Hacker News: DannyB2

New comment by DannyB2 in "Snowflake AI Escapes Sandbox and Executes Malware"

DannyB2 — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:38:27 +0000

AIs have no reason to want to harm annoying slow inefficient noisy smelly humans.

New comment by DannyB2 in "Parsing Integers in C"

DannyB2 — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 21:55:24 +0000

Being liberal in what you accept is fine, as long as what you accept is precisely documented. But then, is that actually "being liberal"?

Better advice is to not do something unexpected -- even if that unexpected result is clearly documented, but someone did not read it.

New comment by DannyB2 in "Solving Every Sudoku Puzzle (2006)"

DannyB2 — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 17:34:45 +0000

It was a denial of service attack, not in the sense of soaking up my brain cells solving puzzles, but in causing me to devise and program my own solver. (In Java, text console only.) Once I wrote a solver, I felt as if I had solved all puzzles.

Then I got interested in devising puzzles with multiple solutions. Not too difficult. But making a few puzzles with two solutions was fun.

Experiment_203(

   " 1 . . | 2 . 8 | . . 9 "+
   " . 8 . | . . . | . 3 . "+
   " . . 7 | . 1 . | 2 . . "+
   //------+-------+--------
   " 4 . . | 1 2 3 | . . 6 "+
   " . . 2 | 4 5 6 | 9 . . "+
   " 6 . . | 7 8 9 | . . 4 "+
   //------+-------+--------
   " . . 6 | . 4 . | 8 . . "+
   " . 2 . | . . . | . 7 . "+
   " 9 . . | 8 . 2 | . . 1 "
  ),

// Solution #1. Found in 0 days 00:00:00.004.

// 245 boards examined so far.

   1 6 5 | 2 3 8 | 7 4 9
   2 8 4 | 6 9 7 | 1 3 5
   3 9 7 | 5 1 4 | 2 6 8
   ------+-------+------
   4 7 9 | 1 2 3 | 5 8 6
   8 3 2 | 4 5 6 | 9 1 7
   6 5 1 | 7 8 9 | 3 2 4
   ------+-------+------
   7 1 6 | 3 4 5 | 8 9 2
   5 2 8 | 9 6 1 | 4 7 3
   9 4 3 | 8 7 2 | 6 5 1

// Solution #2. Found in 0 days 00:00:00.001.

// 287 boards examined so far.

   1 6 5 | 2 3 8 | 7 4 9
   2 8 4 | 9 6 7 | 1 3 5  // <-- 9 6 7 instead of 6 9 7
   3 9 7 | 5 1 4 | 2 6 8
   ------+-------+------
   4 7 9 | 1 2 3 | 5 8 6
   8 3 2 | 4 5 6 | 9 1 7
   6 5 1 | 7 8 9 | 3 2 4
   ------+-------+------
   7 1 6 | 3 4 5 | 8 9 2
   5 2 8 | 6 9 1 | 4 7 3  // <-- 6 9 1 instead of 9 6 1
   9 4 3 | 8 7 2 | 6 5 1


   2 total solutions found.
   304 total boards examined.
   Total time 0 days 00:00:00.041.

Then I got to looking at difficult puzzles on the web. Apparently AI escargot is the world's most difficult. (And the site http://www.aisudoku.com/index_en.html says I can't publish the board). So I'll only publish the stats of applying my solver to it.

  Solution #1.  Found in 0 days 00:00:00.029.
  3,906 boards examined so far.

  1 total solutions found.
  7,832 total boards examined.
  Total time 0 days 00:00:00.085.

New comment by DannyB2 in "Why aren't smart people happier?"

DannyB2 — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 19:39:41 +0000

Ignorance is bliss?

New comment by DannyB2 in "The fastest way to detect a vowel in a string"

DannyB2 — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 19:12:41 +0000

Assume use of 8 bit characters. Declare a constant 256 entry array pre-filled with all False except for the five (or six) vowel characters. This is baked into the code and not initialized at runtime.

Now for each character c in the input string, simply do an array index and see if it is true (a vowel) or not. This avoids either five conditionals, or a loop over the string 'aeiou'. The vowel test is constant time regardless of the character value.

New comment by DannyB2 in "Show HN: Samchika – A Java Library for Fast, Multithreaded File Processing"

DannyB2 — Fri, 23 May 2025 16:12:12 +0000

Should the tests include some 10 GB files?

New comment by DannyB2 in "English Multinyms"

DannyB2 — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 20:09:16 +0000

Peaking Peeking Peking

New comment by DannyB2 in "English Multinyms"

DannyB2 — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 20:01:16 +0000

For this one: cense, cents, scents, sense

Please add: Since

New comment by DannyB2 in "English Multinyms"

DannyB2 — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 19:58:19 +0000

boar, Boer, boor, bore

How about adding: Bohr

New comment by DannyB2 in "English Multinyms"

DannyB2 — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 19:23:51 +0000

Data: Captain, the censors have detected incoming copyright infringement notices.

Riker: Shields up!

New comment by DannyB2 in "English Multinyms"

DannyB2 — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 19:17:20 +0000

Kneel Neal Neil

Knight Night Nite

Knot Naught Not

Lager, Lauger (a last name), Logger

Macs Mac's Macks Maks Max

Tends Tens Tins

Threw Through Thru

Ware Wear (clothing), Wear (diminished by use) We're Where

Your You're Yore

New comment by DannyB2 in "English Multinyms"

DannyB2 — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 18:50:33 +0000

Are we not going to count: Gnu Knew New

New comment by DannyB2 in "English Multinyms"

DannyB2 — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 18:42:15 +0000

Another one from my list that is missing is:

Cents Scents Sense Since

New comment by DannyB2 in "English Multinyms"

DannyB2 — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 17:24:34 +0000

For: call, caul, col

Wot about: cawl ?

New comment by DannyB2 in "iText PDF Library turns 25"

DannyB2 — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:29:26 +0000

JasperReports library used that library, and forked it at it's last LGPL version.

New comment by DannyB2 in "How to Use the Foreign Function API in Java 22 to Call C Libraries"

DannyB2 — Wed, 08 May 2024 20:32:57 +0000

I once (2016 ish) used a serial-port library for Java. Needed to be cross platform desktop app for Linux, Windows and Mac (in that order, all on x86/64). And it was. I have forgotten the name of the library project I included, but it included DLL binaries for the platforms we were targeting.

New comment by DannyB2 in "World Radio History Archive"

DannyB2 — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 16:41:12 +0000

FYI . . .

Download old BYTE magazines from here: https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Byte_Magazine.htm (but note URL has changed to worldradiohistory) https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Byte_Magazine.htm

Or higher quality scans here: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine

Creative Computing: https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing

It's like a trip back in time.

BYTE magazine, April 1980, page 115.

NEW HIGH-SPEED COMMUNICATIONS BUS: Xerox Corporation recently made a public announcement of a new concept of processor-to-processor communications intended for an office environment. This novel concept is called "Ethernet", and is a result of some of the work being done in their research labs. In this concept, a single coaxial cable is used as a high-speed communications bus between all processors; communication protocol is handled through software or software supplemented by special-purpose hardware. Rumor has it that an Ethernet processor is now being developed by some form of joint arrangement between Xerox and Intel.

New comment by DannyB2 in "Add coffee stains to LaTeX documents (2021)"

DannyB2 — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 16:42:53 +0000

Because that is a hardware fix.

Why fix in hardware what can be fixed in software? A simple Latex package could add hydrophobic coating feature to the document file.

Next: the device driver team will be tasked with a software patch to correct for the burned out light bulb on the device.

New comment by DannyB2 in "Add coffee stains to LaTeX documents (2021)"

DannyB2 — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 16:40:28 +0000

Or Diet Coke.

New comment by DannyB2 in "Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?"

DannyB2 — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 20:51:48 +0000

If there were an industrial civilization here before us (modern humans) then it would be astonishing that in all of the fossils we have discovered, we've never yet discovered a single ancient nut, bolt, screwdriver, wrench, etc. Not one single wire or cast metal part.

As per the article, that civilization would have to predate all of the vast history of evolution that we know of. Wouldn't some higher life forms from such an earlier civilization have been in the fossil record?