Hacker News Reader

jbrittonon I am dying of squamous cell carcinoma, and potential treatments are out of reach

I’m not a Dr., I’m not recommending anything, but you might want to look into the following:

I see the FDA approved drug cemiplimab-rwlc for squamous cell. https://www.skincancer.org/blog/new-treatment-for-advanced-c...

And if your willing to consider alternative therapies there is fenbendazole(see joe tippens protocol). It’s a dog dewormer and is available at pet stores as panacur-c.

Also see Albendazole, Flubendazole.

jbrittonon Computation and State Machines (2008) [pdf]

# foldr above was a mistake

# foldl

  state = LightOff
  while data {
    input = get_next(data)
    state = f(state, input)
  }

jbrittonon Computation and State Machines (2008) [pdf]

Is then executed something like:

foldr f LightOff input_stream

jbrittonon ChatGPT requires half a liter of water to have a conversation

Thanks. Good explanation of water usage by data centers here:

https://dgtlinfra.com/data-center-water-usage/

jbrittonon ChatGPT requires half a liter of water to have a conversation

How is water consumed by training? Or are they talking about manufacturing? I get the feeling this is trying to amortize the water used in manufacturing to individual conversations, which makes no sense to me.

jbrittonon To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology

I figure it’s semi trucks that do almost all the road damage. We could just tax the trucks, but that would just get passed along in higher prices for everything. So might as well pay for road repair out of the general fund than have special taxes.

jbrittonon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

“There was a very well coordinated and intentional conflation of the term "lab leak" with the conspiracy theories”

Only by those wishing to shutdown legitimate discussion.

So back to the original question. Who was behind trying to change the narrative.

Dr. Fauci’s emails have shown he orchestrated deceiving the public. I’m not sure that is sufficient to explain the total media backlash against a lab-leak.

jbrittonon WebRTC support being added to FFmpeg

Will this allow a client to receive an rtsp stream and display it (with video tag or on canvas)?

jbrittonon React is 10 years old

This brings up other questions too. Is the state on the client? How does one reconcile the server state and the client state. Is the client state a subset of server state? Is the client state a tree matching the view tree? Does the state contain only the UI data to be rendered or is it all app state.

jbrittonon Up next: a lawsuit threatening your YouTube watch queue

However besides recommendations Google is removing content and some of this removal appears politically motivated or perhaps government agencies are asking for its removal. This aspect is very bad.

jbrittonon Up next: a lawsuit threatening your YouTube watch queue

I generally like the YouTube recommendation algorithm. I would hate to see it go away. On the other hand, I can foresee a recommendation algorithm that would potentially be problematic for society. It might be interesting if 3rd party pluggable recommendation algorithms were supported.

jbrittonon Show HN: ScrapScript – A tiny functional language for sharable software

  > . f = | x -> y -> x \* y

What do these symbols mean “|” “\*”

jbrittonon Google to ban financial lending apps from accessing user photos, contacts

I think the OS should provide the ability to select items and then give opaque handles to applications. The app could send a message to the OS to display photo selector. The OS could send a message back with a handle to selected photo. One could then asks the OS to send a handle, which would forward selected item somewhere else.

jbrittonon Firefox engineers discover a Windows Defender bug that causes high CPU usage

I had always assumed that one application could not touch the memory of another application. Does running as Admin allow breaking this boundary?

jbrittonon CADR Lisp Machine System Software 100 Released

I wondered if there were any CADR emulators to run this on. So I web searched and found this: https://lisp-machine.org/hacking-usim-a-mit-cadr-lisp-machin...

jbrittonon Writing an OS in Rust to run on RISC-V

My phone has this thing where apps ask permission for my contacts. I would prefer something that worked more like, App says to OS, please let the user select a contact and then give me an opaque identifier that I can use to send data to the contact. This way the desired functionality is there, but the app never gets the contact list.

jbrittonon Writing an OS in Rust to run on RISC-V

However, one typically needs to write out a description of the “C” interface. And if the “C” header files are large it can be a lot of work. For example, I’m unaware of any complete Python bindings to the win32api, user32, kernel32, gdi32.

jbrittonon When Rust hurts

There is something I don’t understand. socket recv() is blocking by default. If blocked in recv() there is no safe way to exit the thread. One can set a timeout, but I can’t imagine this works well with lots of threads with a recv() on each thread. One can use select() which has mostly the same problems, either block potentially forever or use a timeout. Although one can create an additional 2 sockets, connect them together and put one of them in the select read set to allow controlled unblocking, but this doesn’t feel like a great solution, so I have always used async for socket code, because I just don’t know how it’s possible to use sync code. I have read you can call close(fd) and get recv(fd) to return, but I also hear this is not safe.

jbrittonon GPU-Backed User Interfaces

How do you render fonts on the GPU? Do you use pathfinder, something else, or roll your own?

jbrittonon GPU-Backed User Interfaces

I don’t think they are GPU backed. Fonts are rendered with CPU and draw really slow. The same with graphics primitives like lines, ellipses. A QML scene graph supports only text, images, and rectangles and the text is CPU rendered. Windows still mainly uses CPU for graphics. Video with changing text overlays is a difficult problem to do efficiently.

jbrittonon Long Covid: major findings, mechanisms and recommendations

There is a section in there “RESPONDING TO OBJECTIONS” to VAERS data. The CDC is not looking at absolute numbers.

jbrittonon Long Covid: major findings, mechanisms and recommendations

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X2...

https://jackanapes.substack.com/p/cdc-finally-released-its-v...

jbrittonon Beyond Functional Programming: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

You can think of the choice ( | ) as a generator function. X generates 1 then 2. Y generates 7 then 8.

For x in [1,2]: For y in [7,8]: yield (x, y)

jbrittonon Ask HN: How do you protect your eyes while coding for long hours?

This article suggests that dark mode maybe protective against myopia while bright mode may induce myopia.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28904-x

jbrittonon The code that ChatGPT can't write

I have briefly played with chatGPT. I don’t understand how you refine a program specification. I tell chatGPT what I want in a few words. It prints out a couple hundred lines of code that kind of work but not quite how I want it. So I delete the code and then rephrase with more detail. This time I exceed the 4k character input limit. Repeat above trying to cram more detail into 4k characters. I often have better luck being more general and hoping for the best. My example case has been managing a list of items where each item has some properties. I’m after a simple CRUD backed by xml.

jbrittonon Association between Vitamin D supplementation and Covid infection and mortality

Lately I’m seeing information indicating that actual sunlight or perhaps near infrared light is more important than just vitamin D.

jbrittonon FCC orders carriers to stop delivering auto warranty robocalls

I want more than the calls stopped. I want a fine of at least 8 billion calls times the legal $500 per call fine plus treble damages. The money distributed to everyone with a phone. I also want to pierce the corporate veil and take everything the owning operators have. Then I want the same done to all robo callers.

jbrittonon New EU rules on car speed limiters coming into force

I have never really liked that in the USA, the posted speed limit is both the normal speed of travel and the maximum speed permitted. I think legally there should be some allowance for exceeding the speed limit when passing. We have some sections where one must move into the opposing traffic lane to pass, and you have to go over the posted limit to do this. I wonder how the self driving AI software accounts for this.

jbrittonon Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

I did find this describing the procedures for transporting ballot boxes. So this link resolves my fear that transport security wasn’t addressed.

https://aceproject.org/ace-en/topics/vc/vcf/vcf02/mobile_bro...

I appreciate your response, it has made me question my thought process.

jbrittonon Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

I don’t claim fraud, but I do have procedural concerns.

I’m of the understanding that ballots stripped from their envelopes were transported to counting centers. Perhaps bribing one driver would be sufficient to swap 1000s of ballots and there would be no trail.

I find the following from https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/05/gateway-pu...

“”” Only after ballots were validated were they delivered to the TCF Center for election workers to process and tabulate them.

Shane Trejo, a writer for the right-wing website Big League Politics, told the Gateway Pundit that he was at the TCF Center where he said he witnessed thousands of ballots being unloaded early Wednesday morning. "There were at least 50 boxes that I saw unloaded at 3:30 a.m.“””

It’s my understanding that the validating process results in the naked ballots being placed into boxes for delivery to a counting center.

The linked article debunks that the ballots were late, but that is not my concern.

I was going to write more about Georgia but then I came across this article which eliminated most of my concerns there. I don’t know why it took a whole year before this was printed though.

https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/investigators-locate-n...

I did see some of the audits, which mostly removed my concerns of cheating. However there were claims in Georgia of mail in ballots that appeared marked by computer and I knew there was going to be a court case on this, but I never saw any reporting on this case. The above article says there were never any such perfect ballots found.

I think the perfect ballot is where my fears come from. Where in the chain could you swap out ballots and put in generated ballots.