Hacker News: funcDropShadow

New comment by funcDropShadow in "Early Humans Likely Ate Carbs and Sugary Foods"

funcDropShadow — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 05:18:39 +0000

Interesting, but I've read for a long time, that our humanoid predecessors at some point figured out how to get to bone marrow with tools. That provided the energy dense food as well an evolutionary impetus to develop larger brains to build better tools and handle them better. Fire and the capability to cook were developed much later.

New comment by funcDropShadow in "Early Humans Likely Ate Carbs and Sugary Foods"

funcDropShadow — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 05:14:07 +0000

How do we know that? Any sources?

New comment by funcDropShadow in "Early Humans Likely Ate Carbs and Sugary Foods"

funcDropShadow — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 05:13:10 +0000

But the Inca lived to late for this discussion. They already had advanced agriculture. For evolutionary terms, the time before agriculture and the time of the predecessors of homo sapiens are more relevant, because that time span was larger by orders of magnitude.

New comment by funcDropShadow in "About 60k migrants arrive in Ceuta in 24 hours, Spanish territory's leader says"

funcDropShadow — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:27:41 +0000

source?

New comment by funcDropShadow in "I can haz smoller NixOS ISOs?"

funcDropShadow — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 07:36:55 +0000

You could manage those VMs with https://microvm-nix.github.io/microvm.nix/ that helps with mounting the nix store read only from the host into the vm. That should save more space than trying to reduce the dependencies of the system closure of the vm.

New comment by funcDropShadow in "My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month"

funcDropShadow — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:09:08 +0000

STM is seldom used in modern Clojure projects, it is certainly not the dominant model. Most projects I am aware of use a few or even exactly one atoms with immutable data structures.

New comment by funcDropShadow in "Dehydration's role in learning and memory"

funcDropShadow — Tue, 26 May 2026 10:31:21 +0000

No other mammal eats cooked or baked food. Raw meat or raw plant contain more water than our food.

New comment by funcDropShadow in "JVM Options Explorer"

funcDropShadow — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:23:36 +0000

When you are administrating so many Java applications, you should investigate an hour or ask your favorite AI how to configure the logging library used in your application of interest. They allow you to remove stack traces and lots more.

New comment by funcDropShadow in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

funcDropShadow — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:24:29 +0000

They wouldn't have to, if the file format accepted floats in proper exponential format.

New comment by funcDropShadow in "10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips"

funcDropShadow — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:25:35 +0000

If companies are allowed to change the meaning of terms in legislation we are in even more trouble.

New comment by funcDropShadow in "What I Always Wanted to Know about Second Class Values"

funcDropShadow — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:09:39 +0000

> Garbage collection, by definition, trashes locality.

No, it doesn't necessarily. It is correct if you are thinking about mark and sweep GC. But that is 50 years old. Generational GC has much better locality. And GC can even improve locality sometimes by moving objects together that are connected by references. I am not claiming that GC is always a big win for locality. That would be very far from the truth. On the other hand it is not by definition so, that locality is trashed by GC.

New comment by funcDropShadow in "10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips"

funcDropShadow — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 12:38:11 +0000

OMG no. Politician have no business making technological decisions. They make it harder to innovate, i.e. to invent the next generation of ECC with a different name.

New comment by funcDropShadow in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

funcDropShadow — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 08:26:19 +0000

The same panel produces much more electricity in space than at the bottom of the atmosphere, because the atmosphere already reflects most of the light. Additionally, the panel needs less glass or no glass in space, which makes it lighter and cheaper.

Launch costs have shrunk significantly thanks to SpaceX, and they are projected to shrink further with the Super Heavy Booster and Starship.

New comment by funcDropShadow in "Intellectual Junkyards"

funcDropShadow — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 16:02:40 +0000

Self-cataloging can be become a method of procrastination. But that doesn't mean that there is no value to be found in methods like Zettelkasten. The activity of looking through your own Zettelkasten has the potential of creating associations and sparking ideas. That can be very valuable and requires some care of your notes. But trying to find the perfect taxonomy for your own notes is foolish mistake. The technical limitations of the original Zettelkasten, makes refactoring the notes to the current approximation of the perfect taxonomy such a huge task, that it is usually avoided.

A nice example of a limitation that supports creativity.

New comment by funcDropShadow in "Norway reviews cybersecurity after remote-access feature found in Chinese buses"

funcDropShadow — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 07:57:38 +0000

So, in order to avoid the negative consequences of a European monopoly, we make sure that a Chinese monopoly prevails? That doesn't seem like a wining strategy for Europe.

New comment by funcDropShadow in "JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart"

funcDropShadow — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 10:06:38 +0000

Even if we assume that JSON numbers are JavaScript numbers. There is the problem that some large natural numbers cannot be represented in double or float although some even larger numbers can be represented. This is very bad if you use these numbers as IDs.

    scala> (Long.MaxValue-1)
    val res4: Long = 9223372036854775806
                                                                                
    scala> (Long.MaxValue-1).toDouble.toLong
    val res5: Long = 9223372036854775807

The fact that I used Scala is irrelevant here. That is true for many programming languages that 64 bit long and double types.

New comment by funcDropShadow in "Writing Memory Safe JIT Compilers"

funcDropShadow — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 14:36:28 +0000

Because, Truffle is reused in multiple language VMs their overall attack surface is smaller than it would be with classical language VM architectures.

New comment by funcDropShadow in "Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces"

funcDropShadow — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 08:35:09 +0000

But with a visible scrollbar you would have a visible indication which behavior you triggered. If the scrollbar is invisible you get a changed viewport in both cases but you have to infer which gesture triggers which behavior.

New comment by funcDropShadow in "Go is still not good"

funcDropShadow — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 14:27:44 +0000

And still there are more modern idioms and language features that ML had in the 70s but are missing from Go. But, these have the fatal flaw of Not being Invented Here.

New comment by funcDropShadow in "Let's properly analyze an AI article for once"

funcDropShadow — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 16:29:39 +0000

The goal of teaching binary trees is not that you can write binary trees in your sleep, the goal is that you train your ability to derive algorithms and data structures. If you look at what a world class soccer player does during training, most of it will never be applied identically during games. The same is true for university studies, if they focus on fundamentals.