Hacker News: zuzun

New comment by zuzun in "Last rites for Gentoo's Chromium package"

zuzun — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 08:34:48 +0000

Chromium is a pyramid of components and the higher you go up, the longer the compilation of single file takes, because they depend on so many things. This makes caching difficult. A small change at the bottom can invalidate many files, especially the heavy ones at the top. The build system ninja already does caching, but it only offers limited benefits. Then there is so much activity that if you plan to do a weekly build, you can do it from scratch.

New comment by zuzun in "Webb and Hubble confirm Universe's expansion rate"

zuzun — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 09:30:30 +0000

Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh.

New comment by zuzun in "Why flying insects gather at artificial light"

zuzun — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 21:19:08 +0000

Flies easily fly through the window if it's substantially brighter than the room.

New comment by zuzun in "Need a PRNG? Use a CSPRNG"

zuzun — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 21:28:13 +0000

The sponge design of SHA-3 makes it a CSPRNG basically. You can keep draining it after you fed the data in.

New comment by zuzun in "MetNet-3: A state-of-the-art neural weather model"

zuzun — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 20:20:09 +0000

It's already happening. For example, ECMWF provides experimental forecasts by their own deep learning model, plus models from Deepmind, NVIDIA, and Huawai.

New comment by zuzun in "We're entering a pretty strong El Niño"

zuzun — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 19:50:13 +0000

They perform several model runs with slightly different configurations and then compare the predictions to a reference period, currently 1991-2020. When they say "above average", most model runs fell in the upper tercile of the reference period and the probability is derived from the fraction.

New comment by zuzun in "We're entering a pretty strong El Niño"

zuzun — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 17:23:49 +0000

If anyone is interested in these seasonal forecasts, all major meteorological institutes upload theirs to https://www.wmolc.org, with new predictions coming out every month.

New comment by zuzun in "Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?"

zuzun — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 09:20:39 +0000

Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell. I finished it yesterday.

It's a collection of articles the author wrote for The New Yorker around the middle of the last century. The stories are portraits of weird, eccentric people and peculiar places in and around New York. Mitchell describes his subjects with dignity, without putting them on a pedestal.

The author is a very good writer and his stories are enjoyable, but only after I had read the book to the last page, I understood what makes this book so great. The stories tell you as much about the author as they tell you about the protagonists. I started the book to get a glimpse of the old New York and finished the book with a great curiosity about the author himself.

New comment by zuzun in "Attention with Linear Biases (ALiBi)"

zuzun — Sun, 14 May 2023 09:35:37 +0000

If I understand it correctly, you are only attending preceding tokens in your paper. Can the constant bias matrix be made symmetric for unmasked tasks?

New comment by zuzun in "WeatherKit"

zuzun — Sun, 03 Jul 2022 07:02:42 +0000

They still publish all their data free of charge and are required to do so by law. For weather forecast, they dump all parameters of their recent model runs.

So I guess I'm saying that you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially...

New comment by zuzun in "Wearing flashy/status clothes makes people less likely to cooperate with you"

zuzun — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 16:04:57 +0000

The expensive stuff still bears the trademark of the brand, the lead designer, or the collection. It's more subtle, but ultimately the reason why people buy it. And some brands really just sell the logo at a high price, like Hermes or Louis Vuitton.

New comment by zuzun in "New UUID Formats"

zuzun — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 17:15:49 +0000

It's necessary to keep them sortable at byte level.

New comment by zuzun in "What’s the best lossless image format?"

zuzun — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 06:32:54 +0000

JPEG doesn't support transparency.

New comment by zuzun in "I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX"

zuzun — Tue, 24 May 2022 14:34:13 +0000

My rule of thumb is that once I start writing imperative LaTeX with loops and stuff, I'm almost always on the wrong path. Now, I might be missing some important corner cases, but by skimming through the blog post, I feel like the author's solution is too complicated. For example, I don't get why this requires auxiliary files.

I would create a counter for the affiliations, let the \affiliation command define macros that contain the name of the affiliation and the value of the counter and then append the output to two different helper macros, one for authors and one for affiliations, whose contents I dump in \maketitle.

New comment by zuzun in "Inkscape 1.2 released"

zuzun — Tue, 17 May 2022 06:48:40 +0000

> dynamic snapping

This release adds alignment and distribution snapping, it's mentioned in the full release notes:

https://media.inkscape.org/media/doc/release_notes/1.2/Inksc...

New comment by zuzun in "Dall-E 2 illustrations of Twitter bios"

zuzun — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 20:57:36 +0000

Oof. Editorial illustrators are about to get automated.

New comment by zuzun in "Estonia, allies to trigger NATO Article 4"

zuzun — Thu, 24 Feb 2022 10:35:10 +0000

Unlike nuclear power plants.

New comment by zuzun in "Show HN: Goopt – Search Engine for a Procedural Simulation of the Web with GPT-3"

zuzun — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 17:38:43 +0000

So basically modern Google without ads.

New comment by zuzun in "In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously"

zuzun — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 07:17:59 +0000

So cash not only grants people freedom and anonymity, it also creates local jobs instead of moving money as arbitrary transaction fees into the pockets of a credit card duopoly? Sounds terrible.

New comment by zuzun in "We built a secret apartment in the mall (2007)"

zuzun — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 17:20:38 +0000

Also a Goosebumps book where the kids discover someone living in their school like this.