HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

SinePost

135 karma · joined December 12, 2022

submissionscomments
SinePost··on AI can interpret animal emotions better than humans
> “But it turns out there aren’t that many pictures of dogs and cats and sheep on the internet”—at least not ones where it’s clear how the animals are feeling, he says.

Sheep I can understand -- most people online are urban and the people who upload the most are urban -- but it also was difficult to find relevant pictures of housepets?

SinePost··on Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
I'll narrow the scope to "OSS software that is common and where its license is not a selling point to most of its users." KHTML/Chromium/WebKit (to Internet Explorer), Firefox, MySQL, BSD (to AT&T Unix), GCC, LLVM, GIMP, InkScape, VLC to name a few.
SinePost··on Linux Hits 4% on the Desktop
I can. Any of the free BSDs (of which FreeBSD is one of them).
SinePost··on FreeBSD 14.0 has reached – RELEASE
1. Desktop which also functions as a server.

2. Centralized documentation, board of directors versus benevolent dictator for life, faster network stack, fewer GNU tools in the base install, ports tree, license.

3. ZFS, Linuxulator, documentation, community, familiarity.

4. Hardware support, especially power management (ACPI, SpeedStep, etc.) on laptops that are not ThinkPads or Dell Latitudes. Wayland.

5. The FreeBSD handbook.

The biggest problem with the BSDs are not the operating systems themselves, but the network effect surrounding GNU/Linux causing developers to completely overlook them, going on to create bodies of code that are not easy to port or in some cases impossible (Systemd, Wayland).

SinePost··on What scientists must know about hardware to write fast code (2020)
It is quite refreshing to see software optimization be explained so simply and elegantly.
SinePost··on Ask HN: Best value computer science book?
It is also available to read online for free.

https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf (Second edition)

https://sicp.sourceacademy.org/sicpjs.pdf (JavaScript edition)

SinePost··on The legend of “x86 CPUs decode instructions into RISC form internally” (2020)
The "Final Verdict" is very plain and is hardly enhanced by reading the body of the article. It would make more sense if it was put in the opening of the article, creating a complete abstract.
SinePost··on Ask HN: Has journaling improved your life?
It absolutely has. I don't think I can live without doing it anymore. I started in middle school and am currently in college. Being so close to me, it's not formal at all, being more like a stream of consciousness filled with anything I think is particularly interesting to myself. I don't do it according to any set schedule; just as I am not equally energetic and insightful every single day, I am not equally productive every day.

If I don't write something down, I forget it and move on to the next idea. While I rarely read what I have written, it is a massive benefit by itself to commit to paper what I am thinking because the process of transforming a pool of unorganized, but related thoughts into something resembling a cohesive idea that can be told linearly is invaluable in resolving contradictions and evaluating their value. I prefer to handwrite because I don't think in ASCII (or Unicode, or LaTeX, or any other computer format). Ninety-nine cent composition notebooks and commodity rollerball pens are all I need.

SinePost··on CS 61B Data Structures, Spring 2023 UC Berkeley
This spring, I completed a data structures course at a large state school. We used Java at our university because Princeton did, and I imagine Princeton did because of the ease of segmenting concepts into classes because Java bytecode is the same between the students' devices and the machines which were used to grade their assignments (our grades were determined as a fraction of the number of test-cases our code would pass).
SinePost··on Marginalia: DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content
What advantages does this offer over something like typing "$QUERY -site:*.com" into a mainstream search engine? I think webmasters in general do a pretty good job at self-segregating their sites into commercial and non-commercial entities through the use of different top-level domains.
SinePost··on Marginalia: DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content
That doesn't actually sound very different from my experience with major search engines beyond the first page. I've taken it as a bit of an law that the Internet outside of large centralized and/or moderated sites gets very fringe very quickly. Since the whole point of the search engine is to display noncommercial sites, users will inevitably face thousands of self-published blogs of varying beliefs, quality, and truthiness. As these fringe sites take up more domain names by total volume than mainstream platforms (there is only one Twitter, Facebook, et al.), I am not surprised at all that they seem to be even more voluminous here than on commercial search engines.
SinePost··on Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars
The article puts too much emphasis on political movements, when the answer is most likely economics and the increasingly sedentary lifestyle of the average youth.
SinePost··on The Arm Manga Guide to the Mali GPU (2021)
Captain Zilog, anyone? https://www.zilog.com/captain_zilog/
SinePost··on Ask HN: Share your favorite YouTube channels focused on mastering a skill/craft
Rick Beato, being an industry professional and former professor, is someone I trust to teach music theory. https://www.youtube.com/@RickBeato/playlists

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned 3Blue1Brown yet, who is perhaps the single most influential figure in popular mathematics today. https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown

SinePost··on The Agon light is the fastest 8-bit microcomputer
The TI-84 Plus CE has a eZ80 at 48 MHz.[1]

https://www.brownmath.com/ti83/diff8384.htm

SinePost··on Chat GPT is the birth of the real Web 3.0, and it's not going to be fun
Good point. I was already concerned about people's reliance on Google's zero-click answers as the deepest level of inquiry before ChatGPT hit the scene. ChatGPT feels like a multiplier of this convenience factor, being also slightly more specific and generally more consistent.
SinePost··on Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service
It's a bit of legend in the YouTube community, but I've never looked into it myself. Thank you for motivating me to. The source in the article is from Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube itself, at SXSW.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/youtube-star...

SinePost··on Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service
From what I hear, this is the case in most universities (or at least in state schools). I really hope this doesn't spoil the view of students auditing on campus.
SinePost··on Show HN: Summate.it – Quickly summarize web articles with OpenAI
I want to see something like this applied to files saved locally. It would be much easier to find files based on what they're actually about rather the filename, metadata, or specific quotations.
SinePost··on On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? (2021)
This is a great paper to introduce someone to the potential ethical issues that large language models have. A concern I have with these models that the paper only dusts upon is the notion of "truth" when the machine has no method to determine it. Do we admit defeat for what the machine does not have a very high confidence in an answer, or go with a popular opinion/interpretation? These are epistemological issues that I don't see being resolved anytime soon.
SinePost··on Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping
I second this question. I've used both before; the user experience is basically the same, and there's no audible difference between the two.
SinePost··on Bringing MathML back to Chromium
I'm a big believer of treating mathematical notation as a first-class citizen on the web. This won't make me jump ship to a Chromium-based browser, but I'm glad to see it happen.
SinePost··on Start a fucking blog
In the author's defense, the site follows the general formula of https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/. It is, by this point, a tradition.