HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ubitaco

25 karma · joined December 15, 2015

submissionscomments
ubitaco··on Em dashes are fucking amazing
I didn't know that AP style recommended spaces either side of the em dash. Here in the UK we generally use en dashes instead, and I thought em dashes always had no spaces. Apparently the wire machines that AP sent their news out by in olden times couldn't always do en dashes.
ubitaco··on UTF-8 is a brilliant design
It's slightly buried in the readme on Github:

> how can we store a 24 byte long string, inline? Don't we also need to store the length somewhere?

> To do this, we utilize the fact that the last byte of our string could only ever have a value in the range [0, 192). We know this because all strings in Rust are valid UTF-8, and the only valid byte pattern for the last byte of a UTF-8 character (and thus the possible last byte of a string) is 0b0XXXXXXX aka [0, 128) or 0b10XXXXXX aka [128, 192)

ubitaco··on A simple 16x16 dot animation from simple math rules
fun! Here's a heart: https://tixy.land/?code=hypot%28x-7%2Cy%2Babs%28x-7%29-9%29-...
ubitaco··on Seismologists suspect earthquake on San Andreas Fault is imminent
Whereas GP is making reference to a case in which Italian seismologists were literally convicted after their predictions did not come true.
ubitaco··on The UX of UUIDs
I would back "blank" as the most likely to be understood by the other person.
ubitaco··on Kalman filter from the ground up
If you can make certain assumptions about the system (mainly that sources of noise follow gaussian distributions and are independent), then the Kalman filter gives the best possible estimate of the system state. And it can be computed cheaply, like on the Apollo guidance computer.

You basically need to know some kind of a model for the system to run KF. Whereas ML is all about working out the model automatically.

As for similarities, KF is a really efficient implementation of Bayesian inference. I think that any ML model that isn't fundamentally using Bayesian inference, is fundamentally flawed.

ubitaco··on Good data scientist, bad data scientist
> Good DS understands the basics of web technology

I'm not a data scientist but a portion of my job is creating pipelines, data analytics and such. I also only have a bare minimum knowledge of web technology. Why is knowledge of web technology part of being a good Data Scientist? Or is this point oriented specifically for data scientists working in web based companies?

Genuinely curious. I could imagine myself working as a DS in the future and that's why I found this article interesting.

ubitaco··on New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency
I'm also not a physicist, but for the fun of the discussion...

Radiative heat loss scales with the fourth power of temperature. I don't know what temperature the ISS radiators are but suppose they are around 300K. Then I think the radiative surface to keep something cool at 10K would need to be 30^4, or 810000 times larger per unit heat loss. So realistically I think you would need some kind of wacky very low temperature refrigeration to raise the temperature at the radiator, and then maybe radiate the heat into the lunar surface.

ubitaco··on British Airways announces immediate retirement of 747 fleet
This happened to me on an emirates A380, but on landing. The timing was comical because immediately after touching down (and being rained on) the entertainment screen prompts you to rate your flight.
ubitaco··on 1 in 4 Statisticians Say They Were Asked to Commit Scientific Fraud
>In fact there is a 25% chance that the person involved in working that out has been asked to commit fraud at some point.

But there's only a 10% chance of that.

ubitaco··on Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
The market has spoken
ubitaco··on H.265/HEVC vs. H.264/AVC: 50% bit rate savings verified
Perhaps you can start at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Free_media_resour... Good luck!