HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

malft

91 karma · joined September 21, 2014

submissionscomments
malft··on Show HN: LLMs can generate valid JSON 100% of the time
Regex-constrained GPT, what is a mnemonic for pi?

> It's a word, a short statement or phrase which you learn.

Can you make a good one?

> Man, I wish I could recommend an answer. You're not gonna remember something, because, obviously, pi's so big. Actually, let's forget pi. There's only one way: Googling for it.

(count the letters)

malft··on My first superoptimizer
If you are familiar with that paper, I'm a little confused by the results section. If I'm reading p01 from figure 7 correctly, the "before" is x&(x-1) and the "after" is a single instruction x&(x<<1). What am I doing wrong?

(The other two wins listed are "recognize the Hacker's Delight trick and replace it with the straight-forward implementation a human would write", which I like.)

malft··on Using HDMI radio interference for high-speed data transfer
TMDS will reduce the number of crossings, but 10110110 will still have more crossings than 0.

It'll be some pseudo-random mapping, not "greyscale", but it'll still be readable.

Look up the wikipedia page for 'ECB mode' for a nice illustration.

malft··on Lenses
The type looks a little insane, but it's just a combination of three mundane hacks that also exist in other languages.

The first: If you need a serializer/deserializer in a simple language like old-school Java, you can either write two methods for each class, or you can combine them into one method like this:

class HoveringSkull inmplements Streamable { String desc; float height; void stream(Stream c) { desc = c.stream(desc); height = c.stream(height); }

... and have two different implementations of Streamable. That's what the choice of (pro-)functor instance does -- you can swap out the implementation to get 'read' and 'write' (and 'deepClone' and 'equals' and 'hashCode' and 'defaultGui' and 'treeMatch' and ...)

malft··on You don't need that CORS request
Before you start rearchitecting your app, be sure to check if the only reason you're seeing preflights on GET is that someone added a dumb X-Requested-By header.

(You can even do POSTs without preflight if you use a whitelisted content-type.)

malft··on Microsoft_craziness.h (2018)
'by a char or two', they said.
malft··on Microsoft_craziness.h (2018)
Pray tell, what is the size of a wchar_t on your system?
malft··on Microsoft_craziness.h (2018)
wchar_t *value = (wchar_t *)malloc(length);

// The documentation says that if the string for some reason was not stored with zero-termination, we need to manually terminate it. Sigh!

if (value[length]) { value[length+1] = 0; }

malft··on The Facebook Logout – We're over Facebook
Isn't that how fundraising works? You make people commit to "supporting your cause" with a trivial pledge, so that when you ask for actual money they can't back out without losing face.

"I will maybe log off at some point" sounds like maybe too weak a pledge to me, but I'm sure they've focus grouped the shit out this.

malft··on Functional programming is not popular because it is weird (2016)
Java has all the security logic INSIDE THE VM.

That's the big difference.

malft··on Q1K3 - An homage to Quake in 13kb of JavaScript
"You can't compress noise." Well, humans can't tell the difference between two snippets of white noise.

It'll be fun. Remember jbig? (can't find the source, but iirc "most of what we're sending is text, so our fax can detect identical characters and reuse them! genius! [ten years and several bonuses later] um boss, our fax swapped a few ... 'identical' ... digits in someone's legal documents, so you have to appear in court now. also their entire scanned document archive is potentially corrupted and they may want damages")

I guess the 'no photos on the internet' people will have the last laugh; they won't be the ones seen criming in the background of someone else's blurry holiday photo.

malft··on Lunatic is an Erlang-inspired runtime for WebAssembly
Yes, that's the point. If you need to parse a JPEG, you spawn a VM to do so. It is allowed to use n seconds of CPU, k bytes of memory, and send a bitmap back to the caller.

(Sure, you could screw it up if the caller accepts a negative-size bitmap and corrupts its heap. Lets assume that process is written in a memory-safe language.)

malft··on The P-versus-NP Page (2016)
Why are the examples for P≟NP always so bad? "Solving TSP", "planning airlines better", "get the $1M bounty"?

Why not SAT? There's a $200,000 bounty paid out every ten minutes for solutions to a well-known SAT problem.

Or crypto. Math. Chess.

malft··on Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic
I assume it was flagged because unless you're already a true believer, "look! this falling building is falling according to the laws of physics" is not a very strong argument.
malft··on You-Dont-Need-Lodash-Underscore
The very first code snippet is a reimplementation of 'chunk' that is at least quadratic. Run away.
malft··on There is no general AI: Why Turing machines cannot pass the Turing test
This sentence sums up the paper:

"Turing machines can only compute what can be modelled mathematically, and since we cannot model human dialogues mathematically, it follows that Turing machines cannot pass the Turing test."

malft··on RSA-230 has been factored
It's very rare for something to scale sublinearly in the number of bits :-)

complexity(2∗∗1024)/complexity(2∗∗762) comes out to about 1500x more work.

malft··on JDK 10 Early Access Release Notes
> The clear passwords present in jmxremote.password file will now be over-written by their SHA3-512 hash by the JMX agent

I must be misreading this. As far as I can tell the ability to read the new format was added in the same version. Did someone forget about forwards compatibility in the jvm?

malft··on The root of all eval
"It's just a normal function." No, it has magical access to the lexical scope.
malft··on Images of New MacBook Pro with Magic Toolbar Leaked in MacOS Sierra 10.12.1
Secure payments? If you hook up a display to the secure enclave, suddenly it's really expensive for malware to steal your money.

(Sorry, replied to the wrong comment and apparently can't delete now?)

malft··on Can we guess your age and income, based solely on the apps on your phone?
They're allowed to ask "does anything on this system handle yelp:// URLs?".
malft··on Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)
Your mental superpowers are caused by a rare mutation shared with 40% of all people?
malft··on Do not let your CDN betray you: Use Subresource Integrity
You get slightly more power in that you can post malformed multipart stuff.
malft··on Do not let your CDN betray you: Use Subresource Integrity
An extra header.
malft··on Ask HN: Facebook clickjacking – is it detectable?
getComputedStyle() doesn't work across iframes.
malft··on 37 rental cars – 2 days – 185,000 miles earned
It would remove the incentive for employees to pay $2k of company money to get $100 worth of (personal) free stuff.
malft··on Resource Hints for Modern Browsers
How does preconnect crossorigin=anonymous differ from a regular preconnect? (I'm guessing some http2 thing?)
malft··on Show HN: Libcox – A C Library for Cross-Platform System Calls
Awesome! More of this. My competitors making suboptimal decisions based on immaturity or prudishness is free money.
malft··on GitHub threatens to shut down a repository for using the word 'retard'
A book in a library, perhaps?
malft··on Things which aren't magic – JSONP
Now run two fetches at the same time, and watch it get the data mysteriously mixed up 0.1% of the time.
Page 1 of 2Next →