Hacker News: stonemetal

New comment by stonemetal in "Human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world"

stonemetal — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 13:01:30 +0000

If gravity were lower we would have evolved differently, walking would have adapted too. On the other hand babies probably wouldn't be able to walk either. Being mobile, defenseless, and not having "runaway!" as the default defense mechanism (like horses) is an evolutionary dead end.

New comment by stonemetal in "The origin and unexpected evolution of the word "mainframe""

stonemetal — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 16:26:31 +0000

> IBM to launch an LLM in 2040.

What about Watson? How did it generate language? My understanding is it output language well enough to match what LLMs do today.

New comment by stonemetal in "CDC: Unpublished manuscripts mentioning certain topics must be pulled or revised"

stonemetal — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 16:21:15 +0000

>is there a chance we had pseudo gender science as well

It wouldn't surprise me if there were a bad actor or two, but suggesting everything in the area is "bad" would.

New comment by stonemetal in "Math has changed the shape of gerrymandering"

stonemetal — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 11:31:38 +0000

>equal numbers of terms won by each party. Therefore, in my view gerrymandering doesn't really have a negative effect on democracy

The point of democracy is not to deliver an equal number of victories to each of the parties. It is to reflect the will of the people. A 10 percent lean in one direction is a 10 percent negative effect on democracy.

New comment by stonemetal in "Build Your Own Redis with C/C++"

stonemetal — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 03:16:31 +0000

More than half a dozen Boost libraries have made their way to the standard.

Boost continues to exist because there is large overlap with the standards committee and they use it as a staging ground to try out new ideas before they are standardized.

New comment by stonemetal in "Golang disables Nagle's Algorithm by default"

stonemetal — Fri, 30 Dec 2022 06:54:54 +0000

Delayed ACK seems like the better default to me, whether it is telnet or web servers, network programming is almost always request response. Delaying the ACK so that part of that response is ready seems like the correct choice. In today's network programming how often is tinygram really an issue?

In this case I would consider the bug to be git lfs. Even if Nagle's was enabled I would still consider it a bug, because of the needless syscall overhead of doing 50 byte writes.

New comment by stonemetal in "Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2?"

stonemetal — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 02:39:14 +0000

I thought it was common sense to not believe in a thing if there is no evidence of a thing. The only way I am going to believe it was a lab leak is if credible evidence shows up. Until then it is an unknown.

New comment by stonemetal in "EU lawmakers slam “radical proposal“ to let ISPs demand new fees from websites"

stonemetal — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 11:59:39 +0000

Content providers pay their ISP bill or they wouldn't be on the internet. End users pay their ISP bill or they wouldn't be on the internet. ISPs unable to figure out how to run a profitable business is no one's fault but their own.

If they can't provide the service they claim to provide at the prices they charge then they probably ought to look into a price increase.

New comment by stonemetal in "Repeal the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906"

stonemetal — Sat, 07 May 2022 12:28:50 +0000

If he actually did any research how could he get it that wrong? Nothing about being built in America, just that the owner and charterer must be Americans, the actual operating crew can be whoever. The coastwise endorsement further defines American ownership with if the owner is a corporation then "must be American" means incorporated in US's legal jurisdiction and voting majority of the board is US citizens.

The dredge act (as linked to by the author) is short enough I will quote it here[1]:

§55109. Dredging

(a) In General.-Except as provided in subsection (b), a vessel may engage in dredging in the navigable waters of the United States only if-

(1) the vessel is wholly owned by citizens of the United States for purposes of engaging in the coastwise trade;

(2) the charterer, if any, is a citizen of the United States for purposes of engaging in the coastwise trade; and

(3) the vessel has been issued a certificate of documentation with a coastwise endorsement under chapter 121 of this title or is exempt from documentation but would otherwise be eligible for such a certificate and endorsement.

(b) Dredging of Gold in Alaska.-A documented vessel with a registry endorsement may engage in the dredging of gold in Alaska.

(c) Penalty.-If a vessel is operated in knowing violation of this section, the vessel and its equipment are liable to seizure by and forfeiture to the United States Government.

[1]:https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...

New comment by stonemetal in "Humble subscription service is dumping Mac, Linux access in 18 days"

stonemetal — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 18:49:26 +0000

>(I'm pretty sure they still made money on those who forgot to skip a month)

It used to be opt in, not opt out to skip a month. IGN is basically trying to figure out how much they can extract from the good will they purchased.

New comment by stonemetal in "4-day workweek boosted workers' productivity by 40%, Microsoft Japan says"

stonemetal — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 00:25:28 +0000

I work at an office that does 9 80. At first they tried the half one Friday, half the other, but switched to everyone in on the same Friday. Basically it annoyed and confused customers trying to reach people. It is just easier to say the joint is closed every other Friday than have the customer try to remember if they need to call Bill or John on Friday.

New comment by stonemetal in "Ask HN: What are relevant books as of C++20?"

stonemetal — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 02:03:06 +0000

Has Andrei been keeping up with C++? Most of the time I hear about him recently is in context of him being a core D member.

New comment by stonemetal in "$250 Trillion in Debt: The World’s Post-Lehman Legacy"

stonemetal — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 04:03:34 +0000

According to the national debt's Wikipedia page 5.7 trillion is owned by the government. That ends up being about a forth of it.

New comment by stonemetal in "A Genetic Condition That 21 People Are Known to Have"

stonemetal — Tue, 28 Aug 2018 12:50:53 +0000

Good thing the New York Times isn't in Europe.

New comment by stonemetal in "Plan to replicate 50 high-impact cancer papers shrinks to just 18"

stonemetal — Wed, 08 Aug 2018 04:09:31 +0000

It isn't but it kind of is. It is a 95% chance that you should reject the null hypothesis. For example if we flip a coin a 5 times and get heads every time that gives you a p value .03 for rejecting the null hypothesis that the coin is fair. If I run the five coin flip experiment a 100 times and never once reproduce a significant result is it because gee science is hard, or is it because you hit one of those 3% of cases. The same goes for real science if you can't reproduce it more often than not then you might be close but you haven't figured it out yet.

New comment by stonemetal in "Plan to replicate 50 high-impact cancer papers shrinks to just 18"

stonemetal — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 04:47:09 +0000

Given that P <= 0.05 is the usual standard, I would hazard that if it can't be reproduced at least 95% of the time then you miscalculated P.

New comment by stonemetal in "Plan to replicate 50 high-impact cancer papers shrinks to just 18"

stonemetal — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 04:34:29 +0000

What do the reviewers do? They don't try to reproduce it. So yeah make shit up, as long as it is plausible no one will notice.

For example Yoshihiro Sato was recently (2016-2017 time frame) caught fabricating results, turns out he had been doing it for 30 years. He had more than 20 papers retracted. Also note he wasn't caught by a fellow scientist in the field he was caught by a statistician bulk processing papers looking for anomalies. So yeah big penalties if you are caught, but the odds of getting caught are so low you have to be stunningly stupid to get caught.

New comment by stonemetal in "New Video of F-117s Flying Out of Tonopah Despite Their Fates Being Sealed"

stonemetal — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 02:32:28 +0000

I didn't realize full size trucks had gotten over 60 feet long and 40 feet wide.

New comment by stonemetal in "AT&T updates firmware to block access to 1.1.1.1"

stonemetal — Thu, 03 May 2018 01:15:23 +0000

Everyone has heard of google, attacking them would cause back lash. Non technical people haven't heard of cloudflare so it is a softer target.

New comment by stonemetal in "Java is Pass-by-Value"

stonemetal — Sun, 22 Apr 2018 15:21:22 +0000

>The effect of this function will be DIFFERENT.

Obviously the output will be different the input was different. The equivalent C code would have passed pointers. In that case the behavior would have been identical passed in values not swapped contents swapped. Just because Java only has object references, doesn't mean they aren't references.