Hacker News: aristus

New comment by aristus in "Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work"

aristus — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 19:55:33 +0000

They literally didn't have a Lunh check digit? Like, 1960s math? My gobs are smacked.

New comment by aristus in "Facebook's Little Red Book"

aristus — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 20:42:33 +0000

Mocking the signs at Facebook started literally the day after they appeared suddenly in the 1601 building. "Break fast and eat things", and so on. There was a very fancy print shop on site and we would work up spoofs on the same equipment.

A large percentage of programmers of a certain generation got their start in the graphic design world.

New comment by aristus in "ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or Tab Delimited Text"

aristus — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 16:05:15 +0000

In the early 2000s, back at the beginning of the world, Yahoo's web code used ^A and ^B for field and record separators to avoid having to escape commas and quotes and newlines. That was probably the last time I ever saw ASCII control characters used as intended in the wild.

There is no technical reason why CSV should have won out, except that keyboards have a comma key and almost never a ^A key.

New comment by aristus in "ReiserFS and the Art and Artist Problem"

aristus — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 15:52:06 +0000

Yes, literally. Same argument applies to limited copyright terms. Though I'd say it would be with less concern, not completely without it.

New comment by aristus in "ReiserFS and the Art and Artist Problem"

aristus — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 15:44:31 +0000

You can like the work but hate the jerk. The real question comes when you decide whether to financially support a jerk's work.

New comment by aristus in "Warewoolf: A minimalist novel-writing system/rich text editor"

aristus — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 04:09:55 +0000

Another n=1, but it depends. Outside interruptions when I'm on a tear are horrible. I don't often distract myself with a full-featured computer. In fact I often spin off into "research" or fiddling with fonts as a way to let my background brain do its work. I do a fair amount of editing on my phone (!) when on transit or generally goofing off.

New comment by aristus in "Consent-O-Matic – automatically fills ubiquitous pop-ups with your preferences"

aristus — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 22:22:08 +0000

Browser DOM Security Mechanism.

New comment by aristus in "Ask HN: What's Your Experience with eSIMs?"

aristus — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 22:54:29 +0000

A SIM card is an often-overlooked "what you have" second factor, yes leaving aside phone company social engineering hacks.

I made the mistake of buying an iphone on a trip to US, which is eSIM only. The tech works fine --Google Fi is a pretty good example-- but I later traded that phone for the exact same "international" model, traded even plus cash, to get my slot back.

New comment by aristus in "How French Drains Work"

aristus — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 00:22:04 +0000

There was no pipe, as such. Just a wide deep long trench full of rocks.

New comment by aristus in "How French Drains Work"

aristus — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 03:07:07 +0000

100 years on, everyone involved was dead. Happens a lot in old neighborhoods.

New comment by aristus in "How French Drains Work"

aristus — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 15:48:53 +0000

Oh, yes. No lawns in that neighborhood but I thought hard about what might be going into the fruits. Years on, no ill effects.

New comment by aristus in "How French Drains Work"

aristus — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 15:26:31 +0000

I discovered French drains while trying to dig a hole for a fruit tree a while back. The land was on a hill and about 30cm down I hit this huge pile of dirty gravel. Ok, so maybe someone filled that spot with gravel. Sunk another hole a bit farther down. More gravel, etc. It took me longer than i'd like to admit to figure it out.

Turns out it was the main drainage for the whole neighborhood. Heh. Moved my tree to the side and it thrived on all that lovely water.

New comment by aristus in "YaFSDP: a sharded data parallelism framework, faster for pre-training LLMs"

aristus — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 18:10:07 +0000

You mean, Yet Another Human-Organized Ontology?

New comment by aristus in "Transforming a QLC SSD into an SLC SSD"

aristus — Sun, 19 May 2024 15:01:41 +0000

About ten years ago I got my hands on some of the last production FusionIO SLC cards for benchmarking. The software was an in-memory database that a customer wanted to use with expanded capacity. I literally just used the fusion cards as swap.

After a few minutes of loading data, the kernel calmed down and it worked like a champ. Millions of transactions per second across billions of records, on a $500 computer... and a card that cost more than my car.

Definitely wouldn't do it that way these days, but it was an impressive bit of kit.

New comment by aristus in "Researchers find high levels of lead, mercury and arsenic in Beethoven's hair"

aristus — Tue, 14 May 2024 22:11:29 +0000

Try "the music of the spheres". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musica_universalis

New comment by aristus in "The darker side of being a doctor (2017)"

aristus — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 18:35:06 +0000

30 years is a lot of time. I agree with GP. Starting back then would have been best; starting now would be second. I live in a country that has twice the number of medical school graduates per 100k population than the US, and unsurprisingly compared to the US it's easier to get general medical and specialist attention.

New comment by aristus in "Zero-rupee note"

aristus — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 16:46:41 +0000

Ah, you're right. They announced they would but Congress didn't act.

https://catalog.usmint.gov/proof-set-2024-24RG.html?cgid=ann...

New comment by aristus in "Zero-rupee note"

aristus — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 16:24:10 +0000

The US stopped minting pennies last year.

New comment by aristus in "What it was like to be the subject of a longitudinal study (2023)"

aristus — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 20:24:27 +0000

Note: This applies only to traditional "harvest" surgery and not the new aphereisis method used today.

The surgery itself wasn't great but I was at 80% after a month and 100% after three. No long term effects.

Here's the thing: at every point in the process, interviews, blood tests, health checks, etc, at every point the entire process is explained very carefully and you are told at every point that it is voluntary and you can back out right up the the minute of surgery.

Except. The recipient has their marrow irradiated and killed a week before you show up to donate. So you better make that appointment. Of course all voluntary. It was a real mindfuck of a whipsaw of emotions going in, and then months of zero information after.

It's hard to explain the feeling of holding another anonymous kid's life in your hands. I'd cry for a week every year around that time, and then the survey phone call.

The story worked out for us. I got to meet him a couple years later and was just invited to his wedding.

New comment by aristus in "What it was like to be the subject of a longitudinal study (2023)"

aristus — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 19:50:21 +0000

I was part of a study of bone marrow donors. Basically a short phone call every year. The questions were solely about physical effects, but each time I tried to explain psychological effects similar to PTSD. I have heard similar stories from other donors. The grad students on the phone were sympathetic but as far as I can tell there was no way to push that information up the chain. They had a checklist and that was it.