HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

thebiss

139 karma · joined November 27, 2017

submissionscomments
thebiss··on Converting integers to decimal strings faster with AVX-512
If you're curious what gets generated, Godbolt maps the C code to ASM, and provides explanations of the instructions on hover. Link below processes the source using CLANG, providing a cleaner result than GCC.

[0] https://godbolt.org/z/78KodqxaP

thebiss··on US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent
The sunrise & sunset calculator at https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/ will plot how this affects your location.
thebiss··on Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes in mice: study (2020)
Horseradish sauce is basically horseradish in mayonnaise, and mayo is made with soybean oil.

Gold's plain "prepared" horseradish is ubiquitous around here, and it only contains horseradish, vinegar, and salt.

https://www.goldshorseradish.com/golds-prepared-horseradish

thebiss··on French moratorium on prion studies after two cases of fatal brain disease (2021)
The lab changes under development should include a protocol for protection _after_ accidental prion-disease needle sticks. Prophylaxis protocols exist for clinicians dealing with HIV, hepatitis, etc. [0]

A radical (barbaric) way might be to immediately tourniquet the finger, anesthetize, and cut off the tip! They could hang a little guillotine next to the eye-wash station....

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/bbp/emergnedl.html

thebiss··on US Navy aircraft carrier headed to the scrapyard after being sold for a cent
The scrapyard is only a few miles west of SpaceX Boca Chica:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/SpaceX+Launch+Facility/@25...

thebiss··on What it means to teach gifted learners well
Our son scored well, but we were told the district looks for students scoring 3 to 4 standard deviations above the mean. That's about 3 students per ten thousand.

We'll find other ways to challenge him.

thebiss··on How to build homes with virtually no heating (2020)
> Another major problem is the quality of building in the UK, mainly driven by a lack of tradespeople, and simply not having the skills to install to the quality levels required by thermally efficient houses like installing a membrane with zero holes in it, using the correct tapes, designing, installing and maintaining heat pumpes and various other things.

It's an incentive and delegation problem. I'm in the US, and have been through three large renovations to family homes, and the trades I've worked were (nearly) all HIGHLY skilled, but had zero incentive to exceed energy efficiency goals required by code. The small business contractor needs to complete your project, get paid, and move on to the next. The best ones don't have any extra time - they're prospecting clients and building estimates for the next big project.

thebiss··on PayPal faces lawsuit for freezing customer accounts and funds
Before Paypal launched, only companies had relationships with payment processors and could directly accept major credit cards. Individuals had basically nothing.

Paypal was a huge catalyst for online auctions and small business, and it took took time for behavior like this to develop. And as others have said, they worked hard to not be a bank.

thebiss··on Decarbonizing rural residential buildings in cold climates
Technical innovation is the first of several inhibitors. There needs to be market availability, AND skills to install and later service a combined photovoltaic heat-pump system.

An analysis of prevalence and growth of both would be an interesting next step.

thebiss··on Ask HN: Advice about aging parents
Readers here might not realize that $5K per month is really affordable. Outside a major metro area, it could be as much as $300-$500 PER DAY.

And just because the building is new and the grounds are beautiful does not mean you get better care.

thebiss··on Tesla ranks almost dead-last on Consumer Reports reliability list
Here's an example of my crappy charging experience.

I live in a large town, population about 60K, and the ChargePoint app shows these options near me right now. This includes ALL charging networks, but only J1772 plugs that fit my car:

16 "public" ports are in the area:

- 4 are actually inside an apartment complex

- 2 are at Whole Foods, but I know 1 has been broken for years.

- 2 are BEHIND car dealerships. That's not really public.

- 3 are at someone's house?

- 2 are at the gym, but 1 has been broken for years.

- 2 are at a high school. I don't spend time there.

- 1 is at the library, and it's always occupied or broken.

If I expand the search to other places I shop:

- 2 ports are at the mall, but 1 of them is broken, and because they're close to the entrance, they're often ICEd.

Thankfully, I drive a PHEV so I can charge at home overnight, and burn gas for long distances. To date, 75% of this car's miles were electric.

thebiss··on Ask HN: Can Firefox be revived?
I wanted to support Firefox as well, and would still prefer to do nothing related to my job on a browser that may be sharing it all because some some click-through EULA gave it permission.

But I can't use it anymore, because it swaps.

My work laptop has only 8GB, soldered. One day I was shocked to find the NVME had only 50% useful life left. Digging further, FF memory demand was causing paging, on a drive that was so fast I wasn't really bothered by it. Who knows how long that had gone on....

Edge doesn't appear to do this.

thebiss··on Firefighters say they’re swamped by calls for routine care from senior homes
You CAN do this in the US, for $1000-$2000 per week.
thebiss··on Ocean drone captures video from inside a hurricane
This 2020 video shows a fleet of their "smaller" models under test in Hawaii: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvXq4n2aVh8
thebiss··on Is Word Error Rate a Good Metric for Speech Recognition Models?
I work in this domain, dealing exclusively with recognition for assistants, which is different from dictation. We measure three things, top down:

- whole phrase intent recognition rates. Run the transcribed phrase through a classifier to identify what the phrase is asking for, and compare that to what was expected, calculating an F1 score. Keep track of phrases that score poorly: they need to be improved.

- "domain term" error rate. Identify a list of key words that important to the domain and that must be recognized well, such as location names, products to buy, drug names, terms of art. For every transcribed utterance, measure the F1 score for those terms, and track alternatives created in confusion matrix. This results in distilled list of words the system gets wrong and what is heard instead.

- overall word error rate, to provide a general view of model performance.

thebiss··on Lambdas as values in Excel
The biggest challenge with Excel features remains versioning: functions are tied to a specific Excel releases, and it takes years before enough people run a version supporting them.

I wish they made these an add-on.

Until then, I expect to hear my fancy files are "broken."

thebiss··on Math Problems for children from 5 to 15 (2004) [pdf]
My personal experience is very very different, and is why I "quip these are too hard."

I explain below, but since Singapore was mentioned, I need to ask a cultural question first:

What do parents and teachers from outside the US do when a child DOESN'T understand math? How is math taught so that kids don't end up crying, getting sick, or hating themselves when faced with math problems? Or is there selection bias: it does happen, but "those kids" are left behind, and never seen by the rest of the world?

My personal experience with kids and math:

I'm in the US, and have one child who repeatedly could not complete math work during school, and would bawl and protest how stupid they were when given math homework at home. Completing it would take hours. Far behind, they could not multiply at age 8 or do fractions at 11. Tutors couldn't cover in an hour what other students finish in 10 minutes. Yet doctors indicated there's no learning disability.

So this leads to my perspective: a prodigious child may certainly be capable of these and enjoy the challenge. But for some others, this may succeed in making them feel worse about themselves, because it's yet another example math they don't understand.

thebiss··on Ask HN: How court is able to find past executive emails?
...and enterprise mail servers (like Exchange) have compliance features that prevent deletes or clone messages once a hold is placed on a certain account.

See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/Exchange/policy-and-complia...

thebiss··on A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement
5. Addiction

Adultery, abuse, and addiction are not new.

thebiss··on pfSense CE 2.5.2
Where does it say CE is going EOL? Long says updates will continue after 2.6, albeit slowly. Just like today.

> There will be CE releases after 2.6, but unlike Plus, they’ll be done when they’re ready, not on a regular cadence.

thebiss··on Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
*per HOUR. Some early case tools were $1000/seat/month.
thebiss··on The humble water heater could be the savior of our energy infrastructure woes
We have insulation thickness standards in the US, varying by weather "zone", but for residential construction they seem to be lightly enforced, and efficiency tests are rare to non-existant. (For an illustration of how we typically insulate, see [0].)

It's only one data point, but I'm in New England and from my home office I've watched builders replace 3 1960's-era homes with large colonials. Each is insulated with fiberglass, no visible foam, and nothing outside the sheathing (exterior plywood) except vapor paper / tyvek.

Sure, it meets code requirements for inches of insulation, but it's far from air tight or efficient.

[0] https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/where-insulate-home

thebiss··on Hyundai acquires controlling stake in Boston Dynamics for $880M
I don't know where to even look for this, but it would be interesting to see if the DARPA investment bought them a perpetual, irrevocable license to technologies they funded.
thebiss··on CaribouLite: Turn any 40-pin Raspberry-Pi into a Tx/Rx 6GHz SDR
There are LTE modem hats. For example, https://newjerseystyle.github.io/en/2020/Raspberry-Pi-connec...
thebiss··on Improv Wi-Fi: Open Standard for Setting Up Wi-Fi via Bluetooth LE
QR code based Wifi setup is extremely handy for guest networks with obscure SSIDs and long complex passwords, and makes it easy for visitors to reconnect when the password changes.
thebiss··on Spatial Audio
For a more balanced perspective, read the Verge's review. [1] My experience so far matches theirs: the impact varies by album/track, and in some cases, the lossless version remains better.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/9/22525028/apple-music-spati...

thebiss··on Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?
And the debris created from a kinetic weapon would indiscriminately destroy other satellites at those altitudes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
thebiss··on Firefox 86.0
I have two, as yet unsolved, work from home use cases:

- I often would like to watch one team member update Trello or Mural, at the same time as another updates Github, while I update a contract. I'd move those streams to my 4k monitor, to keep them readable, while I work on my primary.

- If I'm running a demo to a client, I'd like to have one stream sharing the demo platform, while another shares video of my haggard face, and a third shows my presentation. I don't want to share my whole desktop, to avoid sharing slack or SMS notifications.

OBS can probably do #2. Nothing does #1.

thebiss··on GCC Automatic Parallel Compilation Viability Results Help Up to 3.3x
Compiling entire units as one was standard practice dealing with the (defunct) IBM VisualAge C++ compiler. On one of our larger projects, updating the makefile to concatenate all .cpp's in each component, then compiling those .cpp's, reduced build times from 15-20 hours down to 1-2 hours.
thebiss··on Boston Dynamics shop: Spot Explorer
What makes their batteries 20x more expensive? EV batteries were $176/kWh back in 2018.

https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-b...

← PreviousPage 3 of 4Next →