Hacker News: episode0x01

New comment by episode0x01 in "Theranos.world"

episode0x01 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 20:46:16 +0000

Love the camera jump scare. Genius

New comment by episode0x01 in "Crafting Interpreters: 640 Pages in 15 Months"

episode0x01 — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 06:26:27 +0000

Excellent interview with Bob on this book that's worth a listen: https://corecursive.com/032-bob-nystrom-on-building-an-inter...

New comment by episode0x01 in "Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)"

episode0x01 — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 06:35:56 +0000

I genuinely can't tell if you are being serious or not. Are you not familiar with Britain's and Ireland's "relationship"?

New comment by episode0x01 in "A Business Card Universal Turing Machine (2019) [pdf]"

episode0x01 — Wed, 10 May 2023 15:16:35 +0000

Looks like the author has it under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License and so the work is to be used it its entirety only. So I guess if you do make a modification you can't distribute it.

I could see this being used in a fun little puzzle game or something. Different tapes or finding the right starting point on the tape to end in the correct place, etc

New comment by episode0x01 in "Stochastic gradient descent written in SQL"

episode0x01 — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 16:46:41 +0000

From a comment by the author:

> Also, I can't justify why, but my gut feeling is that the database should be an order of magnitude faster than Python, provided the implementation were to be improved.

Would be curious how that could end up being the case. Perhaps if NumPy wasn't used at all? That would mean no vectorization or optimized storage.

Would be interesting to see how it scaled with length and dimensionality

New comment by episode0x01 in "Advent of Code 2022"

episode0x01 — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 13:36:23 +0000

I'm super excited for this, but also scared. These little puzzles are such a dopamine hit that I can't really be productive until I have that day solved. As the month progresses and the problems get harder, more and more of my time is consumed. Wondering if I should try to wake up early to start before work or just block the website on my work computers.

New comment by episode0x01 in "The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves"

episode0x01 — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 11:21:11 +0000

Reminds me of Cory Doctorow's last story in Radicalized: "Masque of the Red Death". summary from Wikipedia: A wealthy financier builds and manages a doomsday vault, designed to withstand societal collapse.

Interesting story, as are the others in that collection.

New comment by episode0x01 in "C64 Theremin"

episode0x01 — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 09:43:39 +0000

Everything Linus produces just blows me a way. Especially loved his C64 organ [0] and also maybe the only "cool" NFT I've ever seen [1] (basically the source code for the demo is encoded in the token so it's on the blockchain forever instead of just being some link to an image hosted on some server that could disappear at any point.)

[0] https://www.linusakesson.net/sixtyforgan/index.php [1] https://www.linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/nft.php

New comment by episode0x01 in "Many graduate programs are “scams,” according to higher education policy analyst"

episode0x01 — Tue, 24 May 2022 05:00:02 +0000

Econ PhDs are funded

New comment by episode0x01 in "Artificial Intelligence sleep app may mean an end to sleeping pills"

episode0x01 — Fri, 20 May 2022 13:47:18 +0000

Even if this does work, I'd imagine there is a pretty high selection bias. Therapy is work. Journalling is work. Changing is work and really takes commitment. Taking a pill isn't so much work.

The article cites 800k patients in England but I'd imagine the number of successful treatments would be much much lower

New comment by episode0x01 in "Parmigiano Reggiano makers embedding tiny trackers in rind to fight cheese fraud"

episode0x01 — Thu, 19 May 2022 07:43:17 +0000

Unauthorized cheese, anyone?

New comment by episode0x01 in "Introduction to Compilers and Language Design (2021)"

episode0x01 — Wed, 18 May 2022 08:37:15 +0000

I mean isn't C ubiquitous enough that it is essentially language agnostic? Or is your suggestion that is should be purely pseudocode?

New comment by episode0x01 in "Mental illness, attention deficit disorder, and suffering"

episode0x01 — Sun, 01 May 2022 22:53:49 +0000

For myself, the one positive outcome has been more empathy for others. I do count that as a super power (that comes at a crippling cost)

New comment by episode0x01 in "AI models still racist, even with more balanced training"

episode0x01 — Sun, 01 May 2022 19:08:44 +0000

Oh you didn't read the article?

New comment by episode0x01 in "Show HN: An in-browser text editor to easily create static HTML"

episode0x01 — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 09:13:29 +0000

Doing it only in Chrome? Having easy buttons for certain snippets? The author didn't make this to be a vim replacement. I don't think this would be a daily or main editor, but seems easy to use in a pinch

New comment by episode0x01 in "Our Take on NFTs"

episode0x01 — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 11:04:22 +0000

Nothing really. He addresses this in his post. But also the purpose isn't to sell the song (it's already creative commons). Purely just a commemorative token (and the only one he plans to make. It's not about ownership of the song though.

But the reason why this is such a great example for me is because the token actually contains something substantial. This song is now permanently a part of the blockchain, as opposed to just some link to an image host that might not exist in a decade.

New comment by episode0x01 in "Our Take on NFTs"

episode0x01 — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 15:51:43 +0000

Linus Akesson (big in the C64 demoscene) created the only good example of an NFT I've come across [1]. In the token he puts the source code to his "A Mind Is Born Demo" which compiles to the very demo you watch when you view the token [2].

[1] http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/nft.php [2] https://opensea.io/assets/0xa7702e0769c5d408ebf2b056d7c3cc0a...

New comment by episode0x01 in "One of the most famous Victorian dishes is a hilarious lie"

episode0x01 — Mon, 17 Jan 2022 16:22:54 +0000

Yeah I mean I unironically like doing this at times. Texture contrast is great!

New comment by episode0x01 in "Blame Cronyism, Not Capitalism"

episode0x01 — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 15:02:16 +0000

Right, it's not something unique to corporations. It's a consequence of concentrated power

New comment by episode0x01 in "Blame Cronyism, Not Capitalism"

episode0x01 — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 14:46:47 +0000

Not a shocker that corruption ruins things. I guess then the question is how you can design a broadly distributed system that removes the incentives for corruption and minimizes its impact. My guess is that such a system won't be found in capitalism