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whyever

973 karma · joined March 8, 2014

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whyever··on Flattening Rust’s learning curve
How often do you care about the order in which objects are dropped?
whyever··on Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"
Do you mean solar energy sources? Wind turbines have plenty of "spinning mass"...
whyever··on Sign in as anyone: Bypassing SAML SSO authentication with parser differentials
Using more than one Github account violates their ToS though.
whyever··on Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
Who is going to pay the devs?
whyever··on The Insecurity of Telecom Stacks in the Wake of Salt Typhoon
Are you suggesting end-to-end encryption? Telecom providers have to implement "lawful intercept" interfaces to comply with the law in many jurisdictions.
whyever··on The best way to use text embeddings portably is with Parquet and Polars
It uses pyo3 to generate the bindings, so you would have to find a similar crate for F#/.NET and port the polars Python FFI to it. If such a crate does not exist, it will be even more work.
whyever··on Barcelona buys apartment building at center of eviction protests
Except for Vienna.
whyever··on We are shutting down Ondsel
Open Source works best for building blocks of software, not for end products. Companies have incentives to share their libraries and tooling, not so much for the final product like a CAD program.
whyever··on Trump wins presidency for second time
Not sure what you mean by "sourced through the employer".

Usually you need to have enough qualification and a job offer to apply for a work visa that is bound to the employing company for two years. Switching jobs requires reapplying. Afterwards, you can usually get a work visa that is not bound to a specific company, and less time limited.

Normally it's you applying for the visa, but in some cases the company hiring you can file the application, which can drastically reduce the time you have to wait, but cedes some control.

Of course, all this depends on your nationality and the country where you are applying.

whyever··on State of Python 3.13 performance: Free-threading
I don't think this is the same. Does it also cover transitive dependencies?
whyever··on Microsoft technical breakdown of CrowdStrike incident
Not all potential null dereferences are covered by the verifier, they even give an example where the rule is not triggered, but null may be dereferenced by the code.
whyever··on Scientists re-emerge after a year in Mars simulation project
Analog astronauts are already doing this.
whyever··on Allan McDonald refused to approve Challenger launch, exposed cover-up (2021)
This sounds like you are saying colonialism was a success story?
whyever··on 'Equals' has more than one meaning in math
I don't think you can define the reals as a mapping from natural numbers, reals are famously not countable.
whyever··on ARC Prize – a $1M+ competition towards open AGI progress
I think there is a component of memorizing solutions. For example, for mathematical proofs there is a set of standard "tricks" that you should have memorized.
whyever··on Zero Tolerance for Bias
In Monte Carlo simulations you usually don't care about predictability (so using a non-CSPRNG is fine), but statistical bias may compromise your results.

But I agree that a CSPRNG should be the default.

whyever··on Zero Tolerance for Bias
You will still get better results when avoiding the bias, even with a non-CSPRNG. Their bias is much smaller.

Avoiding the division can be faster, especially if you sample many numbers from the same range. But it depends on the use case.

whyever··on Zero Tolerance for Bias
You can calculate the probabilities and expected number of collisions analytically, but evaluating the expressions numerically is tricky for large numbers. I can recommend https://herbie.uwplse.org/ to rewrite the expressions into a form that can be evaluated.
whyever··on Zero Tolerance for Bias
Nowadays, your operating system has a dedicated API for providing randomness (e.g. `getrandom` on Linux), so you would just use that to seed your RNG.

Using the time is questionable, because an adversary can often estimate when the RNG was seeded, enabling brute-force attacks to reconstruct the seed.

whyever··on Zero Tolerance for Bias
Don't use a non-CSPRNG if you worry about adversaries. CSPRNGs are only ca. 10 times larger and roughly as fast if you can use SIMD.

According to [1], you only need 4 outputs to predict xoshiro. Predicting PCG is a bit more difficult, but still on the level of "exercise for cryptography students" [2].

[1]: https://www.pcg-random.org/posts/a-quick-look-at-xoshiro256....

[2]: https://hal.science/hal-02700791/document

whyever··on You'll regret using natural keys
I don't think GDPR is that different in that regard, you also have to minimize access to PII within the organization. See Article 25:

> The controller shall implement appropriate technical and organisational measures for ensuring that, by default, only personal data which are necessary for each specific purpose of the processing are processed. That obligation applies to the amount of personal data collected, the extent of their processing, the period of their storage and their accessibility. In particular, such measures shall ensure that by default personal data are not made accessible without the individual's intervention to an indefinite number of natural persons.

whyever··on You'll regret using natural keys
AFAIK, even using a UUID is still considered PII if it uniquely identifies the user.
whyever··on You'll regret using natural keys
Please don't use % to generate integers from a range, it's not uniform, which can be disastrous if you rely on your numbers not being predictable. You can use crypto.randomInt instead.
whyever··on GPT-4o
They say it's twice as fast/cheap, which might matter for your use case.
whyever··on Shape typing in Python
> Without one any language's type system will feel more frustrating than it's worth, since you won't get inline error messages either.

I disagree, for me the integration with the editor mostly shortens feedback cycles, and enables some more advanced features. The utility of identifying problems without running the code is still there.

whyever··on If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?
Rust also has traits, and no struct inheritance. I think it works quite well.
whyever··on The One Billion Row Challenge in Go: from 1m45s to 4s in nine solutions
My guess: If you run the benchmark several times, the OS will cache the file in RAM.
whyever··on SymPy: Symbolic Mathematics in Python
That's a known problem and somewhat mitigated by symengine:

https://github.com/symengine/symengine

whyever··on SymPy: Symbolic Mathematics in Python
Why are you calculating the Jacobian symbolically? AFAIK, for complex cases, the numerical Jacobian is often faster / more numerically stable.
whyever··on SymPy: Symbolic Mathematics in Python
Not sure what you mean with GUI, but you can use it with Jupyter notebooks.
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