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XJ6

326 karma · joined August 19, 2019

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XJ6··on Elon Musk tweets using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet
You just made that up.
XJ6··on Pizza Hut’s First Website
And yet it gets it so wrong too, far more value is in delivering standard pizzas and standard T-shirts than custom pizzas and t-shirts.

It thinks that just offering a cart is a waste of the internet's potential rather than worth the billions that it is.

XJ6··on NordVPN confirms it was hacked
> No VPNs do this.

Yet.

XJ6··on Rejected from YC (Again)
After 5 rejections, what made you keep going back for the 6th and 7th?

Isn't there a limit beyond which it's a bit disrespectful to keep asking?

XJ6··on Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home
All "big tech" are at it, I tried to go to "My Pictures" the other day and microsoft asked me to run my pictures through facial recognition.

They said that by consenting I was asserting I had the consent of anyone who appeared in any of my photos or might appear in future which is insane to ask of anyone, no-one can really give that third party consent.

Then when I refused they showed me a nag screen which didn't have that warning.

Then just yesterday I opened google camera and it really wanted to run face recognition on my photos. I refused.

I wanted to try the google podcasts but it was a brick because I had disabled "youtube & web activity" in google account settings. There was no way to subscribe to podcasts without web activity, the application said. And without subscribing there was nothing the app could do.

We have a company claiming that because I don't consent to have my web and youtube activity tracked that there's no way I could subscribe to a podcast that I explicitly choose to subscribe to in an application designed for subscribing to podcasts.

They don't stop trying, everyone is trying to hoover up all data, all the time.

XJ6··on Mispredicted branches can multiply your running times
You were right I misinterpreted "out[0] to out[index-1]" but your next statement:

> count of how many numbers are in out[]

is not true, in the latter case it's a count of how many numbers you want to be in out[].

Consider what happens if howmany is 1 and it generates a single even number. In the original you have an empty array and index 0, in the newer one you have an array e.g. [2] and an index 0.

Yes, you can solve this by 'manually' only returning the first "index" elements but it's just asking for trouble and a source of bugs as seen in your attempt to describe it have a difference between the reality and your description.

You might not consider that to matter, but the point I'm trying to make isn't just nitpicking, it's that there are certain expected behaviours from code, and an array which is "all odd numbers, except maybe all odd but one last even number" is bound to lead to broken expectations.

XJ6··on Mispredicted branches can multiply your running times
In the original code, an index = 0 would not be a problem.

Here, trying to access out[index-1] would error.

Yes, you could then guard against that of course, but then that's even more code to maintain.

If this code is a critical hot-path then sure, micro-optimizations can make sense but doing so without over-commenting and a rigorous test suite to catch introduced bugs is a recipe for disaster.

XJ6··on Mispredicted branches can multiply your running times
Then you've got a bug which crashes if all your results were even and index is left zero.
XJ6··on Mispredicted branches can multiply your running times
And just like that, a micro-optimisation has introduced a bug.

If the last number generated is even, it will still appear in the result set in the new code, and not in the old code.

XJ6··on Review of 737 Max Certification Finds Fault with Boeing and FAA
Did anyone ground the max after the first crash or was it all in response to the second?
XJ6··on A little SSH file copy magic at the command line
I went in expecting some kind of Tavis Ormandy type magic to copy files without authentication.

"You can authenticate with keys" wasn't the punchline I was expecting but perhaps if I had noticed the domain I may have set my expectations differently.

XJ6··on Artifact: What Went Wrong?
It's also a rogue-lite, which are the most streamable types of games.

Games where you're winning up until the point of losing (Slay the spire, Fortnite) are easy for a person watching to answer, "Is this person winning?" because they answer is always yes.

Tuning into someone playing Dota, CSGO or a cardgame that is harder to answer, because they have to know enough about the current game-state (often both visible and hidden) including past states to make that judgement.

Slay the spire has fun amounts of randomness with a seriously challenging top-end difficulty. (The world's best have a ~30% win rate against A20 hearts).

But STS is also single player, and it's not really a card game in the pure sense. The player is playing cards but critically, and this is key to the balance and fun of STS, the opponent is not.

The computer never tries to play cards, which means it never tries and fails to be good at playing cards. The enemies movesets have almost nothing to do with card playing which has leant the developers the freedom to explore some really unique and fun enemies such as the reptomancer which spawns more and more minions or the spaghetti monster which can add curses (negative cards) to the player deck permanently, or the transient smoke monster where you're not supposed to kill it's 999hp because it runs away after a few turns anyway.

That wouldn't be possible in a game where the enemies were designed to use the actual cards, because it would risk that power creeping into the player, which would inevitably eventually win.

This form of deck-builder where it's only the player playing a card game is the real breakthrough that STS made, it breaks all the rules of deck builders but still works.

That combined with the streambility means that it supports a few streamers who stream almost uniquely slay the spire.

XJ6··on Ex-World of Warcraft developer's thread about China and the gaming industry
They're also both 10-15 years old!
XJ6··on Stop Using the Flesch-Kincaid Test
English is remarkably monosyllabic, especially for nouns.
XJ6··on SQL queries don't start with SELECT
Auto-rollback transactions is helpful.

Everything is non-destructive without an explicit COMMIT.

XJ6··on United Kingdom Budget Visualization
Yes, HMRC has 56,000 employees, so it's unlikely that's all or indeed mostly administrative costs.
XJ6··on Processing 40TB of code from 10M projects with a dedicated server and Go
If anyone's curious this references the 8.3 filename shortening that windows was even still doing recently.

Amusingly, that tiny bit of backward compatibility can lead to vulnerabilities as outlined here: https://www.acunetix.com/blog/articles/windows-short-8-3-fil...

XJ6··on Instagram Threatened Removal of Verified Status for Posting Snapchat Content
"Verified" ceased to be meaningful as actual verification as soon as "unverified" became a thing.

I think making it a brand-coloured tick conveyed too much of a positive message so people took it as an endorsement, leading to pressure to "unverify" if that person did or said something bad.

Given that action, the "verified" tick then becomes an even stronger signal of endorsement.

Perhaps it would be better to call them "Partners" like on Twitch and make it an explicit contract with revenue kickback.

XJ6··on The Most Misused SSN of All Time
That seems appalling, why wouldn't it just have a normal email/password combination?
XJ6··on Checkm8 – Bootrom exploit for many iOS devices
I don't see a claim that this circumvents secure enclave or device encryption, so I don't think it's possible to "do anything" to an already locked and encrypted device?
XJ6··on New research suggests that we’re making ourselves sick over politics
Brexit related stress is very real, especially for residents who are EU citizens who may be very long time residents but haven't ever thought of the need to get official residency.

"Settled status" is of little comfort when they look and see a PM willing to act unlawfully.

XJ6··on New research suggests that we’re making ourselves sick over politics
> 22.1% admit they care too much about who wins and who loses

Recommendation: Stop framing it as "winning" and "losing".

XJ6··on Be wary of functions which take several parameters of the same type
I prefer to let the IDE do this.

Developing C# in rider if you call `foo(a,b)` then it'll display as `foo(from: a, to: b)` in the IDE.

XJ6··on Show HN: Free React template that makes “Admin Dashboards” easy
Semi-off-topic: There's a really strange shaking effect when scrolling down one notch with the header bar just in view.
XJ6··on The Most Misused SSN of All Time
Would you mind adding context here, what's a PIN number in the context of pizza delivery?
XJ6··on Where Theory Meets Chalk, Dust Flies
Perhaps it's because I've never worked with chalk daily but chalk never felt better than whiteboards to me, just thinking about a chalkboard makes my teeth hurt.
XJ6··on Minimum unit pricing may have helped reduce alcohol-related deaths in Glasgow
People asking questions are being obtuse and also clearly aren't in the UK where this legislation is aimed.

It would be like a continental European going to America and going, "What are all these MILES things? It's confusing!".

XJ6··on Minimum unit pricing may have helped reduce alcohol-related deaths in Glasgow
mooted also means suggested.
XJ6··on Minimum unit pricing may have helped reduce alcohol-related deaths in Glasgow
5% is considered weak for that kind of cheap cider too, white lightning was far stronger than that for a similar price. (And if I remember correctly usually came in 3L bottles)
XJ6··on IBM will soon launch a 53-qubit quantum computer
And just as every company is trying to work out how to "use AI" they'll be trying to work out how to "use Quantum" in future, with all the typical buzzword bullshit that comes with it.
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