rspeer

119 ms·

841.
by rspeer 10y ago
Have you compared the relative carbon impact? You're making it sound like the things you're "obviating" are on at all the same scale. Visa et al. are incredibly efficient compared to Bitcoin. I heard a Bitcoin advocat
842.
by rspeer 10y ago
I understand the negative utility of proof-of-work. It takes useful resources and turns them into nothing. I didn't claim it would be straightforward to make a cryptosystem whose mining process causes a benefit instead of a harm. I did
843.
by rspeer 10y ago
Close. Each shift of an octave doubles the frequency, so octaves are specifically harmonics that are powers of 2. Other harmonic ratios make other intervals (including intervals that aren't in our scale, when you get to bigger prime nu
844.
by rspeer 10y ago
Neat. Aside from the fact that it's built on a bug-prone foundation (Ethereum), the idea at least gives me some hope that cryptocurrencies don't have to have a negative impact.
845.
by rspeer 10y ago
I can't stand the proliferation of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies in a world where people don't have to pay for the externalities of the energy they use. Let me know when there's a cryptocurrency based on proof-of-carbon-sequ
846.
by rspeer 10y ago
Well, we've never really used prime factors of 7 and 11 in Western music. Even introducing the factors of 5 creates centuries of complications (temperament) that caused us to finally give up and throw out all the integer factors, repla
847.
by rspeer 10y ago
I was thinking it's kind of sad that A minor is the scale that's more fundamental in musical notation -- going up to C with a just minor third gets you the not-so-pretty 518.4 because there's no factor of 5 to divide by. Bu
848.
by rspeer 10y ago
There's something special about 432 Hz that has nothing to do with how the music is perceived -- if you're tuning the traditional way, by forming fifths above and below A as ratios of 3/2 and 2/3, then a lot of the numbe
849.
by rspeer 10y ago
Just started looking at Pachyderm. While I can see how a git-based filesystem can help with some use cases, does it do any kind of indexing at all? I see that the FAQ recommends exporting the data from Pachyderm into PostgreSQL, which leave
850.
by rspeer 10y ago
And on text posts. Whenever I see top-level text it looks like it's been downvoted to hell.
851.
by rspeer 10y ago
Can you point me at some? Because I've tried a few immutable data stores and been disappointed every time. Given about 10 GB of JSON structures, I keep finding things that can't outperform the boring combo of: * Convert the versio
852.
by rspeer 10y ago
I hope they're going even farther and considering minifloats. 8-bit integers are easy but limiting and unexciting. 8-bit floats are exactly what some machine learning needs. If you're updating your weights enough, precision can ju
853.
by rspeer 10y ago
That doesn't seem like an appropriate comparison. Tylenol was killing people because it was deliberately tampered with by an anonymous murderer. That's a much more serious issue than a new experimental food that makes some people
854.
by rspeer 10y ago
SCSU and BOCU-1 were never seriously used, as far as I can tell, except to prove a point back when developers were uncertain about implementing Unicode. Unicode standardizer: "Your software needs to support more than one language at a
855.
by rspeer 10y ago
This title's grammar is mangled and confusing on HN. The $160000 was for the developer, not for anyone else. The "for those who use Facebook ads" was a separate clause saying who the post is for. I know HN approves of origi
856.
by rspeer 10y ago
Wow. So there's room in the world for all kinds of tastes. Some people enjoy black metal with unintelligible screaming as the lyrics, for example. However, even black metal fans do not usually force everyone in their neighborhood or th
857.
by rspeer 10y ago
I probably sounded more accusatory than I should have, and I apologize for that wording. But I do think this is much more like retrofitting than like label propagation. It's the vectors that are being propagated, as I understand it, no
858.
by rspeer 10y ago
Hm, I know I've brought it up before. In relation to OpenCyc: ConceptNet doesn't have CycL or any sort of logical predicates -- the assumption is that you are just doing fuzzy machine learning over ConceptNet. I'm pretty sure
859.
by rspeer 10y ago
The graph algorithm they're describing is basically Manaal Faruqui's "retrofitting", although they don't cite him. I will make the charitable assumption that they came up with it independently (and managed to miss t
860.
by rspeer 10y ago
Probably not -- unless you count the proprietary, obfuscated font they use to make the official Unicode charts. Some people snark at Unicode for putting so much more effort into emoji recently than they put into scripts used in actual langu
861.
by rspeer 10y ago
Keep in mind that what you want may not be one font that covers lots of glyphs -- that makes the font take up lots more memory and take longer to load. And you definitely wouldn't want to use a high-coverage Unicode font as a dynamic
862.
by rspeer 10y ago
This is unfortunately necessary. docker-compose starts all services simultaneously and doesn't want you to use an init system inside the container, which means that any dependency that requires a service to be actually available need
863.
by rspeer 10y ago
Ninja is definitely the best and simplest build system I've used. A great example of the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy. The drawback comes from the simplicity: all dependencies have to be explicitly listed, which y
864.
by rspeer 10y ago
Huh. That just sounds like an unnecessary mistake, as a star map is the one kind of map that makes perfect intuitive sense on the ceiling (and its directionality is less intuitive on a piece of paper or a screen). (I could have added that i
865.
by rspeer 10y ago
Aside from selective commits (which they provide a different interface for), what do you use the staging area for?
866.
by rspeer 10y ago
This proposal looks beautiful, but a minor point stuck out for me. Putting large maps on the ceiling sounds like a terrible UX that will confuse people more than orient them. You'll end up with one axis that corresponds to actual direc
867.
by rspeer 10y ago
This article promised a "sincere apology", but what followed instead was > We updated a cartridge authentication procedure in select models of HP office inkjet printers to ensure the best consumer experience and protect them fr
868.
by rspeer 10y ago
Upstart also had inscrutable crashing bugs, kind of like what this article describes about systemd, and it didn't even do as much.
869.
by rspeer 10y ago
I think because it's so hard to do VR well that they'd have to reject almost all the apps. They'd have a choice between a terrible first impression for users, or a terrible first impression for developers.
870.
by rspeer 10y ago
Which means it's important that they try really hard to avoid being detected. They probably can't do it, but it's still got a better chance of success for them than staying in business for a year with no sales. ---- Edit: W

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