORD”
Better link to the official source as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35636765 did just before.

Awesome, by the way.

uKVZe85V··on Glitch Tokens
@dang dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35058479 . Very interesting, still.
uKVZe85V··on Glitch Tokens
@dang dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35058479 . Very interesting, still.
uKVZe85V··on Computer proof ‘blows up’ centuries-old fluid equations
The mathematical truths are the fruit of the work. The social consensus is an implementation "detail". Yet it's the implementation we have. Does this make better sense now?
uKVZe85V··on Ask HN: Which boring technology do you still use?
> I’m a regular trichromat

Do you mean you have tested for usual https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichromacy and showed that you see all shades people usually see, or have you definitely tested for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy ?

uKVZe85V··on Smooth scrolling 60fps on MSDOS 286
286 with VGA? I guess no problem because I've seen a 8086 machine with VGA.

Around 1994, I've seen and played a game on a 8086 machine with a VGA card and full-screen perfectly smooth scrolling. I don't remember the name but it was a 2D-from-above toy-car racing game where each level/race had a different theme.

uKVZe85V··on Fields Medal was never meant for ‘the greatest mathematical genius' (2018)
Well, not the same, but Galois did get fields in his name, actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois_field . Is that what you intended?
uKVZe85V··on Monodraw – a non-subscription, powerful ASCII art editor
The given URL is about what's new in 1.6 and mostly boils down to:

* "app icon, document icon and welcome window",

* "ability to simultaneously edit multiple shapes of the same type",

* "minimum OS requirement has been raised to macOS 11 Big Sur".

For an overview of the software, see this URL: https://monodraw.helftone.com/

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