tlb

9 ms·

121.
by tlb 1y ago
You could try adding more cowbell on a branch, test it with audiences, and revert if they don't like it. But branches are only really useful if you can merge. If the more-cowbell branch tests well, and the faster-tempo branch also test
122.
by tlb 1y ago
Please read the Show HN guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
123.
by tlb 1y ago
Unknown to the public. The NSA doesn't announce when it has pwned other countries (except sometimes much later) and China doesn't reveal intrusions the way US agencies and companies are required to.
124.
The new geography of stolen goods(economist.com)
103 points by tlb 1y ago|128 comments
125.
by tlb 1y ago
The last desktop processor that actually promised a certain speed was probably the 68020. Everything since then has had inscrutable performance characteristics.
126.
by tlb 1y ago
Google has probably sent data to almost every /24 in the last hour. Probably 99% of their egress data goes to destinations where they've sent enough data recently to make a good estimate of bottleneck link speed and queue size. Ha
127.
by tlb 1y ago
When and if alien life is discovered, there’s a high chance the discoverer will be someone who’s spent their career searching for it, rather than someone just stumbling across ironclad proof one fine day. I’m inclined to let those searchers
128.
by tlb 1y ago
Is it a common use case to produce a standalone program that could be tested in isolation? Usually I'm asking for a function (or just a few lines of change) that depends on the rest of my code & environment, so it's not trivia
129.
by tlb 1y ago
Space is the one resource that isn't finite. And even in LEO, the amount of space is huge. It's about the same surface area of the earth, but tens of kilometers thick. We used to have to leave a lot of space between satellites bec
130.
by tlb 1y ago
Please downvote or flag such comments (but only flag if you're fairly sure.)
131.
by tlb 1y ago
There are lots of reasons why people don't fit at a company, and only some of them are the employee's fault. But whose fault it is doesn't really matter. If you aren't happy and aren't appreciated, you should be out
132.
by tlb 1y ago
You can just interpolate bits of Javascript inside C++ to access the DOM, like so: #include <emscripten.h> void sayHello() { EM_ASM( let foo = document.getElementById('foo') foo.innerHTML = 'hel
133.
by tlb 1y ago
I use it for a web version of some robotics simulation & visualization software I wrote in C++. It normally runs on as an app on Mac or Linux, but compiling to WASM lets me show public interactive demos. Before WASM, the options were: -
134.
by tlb 1y ago
The recovery process is to "only apply operations that have both intent and completion records." But then I don't see the point of logging the intent record separately. If no completion is logged, the intent is ignored. So yo
135.
by tlb 1y ago
I encourage anyone who thinks these are easy high-school problems to try to solve some. They're published (including this year's) at https://www.imo-official.org/problems.aspx . They make my head spin.
136.
by tlb 1y ago
There was a time when a file of source code might not fit in memory, or would take up a significant fraction of it. But it hasn't been the case on any developer machine in 20+ years. And the overhead of FILE * accessors like fgetc is s
137.
by tlb 1y ago
There are certainly things a robot can't do with rigid feet, like climbing a tree or rock face. But anything a human can do with rigid shoes like wooden clogs should be possible. Whatever happens inside the clog stays inside.
138.
by tlb 1y ago
If you're not limited to a polyhedron, a thin rod standing on end does the job. A rod would fall over with a big clatter and bounce a few times. I wonder if there's a bistable polyhedron where the transition would be smooth enough
139.
by tlb 1y ago
It's easy to make structures that don't fail: just make them 5x stronger than anticipated max loads. Sadly, this would make a rocket too heavy to reach orbit. So they end up being 1.1x stronger than anticipated loads. And it'
140.
by tlb 1y ago
The whole thing is a test. The risk of huge explosions starts when they load it with fuel, not when they fire the engines. There are risks even before that, like electrical fires or structural failures.
141.
by tlb 1y ago
Yes, and (some near-future) AI is also more patient and better at multitasking than a reasonable human. It can make a change, submit for full fuzzing, and if there's a problem it can continue with the saved context it had when making t
142.
by tlb 1y ago
I don't have this problem with backtraces in Clang. The 'anonymous' lambdas have debugging symbols named after the function it lexically appears in, something like parent_function::$_0::invoke. $_0 is the first lambda in that
143.
by tlb 1y ago
It's true that you can switch very high voltages with MOSFETs in series. But the next step after switching is a transformer that needs to handle 14 MV between the primary and lower-voltage secondary winding. I don't think anyone h
144.
by tlb 1y ago
I agree that SLS sucks because of congressional meddling to award contracts in strategic districts. But you can't have something like NASA without that. Any large government agency is doomed to have to spread work around. Only a privat
145.
by tlb 1y ago
LLMs are not a linear combination of training data. Some LLMs have interacted with the outside world, such as through reinforcement learning while trying to complete tasks in simulated physics environments.
146.
by tlb 1y ago
The most general and unambiguous way to represent a diff is to just include the contents of the two files. It's more data, but that's rarely an issue these days. So instead of `diff a b | patch c`, where the data through the pipe
147.
by tlb 1y ago
Search engines were great for 10-15 years before enshittification took over. It might go somewhat faster with LLMs since the playbook is known. But that's still a long time, so why not make the most of it while it lasts? And something
148.
by tlb 1y ago
When a technology has proven business value, it's too late for seed investment. Existing companies are usually better at commercializing tech with proven business value. The economic purpose of seed investors is to take on technology-m
149.
by tlb 1y ago
The original Tesla Model S went through a set of tires every 15k miles, not because of anything inherent to EVs, but because they came standard with super-soft Michelin Pilot Sport tires which give slightly higher grip than high-mileage tir
150.
by tlb 1y ago
Filters catch particulates, but not gases. Heated ABS releases chemicals like 1,3-Butadiene, a small molecule (4 carbons), gaseous at room temperature, and mildly gasoline-smelling. It's bad for you in high concentrations.

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