Hacker News: michaelhoffman

New comment by michaelhoffman in "Report: Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet"

michaelhoffman — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 21:20:54 +0000

I understand why this is bad, but I personally would sign up for a Microsoft account anyway. Mainly, I don't want all my stuff in "C:\Users\micha". Is there a way to set your username?

New comment by michaelhoffman in "Removing newlines in FASTA file increases ZSTD compression ratio by 10x"

michaelhoffman — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 16:29:40 +0000

When FASTA was invented in 1985, generally sequencing reads would be about half that.

The simplicity of FASTA seems like a dream compared to the GenBank flat file format used before then. And around the year 2000, less computationally-inclined scientists were storing sequence in Microsoft Word binary .doc files.

A lot of file formats (including bioinformatics formats!) have come and gone in that time period. I don't think many would design it this way today, but it has a lot of nice features like the ones you point out that led to its longevity.

New comment by michaelhoffman in "I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia using machine learning"

michaelhoffman — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 21:13:38 +0000

Using machine learning, he counted all of the yurts.

Counting all of the yurts that happen to be using machine learning is a way more difficult problem.

New comment by michaelhoffman in "Dividing unsigned 8-bit numbers"

michaelhoffman — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 20:37:36 +0000

> I assume the author means "out of all the ISAs I know"?

Out of all the ISAs where they know whether it provides integer division or not.

Anthropic is scraping websites so fast it's causing problems

michaelhoffman — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 19:30:08 +0000

Article URL: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/07/29/anthropic-is-scraping-websites-so-fast-its-causing-problems/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41113236

Points: 50

# Comments: 24

New comment by michaelhoffman in "My mental model of setf was wrong"

michaelhoffman — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 20:39:02 +0000

This is not "hard-coded" as I would describe it. It is defined in `gv.el`:

    (gv-define-setter buffer-string (store)
  `(insert (prog1 ,store (erase-buffer))))

Unfortunately, it is marked obsolete since 29.1. The NEWS says:

* Many seldom-used generalized variables have been made obsolete. Emacs has a number of rather obscure generalized variables defined, that, for instance, allowed you to say things like:

    (setf (point-min) 4)

These never caught on and have been made obsolete. The form above, for instance, is the same as saying

    (narrow-to-region 4 (point-max))

New comment by michaelhoffman in "Avoiding Emacs Bankruptcy"

michaelhoffman — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 20:32:56 +0000

This used to be the case until Emacs 24.1, in 2012.

    Passing a nil argument to a minor mode function call now ENABLES
    the minor mode unconditionally.  This is so that you can write e.g.
    
        (add-hook 'text-mode-hook #'foo-mode)
    
    to enable foo-mode in Text mode buffers, removing the need for
    'turn-on-foo-mode' style functions.  This affects all mode commands
    defined by 'define-minor-mode'.  If called interactively, the mode
    command still toggles the minor mode.

New comment by michaelhoffman in "I've stopped using box plots (2021)"

michaelhoffman — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 12:22:37 +0000

Wherever possible, I use sina plots, which provide many of the advantages of violin plots while actually showing the individual data points.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sina_plot

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/sinaplot/vignettes/S...

Adding on a representation of mean in a different style (like a black bar) can be helpful. So can a boxplot-style indication of variance, in some cases.

Okta Mobile Apps Will No Longer Be Available on the China-Based Apple App Store

michaelhoffman — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 17:15:20 +0000

Article URL: https://support.okta.com/help/s/article/the-okta-verify-and-okta-mobile-apps-for-ios-will-no-longer-be-available-on-the-china-based-apple-app-store?language=en_US

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39854570

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by michaelhoffman in "Linux Crisis Tools"

michaelhoffman — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 14:42:48 +0000

When would you need to use rdmsr and wrmsr in a crisis?

New comment by michaelhoffman in "Performance Analysis of Python's Dict() and {}"

michaelhoffman — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 20:14:43 +0000

I wonder if they swapped the benchmark results somehow. Because on my computer, I get roughly the same times but with {} twice as fast as dict().

New comment by michaelhoffman in "Bus Sniffing the IBM 5150"

michaelhoffman — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 17:12:01 +0000

I don't think so, but in 2023 "PC" can refer to a whole bunch of different things, and "5150" is precisely clear about what it refers to.

New comment by michaelhoffman in "Paint on Windows is getting layers and transparency support"

michaelhoffman — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 18:11:00 +0000

I hope it keeps its blazing-fast startup. I regularly used Paint instead of Photoshop on a system where I had both because Paint starts instantly but Photoshop took a bit.

New comment by michaelhoffman in "California tech transplants unhappy with exodus to Austin, report says"

michaelhoffman — Sun, 03 Sep 2023 17:21:17 +0000

The Bay Area has inadequate public transport for a metro of its size, but its utility is kind of another universe from the Austin's CapMetro.

New comment by michaelhoffman in "Show HN: I automated half of my typing"

michaelhoffman — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 15:36:12 +0000

This is super cool. I use Emacs `abbrev-mode` for taking contemporaneous notes but autosuggesting words would be great.

New comment by michaelhoffman in "My Caste"

michaelhoffman — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 21:49:38 +0000

It seems like you may be reading some things into my comment that I didn't write? I made no claims about the procedure being fair or unfair—I'm just describing what it is.

New comment by michaelhoffman in "My Caste"

michaelhoffman — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 20:26:31 +0000

I am faculty at University of Toronto. As part of the process of considering someone for tenure here, the university solicits six appraisals from relevant experts at other institutions. The candidate will not know who the referees are. Generally, the appraisals are positive; a negative appraisal may severely affect someone's tenure case.

I don't see the concern in this post as one of widespread caste discrimination at University of Toronto, but more that he's worried that a single prejudiced person might upset this, either an external referee, or someone internal involved in the decision-making process. In fact, that is exactly what he says.

https://www.aapm.utoronto.ca/academic-administrative-procedu...

New comment by michaelhoffman in "We Don’t Need a New Twitter"

michaelhoffman — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 14:33:27 +0000

Of course, we don't NEED a new Twitter, but many folks WANT a new Twitter.

New comment by michaelhoffman in "Advanced Python Mastery"

michaelhoffman — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 15:56:27 +0000

They're in good company—the C standard also has something called an "expression statement" which is similar.

New comment by michaelhoffman in "Advanced Python Mastery"

michaelhoffman — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 18:00:53 +0000

> A Python program may contain statements or expressions. Here's a Python program that contains no statements: 42.

According to the Python Language Reference, that is a Python program made of one expression statement:

https://docs.python.org/3/reference/simple_stmts.html#expres...