Hacker News: fireflies_

New comment by fireflies_ in "What I learned while trying to build a production-ready nearest neighbor system"

fireflies_ — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 22:57:55 +0000

This is where I started getting that feeling:

> The curse of dimensionality is not theoretical — it’s painfully practical. In high dimensions, naive distance metrics degrade quickly.

> Scaling and normalization are not optional details. They fundamentally shape the geometry of the space.

New comment by fireflies_ in "Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS"

fireflies_ — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 18:28:00 +0000

Arguably XSLT

New comment by fireflies_ in "How to have the browser pick a contrasting color in CSS"

fireflies_ — Sat, 17 May 2025 20:44:58 +0000

This is "relative color" syntax, it works with a range of color spaces/color functions. The key is the "from" at the front. Here's the MDN documentation: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_colors/...

New comment by fireflies_ in "Preferring throwaway code over design docs"

fireflies_ — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 01:08:21 +0000

> In one case, we ran a simple a/b test as a proof of concept on whether to pursue the idea further and it added an extra million bucks a year in revenue.

I'm with the people who decided to ship this. The organization will need to fund more maintenance than they would if they waited, but that has real costs. And "keep your 1mm/revenue idea to yourself" doesn't sound like a healthy engineering culture either.

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

fireflies_ — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 15:33:14 +0000

> Not sure if there is some way to iterate given online feedback.

There have been a some novels and novel-length works written a chapter at a time in public. The Martian by Andy Weir, for example is probably the most commercially successful. Many works by qntm (https://qntm.org/fiction) that are popular in this community have been written that way too.

New comment by fireflies_ in "Initial details about why CrowdStrike's CSAgent.sys crashed"

fireflies_ — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 01:35:33 +0000

> I just don't understand how they still have users.

Because this post is here and not somewhere else. Strong network effects.

New comment by fireflies_ in "'If anything happens, it's not suicide': Boeing whistleblower before death"

fireflies_ — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 19:11:26 +0000

This application of "base rates thinking" was helpful for me - a bit out of left field, I'm aware of the concept and use it sometimes but wouldn't have thought to do so here. Thanks!

New comment by fireflies_ in "Megaparsec Tutorial"

fireflies_ — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 15:43:01 +0000

Thanks for sharing. I've used megaparsec a little but never looked at ReadP. Your tutorial is concise and helpful, I'd have ended up with better intuition faster if I started there.

New comment by fireflies_ in "Island gigantism"

fireflies_ — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 02:53:13 +0000

It's a shame that these aren't parallel. Why couldn't it be "insular gigantism" or "island dwarfism"? (But not both!)

New comment by fireflies_ in "In defense of flat earthers (2020)"

fireflies_ — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 03:52:34 +0000

Would you be equally happy if you were sick enough to be hospitalized as you are when you're healthy? If not, that's a cost. I doubt the out-of-pocket medical costs are the most important part of this decision.

New comment by fireflies_ in "“YouTube is shutting down dissenting Biology PhDs and MDs”"

fireflies_ — Sun, 13 Jun 2021 20:54:11 +0000

This doesn't address all of your comment but specifically with patient confidentiality – Israel agreed to share more data with vaccine manufacturers in order to get quicker access to the vaccines. There are obviously problems with bilateral dealmaking and Israeli distribution (the article below points them out), but Israel almost certainly saved lives by weakening confidentiality. I think that was the right call.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/israel-trades-pfizer-va...

New comment by fireflies_ in "Advancing Excel as a programming language [audio]"

fireflies_ — Wed, 05 May 2021 23:37:22 +0000

In some ways the argument against Excel is like the argument against Electron: if you're comparing it to an elegant, purpose-built and well-tested application, yes... it falls woefully short.

But is that really the right comparison? Lots of people just don't have the skills or time to build a specific applications. Without Excel, what would they do? There are some places where a 90% solution is worse than no solution at all (at least no solution is a forcing function for a "real" application), and in many ways Excel isn't the best expression of the _idea_ of an Excel-like, low-barrier-to-entry declarative programming environment with a built-in UI, but it's truly a wonderful tool. It makes a lot of automation possible for a lot of people.

Hardening critical attack surfaces with formally proven message parsers

fireflies_ — Mon, 03 May 2021 20:09:58 +0000

Article URL: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/everparse-hardening-critical-attack-surfaces-with-formally-proven-message-parsers

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27030038

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by fireflies_ in "MIT suspending SAT/ACT requirement for next application cycle"

fireflies_ — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 19:04:55 +0000

You're being downvoted, but I think this sentiment is right and if you take it seriously, it's an argument for the SAT. Pretty much _everything_ in the USA is pay to win, not just the SAT, and the more subjective factors like essays, extracurriculars, and even grades, are more biased.

Test prep companies have an incentive to overhype their services but research suggests the improvement isn't that much.

There's a Jacobin article making the case for the SAT that people following this debate might enjoy reading: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/03/sat-class-race-inequality...

New comment by fireflies_ in "Python strings are immutable, but only sometimes"

fireflies_ — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 23:08:56 +0000

Yes, you can can replace that with the magic number 49 if you want, ord('1') == 49 because ord returns the unicode code point for a character.

Documentation is here for the curious: https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#ord

New comment by fireflies_ in "80% of musicians earn less than £200 a year from streaming"

fireflies_ — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 22:59:37 +0000

Sounds like this only works if people who listen to smaller bands/indie music listen to fewer songs on average. I'm not sure if this is true. People who find themselves exploring niche tastes are probably "enthusiasts" who do more listening and listen more broadly.

New comment by fireflies_ in "Abuse isn’t an “advising style”: Consequences of MIT sheltering abusive mentors"

fireflies_ — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 22:26:11 +0000

I'm a bit surprised to hear it put this way. Aren't physics students usually welcome in finance as quants?

New comment by fireflies_ in "A word for a value between 0 and 1 (inclusive)"

fireflies_ — Fri, 04 Sep 2020 14:33:58 +0000

A probability has to lie between 0 and 1 but not every value between 0 and 1 is a probability.

New comment by fireflies_ in "Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API"

fireflies_ — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 20:36:52 +0000

It has, Safford Unified School District v. Redding is probably the canonical case here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safford_Unified_School_Distric...

The Hey Way

fireflies_ — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 04:25:24 +0000

Article URL: https://hey.com/the-hey-way/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23547779

Points: 2

# Comments: 0