Hacker News: plusplusungood

New comment by plusplusungood in "Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning"

plusplusungood — Sun, 10 May 2026 04:46:39 +0000

What's your point?

New comment by plusplusungood in "Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th"

plusplusungood — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:34:09 +0000

> Taking advantage of the $200 plan.

No, I'm paying $200 a month for a premium product that I expect premium service for. It's the single most expensive IT expense I have. Taking advantage my foot.

New comment by plusplusungood in "Networking with agents: Put them in the right conversations with Tailscale"

plusplusungood — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 03:50:24 +0000

I worked for a company once where we ran this dodgy shipping software on prem that integrated with our backend via SQL access. When there was an issue, their techs would rdp to a server and run this little VB app that turned out to be a dialog box that could run arbitrary SQL code against our production database.

I trust that more than this nonsense. WTF are we doing?

New comment by plusplusungood in "Payphone Go"

plusplusungood — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:48:16 +0000

Probably could just ask the phone companies. Free advertising to visit their dying phones?

New comment by plusplusungood in "Anthropic Explicitly Blocking OpenCode"

plusplusungood — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:46:46 +0000

That is analogous to the water company charging you more if you use a faucet from another company. It's not a fair competition.

That's why we are supposed to have legislation to regulate that utilities and common carriers can't behave that way.

New comment by plusplusungood in "Formatting code should be unnecessary"

plusplusungood — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 21:10:46 +0000

Ah, the infamous, but fictional, Monkey Ladder Experiment.

New comment by plusplusungood in "Google's new pipe syntax in SQL"

plusplusungood — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 23:24:44 +0000

LINQ is not the same as LINQ-to-SQL. The former is a language feature, the latter a library (one of many) that uses that feature.

New comment by plusplusungood in "Befreak is a purely reversible two-dimensional programming language (2003)"

plusplusungood — Mon, 06 May 2024 15:06:24 +0000

In addition to the standard ways of dealing with this given by other commenters (keeping the original input around), perhaps more interesting is to imagine how befreak might compute 12 mod 4 using repeated subtraction.

I'm not clever enough to write the solution, but I imagine a loop using the branching operators (<, >, v, ^). Since each time through the loop pushes a bit onto the control stack, you have a built-in count for the number of times the loop was traversed.

In the example of 12 mod 4, the program would loop through 3 times and break once giving you 0001 (or 1110) on the control stack and something like 12, 8, 4, 0 on the stack. Then when reversing, control bits would be popped off and you'd end up going back 0, 4, 8, 12.

New comment by plusplusungood in "Scientists have studied the behavior of cats sitting on squares (2021)"

plusplusungood — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 22:22:57 +0000

Funny, a kid at my son's science fair did this for their project. I don't recollect if he had a bibliography...

New comment by plusplusungood in "You can have two Big Things, but not three"

plusplusungood — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 03:05:48 +0000

Yeah... I think this article is bullshit. A better analogy, imo, is the somewhat cliche rocks in a jar. I'm my experience, you get ONE big thing in your life. But there can still be room for other, smaller rocks.

But the overall message is fine, if obvious. You have to prioritize, you can't do everything.

New comment by plusplusungood in "Mustard"

plusplusungood — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 17:09:44 +0000

Also his name, said aloud, is a tautology. France is French.

New comment by plusplusungood in "Storing binary data in playing cards (2014)"

plusplusungood — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 16:40:27 +0000

I used this fact in an interview ages ago. The interviewer wanted a function, in Java, that shuffled a deck of cards such that every permutation was equally likely. I pointed out this was not possible using the standard library random functions since the seed is a long (akshually... it's 48 bits).

They inexplicably hired my know-it-all ass...

New comment by plusplusungood in "Send Me to Heaven"

plusplusungood — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 17:38:27 +0000

The regulation has changed and no longer limits use at altitude. Source: have launched high altitude balloons to 100000' and https://space.stackexchange.com/a/14695.

You still have to be careful to buy a GPS unit that isn't limited in altitude, though.

New comment by plusplusungood in "Light can be reflected not only in space but also in time"

plusplusungood — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 14:59:48 +0000

Really going above and beyond on that, "write a function that reverses a string in place" interview question, aren't they? I'm afraid I'll have to dock points in simplicity though.

New comment by plusplusungood in "Kalman filter from the ground up"

plusplusungood — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 17:09:33 +0000

That is pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Maybe a touch more complicated than what my 11 year old is ready for; but something he can stretch a bit with. Thank you!

New comment by plusplusungood in "Kalman filter from the ground up"

plusplusungood — Sat, 14 Oct 2023 15:13:02 +0000

I'm looking for something similar for PID controllers, or control systems in general. Specifically for a teenager. Most sources I can find are either college textbooks or overly simple summaries for FIRST Lego League.

New comment by plusplusungood in "Leaked screenshot shows Amazon now tracking individual employee attendance"

plusplusungood — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 16:33:56 +0000

For 1, it depends on the building. Early Amazon buildings did not require badging out. I'm my experience, they've been switching to badge out turnstiles over time. That said, I don't think they're using that data in the reports yet. I know of people who simply badge in and go home.

For ooto, they are not tracking this correctly. I received one of the nastygrams when I was on vacation. I forwarded it as my notice of resignation.