Hacker News: fbdab103

New comment by fbdab103 in "Injuries with Electric vs. Conventional Scooters and Bicycles"

fbdab103 — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 20:59:31 +0000

It is not obvious to me that this is correcting for the differences in bicycle vs escooter users? Or the total number of users over time.

By and large I expect someone riding a bicycle to be fitter than the average bear. In contrast, someone using an escooter could have any possible composition: slim/obese, young/old, safe/reckless. The increasing popularity of scooters also means that the absolute number of people has likely risen from a decade ago.

New comment by fbdab103 in "Show HN: Semantic Grep – A Word2Vec-powered search tool"

fbdab103 — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 20:35:19 +0000

I might have a work use case for which this would be perfect.

Having no experience with word2vec, some reference performance numbers would be great. If I have one million PDF pages, how long is that going to take to encode? How long will it take to search? Is it CPU only or will I get a huge performance benefit if I have a GPU?

New comment by fbdab103 in "Texas woman gets 15 years for stealing $109M from Army to buy mansions, cars"

fbdab103 — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 20:30:25 +0000

Fraud against private companies happens all the time as well. There was an infamous case about a guy who sent fake $100+ million total invoices to Facebook, Google, etc[0]. If they had just stopped after a single interaction, probably would have gotten away with it free and clear.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2019/03/25/706715377/man-pleads-guilty-t...

New comment by fbdab103 in "Managarm: Pragmatic microkernel-based OS with asynchronous I/O"

fbdab103 — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 20:16:48 +0000

Is the kernel really the differentiator there? seL4 is a Proven microkernel that is some 9000 lines of C. This ancient SO post[0] claims Linux is 140k lines. The kernel is just a tiny component of the many things required to get an OS up and running. I suspect most projects just peter out as the enormity of the complexity becomes apparent.

[0] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/223746/why-is-the-l...

New comment by fbdab103 in "The secret of Minecraft (2014)"

fbdab103 — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 19:31:08 +0000

Especially when the goto gaming wiki site host is straight-up internet cancer.

New comment by fbdab103 in "The secret of Minecraft (2014)"

fbdab103 — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 19:26:43 +0000

  Nah. Microsoft did a great job handling Minecraft imo.

I am still peeved that my lifetime license "mysteriously" broke during Microsoft's account transitions. Trillion dollar company lacks the manpower and technical capability to handle it? Or someone cannot be arsed to maintain "freeloader" customers.

New comment by fbdab103 in "Adobe exec compared Creative Cloud cancellation fees to 'heroin'"

fbdab103 — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 16:31:00 +0000

Every F500 company with historical Oracle installations built before the open source offerings were actually competitive. Even if every one of those decided today they were going to ditch Oracle, you are talking about multi-year initiatives.

New comment by fbdab103 in "Maglev titanium heart inside the chest of a live patient"

fbdab103 — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 00:56:50 +0000

Why does the article not say how much that thing weighs? It looks hefty, though I suppose a human heart is also probably dense.

New comment by fbdab103 in "Courts Close the Loophole Letting the Feds Search Your Phone at the Border"

fbdab103 — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 00:49:19 +0000

Is this then a done deal? Or can the Supreme Court somehow decide there was a half-sentence in a Federalist Paper which argued the opposite and invalidate the ruling?

New comment by fbdab103 in "US solar production soars by 25 percent in just one year"

fbdab103 — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 03:34:01 +0000

You were not kidding. On the front page of this moment is "14,000 3v Lithium CR2032 Coin Batteries" held in two barrels with a weight of 200 pounds. A tremendous bargain, if you can snatch it at the current bid of $20.

New comment by fbdab103 in "Applied Machine Learning for Tabular Data"

fbdab103 — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 03:25:53 +0000

For 4, I would always start with RF. You have fewer knobs to turn (aka degrees of freedom with which to hang yourself), but still get within spitting distance of XGBoost.

New comment by fbdab103 in "US solar production soars by 25 percent in just one year"

fbdab103 — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 02:03:37 +0000

One company is trying the approach of placing the panels flat on the ground[0]. So long as you put a fence around it to stop local wildlife from crushing them, seems easy enough. Maybe give it a monthly sweep if it is more prone to collecting debris.

[0] https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/texas-solar-farm-flat-on-the-...

New comment by fbdab103 in "US solar production soars by 25 percent in just one year"

fbdab103 — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 01:56:21 +0000

Half of the US voting population is still cheering cries of, "Drill baby drill". There are significant entrenched interests who are fighting renewable development wherever possible. It is only because the economics of solar panels have gotten too good to ignore that things are proceeding.

New comment by fbdab103 in "Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions"

fbdab103 — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 23:37:43 +0000

That the oven timer is oven adjacent seems a must.

New comment by fbdab103 in "Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions"

fbdab103 — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 23:26:37 +0000

Incredibly common in the US as well to use different units per item. All the better because our garbage measuring system can make unit switches significantly trickier.

New comment by fbdab103 in "Bubble Sort: An archaeological algorithmic analysis (2003) [pdf]"

fbdab103 — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 23:03:57 +0000

I do not understand why people act as if demonstrating bubble sort is going to forever taint minds and lead to disaster. When I was sitting in CS101 (or...probably data structures?), the professor was asking how you would sort an array. I "invented" bubble sort on the spot. Doubtless I was one of many who would have done the same.

Is it useful for any scenario? No, but you have to start somewhere, and might as well teach an algorithm that students are naively going to attempt on their own so you can note how terrible it is.

New comment by fbdab103 in "A (not so) small library for terminal based game development"

fbdab103 — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 04:13:09 +0000

Games are notorious for vendoring a dependency and never upgrading it again. If you use an internal API, it is not like you are forced to be on the upgrade treadmill where the sands suddenly shifted and the secret API does something different.

New comment by fbdab103 in "Linux Hardening Checklist"

fbdab103 — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 17:33:47 +0000

From the link, suggestion to set hostname to `localhost`

That is probably fine, but it makes me feel uneasy. Something has to break if you do that, right?

New comment by fbdab103 in "Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex"

fbdab103 — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 20:42:02 +0000

Practically nothing in Latex comes out of the box. Sure, you can bang out markdown-esque formatted text, but the moment you need something more complicated, say URLs, graphics, resize the margins, etc you are likely going to be pulling in a package.

No true scotsman and all that, but I suspect few documents in the wild are bare Latex.

New comment by fbdab103 in "Why didn't Rome have an industrial revolution?"

fbdab103 — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 23:11:20 +0000

Better than that, the printing press is a stupid simple idea that could have been invented basically as soon as you had writing. Wooden printing blocks were used for hundreds of years before the press. As soon as someone had the idea to use it for letters, you could have a functional (if crude) press after a few iterations. Bootstrapping widespread literacy with cheap reading materials.