Hacker News Reader

dcsommeron 3M reaches $10.3B settlement over PFAS contamination of water systems

The negative effects of PFAS on animals and humans is widely studied and reported. There is no confusion on this. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7906952/ is one starting point.

dcsommeron Packing a string of digits into an integer quickly

The BEAM VM (Erlang/Elixir) recently optimized a related procedure as well https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/7426

dcsommeron Dutch rules will soon prevent schoolchildren from having a phone in classroom

Correct parental examples are key to successfully training healthy habits, but phones are plenty addictive in their own right. It's not just a problem of bad parental examples. Why do you think the parents are addicted in the first place? Are children somehow immune? Hypocrisy is not the main thing here.

dcsommeron The One Ring card, Magic: The Gathering’s coveted collectible, has been found

It's not a sealed draft at all. You can purchase as many decks as you like, and you can also purchase from secondhand markets.

dcsommeron Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

> I wonder if a matrix like that would even be legal.

Probably not, but I heard from an acquaintance college admissions official that systems like this exist, and they are highly secretive. This is just one anecdote, so make of that what you will.

dcsommeron USCG says ‘debris field’ discovered within search area for missing submersible

500 > 5

dcsommeron 1Password rolling out “privacy-preserving” telemetry system

Convenience, of course. Secondarily, lack of awareness of alternatives.

dcsommeron Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

Smartphones have dramatically changed the way humans relate to each other, with incredibly profound impact on mental health and social interactions. The negative impact hasn't gone away just because part of the population hasn't seen a different world and can't imagine anything different.

The same may be true of LLMs and all the hallucinated information they share. I would respect and listen to what experts in psychology have to say here by default.

dcsommeron Hurl, a terrible (but cute) idea for a language

I love this exercise. Great job exploring a concept fully. I find this article one of the better arguments I've seen yet against including exceptions in a language.

dcsommeron Political Polarization Comes for Marriage Prospects

The same trend applies to all forms of close relationship. So no, it is a problem if you want to maximize any form of social cohesion.

dcsommeron Political Polarization Comes for Marriage Prospects

Alignment is of course still critical for marriage. The increasing difficulty or low probability of alignment is the problem.

dcsommeron John Carmack on shorter work weeks (2016)

It's threatening to equality (wealth disparity) and also social/cultural values (aka work vs. family/neighborhood/community/etc.). These are all important equities, as is enabling high performers to work well. It is apparently difficult to find the right cultural balance that enables maximum achievement and all the rest, too.

I disagree with any top-down pressures to "solve" this tension.

dcsommeron Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

I'm glad you found a consistent source of enjoyable and enriching interactions online.

That said, do not dismiss the need for long-term, in-person friendship. IRL forces you to confront the uncomfortable/mismatched parts of others. In other words, the whole person. It enables you to comfort and support in a way that is impossible online. This is all both uncomfortable and necessary to form the most meaningful and worthwhile relationships, not to mention vital social skills.

The Internet is an incredible tool to connect like-minded people, but it will not bring happiness in the same way the flesh and blood presence of consistently physically present people can.

dcsommeron Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

NDAs have nothing to do with this. Employees leak all kinds of stuff from tech companies all the time despite NDAs.

dcsommeron Europe: Is compulsory military service coming back?

I don't claim it's the only way to promote social cohesion. A year of mandatory trash pickup would probably do that too. I don't understand the comment about brainwashing. Any form of public education, including mandatory trash pickup, can have that word thrown around.

dcsommeron Europe: Is compulsory military service coming back?

You're right that it is not necessarily efficient from a military effectiveness perspective. I see it as also an educational tool/investment. As other comments have pointed out, this helps the populace internalize their responsibities in war (affecting voting), might help instill social cohesion, and yes also provides a baseline military competency in the populace in the worst case scenario (total war).

dcsommeron “Rewrite It in Rust” Considered Harmful? [pdf]

There's plenty of good content in this paper. FFI safety is a very important topic, and there are unique concerns with Rust FFI. Such a shame it devolves into unprofessional and inflammatory remarks. The authors could have put their names on the paper and gotten a decent credit if they could have kept their emotional responses to the topic out of it.

dcsommeron Black holes might be defects in spacetime

Not without fine-tuning. The issue is that high-energy supersymmetry no longer removes the "ugly constants" of the standard model -- it just shifts them somewhere else. Disclaimer: not a physicist, but I learned a lot reading "Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray".

dcsommeron Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health

Smartphones are not a prerequisite for access to educational resources online. Having an old school computer in a public part of the house is great for such things. Kids should just hang out and focus on each other when they're out and about. No need for a smartphone.

dcsommeron Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

The opening F# upward octave in Paganini's La Campanella is that pitch memory for me. It's fairly well seared in my brain from violin practice. It's very similar for me where I remember the F# pitch and then work out the relationship to the heard tone. However, I am worse with non-orchestral instruments. I think I "cheat" by remembering The timbre of the instrument in certain ranges. I'm most accurate with my own instrument (violin). The less I practice though, the harder it is getting to remember the pitch. I always figured I was somewhere between relative and perfect pitch. I'm curious what this training could do for adult musicians.

dcsommeron Microsoft exec says Windows 11 kernel will soon be booting with Rust inside

> Most

Citation needed. Log4j comes to mind as a logic bug disaster, but all the data I've seen is that >65% of the high severity bugs come from memory unsafety in most software projects.

https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-language... https://alexgaynor.net/2020/may/27/science-on-memory-unsafet...

dcsommeron Microsoft exec says Windows 11 kernel will soon be booting with Rust inside

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/chrome-70-of-all-security-bugs...

https://alexgaynor.net/2019/aug/12/introduction-to-memory-un...

dcsommeron Deploying key transparency at WhatsApp

Why not use the builtin E2EE backups? https://faq.whatsapp.com/490592613091019

dcsommeron Why are movies so dark these days?

Sadly, this is a trend too. Lush, orchestral music with memorable themes, harmonic development, etc. is being phased out in favor of minimalist, repetitive, electronic sounds. To understand what that gives up, I recommend the "Listening In" channel e.g. https://youtu.be/iGN_5oNla_8

dcsommeron Exploring Rust for Vulkan drivers, part 1

> Is it more efficient resource and time-wise to rewrite everything in [Language of choice], or to comb through the currently existing code

This is a false dichotomy. Bugs are concentrated in new code, so the biggest value for Rust is to use it going forward, interoperating with existing C and C++ code. Going backwards and rewriting low bug density code should not be a priority. Both of your alternatives only address existing code.

dcsommeron Git security vulnerabilities announced

Do you have data on the relative frequency and severity of non-memory safety integer overflow security issues?

dcsommeron Git security vulnerabilities announced

Integer overflow isn't a security issue unless your program's memory safety depends on the correctness of the integer operation. Safe rust doesn't (in any build mode), but C/C++ does.

dcsommeron OpenAI starts testing ChatGPT premium

Cumulative damage may be very small now, at the beginning of this age, but educators I talk to certainly are having a reckoning about it. Whether this will ultimately be bad for education is an open question, but with the way many classes and homework are designed now, students using ChatGPT to answer questions certainly do learn less.

dcsommeron About the security content of iOS 16.2 and iPadOS 16.2

I would love to see details of iBoot. How they built a memory safe bootloader with just "a modified C toolchain" is a pretty important detail. Did add they another language to the toolchain or add a special --memory-safe flag to a forked C compiler?

dcsommeron Resources for microtonal music

Another microtonal master was Ben Johnston. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhZd4Tea2cM is his string quartet arrangement of Amazing Grace. It starts with just intonation and then... goes...