Hacker News: burch45

New comment by burch45 in "Toxic Salton Sea dust triggers changes in lung microbiome after just one week"

burch45 — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 21:30:49 +0000

Not just inefficient, it was a large scale industrial accident. A canal wall was breached and not repaired for two years and the runoff all collected in this low lying area. It’s a very odd place to visit now though for marketing reasons they tried to make it into a resort destination before it became a place you can only tolerate for a very short time.

New comment by burch45 in "Resource use matters, but material footprints are a poor way to measure it"

burch45 — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:48:29 +0000

I have never heard of “material footprint” and from the definition it seems entirely worthless. The article doesn’t start with any reason why anyone would be interested in this measure, just that comment it is starting to show up in reports.

New comment by burch45 in "Zram Performance Analysis"

burch45 — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 22:37:08 +0000

This post’s conclusions are odd. It has a bunch of extensive benchmarks showing that zstd is by far the worst performing across every metric except a slight increase in compression ratio and then says the conclusion is zstd is the best choice. Unless I’m missing something in the data.

New comment by burch45 in "Testing is better than data structures and algorithms"

burch45 — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 03:47:26 +0000

Its entire purpose is an optimization. You have an expensive operation. A bloom filter can tell you that you definitely don’t need to do that operation. So rather than wasting a lot of time unnecessarily doing that operation, you get the cheap Bloom filter Che most of the time and only occasionally have the false positive where you do the expensive thing when it turns out you didn’t need to. That as far as I am aware of is the only use case for a bloom filter. That said, I have used it for that purpose effectively several times in my career.

New comment by burch45 in "Testing is better than data structures and algorithms"

burch45 — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 03:40:43 +0000

That is the standard acronym for the course in American universities and has been for many decades.

New comment by burch45 in "Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes"

burch45 — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 03:59:14 +0000

The main issue with a premix is like the article. It’s fit for a single purpose. I only make pancakes from scratch, admittedly I use baking powder and regular whole milk instead of buttermilk and baking soda. But the benefit is those staple ingredients can be used for all sorts of other recipes. I’m not going to bread chicken with Krusteaz. A premix can’t be adjusted either such as for altitude. Premixes and single use kitchen gadgets are areas where corporations really seem to have done a good job marketing that their products are more convenient than the readily available alternatives.

New comment by burch45 in "Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens"

burch45 — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 02:30:45 +0000

This is such a weird example. Doctors are a professions with artificial limits specifically to raise the income of doctors in the profession. There are no starving doctors because they don’t let enough people become doctors to lower the wage.

New comment by burch45 in "The elegance of movement in Silksong"

burch45 — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 03:14:58 +0000

A big part of that is “I will save you X” is a non-starter. That is not making the business more money. If you have something that will actually make the business more money then they will go “Great if I pay you twice as much will it make me 2X?” and if the answer is yes, that will be a sale every time.

New comment by burch45 in "What Does Consulting Do?"

burch45 — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 15:49:56 +0000

The first sentence of the article explains that this is about management and strategic consulting.

New comment by burch45 in "Sega mistakenly reveals sales numbers of popular games"

burch45 — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 10:22:32 +0000

I think the false advertising does great disservice to Clair Obscur. It turns off people who don’t like turn-based combat and ends up disappointing people who do like turn based combat. I very nearly bounced from what is a great game because it was not at all what I was expecting with respect to combat.

Clair Obscur’s combat would be better described as dodge and parry based as that is the primary mechanic. In terms of lineage, the combat is much closer to PunchOut than Final Fantasy 6.

It’s really fun if that is what you are expecting though.

New comment by burch45 in "How to cheat at settlers by loading the dice (2017)"

burch45 — Thu, 22 May 2025 19:41:35 +0000

Yes. Very funny for the author to spend a lot of time talking about null hypothesis testing, but not actually running a control experiment to test the null hypothesis that his dice are actually different from the stock dice.

New comment by burch45 in "The Academic Pipeline Stall: Why Industry Must Stand for Academia"

burch45 — Mon, 12 May 2025 06:29:33 +0000

Theranos wasn’t a great idea or even a good idea. The “idea” was

1. Get a drop of blood 2. … 3. Cure all diseases

That’s not even an idea. It’s just magical thinking.

New comment by burch45 in "How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2"

burch45 — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:22:00 +0000

Undefined behavior to access the uninitialized memory. A sanitizer would have flagged that.

New comment by burch45 in "Go Optimization Guide"

burch45 — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 03:01:11 +0000

This is about go not Java. Go makes different tradeoffs and does not have moving multigenerational GC.

New comment by burch45 in "GPT 4.5 level for 1% of the price"

burch45 — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 14:46:20 +0000

Alexander Hamilton oversaw an explicit program to steal technology from England. https://apnews.com/general-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88...

I believe that is what is being referenced.

New comment by burch45 in "Medicaid cuts could devastate elderly in Florida nursing homes"

burch45 — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 14:40:51 +0000

It’s the basic math of the funding bill. The amount required to continue operating does not equal the amount allocated for social security, Medicare or Medicaid. So no matter what anyone says about “not cutting” there will be cuts. Lawmakers have been asked about this repeatedly with no answers.

New comment by burch45 in "Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28"

burch45 — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 01:14:27 +0000

Brave New World.

New comment by burch45 in "Constant-Time Code: The Pessimist Case [pdf]"

burch45 — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 18:48:59 +0000

It’s not about “giving secret information to a foundry”. It’s entirely the field programmable (FP) feature. It’s also not really programmable in the sense that you would be sending in new instructions in realtime. Reconfigurable is a better word. So giving everyone an FPGA in their laptop isn’t really going help anyone in except some enthusiast who wants to try out some different algorithms.

New comment by burch45 in "The Shape of a Mars Mission"

burch45 — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 13:54:03 +0000

This has been covered before but saying that Mars would be a “humanity guarantee” is actually extremely illogical, not the most logical. Short of the Earth getting blasted to tiny pieces in some way there is no scenario where Mars is more habitable than Earth. This is the sort of sci-fi Utopianism that this sober article is standing in opposition to. Mars may be the second most habitable place in the solar system and it’s infinitely less habitable than a nuked-out fallout-ridden earth or an overheated green house earth. There is no magic scenario where Mars suddenly ends up with a magnetosphere and an atmosphere.

New comment by burch45 in "One year after switching from Java to Go"

burch45 — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 02:25:00 +0000

I actually much prefer go ‘s runtime tooling. Pprof has everything I need built in; heap, cpu, blocking, mutex contention. And don’t need additional tools to visualize the collected data. https://pkg.go.dev/net/http/pprof@go1.24.0