Hacker News: bmm6o

New comment by bmm6o in "Backpressure is all you need"

bmm6o — Sun, 31 May 2026 14:10:31 +0000

I took the analogy to be about the location of the pressure and not the direction. If you allow pressure to build on the input pipe when you can't accept more, the component that is upstream in the flow is able to observe that and respond. Maybe the difference is I envisioned a series of pipes and not a single one.

New comment by bmm6o in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

bmm6o — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:19:14 +0000

You mean the culture of cutting funding from under performing schools to enforce a downward spiral and divert money to private schools? If not you should be more specific.

New comment by bmm6o in "Maladaptive Frugality"

bmm6o — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:40:14 +0000

Let's say that each month I have an extra $1000. Should I use that money to pay down a 4% mortgage, or should I invest it in an index fund that is all but guaranteed to earn more than that?

New comment by bmm6o in "Regex Blaster"

bmm6o — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 15:24:04 +0000

Automated accessibility testing needs to be in your loop, whether you are using an llm or not. Aria labels are easy to get right but they are also easy to forget.

New comment by bmm6o in "Python 3.15's JIT is now back on track"

bmm6o — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:46:50 +0000

There are documented ways to ensure that changes are visible across threads (e.g. locks). If these are not used, the compiler is within its rights to not go out of its way to pull changes from another thread.

New comment by bmm6o in "Private Equity's New Venture: Youth Sports"

bmm6o — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 10:09:32 +0000

Right, it's pretty inevitable given the incentives. I think it's made worse by PE for a few reasons. They are investing with relatively short time horizons because they will need to sell to pay profits. So the long term health of the business is of no interest. If the reputation of the business suffers, that's someone else's problem. Compared to an individual investor who is looking long term, they need to retain customers and reputation.

New comment by bmm6o in "Compiling Ruby to machine language"

bmm6o — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 11:59:18 +0000

It probably still sucks in C, but the C++ DX got a lot better. Importing the idl would generate wrapper functions that made calling code look much more like a normal function. It would check the hresult and return an out param from the function. They also introduced types like _variant_t that help boxing and unboxing native types. It still wasn't fun but it greatly reduced line count.

New comment by bmm6o in "Venn Diagram for 7 Sets"

bmm6o — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 16:52:03 +0000

One example included the empty set, the other did not. It doesn't always make sense to have it.

New comment by bmm6o in "When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”"

bmm6o — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 13:04:08 +0000

I mean, if you're running regedit at all you are not a casual user.

New comment by bmm6o in "Why haven't local-first apps become popular?"

bmm6o — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 03:39:48 +0000

Exchange server accepts or rejects meeting requests. There's no offline room reservation so it's pretty simple.

New comment by bmm6o in "Belling the Cat"

bmm6o — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 20:07:38 +0000

This is a community that values a high signal to noise ratio and generally eschews small talk, a la nohello.org. Congratulating someone for learning something does not advance the conversation.

It also has a low tolerance of what it perceives as reddit- style in-group signaling via repetition of a common meme (xkcd, in this case). Again noise vs signal but also suspicion of karma farming.

New comment by bmm6o in "Use Bayes rule to mechanically solve probability riddles"

bmm6o — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 16:00:09 +0000

There's also the cultural context of Monty Hall being a real person who had a real game show, on which he really opened doors with goats behind them. Most readers of her column would have been familiar with the mechanics of the show. And the question doesn't really make sense if there's a chance that he opens the door with a prize, there's no more hidden information in that case.

New comment by bmm6o in "Creating beautiful charts with JRuby and JFreeChart"

bmm6o — Fri, 02 May 2025 15:04:53 +0000

What you should really track and chart is your downtime.

New comment by bmm6o in "Can Earth's rotation generate power? Physicists divided over controversial claim"

bmm6o — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 13:51:32 +0000

Also relevant is that the oceanic bulge is along the elliptic, but the earth's axis of rotation is tilted. So the effect can vary by latitude.

New comment by bmm6o in "Can Earth's rotation generate power? Physicists divided over controversial claim"

bmm6o — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 21:07:42 +0000

The short answer is that there would still be tides without rotation, but with a period based on the lunar cycle. We have daily tidal effects, the moon can't do that by itself.

New comment by bmm6o in "Edgar Allan Poe's life was a mess. But his work was in his command"

bmm6o — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 18:44:04 +0000

What's interesting is that Poe is not in the Altered Carbon book. The hotel was called the Hendrix and its avatar was Jimi the guitarist. They couldn't get image rights for the film, so had to change it. But i agree that atmospherically and thematically Poe is a better fit.

New comment by bmm6o in "3,200% CPU Utilization"

bmm6o — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 15:35:30 +0000

I've seen this in production C#. Same symptoms, process dump showed a corrupt dictionary. We thought we were using ConcurrentDictionary everywhere but this one came in from a library. We were using .net framework, IIRC .net core has code to detect concurrent modification. I don't know how they implement it but it could be as simple as a version counter.

It's odd he gets so hung up on npe being a critical ingredient when that doesn't appear to be present in the original manifestation. There's no reason to think you can't have a bug like this in C just because it doesn't support exceptions.

To me it's all about class invariants. In general, they don't hold while a mutator is executing and will only be restored at the end. Executing another mutator before the invariants are reestablished is how you corrupt your data structure. If you're not in a valid state when you begin you probably won't be in a valid state when you finish.

New comment by bmm6o in "Inheritance and Subtyping"

bmm6o — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 20:52:54 +0000

It seemed really encouraged in early Java. I think C# picked it up more to support mocking for unit testing.

The Go approach is a breath of fresh air when it comes to mocking and testing.

New comment by bmm6o in "The intricacies of implementing memoization in Ruby"

bmm6o — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 18:35:15 +0000

Right. Also note that the non-optimized implementation boils down to computing F(n) = 1+1+1+1+...+1, with a function call tree that has 2F(n) nodes. So no matter what the relative cost is for addition and function calls, the total time should go like F(n).

New comment by bmm6o in "A made-up name is better than no name"

bmm6o — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 00:39:34 +0000

The 'p' is for print.