manimino

8 ms·

31.
by manimino 4y ago
Social media amplifies narcissists. I believe it also makes people more narcissistic (personal experience). Would love to see studies on that.
32.
by manimino 4y ago
The amount of land in your starting hand often determines the game's outcome in Magic. This is not seen as "fun" by many players. Why play a supposedly skill-based game if RNG is so strong? So it's quite possible that th
33.
by manimino 4y ago
The correct Fisher-Yates shuffle is this (from Wikipedia): -- To shuffle an array a of n elements (indices 0..n-1): for i from 0 to n−2 do j ← random integer such that i ≤ j < n exchange a[i] and a[j]
34.
by manimino 4y ago
I have this problem with recommendation engines generally. Spotify, Netflix, Steam, etc. They are very bad at making novel, interesting recommendations. They will also blindly recommend popular things, which is irritating. Steam is an excep
35.
by manimino 4y ago
Thanks for that perspective. I wanted to emphasize the difference between this solution and the Aeropress. I went into hyperbole in doing so, and will be more careful about that in future. Hopefully the clarifying edit resolves your concern
36.
by manimino 4y ago
There's a far better Keurig alternative with ZERO cleanup. Not easy cleanup, ZERO. (Edit: To clarify - zero extra, relative to a Keurig.) They are called "hanging ear coffee filters" - it's just a disposable paper filter
37.
by manimino 4y ago
It calls out AI / ML specifically. Guess our regression models will have to go back to being "statistics". Shame, it felt so much cooler to call them "Machine Learning".
38.
by manimino 4y ago
What made internet culture change so much after 2014?
39.
by manimino 4y ago
Utilities and governments tend to have close relationships. Governments want utilities to continue working at reasonable prices, so they regulate utilities heavily. In exchange, utilities get protection against competition. This is true in
40.
by manimino 4y ago
Exactly right. Typical solar installations keep you on the grid. And when the grid goes out, so do you. To become grid-independent adds substantial expense. Having your own battery adds another $10-20k, along with whatever costs are associa
41.
by manimino 4y ago
Cleaning panels also needs to happen periodically. That cost can be in the thousands, especially if your roof is hard to access (e.g. high off the ground). There are so many ways a rooftop solar installation investment can turn against you.
42.
by manimino 4y ago
Utility-scale solar is far more efficient than rooftop solar. With rooftop, the panels face whatever direction the roof does. But utility solar fields have panels that rotate to face the sun. Considering that power generation depends on the
43.
by manimino 4y ago
I once interviewed at a company for a job that was pretty much a dream job - very niche passion. Everyone there was very into that niche. Except for the CEO, who prided himself on not knowing anything about the field. He saw not knowing the
44.
by manimino 4y ago
Yes, there will always be workarounds, but those come with prices of their own (such as time spent getting around them, people to hire, etc.) As an analogy, we catch more dumb criminals than smart criminals - but overall it's still wor
45.
by manimino 4y ago
Linux desktop since 2016 here. The nice part about the Linux bullshit is that it's always the same bullshit. You don't get brand new bullshit shoved at you. It's nice to feel like you really own your software.
46.
by manimino 4y ago
I am not allowed to print $100 bills with my general-purpose printer. Many printing and copy machines come with built-in safeguards to prevent users from even trying. It's quite possible to apply the same kind of protections to generat
47.
by manimino 4y ago
I just recently took a year off to study, do side projects, and take care of family. It was a much-needed break following the many stressors of the covid era. Some things matter more than money. Having worked for 10ish years beforehand, it
48.
by manimino 4y ago
If you have anxiety, and use caffeine regularly, step 1 should be to eliminate caffeine. Caffeine withdrawal symptoms (headaches, insomnia) typically last about 10 days, but the improvements on stress and anxiety start by day 3 or so. They
49.
by manimino 4y ago
This is a good policy in general. Say everything you want to say in one comment, and do not reply back to anything. Replies are where people start getting defensive. Even if the discussion is friendly, once you've said your piece, it i
50.
by manimino 4y ago
Magnus cares deeply about the image of chess as a sport. He has done a great deal to popularize chess. Cheating threatens the legitimacy of chess itself. It makes sense that Magnus would take a stand on it, even if he risks losing face by d
51.
by manimino 4y ago
Are you referring to distributed MySQL such as Vitess? It is the backend for Slack and GitHub; also was the backend for YouTube in the past. https://vitess.io/
52.
by manimino 4y ago
You don't have to generate every possible md5. Just ~10^19 keys is enough to probably have a cycle.
53.
by manimino 4y ago
You'd need to run many parallel processes like MD5(MD5(MD5(thing1))), MD5(MD5(MD5(thing2)))... I think the math still works if you do that. But the cycle would have to be contained entirely within one of the individual runs. So that co
54.
by manimino 4y ago
Follow-up -- If you repeatedly do MD5(MD5(MD5(something))), how long will it take to find a repeat value? Assuming MD5 is random, this is the birthday problem. Since MD5 is 128 bits, you need about 10^19 hashes to get a repeat. [1] The MD5
55.
by manimino 4y ago
Neat question. The best answer seems to be an HN thread from 13 years ago (!) which posits that the chance of one existing is ~63%: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=614079 However, it appears no one has actually discove
56.
by manimino 4y ago
There's an influential article from 2009 called "The Sodas Are No Longer Free": https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear... Small conveniences and tokens of appreciation rea
57.
by manimino 4y ago
Wow, congrats on the speedup! Breakthroughs like that feel really good.
58.
by manimino 4y ago
As far as the bitmaps holdup, well. Let's see. The slowest step in ducks right now is combining the results of a multi-index query. Suppose I get 1000 objects matching one attribute and another 1000 objects from another, I've now
59.
by manimino 4y ago
Ducks, the story: I was using Python in-memory vector search engine called Annoy [1] to do semantic search on various kinds of data. It worked great for finding "similar" objects. Story A has similar text to story B, image A looks
60.
by manimino 4y ago
Writing an object indexer is a fun project. My Python indexer, ducks [1], went through a lot of the same development stages, such as supporting only exact-value matches at first. I tried binning too, but ultimately using a BTree was simpler

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