Hacker News Reader

IvyMikeon Zuckerberg says Meta will build a data center the size of Manhattan in AI push

From the classic tweet[0]:

> Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

> Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

[0]: https://x.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538?lang=e...

IvyMikeon National Archives at College Park, MD, will become a restricted federal facility

From the site:

> All researchers must apply and present a researcher card, which may be obtained in Room 1000. This ensures that proper identification is on file for all individuals accessing the building to establish a legitimate business purpose. Abuse of any researcher registration to circumvent access by the general public may result in a trespass situation and a permanent ban from access to all NARA facilities.

What the hell does "legitimate business purpose" mean? What "business" need is there for JFK Assassination records (which I think are at this site), for example? If I'm getting a PHD or writing a book, is that a "business" need? I suspect not.

Also, "Abuse of any researcher registration to circumvent access by the general public may result in a trespass situation and a permanent ban from access to all NARA facilities" seems like a very poorly constructed sentence.

IvyMikeon The scientific “unit” we call the decibel

> People who assume that everyone is an idiot but themselves are rarely correct.

This is an off-by-one error.

IvyMikeon Stack Overflow is almost dead

How will ChatGPT learn the next computer language now?

IvyMikeon Converting a Git repo from tabs to spaces (2016)

Galaxy brain: indent using U+001F Unit Separator

IvyMikeon The narrowest escalator in New York City

Temple Grandin says this keeps the riders calmer.

IvyMikeon Jeff Geerling won't connect his dishwasher to your stupid cloud [video]

Just put your dishwasher in airplane mode...

IvyMikeon DEDA – Tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation Toolkit

The github references this document: Timo Richter, Stephan Escher, Dagmar Schönfeld, and Thorsten Strufe. 2018. Forensic Analysis and Anonymisation of Printed Documents. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security (IH&MMSec '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 127-138.

There is a copy here: https://ericbalawejder.com/assets/hexview/Forensic-Analysis-...

  Table 1 (manufacturer, #of printers analyzed, dots found): 
  Brother 1 no 
  Canon 10 yes 
  Dell 4 yes
  Epson 8 somemodels 
  Hewlett-Packard 43 somemodels 
  IBM 1 yes
  KonicaMinolta 21 somemodels
  Kyocera 4 yes 
  Lanier 1 yes 
  Lexmark 6 somemodels 
  NRG 1 yes 
  Okidata 9 somemodels 
  Ricoh 6 yes 
  Samsung 5 no 
  Savin 1 yes 
  Tektronix 4 no 
  Unknown 1 yes 
  Xerox 15 somemodels

It sounds like they mostly understand the dot patterns wherever they found them, with some caveats that are explained in the paper.

IvyMikeon The High Heel Problem

The golf animation is described as a problem, but I say it depicts what would actually happen.

IvyMikeon Betting on the Pope was the original prediction market

This guy is in contention for pope, and he's definitely got an edge in this contest.

https://collegeofcardinalsreport.com/cardinals/pierbattista-...

IvyMikeon A drill bit that can also drive screws

The real hack is to have two drills. Seems excessive but once you do it you'll never go back.

IvyMikeon Stability of Active Ingredients in Long-Expired Prescription Medications

"In conclusion, this study provides additional evidence that many prescription pharmaceuticals retain their full potency for decades beyond their manufacturer ascribed expiration dates. Given the potential cost savings, we suggest the current practices of drug expiration dating be reconsidered."

IvyMikeon The PETG adhesive test [video]

I don't have a ton of experience gluing PETG--the one I've used is "PETG Gloop", which I don't think he tested. I wonder if there's a close analog, or where it would fall in his rankings.

(PETG Gloop SDS is available here, if you want to see the chemical components: https://www.3dgloop.com/sds )

IvyMikeon TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users

Big 1984 energy coming from this story.

“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.”

IvyMikeon LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

The Eaton fire is currently destroying Altadena in what I would call regular neighborhoods on regular streets. On a good day, it's like 20 minutes from Downtown LA. It's hard to fathom. https://www.reddit.com/r/pasadena/comments/1hwv3od/much_of_a...

IvyMikeon Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases

The "The cardinal mistake is inconsistency" is 100% true. We used to call the guiding philosophy of working in these codebases "When in Rome".

IvyMikeon The era of open voice assistants

If you have home automation, surely you've run into this situation when Comcast flakes (or similar):

"OK, Google, turn lights on" "Check your connection and try again"

As far as I can tell, if you have Home Assistant + this new device, you've fixed that problem.

IvyMikeon Half My Life with Perl

I think you would really have needed to learn Perl in the 1990's.

Perl had three huge advantages (at least for me) when I first used it in 1992: 1: familiar syntax which paralleled well-loved tools (sed, troff, grep) 2: associative arrays as a built-in 3: regular expressions as a top-level language feature (not buried in some library with clunky syntax). A few years later, CPAN was another huge advantage.

Nowadays, syntax compatibility with sed is a disadvantage not advantage, associative arrays/dictionaries exist or are easily available for basically every language, and CPAN was the model that everybody else copied or did better. So really the "regexp syntax is immediately available" is the only remaining advantage, and it's rare that it would be worth it.

IvyMikeon Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

I always liked this clause from the Underhanded C Contest:

"The Underhanded C Contest was a programming contest to turn out code that is malicious, but passes a rigorous inspection, and looks like an honest mistake even if discovered."

IvyMikeon Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

I just gave a connection white supremacy and evolution denial, not trying to prove any absolutes. Everything you are saying seemed kinda obvious and thus I didn't mention it.

IvyMikeon Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

As a whole?

White supremacists hate the idea that they could have had non-white ancestors. Belief in a white Adam & Eve is much more in line with their world view. Non-whites were created by "the Curse of Ham". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham

IvyMikeon Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab

Back in my day we just looked at the ctime of /dev/mouse

IvyMikeon GIMPS Discovers Largest Known Prime Number: 2^136279841 – 1

In some ways, it's right on schedule: https://twitter.com/deepakvenkatesh/status/18483562170366856...

IvyMikeon California bans legacy admissions at private universities

I went to a state school, but I understood that the system in the Ivy League is:

The smart kids get to take advantage of the rich kid's money and access, and rich kids get to take advantage of the smart kid's smartness. Depending on your point of view this is symbiotic or parasitic, but either way, it's a big part of why they have legacy admissions.

IvyMikeon A Case Study of Reflex Epilepsy Induced by Playing Chess

Reminds me of Von Goom's Gambit

https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v031n06_...

IvyMikeon Racist plant names will change after historic vote by botanists

In my foodie circles I hear makrut lime more often.

IvyMikeon California Grid Breezes Through Heatwave with Batteries

There's a future issue looming: at some point, a lot of the natural gas peaker plants build for 2021 capacity will be idle almost all of the time. (Based on how often my local peaker plant seems to run, that may actually already be the case).

Keeping peaker plants around and having them ready year round for just a few days use is going to feel expensive; but decommissioning the plants too early has its own risks.

IvyMikeon Ask HN: How do browsers isolate internal audio from microphone input?

Did you just invent yet another linux audio stack?

IvyMikeon How I turned seemingly 'failed' experiments into a successful PhD

If you're curious, here's her PhD thesis. (It's dual-language German/English): https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/opus4-ubp/frontdoor/deliver...

IvyMikeon Gravitational wave researchers cast new light on Antikythera mechanism mystery

I'm currently building this 3d printed version of the Antikythera mechanism. It's not easy:

https://www.printables.com/model/284372-antikythera-mechanis...

It is insane how complicated this is, and this is a simplified version of the actual thing. This schematic of the proposed full mechanism (I think it's hypothesizing some of the missing parts) blows my mind: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Antikyth...

If you have a 3d printer, I really am enjoying the project and recommend it.