Hacker News Reader

GrumpySlothon When Optimising Code, Measure

Rewriting from Python to anything else would make it faster.

GrumpySlothon Niklaus Wirth, or the Importance of Being Simple

I wouldn’t call D simple. The list of features seems to be endless.

GrumpySlothon European Remote Worker Index

I work based on a standard labour law contract remotely and I’m not compelled to fulfil any quota of days worked from office.

GrumpySlothon Ask HN: Are tech layoffs happening abroad?

Most of German job offers I’ve seen require proficiency in the German language. That’s unlike offers from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, or Israel, where you’re only required to speak English. Nothing else is ever even suggested in those offers. My sister works in Germany and says that while Germans are pretty easy to talk to in English on the street, in a shop etc., they’re reluctant to do so in a work context and she gets irritated looks when she only speaks at B1 level. Germany is pretty uniquely hostile to foreigners in that regard. I suspect that the requirement you’re speaking of is set up mainly to filter out those who don’t speak German very well.

GrumpySlothon Tennessee after-school Satan club holds first meeting despite protests

If you consider the serpent from the garden to be Satan, then the Bible. It gave humans knowledge after all while God forbade it.

This story has always reminded me of the story of Prometheus. Both were punished by gods for their gifts to humanity.

GrumpySlothon Israeli group claims it’s using back channels to censor “inflammatory” content

Wouldn’t deleting posts of high-profile users be easily noticed and lead to Streisand effect? The article says it didn’t manage to verify the cited claims.

GrumpySlothon Israeli group claims it’s using back channels to censor “inflammatory” content

> Iron Truth claims its tech industry back channels have led to the removal of roughly 1,000 posts tagged by its members as false, antisemitic, or “pro-terrorist” across platforms such as X, YouTube, and TikTok.

Does anyone know if that’s a lot? I don’t know either way. I just have a gut feeling that compared to the number of posts made by bots on any political matter it barely matters.

I wonder if it wouldn’t be more efficient to counter with more bots going in the other direction with likes and posts.

GrumpySlothon "I Contribute to the Windows Kernel. We Are Slower" (2013)

(2013)

GrumpySlothon Why use strace in 2023? [video]

You need to use sudo. I have SIP enabled and use DTrace regularly. Trust me, it works. (As long as you use it properly, i.e. not like an alias for strace the way you tried here.)

GrumpySlothon Why use strace in 2023? [video]

SIP doesn’t block dtrace. You can use it just fine to e.g. trace dynamic library function calls.

What really is a problem on MacOS is that they stopped shipping kernel syscall symbols. So you can’t trace syscalls anymore in the default setup. I’ve read on some forum that you can download the symbols from some website and it works then, but didn’t bother with it at that point.

Ironically, despite DTrace originally being a Unix tool, I’ve had the most success using it on Windows. On Mac I can’t trace syscalls by default, on FreeBSD for some reason it didn’t notice that processes inside jails were opening files (despite DTrace running on the host)... On Windows on the other hand DTrace works perfectly for me.

GrumpySlothon First new VAX in 30 years? (2021)

There is one joystick in the photo. It’s even labeled "JOYSTICK". :)

GrumpySlothon In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way

> In my experience international train travel in Europe is always more expensive, sometimes 3-4 times more expensive, than airtravel.

Not necessarily. Look at this itinerary e.g.: <https://thesavvybackpacker.com/cheapest-travel-europe-train-...>. With a few exceptions, train was cheaper than the plane, often several times.

And now for what happens when it’s more expensive and inconvenient to be concerned about the environment: <https://www.thelocal.no/20230125/why-cross-country-flights-a...>

GrumpySlothon In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way

Your second link also gives an alternative explanation of people being motivated economically, not environmentally. And quote from the first link:

> 91% say they want to replace short-distance flights by fast, low-polluting trains in collaboration with neighbouring countries

See how a train being fast was bundled into the question.

Let’s forget about environment for a moment. Going by plane is a lot less convenient, when you can take a train, due to needing to show up a lot earlier at the airport, going through security and all kinds of overhead. So when trains work, i.e. they’re fast, reliable and affordable, nobody needs environmental concerns to use them.

For me to be convinced that someone is taking a train for environmental reasons, the train would need to be more expensive for them than going by plane. Because otherwise everyone likes to see themselves in a good light and say how much their choices are dictated by ethics, when in reality the wallet is often a more potent motivator than environmental concerns. Just like every employer likes to say that they hire and promote based on merit, but then it turns out that on average taller people get hired and promoted more often. And the employers will still believe that they weren’t influenced by that. Just like travellers will overestimate the influence of environmental concerns on their choice of mode of transport. In both cases it’s because people like to see themselves in good light. And same way most of the people who say they’d prefer to buy products produced in fair worker conditions, won’t actually buy the products whose prices reflect that. Declarations are cheap. Particularly feel-good declarations.

GrumpySlothon In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way

This point is repeated many times throughout the article. It’s not picking, unless you mean I should ignore half the article.

GrumpySlothon In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way

I can see reduced prices driving the demand. I doubt about the reduced emissions part. Why should I believe that that’s what’s driving people?

To me it just sounds like a marketing spin. Don’t get me wrong: it’s cool that people are choosing a cleaner means of transport, but I doubt this is the reason.

GrumpySlothon In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way

The convenience is very much new. 15 years ago in Poland it was completely normal for a train to have multi-hour delays. Now it’s not, and the trains are getting a lot faster. E.g. currently it takes 2h-2h 22m to go from Warsaw to Gdańsk. In 2016 it used to take 3h. 15-20 years ago it could take half a day or longer.

GrumpySlothon In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way

> Amid concerns about climate change, demand for rail service is strong

This attempt at spinning it as people being motivated to use trains out of concern for the climate is hilarious. Almost nobody thinks like that. Trains are just a hell of a lot more convenient than alternative modes of transport for long distance trips.

GrumpySlothon Benchmarking 20 programming languages on N-queens and matrix multiplication

A curious thing about Swift: after https://github.com/attractivechaos/plb2/pull/23, the matrix multiplication example is comparable to C and Rust. However, I don’t see a way to idiomatically optimise the sudoku example, whose main overhead is allocating several arrays each time solve() is called. Apparently, in Swift there is no such thing as static array allocation. That’s very unfortunate.

GrumpySlothon The value of canonicity (2020)

> Clojure is 16 years old, how is that hipster tech?

Common Lisp is 39 years old and it’s hipster tech. APL is 57 years old and it’s hipster tech. You can be a hipster at any age. (And it’s not a bad thing.)

GrumpySlothon Discovering copy-on-write in R

It’s only transparent for types that already implement copy-on-write. For custom types you need to implement it yourself, using reference typed private properties.

GrumpySlothon Progress toward a GCC-based Rust compiler

What’s the difference?

GrumpySlothon Misra C++:2023

If you call mmap/VirtualAlloc/open/fopen in your constructor and later it throws, you will have a resource leak, because the destructor won’t clean it up.

GrumpySlothon Misra C++:2023

If you call mmap/VirtualAlloc/open/fopen in your constructor and later it throws, you will have a resource leak, because the destructor won’t clean it up.

GrumpySlothon Progress toward a GCC-based Rust compiler

C++ and Java, which have many implementations, also have proprietary distributions, see Apple’s fork of Clang, Microsoft’s MSVC, Azul VM, Jamaica VM, ...

And some of them are pretty nice. Life is good.

GrumpySlothon Misra C++:2023

Maintaining state invariants is trivial without exceptions thrown from constructors. Just make constructors private and write a public static factory method. Allowing exceptions in constructors on the other hand creates the problem of: what should the destructor of an only partially constructed object do? It’s just unnecessary.

GrumpySlothon 'Tranq tourism': TikTokers travel to film drug users

Depends on the number of people in the photo. And on whether you can identify the face of the person in the photo. E.g. recently when many people used facemasks that made a lot of photos of them legal to publish. And if there is a crowd of people, e.g. 10 people, then you can publish even with the faces visible.

GrumpySlothon Atree: A simple and efficient pointer-free tree implementation

Measurements suggest that binary search is at least competitive with linear search and is often the winner, so it’s a reasonable default[1].

But naive binary search can also be improved upon by dividing the searched space into 3 subranges instead of 2[2].

[1]: <https://www.pvk.ca/Blog/2012/07/03/binary-search-star-elimin...>

[2]: <https://www.pvk.ca/Blog/2012/07/30/binary-search-is-a-pathol...>

GrumpySlothon Hunter-gatherers' work was play

> We can already do that at leisure, but most would not care to go a whole day (let alone every day) trudging around by necessity.

We can do that at best 2/7 days a week. In reality, modern life forces us to dedicate even less time to that.

I've done that many times. The feeling at the end of the day is always unlike any other. Wouldn't swap those experiences for anything else.

> You seem to be framing the search for food as a low-stakes endeavor.

Have you ever picked mushrooms? Do you know how little time it takes to get enough mushrooms for weeks to come? And then how much meat there is in a deer?

I agree that the risk of being murdered is higher. Although I think you overestimate the frequency of encounters. There weren't a lot of people back then on Earth. I also don't think this decreases happiness all that much. The slow senseless willowing away in an office everyday seems like a much less happy existence, even if it's a longer one.

GrumpySlothon Hunter-gatherers' work was play

Yes?

Spend a day endlessly walking (roaming), searching in the forest for berries, mushrooms etc., doing hand-to-hand combat, hunting...

Spend a day in front of a computer.

Which one do you think will end in a feeling of happiness?

GrumpySlothon In OpenZFS and Btrfs, everyone was just guessing

> disabling the writing of 'last accessed' timestamps

atime is the most useless filesystem feature I’ve heard of. But on most Unix-like systems it’s enabled by default and the main thing it does is turn reads into writes, degrading performance. All the while ctime isn’t a standard Unix filesystem feature. And ctime to me always seemed infinitely more useful (and cheaper!) than atime.

</rant>