Hacker News: rvbissell

New comment by rvbissell in "Slashdot effect"

rvbissell — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 16:50:31 +0000

The name changed when Slashdot lost significant mindshare among tech nerds.

New comment by rvbissell in "What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO"

rvbissell — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 17:47:06 +0000

It also said in an html comment,

  there are no secret messages in this html
  there are no tyops in this html

which at the time I took as some inside joke.

New comment by rvbissell in "Killing the Mauna Loa observatory over irrefutable evidence of increasing CO2"

rvbissell — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 16:08:49 +0000

> anything but regular

From context your meaning is clear, but I think you got that idiom inverted.

New comment by rvbissell in "No Calls"

rvbissell — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 18:37:22 +0000

Are you me? I think you might be me.

New comment by rvbissell in "3blue1brown YouTube Bitcoin video taken down as copyright violation"

rvbissell — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 20:13:54 +0000

'headcanon' is jargon within general fandom. The term refers to the application of imagination against the established canon of a body of fiction, to expand upon that body of work.

Example:

- Superman being from Krypton is canon.

- Superman not truly being the son of Jor-El, because his mom slept around, might be one fan's headcanon.

New comment by rvbissell in "Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)"

rvbissell — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 21:12:26 +0000

I was about to recommend "Satisfaction High, Information Tenuous"

New comment by rvbissell in "The Most Expensive Eating Disorder"

rvbissell — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 03:56:33 +0000

> He's being interviewed and some people blink a lot when they're nervous!

We're talking about a guy that chooses to be in front of a camera, weekly, for millions of views.

New comment by rvbissell in "Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy"

rvbissell — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 15:08:41 +0000

Someone who doesn't care about polluting our corpus is not going to care about your robots.txt

New comment by rvbissell in "Computer scientists prove that heat destroys quantum entanglement"

rvbissell — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 14:31:05 +0000

Catch 22: and if there is no air inside the box, then you are certain the cat is dead.

New comment by rvbissell in "A wonderful coincidence or an expected connection: why π² ≈ g"

rvbissell — Sun, 11 Aug 2024 16:53:14 +0000

There might be, I don't know. But as you're already aware, we are culturally stuck with pi and so that's how it is taught.

New comment by rvbissell in "A wonderful coincidence or an expected connection: why π² ≈ g"

rvbissell — Sun, 11 Aug 2024 16:50:39 +0000

Actually, no: that Tau-centric area formula you gave derives naturally from taking the integral. Your example actually fits the expectation you have from what you learned in Calculus I. You should _expect_ that 1/2 scaling to be there.

If it seems awkward to you, it's only because of a lifetime of seeing it done in terms of pi.

New comment by rvbissell in "A wonderful coincidence or an expected connection: why π² ≈ g"

rvbissell — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 15:00:51 +0000

No, Tau is fundamental. Pi only exists because someone mistakenly thought the formula for circumference involved diameter, when in fact it involves radius. ("Quit factoring a 2 out of Tau!" I tell them.)

New comment by rvbissell in "Tech CEOs are backtrack on RTO mandates–now, 3% want workers in office full-time"

rvbissell — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 03:37:02 +0000

There are only so many TLAs...

New comment by rvbissell in "Don't use 7-segment displays (2011) [pdf]"

rvbissell — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 18:58:48 +0000

My guess is: economies of scale, in 2024 (vs say, 1990)

New comment by rvbissell in "The Right Kind of Stubborn"

rvbissell — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 18:29:43 +0000

That's cool. The news front-page screenshot & calendar use-cases appeal to me. (Although, it seems like I could just do the news FP thing myself, with "Any image URL", rather than your $3/mo service.)

Is it touch interactive? Like, can I tap on a cell in the calendar to see "... and 2 more" details?

Can I easily create my own replacement frame?

Can I hang it on the wall in a manner where I can rotate between portrait & landscape orientations, and have it react in an appropriate way for the running app?

Is there an SDK for app development?

New comment by rvbissell in "Brain overgrowth dictates autism severity, new research suggests"

rvbissell — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 22:21:49 +0000

It seems to me that GP was using sarcasm to express agreement with your comment.

New comment by rvbissell in "Evolution of the ELF object file format"

rvbissell — Mon, 27 May 2024 23:27:19 +0000

Do you have any examples of the pretty-printing that you've generated?

New comment by rvbissell in "The spy who flunked it: Kurt Gödel's forgotten part in the atom-bomb story"

rvbissell — Fri, 17 May 2024 05:04:54 +0000

I missed your suggestion about Cantor's diagonalization earlier today, but I thank you for bringing it to my attention. That is quite clever.

New comment by rvbissell in "The spy who flunked it: Kurt Gödel's forgotten part in the atom-bomb story"

rvbissell — Fri, 17 May 2024 04:19:34 +0000

That's an interesting statement about rationals. My intuition would be to consider them a subset of the reals, and for natural numbers to be a subset of the rationals. How is my intuition failing me, in this case?

EDIT: found the answer: with Cantor's diagonalization, you can count all the rationals -- effectively mapping each one to a natural number. Since this mapping is demonstrably possible, they have the same cardinality.

New comment by rvbissell in "The spy who flunked it: Kurt Gödel's forgotten part in the atom-bomb story"

rvbissell — Thu, 16 May 2024 18:06:24 +0000

Thank you. It seems absurd that 'next largest' could mean 'larger than the largest'. Hence my (OP's) interpretation.