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rackjack

702 karma · joined May 14, 2021

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rackjack··on Show HN: PRQL 0.2 – a better SQL
Obligatory dismissive comment:

> 0.2

No it ain't (in production).

Anyway, this looks great. I LOVE the fact that you've provided a book too. Consider me a fan!

rackjack··on Learning Rust – Day 4 – Understanding Modules
I think the most surprising thing about Rust modules is that you need to """pre-declare""" them, especially since Rust doesn't really use function prototypes.

So when you try to move a module into its own file, you need to keep the `mod foo` in the original file.

rackjack··on Bits of advice I wish I had known
Same vibe as diners who put down money on the table and take some away every time they don't feel doted on enough
rackjack··on A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV
It's funny because you'd think this watchfulness + technology like Nextdoor would let kids be more independent, e.g. if anybody tried to snatch your kid they'd be reported by half a dozen busybodies watching through their windows.
rackjack··on U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
That rabbit hole of esotericism was pretty cool.
rackjack··on Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy-trace_theory
rackjack··on Turning back the clock: Human skin cells de-aged by 30 years in trial
Biology is not programming, man.

We can work on different abstraction levels because in the worst case, we can just crack open a hex editor and write raw assembly or mess with the OS directly. We've built on that to get C, and Java, and Python, and all that other good stuff, but we can go all the way to the bottom if we need to.

Now imagine you're working on a computer with proprietary hardware. The easiest way to interact with it is via a provided high level language, like Lua. This is eating, drinking, sleeping, exercising. Now imagine that you crack open the assembly because something is just not working right. Some illness or something. And you come to realize there are thousands of different opcodes (proteins, enzymes, genes, etc.). Not only that, but sometimes they work differently depending on where in the computer they are located or the time of day or whatever (organs, menstrual cycle, circadian rhythm, etc.). You can make some good guesses on what a couple of them do, but you are not sure of the entirety of their effects for the majority of them.

So you're looking at the interfaces and you figure out if you send the right data to this and that place, you can get it to work right, maybe with some acceptable or unforeseen consequences. This is medicine, and it is a miserable way to do things due to the complete lack of understanding and control, much like driving your car from the backseat with a 10 foot pole while facing backwards.

So you've discovered a lot of hacks, made a lot of medicine, collected a lot of 10 foot poles. And as you look at your ever expanding collection, now easily in the thousands, you begin to get the creeping feeling that (a) you will never find a panacea, (b) the system you are working on is a disgusting mess of patchwork jobs on patchwork jobs developed over millions of years, and (c) there is probably an underlying system directing all of this, but its complexity might not even be better than what you're operating on now, and you definitely lack the technology to utilize it properly anyway.

And what you're doing is saving and bettering people's lives on the whole. And then some big shot comes in and says "Ackchyually, why don't you just access the lowest layer directly? Pretty sus." Try to have some perspective and humility on how horrifically complicated biology is. Life was evolved, not designed. Life isn't a computer. The relative simplicity and sanity of technological systems is a blessing absent in biology.

rackjack··on Microplastics found in live human lung tissue
The cynic/conspiracy theorist in me says "Imagine blaming kids for acting weird when they're literally infested with plastic."
rackjack··on I need to stop being boring
Easy to say this when you don't have 1 billion people also gunning for the opportunities you want (maybe less since they're in Hong Kong and not the mainland)
rackjack··on One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine
It doesn't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30664769

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30763209

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30763216

Look at the author.

rackjack··on A few things to know before stealing my 914
This is a very funny article and the reveal that people have actually tried to steal the car was a perfect closer.
rackjack··on Each Firefox download has a unique identifier
What're the alternatives to Firefox? The only ones that come to mind are Opera and Brave, and Brave had some controversy too.
rackjack··on The new silent majority: People who don't tweet
Fun fact, this theory actually comes from a 4chan post.
rackjack··on Show HN: WAPM – WebAssembly Package Manager
Wasn't there some Wasmer controversy with the CEO or founder or something last year? Not trying to disparage the company or their work, I was just reminded of it by this post.
rackjack··on Learn Rust by writing a small OS
Before anybody takes this specific prediction too seriously, this guy posted numerous misleading claims about Actix's use of `unsafe` in another thread before deleting them and seems to have a strange vendetta against Rust in general.
rackjack··on Announcing Actix Web v4.0
Why don't you provide evidence of extant misused `unsafe` first? Or is the whole software world to believe the words of lambda_dn?
rackjack··on Rust 1.59.0 with inline assembly support etc.
`ControlFlow` is a nice QoL addition.
rackjack··on Hello Many Worlds in Seven Quantum Languages (2021)
First we build circuits, then we build languages, then we build everything else
rackjack··on Love is biological bribery?
Reminds me of this image:

https://i.redd.it/lr5rfu3paen61.jpg

rackjack··on DuckDuckGo \u202E
Easter bug?
rackjack··on Google Search Is Dying
Maybe a different kind of terror than Dead Internet Theory: the Internet is "alive", but it acts as if it was dead.
rackjack··on I changed my mind about advertising
Agreed. Anybody who's into an obscure music genre can attest to how hard it is to find such music, let alone finding good ones.
rackjack··on Computer scientists prove why bigger neural networks do better
Silly thought: if bigger NN's are better, shouldn't more neurons be better? Why aren't elephants smarter than us, despite having more neurons?

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

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24971054/

rackjack··on Show HN: Veganize any recipe site with EatKind Chrome extension
Agreed. Not sure if the vegan replacements have the same properties (fattiness, moisture, etc.) that the recipe expects, and many vegan dishes from South/Southeast Asia and so on are delicious.
rackjack··on Vim Galore: everything you need to know about Vim
Vim is very big, so don't learn it until you need it. For example, if you want to draw diagrams in Vim, you could certainly just add all the spaces and such yourself, or you could use `virtualedit=block` and vim will add the spaces for you. But you'd never know about the option beforehand because you didn't need it before.
rackjack··on I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone
Not really his problem.
rackjack··on Zendesk pretends to be open source?
I think the question mark can be removed from the title.
rackjack··on Young people from Brazil's favelas set out to conquer digital world
I think it's both, due to secret ballots and first past the post voting, for example.
rackjack··on Welcome to Waifu Labs v2: How Do AIs Create?
For anyone looking to do this, here's some I made:

https://i.imgur.com/1V1wPMC.jpg

I rolled around 40 times on the first stage and chose a horror. I skipped the second stage and didn't roll on the third stage, just chose one of the presented details. I skipped the fourth stage because I rolled maybe ~200 times and only saw around 1-2 comparable horrors.

https://i.imgur.com/1vBeg1j.jpg

I rolled around 100 times on the first stage and saw about 3-4 horrors before choosing a horror. I rolled about 70 times on the second stage, didn't find anything interesting, just chose a normal color palette. I rolled maybe 80 times on the third stage and chose a horror, though the results were pretty consistently horrors. I rolled around 60 times on the fourth stage and saw about 1-2 other horrors before choosing a horror. Also, here's what it looked like after the third stage and before finishing the fourth stage:

https://i.imgur.com/ditm8nF.jpg

It's possible the third and fourth stages can produce horrors from normal faces, I didn't check.

rackjack··on Welcome to Waifu Labs v2: How Do AIs Create?
I LOVE that "horror". Reminds me of some of the art I've seen on album/single covers. Any chance of letting people access that kind of intermediate step? (Though I know it's a niche as hell use case).
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