Hacker News: spirographer

New comment by spirographer in "A down detector for down detector's down detector"

spirographer — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 08:30:34 +0000

It would be great to register this in downdetector to make sure it is up.

New comment by spirographer in "WPEngine, Inc. vs. Automattic– Order on Motion for Preliminary Injunction"

spirographer — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 21:39:38 +0000

You mean "Losely", right...

New comment by spirographer in "The Art and Mathematics of Genji-Ko"

spirographer — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 00:04:21 +0000

This is a great article! Funny about Yugiri (39), because your version is a mirror image to Eawase (17), and the traditional Japanese Yugiri breaks that symmetry.

Every Genji-mon that is not self-symmetrical should have a mirror image, which I was able to quickly verify in the Genji-mon table you displayed.

Minori (40) is the only non symmetrical Genji-mon that breaks the rule, because it's the only one whose mirror image is also isomorphic to itself.

I can only imagine that there was something deliberate about the symmetry breaking for Yugiri, given the almost fanatical attention to detail in Japanese arts in general, and the equally strong penchant for deliberate imperfection in traditions like Kintsugi.

New comment by spirographer in "Dots Will Be Connected"

spirographer — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 15:09:49 +0000

Brilliant synthesis:

Globally humans have transitioned almost overnight from information/knowledge scarcity to information flood. Once we had plenty of time to forage information to construct narratives and share them and agree/disagree on them before the next influx. Now we are literally waterboarded with information that has no context, minimal sharing and no real conversation attached. We are left with whatever individual narrative our pattern matching can construct, and it's usually inadequate. Narrative is definitely a superpower of the group not the individual.

We may need to wait a generation until people who have grown up in this world and can filter feed on the information can create/disseminate narrative adapted to the new rate of information flow and yet somehow true to reality.

New comment by spirographer in "Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so"

spirographer — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 17:03:48 +0000

Loved the article! There are so many great details such as the standardization of UTC happening after UNIX time invented, UNIX itself being born before the epoch, and all the great insight into the morass of 64 bit time across modern OSes.

Putting on my pedantic hat though, I see that East and West were switched in the discussion of Japan's unique 50/60Hz AC frequency split, and I can't get my mind off it. Hope you can make the edit.

New comment by spirographer in "Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)"

spirographer — Sat, 06 Aug 2022 03:10:21 +0000

I was a teenager, desperately looking for the cheapest possible system (because I couldn't afford any of them). And I would longingly read all the ads hoping a miracle wold happen. Later on I learned that one of those companies was named after the college dorm where the computer was conceived. So cool.

New comment by spirographer in "Null Island, the most real of fictional places [pdf]"

spirographer — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 16:43:25 +0000

Null island is like the opposite of the Bermuda triangle. In fact, maybe they form a portal...

New comment by spirographer in "Cocktail party ideas"

spirographer — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 20:13:44 +0000

Also, very relevant to discussions of whether we live in a simulated universe!

New comment by spirographer in "Cocktail party ideas"

spirographer — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 19:57:34 +0000

The whole discussion of whether we live in a Matrix-like simulation falls into this category as well. There are so many layers of oversimplification at play in most peoples' conceptualization of a simulated universe that it is hard to even begin to have a conversation about it.

New comment by spirographer in "Why There Aren't More Googles (2008)"

spirographer — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 08:58:35 +0000

Companies fill ecological niches. When new technologies emerge there is room for a new apex species/(company), and a few smaller wannabes. There just isn't unlimited room for large companies to emerge, and that is the principal reason why there aren't more googles and facebooks around. In the end it has very little to do with VCs and entrepreneurs, except for the ones who happen to be in the right place at the right time to take an as yet non obvious idea and turn it into something huge.

New comment by spirographer in "Rendering floating numbers: advances in problems you didn’t know you had (2011)"

spirographer — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 09:25:56 +0000

Here is the reference for the most recent work (2019) of note in this domain. Ulf Adams extended his 2018 Ryū algorithm to implement Ryū printf which is 4x faster than the best other implementation tested on Linux, Mac and Windows. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3360595

New comment by spirographer in "Dickhead of the Week: Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri"

spirographer — Sat, 12 Sep 2020 16:05:30 +0000

The reason Instagram's founders are no longer there is because they could not stomach being forced by facebook to publicly make these kinds of statements.

New comment by spirographer in "Programming with Categories"

spirographer — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 17:29:17 +0000

At a meta level, Category Theory requires some comfort with abstraction, which really only comes with a mathematical education. So while it may stand apart from much math, it relies on your strong mathematical foundations.

New comment by spirographer in "Rob Pike's Rules of Programming (1989)"

spirographer — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 14:03:18 +0000

Rob Pike's rules of programming simplified :

- Start with stupid code built on smart data (after Fred Brooks)

- When in doubt use brute force (Ken Thompson)

- Premature optimization is the root of all evil (Tony Hoare)

New comment by spirographer in "Risk BowTie Method"

spirographer — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 13:04:06 +0000

I would recommend this method for documenting all functions, processes, APIs. It can be seen as making explicit what intended inputs, and outputs are, and adding layers to describe input validation to eliminate (buggy behaviors), and testing/fuzzing to prevent introduction of risks, and enabling exception code to mitigate unavoidable error conditions upon process completion. The bowtie method really encapsulates software behavior quite well.

New comment by spirographer in "The periodic table, colour coded by the likely origin of each element"

spirographer — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 15:29:19 +0000

This article gives the more detailed explanation of the chart's data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleosynthesis

BTW, image search of nucleosynthesis gives about 10 different versions of this infographic, with fairly significant variation.

New comment by spirographer in "Cyc"

spirographer — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 18:24:16 +0000

My 2 cents is that I can ask just about any question I can think of and absorb and internalize an amazing answer in 5 minutes of reading. Many of those same questions can be automatically asked and answered too. The web and search engines are realizing the promise far better than anything else.

New comment by spirographer in "Long S"

spirographer — Thu, 05 Dec 2019 10:36:59 +0000

You can actually use the google ngrams data set to determine that the long s was eliminated from print over a 25 year period roughly from 1795 to 1820.

New comment by spirographer in "The universal decay of collective memory and attention"

spirographer — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 06:16:53 +0000

An earlier version of the paper that is not behind a paywall:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5759bc7886db431d658b7...

New comment by spirographer in "Voronoi Airports: all 54,000+ of them rendered in WebGL"

spirographer — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 08:21:47 +0000

List of 57 airports with lat/long between -1 and 1 from ourairports.com data set:

id,ident,name,latitude_deg,longitude_deg

18539,K22W,[Duplicate] Transylvania County Airport,-0.7,0

324674,PL-0142,Erase Me 11,-0.3,0

324675,PL-0143,Erase Me 12,0,-0.3

324678,US-0610,Erase Me 13,0.4,0

323989,AU-0112,Erase Me 26,0.6,0

324033,CA-0571,Erase Me 23,0,0.6

324533,SG-0004,Erase Me 20,0.5,0

324609,LU-0007,Erase Me 2,0,0.1

324610,GB-0518,Erase Me 3,-0.1,0

324611,GB-0519,Erase Me 4,0,-0.1

324612,IM-0004,Erase Me 7,-0.2,0

324613,GB-0520,Erase Me 8,0,-0.2

324614,GB-0521,Erase Me 9,0.3,0

324673,PL-0141,Erase Me 6,0,0.2

325010,IN-0102,Erase Me 16,-0.5,0

325026,US-0667,Erase Me 17,0,-0.5

325027,PHL,Erase Me 19,0,-0.4

325053,CA-0687,Erase Me 22,-0.6,0

325235,US-0692,Erase Me 14,0,0.4

325236,US-0693,Erase Me 15,0,0.5

325303,AE-0026,Erase Me 21,0,-0.6

325311,FR-0362,Erase Me 25,0,-0.7

325333,LGW,Erase Me 24,0,0.7

325399,GB-0530,Erase Me 10,0,0.3

325562,SA-0009,Erase Me 18,-0.4,0

325563,PK-0021,Erase Me 1,0.1,0

325721,AF-0005,F@# Off Spammer!,0.7,0.7

325899,US-0792,Not anywhere near Oklahoma city,0.5,0.7

325935,US-0794,"Not Allentown unless they moved it to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, which I doubt",0.7,0.8

325957,JNB,NOT OR Tambo International Airport,0.7,0.9

325966,US-0796,Not DTW although Detroit can be just as isolated,0.6,0.8

326149,CA-0707,yyz,0,0

326150,GB-0536,LHR,0,0

326151,GB-0537,heathrow,0,0

326153,AU-0116,SYD,0,0

326154,AU-0117,MEL,0,0

326155,AU-0118,LST,0,0

326345,MA-0002,cmn,0,0

326346,CMN,CMN,0,0

326611,NO-0074,Mike Tom,0,0

328135,EG-0005,Cairo,0,0

326459,CDG,ஜWAZIFA ღ//ღDUAღ//ღAMALஜpasand Ki Shadi Ka Wazifa +91- 9784839439,0,0

327169,AU-0122,Frank,0,0

326654,IT-0530,Libr,0,0

328069,ZA-0159,FACN,0,0

326166,RO-0029,Popasul Zburatorilor Airfield,0,0

326167,RO-0030,Popasul Zburatorilor Airfield,0,0

324828,GB-0523,Erase Me 5,0.2,0

325970,AE-0027,F*#$ Off @james_Andrew!!!,0.6,0.7

328056,HLA,Lanseria,0,0

326274,US-0813,(Duplicate)Grandpa's Farm Mendota Airport,0.000001,0.000001

326290,YMX,International Airport of Mirabel - Academy of Aeronautics of Canada Flying School training,0,0

328024,US-0883,JFK,0,0

326886,PH-0165,clark international airport,0,0

326164,US-0805,Twin Cities,0,0

326437,NL-0049,Airport Teuge,0,0

327147,AU-0120,Wbl,0,0