Hacker News: kutkloon7

New comment by kutkloon7 in "A Branchless UTF-8 Decoder"

kutkloon7 — Sat, 07 Oct 2017 18:43:41 +0000

To get the unicode codepoint. For example, you need this when you want to render a character, or convert it to another representation.

New comment by kutkloon7 in "The decline of Turkish schools"

kutkloon7 — Sat, 30 Sep 2017 13:47:01 +0000

A huge number of journalists is being arrested in Turkey. Turks who say bad things about Erdogan and/or Turkey on social media often get arrested.

New comment by kutkloon7 in "The decline of Turkish schools"

kutkloon7 — Sat, 30 Sep 2017 13:42:12 +0000

True, but is also a public secret that people who vote against Erdogan are being threatened.

New comment by kutkloon7 in "'You will be sexually harassed': just one of the perils of working for tips"

kutkloon7 — Fri, 29 Sep 2017 19:21:16 +0000

Only in America

New comment by kutkloon7 in "Modern terminal-based text editor"

kutkloon7 — Fri, 29 Sep 2017 12:40:13 +0000

"Does micro support Vi keybindings?

No, if you want to use Vim then use Vim."

Kthnksbye

New comment by kutkloon7 in "Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars"

kutkloon7 — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 20:01:20 +0000

The things that are priorities in the USA have always puzzled me. Students pay an absolutely insane amount of money for an education that is very mediocre. It is clear that the American education is failing. About half of the population voted for a man who does not believe in science. But somehow, the main priorities for universities seems to be enforcing diversity and gender-neutral pronouns?

I am not saying that thinking about this is wrong, there is just a deep disconnect with the realities that people live in, and many people seem to have a problem viewing things from another perspective.

New comment by kutkloon7 in "Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars"

kutkloon7 — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 19:52:29 +0000

That is absolutely false. Since I have my computer science/math degree my linkedin inbox has been flooded with messages from recruiters. I can guarantee you that they are not looking for an English major.

New comment by kutkloon7 in "Worldwide airport chaos after computer check-in systems crash"

kutkloon7 — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 12:00:34 +0000

Well, this is awfully related to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15343559

New comment by kutkloon7 in "PulseAudio under the hood"

kutkloon7 — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 09:13:49 +0000

> PulseAudio also didn't do bugfix-only releases, you either backported or waited for the next major release and hoped it didn't break anything else.

Haha, that is ridiculous!

New comment by kutkloon7 in "Encourage 'Dutch reach' to stop cyclists' car-door deaths"

kutkloon7 — Sun, 24 Sep 2017 18:43:50 +0000

Sometimes you just have to bicycle close to cars. Even if you take the effort to see inside parked cars (it is probably better to just watch the road), it is simply impossible to evade suddenly opening car doors if they are opened at just the wrong time.

Its a bit like saying that cyclists just have to avoid you if you would suddenly jump on the biking line.

New comment by kutkloon7 in "PulseAudio under the hood"

kutkloon7 — Fri, 22 Sep 2017 11:11:27 +0000

I am quite surprised that PulseAudio has a bad reputation. I couldn't get ALSA working on Arch Linux, and simply installing PulseAudio resolved all my issues.

From the sentiment here I get the feeling that it might stop working any moment.

New comment by kutkloon7 in "The Joy of Sexagesimal Floating-Point Arithmetic"

kutkloon7 — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 15:21:56 +0000

And 120, 180, 240, ... ;)

New comment by kutkloon7 in "The Joy of Sexagesimal Floating-Point Arithmetic"

kutkloon7 — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 12:10:51 +0000

Ahh, that explains a lot. Thanks.

New comment by kutkloon7 in "The Joy of Sexagesimal Floating-Point Arithmetic"

kutkloon7 — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 09:40:22 +0000

I'm not sure why the author included 'floating point' in the title (probably to hint that the Babylonians did not use a symbol for zero, and had the point floating in blank space). To technical-minded people, floating point is synonymous with hardware that computes using a floating point representation, so this is a bit deceiving.

New comment by kutkloon7 in "The Joy of Sexagesimal Floating-Point Arithmetic"

kutkloon7 — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 09:32:17 +0000

The Babylonians already used a composite-ish system for numbers < 60: They had a different symbol for 10. However, smaller numbers were represented by repeating the unit symbol (which is not very clever).

I guess that the least confusing transcript to modern notation would be something like 7, 24

to represent 7 * 60 + 24 = 444

New comment by kutkloon7 in "The Joy of Sexagesimal Floating-Point Arithmetic"

kutkloon7 — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 09:27:32 +0000

Yes, composite numbers have many advantages. Working in base 60 = 2^2 * 5 * 3, has advantages of working in base 2, base 5, and base 3.

In base 10, you can quickly spot multiples of 2, 5, and ten (or alternatively, reduce any number module 2, 5, or 10).

New comment by kutkloon7 in "What, exactly, do philosophers do?"

kutkloon7 — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 02:09:02 +0000

It is very characteristic for philosophy to have a very clearly defined question, and a very long and pompous essay which does not provide an answer at first sight.

New comment by kutkloon7 in "Random Write Considered Harmful in SSDs (2012) [pdf]"

kutkloon7 — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 10:29:54 +0000

I have skimmed the paper. It seems that they assume that the writes are skewed (e.g. some parts of the memory gets written to more often). This seems to be a reasonable assumption for real-life situations, but I am not sure if 'random writes' is an appropriate name (since usually people assume random to be uniformly random).

(Not 100% sure if I understood this correctly, though)

New comment by kutkloon7 in "“There Is No Reason for Any Individual to Have a Computer in Their Home”"

kutkloon7 — Fri, 15 Sep 2017 16:45:17 +0000

I think it is also very much a chicken-and-egg problem. Without software for personal computers, there is no need for personal computers. When there are no people with personal computers, it is not interesting to write software for personal computers.

Then again, why would someone want a personal computer in that time? The things computers are used for now are broadly: 1. Multimedia 2. Communication 3. Administration 4. Computing (for example in science or finance)

The only purpose where you actually need a computer is for computing. This is not something that you typically do at home. It was simply not conventional to use a computer for other purposes at the time. There were no fancy HD screens and the like, and no ubiquitous internet access.

How FreeType's rasterizer work

kutkloon7 — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 08:49:12 +0000

Article URL: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/freetype/freetype2.git/tree/docs/raster.txt

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15217027

Points: 2

# Comments: 0