Hacker News: CalChris

New comment by CalChris in "Political meddling at the Census Bureau damages the US statistical system"

CalChris — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:20:14 +0000

Opinion.

New comment by CalChris in "You could have invented PageRank"

CalChris — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:07:35 +0000

> Sergey Brin and Larry Page came up with this precise algorithm, i.e., PageRank, which was one of the key algorithms that helped catapult Google into a household name and made them tons of money. Both Sergey and Larry were grad students at Stanford, so their coming up with such an amazing algorithm doesn’t seem surprising.

No, Brin wasn’t a co-inventor of PageRank.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US7058628B1/en

New comment by CalChris in "Dolly Parton has died"

CalChris — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 18:25:58 +0000

I saw Dolly at Hardly Strictly in 2005. She was great.

New comment by CalChris in "SeL4 security proofs now complete on AArch64"

CalChris — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 20:18:51 +0000

Side channel timing attacks are micro architectural. The SeL4 security proofs are architectural.

Caffeine and Cardiovascular Disease: A Scientific Statement from the AHA

CalChris — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 01:37:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000001454

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340077

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by CalChris in "Woman pulled over at gunpoint twice after flock camera glitch"

CalChris — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:42:22 +0000

Brookfield's police chief has defended his officer's, saying they responded appropriately given the information in front of them.

This meant there were no humans in the loop.

New comment by CalChris in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"

CalChris — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:28:27 +0000

Zuckerberg's boat needed to be monitoring 13 (bridge to bridge) as well. It was in US waters, power driven and greater than 20 meters.

Bow Windshield

CalChris — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 05:23:36 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_windshield

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49253706

Points: 15

# Comments: 4

New comment by CalChris in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"

CalChris — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 20:52:39 +0000

https://youtu.be/qEo5Rw6AMMU?is=Hq_h6s5heJFrRLpP

New comment by CalChris in "Register deprivation: spills and runtime under forced register scarcity"

CalChris — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 20:44:40 +0000

How much effect the CPU's register remapping has? Probably a lot and the article doesn't discuss it at all.

However, the Intel Xeon E-2236 was released in 2019; so it's hardly ancient and the current E-2400 isn't so different.

As for hardware register renaming, Tomasulo dates to 1967 and out-of-order ROBs were common in the 90s. I don't know that there's been any major new ideas microarchitectural ideas in register renaming since the 90s.

I still think it's a meaningful experiment but could be improved with consideration of microarchitectural features.

New comment by CalChris in "Does creatine make you smarter?"

CalChris — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:59:45 +0000

I was taking 5mg of Creatine and was in the ER for an unrelated reason. My metabolic panel measured creatinine at 1.34 mg/dL. A panel from last year without the supplement was a very normal 0.95. These were gummies and I wasn’t slamming water.

BTW, it tends to trash the eGFR test which relies on an unbiased creatinine reading.

New comment by CalChris in "The mask that compiles to nothing: how HotSpots JIT learned to reason about bits"

CalChris — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 14:39:12 +0000

Why is this known bits optimization being done by the JIT rather than the Java compiler?

New comment by CalChris in "Is The Economist Always Wrong?"

CalChris — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:15:50 +0000

It started with Greenspan but ramped up under Bernanke.

https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...

New comment by CalChris in "Dostoyevsky isn't difficult"

CalChris — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 02:32:00 +0000

I liked The Possessed by Elif Batuman. I had read The Idiot in high school, a death march for a term paper. But I liked Batuman's reading of it better than mine (but not enough to re-read it).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elif_Batuman

New comment by CalChris in "1,700 free online courses from top universities"

CalChris — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 03:45:18 +0000

Thanks. Stanford's archive seems to be one big 296.2G blob. But it's there at least.

https://archive.org/details/stanford_itunesu/

New comment by CalChris in "1,700 free online courses from top universities"

CalChris — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 03:13:03 +0000

The Stanford iTunesU classes have been truncated to a few seconds. So Susanna Braund's Aeneid course (which was brilliant) is gone. Same thing with their Hannibal course. I don't know that they're available elsewhere. Apple dropped iTunesU (2021?) and Stanford didn't have a backup.

New comment by CalChris in "DOS Game "F-15 Strike Eagle II" reversing project needs DOS test pilots"

CalChris — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 23:57:26 +0000

I have a friend who flew F15s. I’ve sent him this.

New comment by CalChris in "A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer"

CalChris — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 20:40:33 +0000

It’s odd that the operator of the scam knew full stack level details of its implementation. To me, it seems like they were targeting the author, perhaps as something like privilege escalation, identity escalation perhaps.

New comment by CalChris in "A dumpster arrived behind my university's library"

CalChris — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:20:23 +0000

Berkeley has the Northern Regional Library Facility in Richmond, CA for this very purpose. I’ve checked out books where they crackled as I opened them and it was clear I was the first to read them.

https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/visit/nrlf

New comment by CalChris in "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]"

CalChris — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 05:14:17 +0000

People don’t get credit for fixing problems that do happen. Maybe possibly in a sales scenario where your fix unblocked the sale. Otherwise nada.