Hacker News Reader

ketralnison Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings

This administration has spent quite a lot of time going after media companies.

ketralnison xAI joins SpaceX

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM

ketralnison Homomorphically Encrypting CRDTs

Sure but it will just select the word in your browser

ketralnison I've largely replaced Google with ChatGPT for looking things up

If the only thing it did was give me references that's already a leg up

ketralnison Evidence suggesting Quasar Alpha is OpenAI's new model

Shrug, programmers always have weird names for things https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

ketralnison Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news

I also don't read all of the terms and conditions, and I feel free to get mad at unreasonable items that I discovered while using the product. Fight me.

ketralnison I tried making artificial sunlight at home

Have you considered taking neutrino supplements?

The nice thing about them is that they're flavour changing

ketralnison Peano's Axioms

It's up to you if you think it's "better" but it's answering the question of whether Peano axioms are the only fundamental structure

ketralnison Google change is breaking some digital photo frames

This is exactly why even as a programmer I don't own pretty much any tech crap at all. No cloud connected home automation, photo frames, voice assistant, smart lock, wifi washing machine, nothing. The whole industry is just too brittle and unreliable and your money will evaporate the moment some product manager doesn't want to schedule a bug fix and kills the product instead because it's easier than meeting the promises that you already made. I minimise the number of computers and phones and whatever else to what I'm willing to spend a bunch of time updating and maintaining.

ketralnison America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

In that case the pilot would still be able to override controls

ketralnison America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

That there is a computer at ATC that a human looks at, reads what it says with their eyes, speaks those instructions over the radio in a specific protocol, another human listens to it (and confirms within that protocol), and inputs those control signals into the airplane.

Computer -> human -> radio(spoken protocol) -> human -> plane.

There aren't a lot of practical reasons it can't just be

Computer -> radio(digital protocol) -> plane

(There are nonzero reasons, such as the presence of weird situations, VFR aircraft, etc., but it's not a lot.)

ketralnison Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

No? You can have a photos app that doesn't phone home while not having to move to a cabin in the woods. See: every photos app that doesn't phone home, and I currently don't live in a cabin in the woods.

ketralnison Mathics 7.0 – Open-source alternative to Mathematica

> I love how I get downvoted for every negative comment about this rather than an actual rebuttal of the issues.

It's because you haven't mentioned any issues. Just said it's terrible and buggy. Nobody can debug that for you based on that description. If they haven't experienced the same "issues", the best they can say is "nuh uh".

ketralnison A made-up name is better than no name

I don't know why it's named that way but you need some number of cross-country flights and hours because there are skills that you pick up doing that (several kinds of navigation, fuel management, weather management, flight planning, map reading, etc) that you wouldn't by flying in circles or by spending time in the pattern (looped takeoffs and landings, which you do also need to do a fair amount of but builds a separate set of skills)

ketralnison A made-up name is better than no name

No, it's not just the computer world.

Affordable housing where I live is a specific thing. Below-market-rate housing purchaseable/rentable with specific income requirements. Some number of units in new builds are usually required to meet this requirement. Your example sounds similar, it is also specifically defined and not just housing that is affordable but rather it meets specific requirements.

A cross-country flight to a pilot licence is a flight that goes greater than 50 nautical miles one-way. During flight training you need some number of these so you talk about them a lot during that training and it's mentioned a lot in the regulations.

And as I guess you're aware secure computation is also a term of art in CS for a specific thing.

I'm sure every field has terms of art that overlap with things whose words don't precisely describe. A chef's knife is a specific shape/class of knife, not any knife used by a chef. Law is full of them. There is a wealth of examples.

ketralnison A made-up name is better than no name

I have a lot of conversations like "There's a technique called 'secure computation', which confusingly is not just computation that is secure", "They're building affordable housing, which confusingly is not housing that is affordable", "I was on a cross-country flight, which confusingly is not a flight that crosses the country". Using a different word entirely can avoid that problem

ketralnison Owl Lisp – A functional Scheme for world domination

Python also detects this situation (at runtime using refcounts) and does in-place mutations where possible https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/a2ee89968299fc4f0da4b...

ketralnison Using Erlang hot code updates

This is my experience. About 25% of the time I'd encounter a bug that's impossible to reproduce without both versions of the code in memory, and end up restarting the node anyway dropping requests in the process. Whereas if I'd have architected around not having hot code updates I could built it in a way that never has to drop requests

ketralnison Jury awards American Airline $9.4M from website behind 'skiplagging' hack

Also... they DID sell that seat. To the person that bought it, and paid for it, and then didn't use it. They didn't cost the airline any money. They paid for the seat. They don't get the money back for the seat they don't use. The airline keeps the money for it, while not incurring the costs of filling it.

ketralnison Web Platform Status

Sure yes. Just like caniuse https://caniuse.com/flexbox

ketralnison New Warp Drive Model Requires No 'Exotic Matter,' Scientists Say We Can Build (2021)

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/abdf6e

> provide optimizations for the Alcubierre metric that decrease the negative energy requirements by two orders of magnitude

It still requires negative energy

ketralnison visionOS thermally throttles based on how much it hears the fans in the mics

Maybe to give additional fans when the environment is so loud you can't hear them anyway

ketralnison Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024

What company was this?

ketralnison Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024

I'm in the exact same situation. I'm still on 7 (the last fully local version) but the cracks are starting to show. I can forgive them for iOS forcing you onto their update treadmill but they've intentionally crippled the Firefox extension for this version too, and it flat doesn't work on windows anymore and it's not like Windows or Firefox are deprecating their APIs all of the time.

ketralnison Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024

> anything other than a safely encrypted SQLite file

There is a little bit of subtlety to this https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/files/6487/pwvault.pdf

ketralnison A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material

Feels like people calling bad scrolling and other jitter "janky" to just mean that it's a bit crap and people deciding that "jank" is a technical term. No buddy jank just means jank and slop just means slop. This isn't a "new term".

ketralnison Tom 7: Badness 0 (Three ways)

If the UI is my shell then it is. If it's part of a larger script being executed by python embedded in a cron job wrapped in a burrito, it may not be

ketralnison Make your program slower with threads (2014)

No. Rust has no controls for side effects or allocations

ketralnison Make your program slower with threads (2014)

This happens at runtime. I want something in the type system.

ketralnison Make your program slower with threads (2014)

Capabilities help a lot if you just want to permit/deny the action. But maybe I want to know more than "can it allocate", I also want to be able to pass in an arena to make it allocate in a particular place and I might want that to be different in different parts of the code. Generics sort of help here if you want to explicitly thread your allocator all over the place like Zig but allocation is so common in normal code that ergonomically I want it to be invisible in the common case and controllable in the uncommon case