Hacker News: failbuffer

New comment by failbuffer in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

failbuffer — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:59:50 +0000

It's the "your choice" that's the problem. The quality of a society is dominated by the choices that other people make.

New comment by failbuffer in "Buddhist Retreat: Why I gave up on finding my religion (2003)"

failbuffer — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 21:19:40 +0000

Well, it's not yet monetized by YouTube hustle bros, for one thing. :D

New comment by failbuffer in "Hackers use ZIP file concatenation to evade detection"

failbuffer — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 01:34:40 +0000

In a similar vein, HTTP header smuggling attacks exploit differences in header parsing. For instance, a reverse proxy and a web server might handle repetition of headers or the presence of whitespace differently.

New comment by failbuffer in "The Death and Life of Prediction Markets at Google"

failbuffer — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 18:34:36 +0000

This is the Hacker News community. Let's be constructive and civil. Your comment would have more interesting and relevant if you had explained why this trading strategy is a bad idea instead of just labeling it as "idiotic".

New comment by failbuffer in "Title drops in movies"

failbuffer — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 23:50:01 +0000

Hmmm... I nominate Mortal Kombat (1995) for the cringiest title drops. Instead of being used once for a climatic fight scene, they keep dropping it over and over (10 times according to the article).

New comment by failbuffer in "Manjaro Linux prepares to enable telemetry by default"

failbuffer — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 17:44:23 +0000

I don't know the law, but "build it yourself lol" is hardly easy, especially for software that needs to be constantly updated for security.

New comment by failbuffer in "A comparison of Rust’s borrow checker to the one in C#"

failbuffer — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 15:00:17 +0000

Alternatively (or at least additively), most C# developers don't really need all the new ref/Span features. They're writing line-of-business apps and garbage collection is a fact of life, not some burden to be avoided.

Microsoft probably added these features to push the language into new niches (like improving the story around Unity and going after Arduino/IoT). But it's of little practical appeal to their established base.

New comment by failbuffer in "I Am Tired of AI"

failbuffer — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 15:29:54 +0000

Heuristics don't have to be perfect to be useful so long as they improve the efficacy of our attentions. Once that breaks down society must follow because thinking about every topic is intractable.

New comment by failbuffer in "The Miraculous Resurrection of Notre-Dame"

failbuffer — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 21:10:54 +0000

My cynical take (as an American) is that anything but the previous design would have been subject to politicization and protracted decision-making. Donors would have been more fickle, stakeholder groups would have mushroomed, and reconstruction probably wouldn't have even started yet. From a project management standpoint, the decision to keep it the same was as absolute win.

New comment by failbuffer in "They don't make readers like they used to"

failbuffer — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 19:24:00 +0000

STEMcore (which, to be clear, is just a term I made up) mostly solves problems with STEM. Contrast with something like The Expanse which builds the setting from (some) realistic physics (plus a few enabling premisses) and mostly solves problems with politics and tactics.

New comment by failbuffer in "Openpilot – Operating system for robotics"

failbuffer — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 16:27:25 +0000

Could someone explain the joke? I've been dabbling with learning robotics and I've been confused by how ROS and ROS2 both appear to be actively developed/used. Is ROS2 a slow-moving successor version (like Python 3 was) or a complete fork?

New comment by failbuffer in "They don't make readers like they used to"

failbuffer — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 16:22:23 +0000

Weir may have invented a new genre: STEMcore. His narrator-protagonists face a series of puzzles which they resolve with imaginative STEM skills and... well, that's most of it. I mean, he sets up a pretty good near-future world and gives the protagonist one big problem to resolve that helps drive tension (making it a quick read), but ultimately you're reading a short story that ate a physics textbook.

New comment by failbuffer in "Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math"

failbuffer — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 20:53:09 +0000

Add negative numbers to your list as well. Mathematicians used to rearrange terms specifically to avoid them (e.g. before the concept existed).

New comment by failbuffer in "$50 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 comes with a lower price and a tweaked, cheaper CPU"

failbuffer — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 04:49:14 +0000

RPi has an ecosystem and great documentation. People use it for projects because every tutorial and YouTube video out there shows you how to get the job done with an RPi. There's a jillion expansion boards (HATs), hundreds of 3D prints, many ready to run OS images (selectable from an easy to use flashing tool), and even a first party camera module. The 40 pin GPIO header has stuck around unchanged thru all but the earliest hardware generations. Does the N100 offer that?

There are more performant and efficient alternatives, but for many hobbyists, prototypers, startups, and students (or rather, their teachers) it's not worth the extra time/headaches/hassle to start adapting an rpi solution to non-rpi hardware.

New comment by failbuffer in "Google removed Organic Maps from the Play Store"

failbuffer — Sat, 17 Aug 2024 14:55:02 +0000

For relatively static info, sure. For real time bus/rail status you need integrations to countless public transit systems. For stuff like store times, etc, you need sufficient market power so that business owners are incentived to provide that info.

New comment by failbuffer in ""We ran out of columns""

failbuffer — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 19:48:58 +0000

... and get them talking directly to the user. I feel that's where the real magic happens.

New comment by failbuffer in "CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops"

failbuffer — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 20:13:29 +0000

Honestly, that sounds like a typical ER visit.

New comment by failbuffer in "Blue zones – Regions where people live exceptionally long lives (2016)"

failbuffer — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 17:41:55 +0000

Loma Linda, CA, USA; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece; Okinawa, Japan

How many of these places have a sufficiently weak government as to permit pension fraud? Grandpa can "live" quite a long time if there's a paycheck rolling in every month.

New comment by failbuffer in "Software galaxies"

failbuffer — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 19:32:56 +0000

2D might be more practical if you were trying to make architectural decisions, but I feel the author's whimsical embrace of the starship metaphor made his/her project more interesting and fun. I've already seen a bunch of 2D code graphs.

New comment by failbuffer in "Beyond velocity and acceleration: jerk, snap and higher derivatives (2016)"

failbuffer — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 22:04:52 +0000

You could just as well ask "why not give the fastest ride possible so everyone saves time?"