Hacker News: dangerbird2

New comment by dangerbird2 in "Living descendants of Mark Antony"

dangerbird2 — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 17:36:37 +0000

Maybe ridiculous, but not totally unprecedented. Aga Khan IV is generally considered to be royalty despite the fact that his family hasn't held secular power (outside of the occasional governorship) since [1095](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nizar_ibn_al-Mustansir). Of course, they held religious leadership as Imams of the Nizari branch of Islam.

New comment by dangerbird2 in "Fly.io makes infrastructure easy for developers"

dangerbird2 — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 17:45:20 +0000

One possibility is that they have fewer regions than something like AWS, so they can put their data centers somewhere where they get favorable electricity/cooling costs.

New comment by dangerbird2 in "The Missing Chinese Machine Revolution"

dangerbird2 — Sun, 28 Aug 2022 19:06:17 +0000

> If you try to simply cook wheat grains, you will end up with a rather nasty porridge

Maybe nasty to modern eaters, but wheat porridge was a staple in Europe, N. Africa, and the Middle East for thousands of years, especially outside of towns where gristmills were far away and often exorbitantly expensive

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

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

New comment by dangerbird2 in "First look: adding type annotations to JavaScript"

dangerbird2 — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 19:00:29 +0000

Did you read the article? All the proposal does is allow the javascript engine to accept typescript-style syntax, while erasing all the annotations at runtime. From the browser's point of view, it would essentially treat the type annotations and type declarations as comments. This combined with native Ecmascript modules means you could theoretically develop a typescript application with no bundler or other build tools. You'd be able able to use typescript autocomplete and linting in your editor, and just serve the files to your browser with a static http server. Some newer bundlers like Vite and esbuild greatly reduce the amount of configuration required to set up a typescript project, but being about to develop a project with nothing but an editor and a browser would be a huge win for small projects.

Since the proposal doesn't care about the semantics of the type annotations, it doesn't even necessitate typescript. It would work just as well with Flow typing or even a completely new type checker.

New comment by dangerbird2 in "CXX – safe interop between Rust and C++"

dangerbird2 — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 16:55:58 +0000

bindgen[1] already exists to autogenerate a rust API from c headers. It's inherently unsafe because C code is inherently unsafe. In particular, there is no language constructs like destructors or constructors, so you can't naively create a C-based API that can prevent memory/resource leaks and use after free errors. While C++ does have the same issues as C with unsafe pointer semantics, it does have constructors, destructors, and other features that map almost perfectly with Rust's RAII-based resource management, making it pretty easy to generate a safe(ish) rust interface. In practice, it's pretty easy to create a safe rust API from a C library: use bindgen to create the low-level unsafe API, then create rust wrappers using the ad-hoc creation and descruction library functions to implement RAII.

[1] https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-bindgen/

New comment by dangerbird2 in "Magpies have outwitted scientists by helping each other remove tracking devices"

dangerbird2 — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 14:56:38 +0000

This article is about Australian magpies, which aren't related to European Magpies and other corvids. They're known more for their extreme territoriality than for their intelligence, but OP's article clearly shows they're no dummies either.

New comment by dangerbird2 in "Heart-disease risk soars after Covid, even with a mild case"

dangerbird2 — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 14:07:57 +0000

But that means it's almost impossible to get heart cancer, so at least we've got that going for us

New comment by dangerbird2 in "Django Ninja – Fast Django REST Framework for Building APIs"

dangerbird2 — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 18:27:27 +0000

DRF was about as good as it got for automatic schema generation and data validation before python static type hints made things like pydantic possible. It also sets up good defaults for stuff like query parameter-based filtering, pagination, and resource relationships (it supports HATOAS by default).

New comment by dangerbird2 in "The Curse of NixOS"

dangerbird2 — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 14:54:35 +0000

How does Guix compare to Nix? It seems like by using a scheme-based DSL instead of an ad-hoc configuration language, it solves one of the main complaints the author has about Nix.

New comment by dangerbird2 in "French Navy ATL2 MPA: Someone Just Lasered The Wrong Aircraft"

dangerbird2 — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 15:32:42 +0000

They'd fare poorly, but for different reasons. Digital cameras can be vulnerable to IR lasers because their sensors are sensitive to infrared light. Human retinas aren't sensitive to IR, which ironically makes IR lasers more dangerous than visible ones, since they don't trigger the blink reflex which would otherwise limit the damage to the eyes.

New comment by dangerbird2 in "Does the Bronze Garbage Collector Make Rust Easier to Use?"

dangerbird2 — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 17:36:06 +0000

Python does have real threading. The `threading` module provides os-level threads and synchronization primitives. The only difference between this and multithreading in C or Java is that CPython's GIL prevents more than one thread executing bytecode at a time. This prevents parallelism, but not concurrency.

Note this does not mean that python code is thread-safe by default. At most, you can theoretically rely on bytecode operations to be atomic, which means you'll need to synchronize multi-threaded code with mutexes, semaphores and higher-level synchronization constructs.

New comment by dangerbird2 in "Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps"

dangerbird2 — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 20:14:03 +0000

Also office scanners. Basically, it's still a 2D image, but instead of two spatial dimensions, it has a spacial dimension and a time dimension.

New comment by dangerbird2 in "How to develop black and white film at home with coffee (2019)"

dangerbird2 — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 18:05:32 +0000

> once you’ve taken your picture, you need to: 1) remove remaining silver halide that wasn’t exposed to light, 2) “fix” the remaining silver so it’s stable

Isn't that somewhat backwards? The developer converts exposed grains to metalic silver to create a visible image from the latent one, the stop bath neutralizes the developing solution, and finally the fixer dissolves unexposed silver halide.

New comment by dangerbird2 in "Tesla remotely unlocks Model 3 car, uses smart summon to help repo agent"

dangerbird2 — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 16:32:34 +0000

It's not owned by the bank until you foreclose, after which it's most certainly owned by the bank.

As an aside, how often is it for the manufacturer/dealer to own the bank that issues auto loans. I got mine from Capital One, and I assumed most auto loans outside of the sketchy loanshark used car dealers were issued by the big national banks

New comment by dangerbird2 in "Log4jmemes.com: for those of us that need a laugh"

dangerbird2 — Wed, 15 Dec 2021 17:19:01 +0000

Fluent-bit/fluentd are written in C and ruby :)

New comment by dangerbird2 in "HTTP/3 Is Fast"

dangerbird2 — Wed, 15 Dec 2021 14:13:00 +0000

Yeah, one of the major uses of http/3 is that it can gracefully handle connection interruptions and changes, like when you switch from wifi to mobile, without having to wait for the tcp stream to timeout. That's a huge win for both humongous web apps and hackernews' idealized static webpage of text and hyperlinks.

New comment by dangerbird2 in "Mount Athos, the “Autonomous Monastic State” of Greece (2016)"

dangerbird2 — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 19:10:11 +0000

The solar cycle is extremely important for premodern agricultural societies, since it allows predicting growing and harvesting seasons. If you're going by the Julian calendar and the Autumn equinox is falling on September 10, there's probably going to be confusion as to when the harvest should occur. In the case of the Gregorian Calendar, Catholic countries rely on the Spring Equinox to schedule Easter, and when it started occurring well before March 21, this made it increasingly difficult to synchronize the religious and secular calendars.

New comment by dangerbird2 in "PDM: A Modern Python Package Manager"

dangerbird2 — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 22:27:01 +0000

Inspired by Michel Foucault's Pypi and Punish

New comment by dangerbird2 in "FerretDB: A truly open-source MongoDB alternative"

dangerbird2 — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 15:30:35 +0000

"spaz" is indeed short for "spastic", but it's not typically seen as an ableist slur like it is in the UK. Presumably, the word had been out of use as a term for people with cerebral palsy long enough in the US that it passed through the "Euphemism treadmill"[1], and is no longer associated with actual disability (similar to "imbecile" or "moron").

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Lifespan

New comment by dangerbird2 in "Mushroom leather and how it is made (2020)"

dangerbird2 — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 14:41:40 +0000

It depended on the climate and society. Pastoralists living on the steppes almost exclusively lived off animal meat and dairy products, while folks in areas with heavy grain production were much more likely to get the vast majority of their calories from staple grain crops.