Hacker News: evilotto

New comment by evilotto in "I am rich and have no idea what to do"

evilotto — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 06:20:00 +0000

Boo fucking hoo. Oh, pity me, I'm rich and sad. What ever will I do with all my money that will make me happy?

You don't need purpose, you need perspective.

Instead of benefiting the billionaire class by working with DOGE to tear down what little safety nets we do have, go volunteer to pack meals or drive a truck at your local food bank. https://www.sfmfoodbank.org/volunteer/

They'll be a lot less judgemental than I am.

New comment by evilotto in "Message order in Matrix: right now, we are deliberately inconsistent"

evilotto — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 06:38:06 +0000

I think the most important property to preserve is causality; that is, if a user sends a message B after they have read (i.e., received) a message A, then B should come after A for everyone, because B depends on A. Basically use a Lamport clock.

New comment by evilotto in "The $5000 Compression Challenge (2001)"

evilotto — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 08:46:38 +0000

That's not what it was at all.

Any time you say that something can't be done, you will attract people who say "I have found a way to do it!" Even more so if you have a proof that it can't be done. This phenomenon is far older than the internet; the term "morbus cyclometricus" suggests its origins in antiquity.

The FAQ maintainer was not looking to profit off fools. They wanted to chase them off; after spending several pages explaining why the task is impossible it is tedious to explain to a crank (the term generally used for such people, as described by Underwood Dudley) that they are in fact wrong, the task is impossible, and here's why. It's easier to say "Pay me if you want to waste me time" and reasonably assume that no one will do it.

It's similar in spirit to the James Randi challenge. You're not going to win it, because you're not going to prove that math or science is wrong. But the JREF had as its goal to expose the charlatans, and had the time and resources to devote to the task. A newsgroup FAQ maintainer has neither the time nor the resources. So they shouldn't have volunteered? Then you have no volunteers. Hooray for the internet.

Now yes, every once in a great while someone will come along and legitimately do something that was claimed un-doable; the obvious case is George Dantzig. But that case also shows that any scientist or mathematician who can be shown an error in something thought impossible will be thrilled at the discovery, because that is new knowledge, which is the whole point. Poking a hole in the rules of the contest, finding a weasel way around them, is not something interesting at all.

New comment by evilotto in "The $5000 Compression Challenge (2001)"

evilotto — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 04:30:02 +0000

This is why we can't have nice things.

Some volunteer puts in time maintaining something and makes a claim that is obviously correct and - most likely in jest - promises cash to anyone who shows it to be wrong. Then some rules lawyer decides that he's better than the unpaid volunteer and does his best to humiliate him, just for the lulz.

Is it any surprise that volunteers rarely stick around for long?

Nowadays lots of companies run bug bounty programs where if you find a bug and report it responsibly you can get real cash. This is a valuable service. And I'm positive that these programs get gobs of submissions from people trying to see if they can find a bug in the rules, rather than in the software. If the people vetting the submissions to such programs weren't getting paid for it, I'm sure they would quit in disgust.

New comment by evilotto in "Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted"

evilotto — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 09:29:27 +0000

This happens with physical addresses too, for similar reasons. The ABC (Alcoholic Beverages Commision) tracks complaints against physical addresses, and too many violations will get an address banned from permits. Then a new owner comes in with a new business and gets mysteriously denied for a liquor license, even years later.

New comment by evilotto in "Cats are (almost) liquid"

evilotto — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 17:31:53 +0000

Not to mention Fardin, 2014.

New comment by evilotto in "Serialization Is the Secret"

evilotto — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 00:41:35 +0000

The talk about immutabilty and serialization makes me think of tcl, where "everything is a string" also means "everything is serializable" and you don't copy references around, you copy strings around, which are immutable. What's neat is that it always looks like you are just copying things, but you can mutate them, just so long as you can't possibly tell that you have mutated them, meaning that the old value isn't visible from anywhere. With the caveat that sometimes you have to jump through hoops to mutate something.

New comment by evilotto in "I Like Makefiles"

evilotto — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 06:57:08 +0000

I have a suspicion that a lot of people who rant about makefiles using tabs also praise python for the brilliance of using whitespace for scoping. Or who love yaml for its indented block structure.

Nah, who am I kidding ... no one loves yaml, it's just better than most of the alternatives.

New comment by evilotto in "I Like Makefiles"

evilotto — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 06:47:24 +0000

the only thing I really miss in make is the ability to resolve mtime as something other than mtime. So I resort to using touchfiles which are gross but still work better than a lot of other things (I'm looking at you, docker build caching).

New comment by evilotto in "Pnut: A C to POSIX shell compiler you can trust"

evilotto — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 16:36:00 +0000

> So we stopped selling those [hammer factory] schematics and started selling hammer-factory-building factories.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180722051250/http://discuss.jo...

New comment by evilotto in "Lambda Calculus Interpreter"

evilotto — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 18:51:44 +0000

The default page, without including a term does have some explanation

https://lambda-calculus-interpreter.netlify.app/

Voyager 1 is doing science and is still alive

evilotto — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 18:43:31 +0000

Article URL: https://apnews.com/article/nasa-voyager-1-interstellar-space-1b4a1f9f9adfa23d60b539301b3f035b

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40683666

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by evilotto in "Designing a website without 404s"

evilotto — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 04:10:36 +0000

There used to be a plugin (or something) that would let you play Zork on a 404 page.

New comment by evilotto in "Lambda Calculus Interpreter"

evilotto — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 06:02:48 +0000

Lambda Calculus Interpreter

evilotto — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 05:54:23 +0000

Article URL: https://lambda-calculus-interpreter.netlify.app/?term=(%CE%BBt.%20t%20t%20(%CE%BBh%20f%20n.%20n%20h%20f%20n)%20t%20t%20t)%20(%CE%BBf%20x.%20f%20(f%20x))

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40654974

Points: 18

# Comments: 11

New comment by evilotto in "POV-Ray – The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (2021)"

evilotto — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 15:43:41 +0000

New comment by evilotto in "Turning off electrical grids to prevent wildfire− a complex, technical operation"

evilotto — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 05:54:23 +0000

Why is it that the costs "trickle down to the electricity consumers" while utilities like PG&E report record profits? Are profits more important than safety, or customers?

New comment by evilotto in "Ask HN: Are there any websites for SQL puzzle games?"

evilotto — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 23:05:22 +0000

There used to be a multiplayer space game called Schemaverse that was played by writing sql, but it seems to have gone away.

https://schemaverse.com/

New comment by evilotto in "Big media publishers are inundating the web with subpar product recommendations"

evilotto — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 21:07:37 +0000

This isn't really about google search results. The underlying playbook is the same one that has been used by vulture capitalists for quite some time now. Find a company with some value, buy it, extract the value into cash for the hedge fund, screw the employees and the public, move on to the next target. Look at what Alden Global has been doing to newspapers for years, and more recently Greyhound bus terminals. Gordon Gecko was a character in a movie, but based on all-too-real people and behaviors.

New comment by evilotto in "California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment"

evilotto — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 19:24:10 +0000

But how would they make money off pedestrian infrastructure or old boring technology? If there's not an app for it, then no one's interested.