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cmpb

750 karma · joined January 9, 2013

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cmpb··on Tasks, microtasks, queues and schedules (2015)
I didn't realize why my browsers (Firefox, iOS Safari) were correctly handling the tests, despite the article indicating they were not compliant. Then I realized the article is from 2015.

The content is still really useful, though. A good understanding of JS tasks & microtasks and HTML jobs is really useful for diagnosing the inevitable front-end weirdness encountered during development when using any of the major frontend frameworks (which contain a lot of abstraction that separates the developer from these lower-level facets).

cmpb··on Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit
>Source code is a red herring here

If there were a way to ensure that the test suite applied to these forensic labs was all-encompassing w.r.t. the genetic variables at play, then maybe. But that sounds impossible. What if there's a coding error that causes the software to operate differently/incorrectly only for people with a certain (rare) genetic abnormality?

For what it's worth, I'm totally unversed in genetics, though I have a great deal of experience writing software tests (and seeing them come up short in adequately modelling real-world data).

cmpb··on Some Proteins Change Their Folds to Perform Different Jobs
Counterargument to 2: the air is largely nitrogen, but humans do not utilize it during respiration. Thus, this reliable feature of the environment has not been selected as a dependency.

I'm not necessarily arguing it's untrue, just not quite the hard-and-fast rule that 1 is.

cmpb··on The Dunant subsea cable
Ah the old "entire digitized Library of Congress" per second metric
cmpb··on Ask HN: What is the oldest image online in which the link is not broken?
In the past, I have found it very difficult to get through books, but I’ve never had a problem with just putting it down when I’m not interested. I think that’s a big part of my situation: I have had trouble finding things that really hold my interest. And even for some books that I did find interesting, my low reading speed made the process drag on for too long for my interest to hold up. But no, I’m not tortured. I do appreciate your concern, however.
cmpb··on Ask HN: What is the oldest image online in which the link is not broken?
It definitely doesn't fit the bill of this thread (no images, not original links), but it's an interesting site nonetheless. I'm amazed at the number of books you've read over the years. I'm shooting for 3 books this year, and that's a 200% increase over last year!

Do you have good memory for the content of the books you've read? Or do some specific books stand out even over several years?

cmpb··on Time-lapse of a single cell transforming into a salamander (2019)
Good point. That seems like a "soft-shutdown" compared to the "hard-shutdown" that I interpreted from the parent post: dying due to being unfit in the environment.
cmpb··on Monarch butterfly population in California spirals to another record low
>An unusually high number of reports of late breeding and captive rearing near the coast—primarily on tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica)—may also suggest there are higher numbers of non-migrating monarchs than usual which can negatively impact the population.

Just a friendly reminder to milkweed enthusiasts to always use your local native milkweed instead of the exotics. They might attract more butterflies, but they're bad for the population because they spend more time later in the year on the exotics instead of migrating back for overwintering.

cmpb··on Super-expressive – Write regex in natural language

  SuperExpressive()
    .anythingButString('aeiou')
    .toRegex();
  // ->
  /(?:[^a][^e][^i][^o][^u])/
There's got to be a better way to express that in Regex, right?
cmpb··on Bill and Melinda Gates: America’s Top Farmland Owner
I'm curious about this. Is there any easy way to determine how much wealth Putin or Xi actually has? Or is any discussion about their wealth just anecdotal?
cmpb··on WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app
It could also be that he had the "privilege" to earn it (as not everyone has that privilege).
cmpb··on Conspiracy theorists mistake guitar pedal diagram for “5G Chip”
I'm sure that, as with most mental illnesses, susceptibility to conspiracy theory would be a scale (say, not-very-susceptible to highly-susceptible). And in that case, we're all on the scale somewhere.

As you mention such weaknesses being "actively exploited", it makes me think of advertisements / advertising agencies attempting to manipulate people (to buy stuff, etc.). Perhaps our location on the conspiracy-theory-susceptibility scale would correspond with our susceptibility to advertising tactics, such that those who are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories correlates with those who are more likely to buy something based on seeing an advertisement. Or perhaps there's even some element of training in there, whereby some people might be "trained" by advertisements into being more likely to believe in conspiracy theories.

Or maybe I'm just trying to pin negative behavioral consequences to the advertisement industry, a facet of our society that I find loathsome.

cmpb··on We Rewrote Everything in Rust, and Our Startup Still Failed
I'm just saying, it took me until halfway down page two to realize it.
cmpb··on Stellar Explosion in Earth's Proximity
Please, rant away! I'm interested in your opinion and the context of the decommissioned machine
cmpb··on Show HN: Memory Pill
That sounds like a pretty easy/fun daily routine!
cmpb··on Show HN: Memory Pill
I do this too, but my window of I-can-still-take-my-meds is shorter because it’s only one dose for the day, and if I take it too late, I’ll be up all night. I’m usually halfway to dropping off the kiddos at daycare when it dawns on me, and I have to race home before going to work.
cmpb··on 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park
That's an interesting concept. Normally fire is a healthy part of the ecosystem, but as humans we've changed the context in which fires occur (e.g. by reducing naturally occurring fire and by making droughts more common) such that when they do occur they are more destructive than many species are able to handle. If that is the case, I wonder if there is a way we could reintroduce fires to the system (i.e. controlled burns) in such a way that it doesn't completely destroy the ecosystem.
cmpb··on Audio Engineers Built a Shield to Deflect Police Sound Cannons
Special training would be my guess at the suit defense tactic here. Police are trained to toss the item in such a way that it’s not considered assault, etc. Same reason police are allowed to use the giant screens in their cars while they’re driving.
cmpb··on From chaos to free will
I would appreciate a response to this as well, from the author or someone knowledgeable on this subject
cmpb··on China to Allow State-Security Agents to Police Hong Kong
I think the normality of it isn’t the issue. The issue is that many residents of Hong Kong have been explicitly demonstrating that they are not comfortable with China having any control in Hong Kong
cmpb··on X
Thanks for reminding me to catch up on the last few months of XKCD! Ended up sending a bunch of coronavirus-related comics to my biologist wife.
cmpb··on Do not Draw a Penis
What about https://www.revk.uk/2018/10/unicode-dicks.html?m=1
cmpb··on For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off from All Human Contact (2013)
>Lacking guns and even bows, they could hunt only by digging traps or pursuing prey across the mountains until the animals collapsed from exhaustion.

This reminds me of a show I watched on the Science channel when I was young about how humans have evolved. They showed various African civilizations and detailed how they hunt in parties by simply keeping pace with the animal until the animal just collapses. It goes on to say that that is one characteristic of human evolution that has made us drastically more successful at surviving than other species

cmpb··on Windows 95 UI Design
Oh goodness, now I can't unsee it.
cmpb··on A father knitted his baby’s first year of sleep pattern data into a blanket
I think in this case, the picture of the blanket actually says a lot more than the title. Not much substance outside of those two things, however. Either way, HN often brings a lot of substance to the table in the comments for these type of articles.
cmpb··on What is the new Apple U1 chip?
I’m trying to imagine a world where this technology is ubiquitous, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’ll be easily exploitable from the perspective of a nefarious actor (e.g. a jamming device of some sort). I just can’t see safety-critical systems coming to rely on it
cmpb··on Tardigrades may now be living on Moon
I think it’s more likely that it was in their calculations to not bring them back.
cmpb··on Apollo 11 50th Anniversary
As a citizen of the United States (who came of age well after this event took place), I've only ever been told that this was an act of heroic success, something to be proud of, something that America should be proud of. I'm curious what the reception to this was outside of the U.S. Especially, e.g., to someone living in the USSR, what was it like hear that someone else had put a man on the moon?
cmpb··on New Property of Light Discovered
Science did know it. It just didn’t realize that the angular momentum could change with time.
cmpb··on New Property of Light Discovered
No, it seems that I’m this case, the angular momentum of the light beam itself changes over time, a process that is typically referred to as (or driven by?) torque in classical mechanics, and so they used that term here as well. They call it “self-torque” (I believe) because it’s the light changing it’s own angular momentum. But I’ve not been involved with physics academia in several years, so take it with a grain of salt.
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