Hacker News Reader

mm321on Garbage collection for systems programmers (2023)

> I believe calling `free()` gives the memory back to the allocator, which is much better than giving it to the OS

Having to deal with memory fragmentation in long running servers is no fun at all, especially internal fragmentation of pages maintained by slab allocators.

this is not a very common problem, but it is a hard one to deal with.

mm321on The CIA's Cold War plan to use stray cats as spies

excuse my ignorance, i am not much into agriculture: they didn't get you any pesticides until the mid nineties? How comes?

mm321on The CIA's Cold War plan to use stray cats as spies

they had a propaganda campaign in the soviet union - in the early 1950ies : the colorado potato beetle was said to have been spread by the evil CIA in order to destroy the glorious soviet potatoes... now I am starting to wonder about that one (always regarded this as invention and co-production of the Stasi/MGB/KGB)

mm321on Ask HN: Doom and Gloom but financial markets doing well?

not sure that everyone is getting a raise this year.

mm321on Fast Virtual Functions: Hacking the VTable for Fun and Profit

> post C++11 will have overtaken pre-C++11 as the majority of the 26 year history of standardized C++

that's because they switched to a different 'release cycle' for C++ standards, also now they have minor releases like C++14.

mm321on C++ Exit-Time Destructors

Yes, you fix the problem by calling the initialization stuff from a single point.

mm321on C++ Exit-Time Destructors

the article didn't mention the “static initialization order ‘fiasco’"

https://isocpp.org/wiki/faq/ctors#static-init-order

If you have two static objects in two different files then good luck if one depends on the other, as the initialization order is not well defined.

If both files are in the same executable then you can get around that by linking the object files in the desired order - well mostly, kind of.

i have hit this problem at some point...

mm321on Ask HN: Doom and Gloom but financial markets doing well?

> median household income is increasing the fastest it has in 80 years even adjusting for inflation

I am not sure about that, inflation was quite high during 2022-2023 and prices didn't go down. It is true that inflation is down right now - as this is an election year; however you still have to pay for current prices with what you get as your current salary.

mm321on 72% of U.S. Teens Feel Peaceful Without Smartphones.

i hope you are right. Things like TikTok are very unhealthy - and now every social media is trying to emulate them with their version of 'shorts'. But i am not sure if we will have the guts to stop this madness, new media and ad-tech are a very powerful force in politics.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/30/tiktok-me...

mm321on Java 22 Released

you didn't like java generics? why?

mm321on Primatologist Frans de Waal has died

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal

"His research into the innate capacity for empathy among primates has led De Waal to the conclusion that non-human great apes and humans are simply different types of apes, and that empathic and cooperative tendencies are continuous between these species. His belief is illustrated in the following quote from The Age of Empathy: "We start out postulating sharp boundaries, such as between humans and apes, or between apes and monkeys, but are in fact dealing with sand castles that lose much of their structure when the sea of knowledge washes over them. They turn into hills, leveled ever more, until we are back to where evolutionary theory always leads us: a gently sloping beach.""

mm321on "Lots of people in CS are (almost surely) GPT-ing their peer reviews"

Stanford says: we have a GPT4 based tool to help you draft a review - wonderful tool, it saves researchers tons of time.

https://hai.stanford.edu/news/researchers-use-gpt-4-generate...

Now it will be hard to tell, if a given review has been done exclusively by this drafting tool, or with some human input/oversight.

mm321on How Arnold Schoenberg changed Hollywood

it is a bit of a confirmation bias machine. still it gives better leads for learning about a subject (better results than just searching with google)

I also fancy that you can talk with the machine about itself, to me that is still having some degree of novelty.

mm321on How Arnold Schoenberg changed Hollywood

I had an interesting conversation with google bard/gemini about this topic. Here is the link to the conversation: https://g.co/gemini/share/67da9e441ad9 Fascinating stuff...

my notes of what i am learning in the process of these discussions: https://github.com/MoserMichael/my-notes/blob/master/talking...

mm321on Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies

> An employee familiar with G.M.’s Smart Driver said the company’s annual revenue from the program is in the low millions of dollars.

i would have guessed that this is making more money. Does anyone know why this is the case?

mm321on How Arnold Schoenberg changed Hollywood

> Sometimes I wonder if the human brain is just another LLM

The brain is a lot about predicting situations/telling you what comes next and how to adjust your behavior to that prediction - i guess that is the common part with the LLM. The difference is that the LLM is predicting the most likely word, while the brain is matching a given situation/frame to your knowledge and past experience - it's about understanding stuff on a different level.

what i still don't get is how predicting the next word can come up with an answer that actually makes sense most of the time, that came as a big surprise to me...

mm321on How Arnold Schoenberg changed Hollywood

i got the impression that atonal music is less commonly used in recent movies, past decades made more use of it, is that true? Now they still use it at moments of tension, but less frequently in other scenes.

i wonder if that is done in order to appeal/be accessible to a younger audience (that's where the movie going audience is)

mm321on BlackHat: How Yandex is aggregating user data [video]

The analysis is based on a leak of the source code for the Yandex backend. It may be possible, that other players in the field of online advertising are doing something similar.

mm321on VSCode and WSL makes Windows awesome for web development

good idea. Thank you!

mm321on VSCode and WSL makes Windows awesome for web development

my problem with WSL: you need to install the same version of your environment twice: on windows and on WSL. For example: if you have python installed on windows, then you can't run the executable of the python interpreter in a bash shell running under WSL.

mm321on The Real-World Locations of 14 Sci-Fi Dystopias (2014)

very mild WW3. Earth is a wasteland where almost all animals died from radiation long ago and anything that survived it is an object of worship. Survivors need to go through periodic checkups, those affected by radiation are labeled off as "chickenheads". People are emigrating to desert Mars - which is an even worse wasteland, where things are so bad that even the Robots are trying to escape back to Earth, such a Robot has to kill his former master and then pose as his former master. (the whole plot is about finding these Robots)

The culture of the survivors is based on this worship of what remained of the animal kingdom, as seen in the test that they administer to check if you are a robot or not.

Especially amusing: the Robots in the book are hallucinating - (these hallucinations are called 'false memories'), just as these large language models of ours...

mm321on The Real-World Locations of 14 Sci-Fi Dystopias (2014)

The book is very different from the movie; the book is post World War 3 while the movie isn't.

mm321on Inside North Korea's Forced Labor Program

> People send to EU are not some slaves, but highly loyal party members.

Mr Troll, be careful with your karma: you can always wake up in some workers paradise, but be careful not to wake up on the wrong side of the barbed wire fence...

mm321on Inside North Korea's Forced Labor Program

> Since then, North Koreans have been sent to Russia, Poland, Qatar, Uruguay, and Mali.

Poland? Poland is a EU member country, is it legal to employ North Korean slaves in the EU?

Update: Found the following link https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2017-00624... Some Christel Schaldemose was asking the European Parliament the same question back in 2017, but I didn't see an answer.

mm321on First Contact with Whale Civilization Could Unfold

Orcas and Giant Manta Rays can pass the mirror test, did anyone try to do the mirror test with Sperm Whales? (I guess that would be difficult due to the size of the Whales:)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test

mm321on First Contact with Whale Civilization Could Unfold

archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240226020725/https://www.theat...

mm321on A giant meteorite has been lost in the desert since 1916

i thought the "little prince" came later...

mm321on 100 Years Ago, IBM Was Born

This is not correct. The Wannsee conference took place in January 1942, concentration camps were actively killing during 1942. Before that there were the mobile killing units, the SS Einsatzgruppen that already systematically killed more than a million Jews in the occupied parts of the Soviet Union during 1941-1942.

mm321on Scientists discover underlying cause of "brain fog" linked with Long Covid

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9111001/

"We suggest that flavonoids as critical nutritional supplements, are suitable for the alleviation and shortening of the period associated with the post‐COVID‐19 syndrome."

Flavenoids are onion extracts, Quercetin is one of them.

mm321on Scientists discover underlying cause of "brain fog" linked with Long Covid

we have had lots of complications after COVID, in my family. I have been cooking a lot onion soup - onions are supposed to strengthen the immune system and are anti-inflammatory. Now the result tastes good, and I think it helped them to get over that COVID shit. (however I guess there isn't a lot of science in this diatribe...)