Hacker News: dreish

New comment by dreish in "Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI"

dreish — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 17:50:12 +0000

You can already do that with OpenCharacters at https://josephrocca.github.io/OpenCharacters/. You just need to set up an API key with OpenAI, and you can customize hidden prompts for different characters, whom you can name, you can edit earlier parts of conversations, and it automatically summarizes earlier parts of conversations to keep a never-ending thread within the context limit.

New comment by dreish in "The myth of revealed preference for suburbs"

dreish — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 21:07:20 +0000

That's an interesting point. I would point out another problem with this article based on my own experience living in metro Atlanta since 2001: many people, especially those moving to Atlanta from the Northeast, would likely have said that there was no good urban neighborhood in which to live in Atlanta in 2005. I think that was more of a chicken-and-egg problem than a zoning one. Midtown Atlanta had the right zoning and had neighborhood civic associations that were working toward urbanizing the neighborhood, but it wasn't until several years later that significant amounts of neighborhood-serving businesses started to move in.

New comment by dreish in "The myth of revealed preference for suburbs"

dreish — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 20:30:38 +0000

That's decidedly not what the article claims. It claims that there are people who live in the suburbs but would prefer not to, and provides evidence to support that claim. The same evidence acknowledges the existence of people who are happy living in suburbs.

New comment by dreish in "Meltdown Proof-of-Concept"

dreish — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 21:14:11 +0000

I've been thinking along the same lines for the last few years. If you did this, you could have a multi-user operating system in a single address space and avoid the cost of interrupts for system calls (which would just be like any other function call).

New comment by dreish in "Notes on debugging Clojure code"

dreish — Tue, 30 May 2017 17:10:36 +0000

Why not define debug-req and debug-auth as atoms before this function, and set them with (reset! debug-req req) etc.?

New comment by dreish in "Everything you need to know about the WannaCry / Wcry / WannaCrypt ransomware"

dreish — Sun, 14 May 2017 18:40:05 +0000

The article points out that the phone-home domains this ransomware uses were generated by keyboard-mashing. Can we tell what keyboard layout was used?

New comment by dreish in "My 2015 MacBook Pro Retina Exploded"

dreish — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 17:21:50 +0000

I've had plenty of batteries swell, and none catch fire before I got them replaced, so I have to think it could help.

In my experience Apple is not consistently good about dealing with this. In every case, I've ultimately been able to get the battery replaced at no cost to me, but with an iPhone 6 that started swelling about a year ago, pushing the screen out, phone support told me flatly that this wasn't something that could possibly happen with such a new device, and suggested that I try to make a Genius Bar appointment on my own. When I brought the phone into the store later that day, they replaced it on the spot, with no appointment. (I wasn't going to accept carrying around a time bomb for another week or more.)

New comment by dreish in "Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?"

dreish — Wed, 18 Jan 2017 18:24:20 +0000

In case you're not joking, MINIX is much smaller than 100KLOCs.

New comment by dreish in "The Lisp Curse (2011)"

dreish — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 17:28:46 +0000

But one of the most important features of Clojure is that it's hosted on mature, decidedly non-Lisp platforms with plenty of well-maintained libraries, and it has clean, concise interop. If that's what a Lisp needs to become popular, then I'd say that's evidence for this theory, not against it.

New comment by dreish in "Undefined behavior can result in time travel"

dreish — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 22:12:47 +0000

pascal_cuoq is correct. Here's an excellent introduction to the subject:

http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-...

New comment by dreish in "Fidelity now allows clients to put bitcoins in IRAs"

dreish — Thu, 12 Dec 2013 00:44:31 +0000

You are vastly overestimating how happy millions of dollars will make you. Google around a little and you might actually put a negative number on it.

If you get the numbers right, you will arrive at the same advice any financial advisor would give you: in something as novel and hard to price as bitcoin, only invest risk capital, defined as money you could lose in its entirety and still have a sound financial plan.

New comment by dreish in "A glimpse of undefined behavior in C"

dreish — Sat, 30 Nov 2013 22:04:38 +0000

That's a reasonable question. It's a shame this comment gets downvoted instead of the various people falling all over themselves to show off how smart they are by posting incorrect guesses about how undefined behavior doesn't matter.

Here's a good article that addresses the question "Why have undefined behavior?"

http://blog.regehr.org/archives/213

This one linking to the above is also worth reading:

http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-...

New comment by dreish in "Which hashing algorithm is best for uniqueness and speed?"

dreish — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 19:07:59 +0000

That's a design goal for cryptographic hash functions, which these are not.

New comment by dreish in "Whatever happened to due process?"

dreish — Tue, 08 Oct 2013 17:58:43 +0000

It's "just" a business district within London, leaving aside a couple of millennia of history. London comprises the City and 32 boroughs, somewhat similarly to the way New York is made up of five boroughs, one of which is also called "New York" in some contexts.

New comment by dreish in "Make the Metric system the standard in the United States"

dreish — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 21:04:24 +0000

What does it mean to say that "the 1/2-inch chuck/collet/whatever is really machined to 12.7mm"? 0.5 inches is exactly 12.7 mm, so what else would it be machined to?

New comment by dreish in "The hum that helps to fight crime"

dreish — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 14:25:47 +0000

This is the illustration I see (I think it might be European):

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/64639000/jpg/_64639977...

This is what very nearly every power outlet in the U.S. looks like, down to the color, vertical configuration, and flat-head screw in the center:

http://img.ehowcdn.com/article-new/ds-photo/getty/article/16...

New comment by dreish in "Apple Said to Fire Maps Manager After Flaws Hurt iPhone 5"

dreish — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 20:17:02 +0000

Compared to the last time Google switched mapping databases, which I think was about three years ago, Apple Maps (for my town at least) has been remarkably accurate. For several months, Google Maps was putting my home address more than a mile from where I actually live (right in the middle of a major city, so a mile is a world away), and it refused to parse addresses for at least a couple of major commercial roads with unusual names. I don't think I've been able to find a single comparable problem with Apple Maps. Visual glitches don't ruin my day nearly as much as refusing to parse a business' address or placing it a mile away from where it is.

I still use Google Maps (via the web now), though, since I prefer the way it presents traffic data.

New comment by dreish in "Fog Creek is about to go down"

dreish — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 15:48:54 +0000

I would suggest the following mental exercise the next time you want to make a comment on HN:

Imagine you are at a dinner party at Paul Graham's house. He's there, obviously, along with several startup founders, aspiring founders, and a few established industry figures, including the person you are about to disagree with or criticize.

It will undoubtedly take more effort to figure out how to frame your criticism so that it doesn't make you a pariah, but the advantage will be that you will leave open the possibility of forming beneficial business and personal relationships.

In this case, I would try describing your own successes with building redundant services, and describe some of the other approaches you found while researching ones that you have built.

New comment by dreish in "Javascript's NaN"

dreish — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 18:35:48 +0000

This is hardly a JavaScript quirk. In Clojure:

    hackclj.core=> Double/NaN
    NaN
    hackclj.core=> (== Double/NaN Double/NaN)
    false
    hackclj.core=> (= Double/NaN Double/NaN) 
    false
    hackclj.core=> (.equals Double/NaN Double/NaN)
    true
    hackclj.core=> (identical? Double/NaN Double/NaN)
    false
    hackclj.core=> (type Double/NaN)
    java.lang.Double
    hackclj.core=> (number? Double/NaN)
    true

In Perl (which doesn't have a concept of a number type distinct from other scalars such as strings, but we can see that it participates in addition differently from non-numeric scalars, which behave like 0):

      DB<1> $inf = 1e300 * 1e300
    
      DB<2> $nan = $inf - $inf
    
      DB<3> print $nan
    nan
      DB<4> print ($nan == $nan)
    
      DB<5> print ref($nan)
    
      DB<6> print $nan+1   
    nan

In Ruby:

    irb(main):001:0> inf = 1e300*1e300
    => Infinity
    irb(main):002:0> nan = inf-inf
    => NaN
    irb(main):003:0> nan == nan
    => false
    irb(main):004:0> nan.class
    => Float

Python 2.7.3 (much earlier versions got equality wrong, claiming nan == nan):

    >>> inf = 1e300*1e300
    >>> nan = inf-inf
    >>> nan
    nan
    >>> nan == nan
    False
    >>> type(nan)

New comment by dreish in "Clojure's concurrent agents in action"

dreish — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 18:14:37 +0000

send should never be used in a function that will not keep the CPU busy, such as one that calls Thread/sleep. send-off, which will allocate a new thread rather than taking up a slot in Clojure's fixed-size agent thread pool, should be used instead.