Hacker News: plesner

New comment by plesner in "Bigger Better Varints"

plesner — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 12:23:42 +0000

This post was actually partly inspired by a HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40426666.

New comment by plesner in "The Mindlessness of Ostensibly Thoughtful Action (1978) [pdf]"

plesner — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 19:15:04 +0000

Their model of scripts and mindlessness is only one of many possible explanations of the behavior they're seeing. And I don't even know where to start with the sending letters to random doctors thing.

Is this actually a thing that was/is taken seriously?

New comment by plesner in "PEP 760: No more bare excepts"

plesner — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 15:41:27 +0000

If someone on my team or in my company proposed to break most of our python code for no substantial reason, unless they were pretty junior I would count that as a real red flag against their judgement.

How do people land on the python steering council exactly?

New comment by plesner in "The Fastest Mutexes"

plesner — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 16:37:30 +0000

I'm very ready to believe your description of the state of python is true but I've been out of the loop on python for a while. I'm interested in more details. Can you expand or point to any articles that give more details?

New comment by plesner in "NASA is about to make its most important safety decision in nearly a generation"

plesner — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 17:57:25 +0000

It's a diphthong though. Same as the difference between George (roughly dzo:rdz) and Geörge (roughly dze:ordz).

New comment by plesner in "CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor also linked to Linux kernel panics and crashes"

plesner — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 10:44:05 +0000

> I think blaming DEI hires for problems is mostly people who don't like the idea of hiring based on race/gender/etc. and who also realize that if you do that hard enough, you're bound to get inferior people because you're limiting your hiring pool.

Isn't that exactly the problem though: hiring is currently based on race/gender in favor of white/male hard enough that you get interior people from that hiring pool?

New comment by plesner in "Microsoft has serious questions to answer after the biggest IT outage in history"

plesner — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 16:06:56 +0000

There seemed to me to be a clear shift in focus from CrowdStrike to Microsoft somewhere along the way, maybe a little while after George Kurz' message. I was wondering if it was either spin or the media collectively deciding that people understand what MS is better than CS.

New comment by plesner in "Welsh government commits to making lying in politics illegal"

plesner — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 19:25:55 +0000

How much of a politician's time is taken up by making public statements of the type this kind of legislation covers? At least for someone in power, surely only a small part.

If we can't trust politicians to tell the truth in public statements then that's the smaller problem. The bigger problem is: what are they doing the rest of the time when not in public? What kinds of decisions are they making and how are they exercising power? Being a liar and being a terrible leader goes hand in hand. This gives the impression of doing something useful when the best case scenario is that awful people can continue to exercise power, they just have to be a bit more careful what they say in public.

The real question is, how do you prevent terrible people from ending up in positions of power. But avoiding that requires changing how people come to power which nobody in power wants to do. So we get red herrings like this instead.

New comment by plesner in "All I want for Christmas is a negative leap second"

plesner — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 06:06:14 +0000

It makes a lot of sense to not care about a slight amount of drift. But that already exists: that's what TAI is. Why make UTC into another TAI just slightly offset? Why not just switch to TAI? Or, if the 37 second difference between UTC and TAI is the problem they can make a new TAI-minus-37.

What makes no sense is taking something useful, UTC, and redefining it out of existence. Then what time do you use if you really do care about drift? Do we invent a new UTC?

New comment by plesner in "vu128: Efficient variable-length integers"

plesner — Thu, 23 May 2024 17:46:32 +0000

I implemented a slight variation of this a while back which worked as described up to 11110xxx but then a prefix byte of 11111xxx meant a payload of 64*2^xxx bits. So 11111000 is followed by a 64-bit value, 11111001 by a 128-bit, up to 11111111 which is 8192 bits.

New comment by plesner in "Regular expression matching can be simple and fast (2007)"

plesner — Tue, 21 May 2024 18:15:46 +0000

This is a fine introduction to automata-based regexps but the framing of comparing "good" automata with "bad" perl-style is misguided. Automata and perl-style regexps are different beasts and solve different problems. The problem seems to be one of terminology: the perl style should never have been called regexps. That's not what they are. It's a pattern language that happens to have a variant of regexps as a subset.

New comment by plesner in "Infinite Craft"

plesner — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 19:24:02 +0000

Future + Germany = Hitler

Plant + Germany = Beer

Flower + Germany = Hitler

(Harsh!)

New comment by plesner in "Infinite Craft"

plesner — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 19:13:33 +0000

Some interesting finds.

Future + Time = Present (with a gift icon) Present + Present = Gift

(So it's using the words not the concepts)

Paradox + Snowman = Yeti

(Makes sense)

Arnold Schwarzenegger + Narwhal = Shwarzenwhaler

(Shwarzenwhaler has 0 hits on Google, it made it up)

Shwarzenwhaler + Time Machine = Hitler (with a crown icon)

(I kid you not!)

Unicorn + Hitler = Unihitler

(I continue to kid you not!)

12 Days of Curtsmas

plesner — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 19:03:01 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLFpXNanTP9UM0jPNcIuIMG4K--O-Gv3O

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616740

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Denmark's biggest union joins strike against Tesla

plesner — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 06:11:37 +0000

Article URL: https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/3f-transport-gaar-med-i-konflikt-mod-tesla

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38527650

Points: 8

# Comments: 3

New comment by plesner in "The microcode and hardware in the 8086 processor that perform string operations"

plesner — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 18:49:56 +0000

Babbage's analytical engine used a form of microcode ~100 years earlier. Complex operations such as multiplication and division were implemented by lower-level instructions encoded as a series of pegs on a rotating barrel. Each micro-instruction ("vertical" in Babbage's terminology) could take several seconds to execute so a complete multiplication or division would take minutes.

New comment by plesner in "JEP 442: Foreign Function and Memory API (Third Preview)"

plesner — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 20:28:48 +0000

This is an intricate API that is likely to require an intricate implementation just to be correct. But correctness won't be enough, the JEP requires the JIT to implement some complex optimizations.

I could use some reflections around: how do you implement such a large and complex feature in a JIT without potentially creating lots of vulnerabilities. It looks like a lot of new surface area in the VM with bad failure modes and VM engineers too are only human.

New comment by plesner in "Bitwise Division"

plesner — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 16:45:07 +0000

Author her. I didn't run benchmarks. I'm suspicious of micro-benchmarks and I don't have a context where I can try it against realistic data. Also, I just enjoy the maths of it even if it turns out not to make a huge performance difference in practice.

New comment by plesner in "A record label bringing Iranian music to the world"

plesner — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 04:50:17 +0000

I came across iranian classical music by accident years ago and keep coming back to it in a way I don't even with western classical music (I'm european). It's beautiful, highly skilled, passionate, and very much its own thing.

My starting point was Hossein Alizadeh and Masters of Persian Music (which also features Mohammad and Homayoun Shajarian). Unfortunately their albums come and go a bit on streaming services.

New comment by plesner in "On Summing Integers"

plesner — Sun, 07 Mar 2021 19:04:06 +0000

Could you not just do

sum(byteVals) + sum(intVals) + 128 * len(intVals)?