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bla3on Why Apple’s iMessage is winning: teens dread the green text bubble

Reminder: if you see an article reappearing every few months ("suits are in again"), it's very likely pushed by some company's PR department.

Wonder which company might be interested in pushing this story!

Edit: see http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

bla3on Paxos

That was an interesting read, thanks!

bla3on Google deploying planes over cities for 3D maps (2012)

2012 Google seemed hungrier and more ambitious than 2022 Google.

bla3on OpenSea valued at $13.3B in new round of venture funding

The link you posted says that ratios are similar, but number of involved people is several orders if magnitude bigger.

bla3on OpenSea valued at $13.3B in new round of venture funding

36k wallets own 80% of NFTs, 10x that number of wallets own all of them [1]. And that's wallets, not people. That's not what "people" want, that's what a bunch of millionaires push, hoping to get out first.

1: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/01/second-life-nft-ownership-...

bla3on The joy of building a ray tracer, for fun, in Rust

No. 1/2 == 0 in py2 (and C, Java, ...).

bla3on How Audio Fingerprinting Works

(2020)

bla3on Exiled from the Metaverse before it even started: Facebook bans are for life

"landing some time next year"

bla3on Apple to Apple Comparison: M1 Max vs. Intel

Building a project isn't a single-core workload usually, though.

bla3on Tuple: Pair Programming Tool for macOS

For me personally, I'd pay $99-$149 flat plus paid updates if I liked it. But I know what they say about asking your potential customers what they're willing to pay ;)

bla3on Zig: Drop MinGW-w64

Windows uses its own calling convention. I'm sure COM win32 headers have no shortage or atrocities, but this post here is just saying that GCC doesn't implement the Windows calling convention for struct returns, while clang does.

bla3on Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

That might still be true if they coexist. But I'm no expert. https://erictopol.substack.com/p/omicron-is-getting-more-def... says they compete, so I'm willing to believe that. But the thread https://mobile.twitter.com/trvrb/status/1470420195567030274 linked from there says it's not certain, and it sounds fairly convincing too.

bla3on Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

I think it's not yet a given that omicron competes with delta. Since they're fairly different it's possible both strains can coexist.

bla3on GitHub taking down tools allowing defenders to reproduce the Log4j vulnerability

If a tweet is wrong and you're not out to spread FUD, you delete the tweet. That's standard procedure.

bla3on Understanding Fast-Math

Recent post on the same topic that gets the same information across with fewer words: https://kristerw.github.io/2021/10/19/fast-math/

bla3on Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

In addition to the other comments pointing out the moat, it's also just a good product. There's some controversy here or there, but the watching experience is fast and good, it's available almost everywhere (phones, laptop, smart tvs, consoles, ...), and it just works well.

If someone hosts something on Vimeo, I always perceive that as giving users a worse experience just to make a point. Vimeo embeds don't sync how far I've watched across devices. It doesn't even remember it in a single tab on a single device. (Maybe that's because I don't have a Vimeo account but I do have a YouTube account. But that's part of the mount.)

bla3on Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?

It's a bing frontend with a few special cases handled differently. For most queries, you get bing results. Easy to check by comparing results.

bla3on Faster software through register based calling

The calling convention described in the parent is the Windows 64-bit calling convention. In the 64-bit calling convention used on all other platforms, the first six arguments are passed in registers (RDI, RSI, RDX, RCX, R8, R9).

The parent is correct, just incomplete :)

bla3on California moves to recommend delaying algebra to 9th grade statewide

In my experience, high achievers become interested in topics only covered in higher grades sooner or later anyways. And once they do, they pursue them only out of interest and intrinsic motivation, and that tends to boost their motivation. So I don't think this affects high achievers all that much either way.

Almost by definition, school (and everything else) is designed for the top of the bell curve.

Now, maybe school plan design can move the median ability up or down, and I don't have an opinion on if this change here does that, and if so, in what direction. I do think it doesn't affect the high end much either way.

bla3on An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

> Hype-Free

> It’s a hip bar in a club that a cooler friend had to tell you about.

Ok then.

bla3on Ask HN: What mental models do you use everyday?

Never heard about it either, but probably https://feelingswheel.com/

bla3on LLVM relicensing update and call for help

It wasn't clear to me that "the list of remaining individuals and corporations we need to get agreements from" in "Call for help" was a link since it's not underlined and styled with exactly the same color, font, and font size as normal text. The link points to https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18_0Hog_eSwES8lKwf7WJ... If you know anyone on that list, consider reaching out to them with a link to this blog post.

bla3on Sorry Safari Team

> They were at no point comparing the latest version of Safari against a year old version of Chrome.

They tend to update that page after a Safari update, which is yearly. They tend to highlight benchmarks that Safari looks good in. If Chrome and Firefox then optimize these highlighted benchmarks and catch up on these benchmarks within a month, Apple still has that page show the old data for a year. And for next year's release they again pick the benchmarks that look best for them at that moment in time and keep the numbers up for a year. Even though this update cadence guarantees that the numbers are outdated and misleading for the majority of the time they're up.

bla3on Sorry Safari Team

Weird that the Safari team gets worked up over this when https://apple.com/safari regularly shows numbers based on years-old versions of Chrome.

They just updated it so it's now only Safari prerelease versus Chrome 94, but it used to compare against a one-year old version. Right after the update, it's still comparing prerelease to an outdated stable Chrome version.

Apple is very willing to intentionally make skewed comparisons to make themselves look good, but Apple apparently also gets very upset over an apparently honest mistake where a presentation that even tried to make them look good didn't make them look good enough.

bla3on Google Outage in Europe

Looks like it might be resolved now.

bla3on A Death-Aware Career Plan

Not sure NFTs should be part of your retirement plan.

bla3on Web fonts, boy, I don't know (2016)

That's a joke, it's intentionally missing to make the point.

bla3on Ask HN: Is it unprofessional to leave a new job where everything is a mess?

I think the point is that even if OP can sustain themselves, leaving before having a new job lined up will likely negatively impact their chances for their next job. So unless they can sustain themselves indefinitely (unlikely, else why would they have a job now), lining up a new job before leaving seems like good advice.

bla3on Raspberry Pi 4 achieves Vulkan 1.1 conformance, gets GPU performance boost

The Pi has much better performance per dollar, which is a metric that's important to some people too.