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arithma

Re:What is the index of an empty string in an empty string? on Thursday December 14, 2023 @02:31PM (#38646078)
The most appropriate behavior is implemented by regex.

Find the empty string and replace with say

  `($&)` 
where

  `$&`
refers to the captured variable, and with input

  `xyz`,
the result is

  `()x()y()z()`
With an empty input, the result is

  `()`.
The result of indexOf can consistently return the first index of the first half open subrange in a string. It just so happens that the first subrange of an empty string in an empty string is [0, 0).

The limiting case is also an interesting way to look at it:

  ()a()b()c()
  ()a()b()
  ()a()
  ()
Re:Tricking Monty Hall on Saturday July 15, 2023 @10:00AM (#36736822)
I haven't done the analysis, but one major assumption that the whole result is based on is whether the rules of the game are pre-established or just revealed after the first pick. With an adversarial game host who has the option to reveal or not, maybe the result changes, but more importantly, it explains the intuitionistic refusal for some to buy the argument.
Re:Tricking Monty Hall on Saturday July 15, 2023 @09:56AM (#36736790)
Are we siblings
Re:Introduction to Spherical Harmonics on Thursday March 16, 2023 @01:07PM (#35184885)
Spherical Harmonics became extremely trendy in the graphics literature for dynamic lighting and pre-baked light maps of some sort, and completely dropped off at some point. Still remember some discussions and questions regarding how they're not easy to "orient".
Re:I’m a productive programmer with a memory of a fruit fly on Monday September 19, 2022 @03:45PM (#32902972)
I often don't comment code, especially in personal stuff, but when I occasionally do, which happens mostly when things get overwhelming, I find bugs or fix things that I was stuck on. Writing forces you to understand better, name better, and almost feels like providing you with another perspective, all without leaving your own self.
Re:I've been abusing HTTP Status Codes in my APIs for years on Wednesday July 13, 2022 @11:59AM (#32084521)
What I like about this approach is that if you are using any other protocols for transport, everything becomes instantly portable. Imagine having the same logic serving objects per IDs through HTTP and websockets. Rest makes things more clumsy. Though I would concede doing things the REST way, as in the app-server participating in the http headers/status enables caching and all sorts of things that would be hell to do through otherwise.
Interesting to think how many 10^6 faster gates would be needed to do the work of 10^9 at the same speed. Say take the 8086 and make it a million times faster. At about 30K transistors and 5MHz. A photonic 8086 apparently would run blindingly fast around anything available now.

Serial speed is always a gain up, no questions asked I guess.

Obviously all of that is over simplified, and not considering other components to any system that would be built (but hey, it's not like any of this is happening tomorrow anyway).

Re:“Computer science is not about computers” on Sunday May 30, 2021 @01:21AM (#27330814)
Computer science is much more like Mathematics than Physics. It feels wrong calling "computer science" a science, in the same sense of calling "Mathematics" science.
Re:Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2021 on Tuesday May 04, 2021 @02:54PM (#27041390)
In addition to the other mentioned reasons, I guess it's valuable feedback for their providers, and if that feedback is acted upon, it's beneficial for them.
Re:Bitcoin as a Battery on Sunday March 28, 2021 @02:38PM (#26612930)
Bitcoin is more of ash rather than a battery in this analogy.

I like bitcoin (the idea, not the burning of the planet, even though it's only a temporary hack to bootstrap the whole thing). And hey, maybe it will encourage building nuclear mining farms, that will give their owners free bitcoin, and then we can use the nuclear plants.

The only defense I can stomach for Bitcoin's unfathomable energy consumption is that it might be only temporary. Is it worth it? So far, not that much, but I think developed-countries under-estimate the value of bitcoin, since they have more stable economies, and thus currencies, and enjoy freedom of moving their money, and data privacy...

Re:Draw an iceberg and see how it would float in water on Saturday February 20, 2021 @02:48AM (#26202409)
I knew this was happening, but reading it, hey, maybe that's one way to get anti-gravity. Just loop the topology on itself. Obviously commenting in jest, but now I'm intrigued to see if someone has seriously considered this.
Re:C++ Is 9.4 Times Faster Than Python in Prime Number Test on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @11:05AM (#26014918)
C++ expression-power has increased considerably since C++11, and I believe, semantically, Prime Number generation in both C++ and Python could be python-line for c++-(line[s]) translated. C++ approaching the comfort and ease of use of Python is a worthy goal to reach. The flip side is well appreciated too (Cython, where Python can converge to C++ performance is noteworthy as well).
Re:The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real on Saturday December 26, 2020 @06:51PM (#25547464)
We all at least are dumber than we'd like to be. Nobody would refuse a pill that would make them smarter. Sorry for off-topic, but this has been gnawing at me lately, feels like something is a miss about my cognition, only very subtle, nothing to go for any kind of practitioner. Is there any route actually for giving the good old fat bucket a rattle to make it work back at original capacity? Have you ever tried anything?

I know this is off-topic, if it annoys anyone, I could take it somewhere else, but thought people interested in this article might have experimented or self-reflected.

Re:Bitcoin breaks above $20k on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @12:09PM (#25445058)
Just a question, isn't all criticism against bitcoin applicable to gold?

Money/Currency/Value in general can't be reduced or derived from first principles. You always have to take into account human nature, economic activity, and most unfortunately: psychology. So all criticism about how bitcoin inherently being pointless, sounds like off-tune. I want good reasons to/NOT-to buy in.

First-world country citizens kind of trust their governments to at least behave lawfully, or at least be eventually accountable. There are systems in place for transactions and accounting, and "everyone" has access.

The "Value" of bitcoin, coming from a struggling third-world country (Lebanon), is in the ability to be independent of a currency that is inflating quickly, being able to transact with the outside world (even if only in bulk) without being under the mercy of a failing financial system that is lurking around to take a share in every which way possible.

The energy consumption needs of bitcoin are an obvious drawback. But I don't think it's fair to brush away the whole thing for only that reason.

Disclosure: I own an embarrassingly small amount of bitcoin (~0.4BTC).

Re:Ask HN: What are some good methods to prove current time? on Monday October 12, 2020 @04:08PM (#24758883)
Reading something allows one to create a proof of being after. Writing something allows one to create a proof of being before.

Are there other ways of conceptualizing this problem?

This kind of reminds me of the usual interview question: can you make a fair die from an unfair one.

Similarly, us as humans, could possibly have the ability to get over some/all of our distorted senses.

I am not talking about every day life here. It's in principle possible to deal with the logical fallacies that we're programmed with, but it requires effort.

What am more interested to convey is: our potential for objectivity is troubled with subjectivity. It is, however, not impossible on just the account of having subjective distortions. Those can be overrun.

There are many other similar analogies that come to mind, one that is prominent: digital systems made from purely analog ones.

From a capabilities point of view, they're native. You can access the OS api just like any other native app.

From a developer side, it looks like developing a webapp without the usual limitations of API access, albeit at an extra cost of marshaling or build-complexity.

There really is no reason to think of HTML/CSS/JS as Web only though.

Re:Timeline of the Far Future on Sunday May 17, 2020 @01:20PM (#23213464)
Are there similar predictions but on a short time scale. Like from now until 10,000 AD?

Culture, technology, and geology (and hey, everything else, biology, astronomy..)

I find it hard to try and see what the future may hold, and it seems that is the case since we're at an event horizon of human culture change. Talks of singularity already having come upon us is relevant in terms of predictability to a certain extent, but I kind of feel comfortable to say that humanity will indeed stabilize in at most 5k years, since we're already hitting marginal returns in technology investments. There might be two more singularities that can unlock more unpredictability: AI and biology.

Re:Surprisingly Turing-Complete on Sunday April 12, 2020 @11:27AM (#22848822)
This is definitely interesting, but there's always Javascript in the browser. It's turing complete by design, and it can and is sandboxed to a lot of success. The fast and quick conclusion that TC in itself is dangerous is not warranted, but when it's not intended, it can have unexpected consequences that might have some security, or other (stability) implications. That's what I take away from the article.
Re:Database Lab – Full-size staging databases as a service on Saturday February 08, 2020 @02:02AM (#22274423)
A bit tangential, but this reminded of an idea I had when I was learning about containerization and overlayfs. Would postgres work with data stored in an overlay and allow a similar workflow?
Re:Software Disenchantment (2018) on Wednesday January 01, 2020 @06:27PM (#21931536)
Users don't know about this performance gap, but there is a gap, and that gap is an economic opportunity.

Since the current practices are so inefficient, users are having to pay for this from pocket as hardware expenses. Buy a $1000 smartphone, to get the same experience as last-year's.

A different stack (don't need to reinvent the universe), can be branded as brutally efficient, uses slim hardware, and strict engineering practices to provide a much better experience at a fraction of the price (1/5 possible.)

I believe nobody is doing that yet since there are two main barriers:

1- Risk of no-market (I think this might be proven unfounded, given the current trend in price hikes)

2- Capital investment necessary to get started (But this also can be solved given the obvious appetite for the next-big-thing money being poured left and right, without anything catching on yet)

I think people confuse two important things. 1- Energy consumption of the lower stack versus total of a single implementation (could possibly be very low) 2- Energy consumption of the lower stack multiplied by everywhere it is deployed

1- Yes, optimizing for lowering this consumption by an app-developer can definitely be an ill-advised endeavor economically (you're saving 0.1-10% of your cost.. by adding a huge investment of time, possibly larger than the application development itself) 2- Optimizing across all deployments, can definitely move the needle, in a very significant way, against the effort required, since you're automatically deployed on 1000-1M places.

It's the same reason library developers (especially system/langugage/heavily-used-libraries) have a very good reason economically (and therefore ecologically as well) to optimize. Competition here is a huge benefit to everyone, including the environment.

Re:In Praise of the 5-Hour Workday and Other ‘Radical’ Ideas on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @03:26PM (#21466809)
If you spend 80 hours you're being inefficient. If you spend 20 hours (and they're being charged for value,) they feel they were deceived. Selling your hours to anyone truly seems like a lose-lose situation.
Re:PostgREST on Sunday November 03, 2019 @03:05PM (#21436218)
"ORM" is more like a compiler, it takes one language/(api can be seen as a language) as input and outputs another language (SQL) as output.
Re:No Silver Bullet (1986) [pdf] on Friday August 30, 2019 @06:39AM (#20837343)
Can you elaborate on that just a bit, I couldn't find anything relevant by doing a quick search for a few combinations of those keywords.
Which does not compile in C++ or C# :)
Very tangential question that hit me while reading the comments: Is the current scenario possible: company A owns 10% of company B, and company B owns 10% of company A. Does that mean getting the valuation of both companies require solving algebra? Or is this outright prevented by other methods, like the board of A owns most of A and 10% of B?
Re:'Matrix 4' officially a go with Keanu Reeves on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @05:34PM (#20752447)
I hope Matrix 4 explores how Neo expresses disgust with humanity, as in, becoming more like Smith, and Trinity now kills him. Anything that continues the saga with a goody-two-shoes Neo at this stage is... boring. He's too powerful not to be a villain?
If an AI is doing it, maybe, but it also has to be unhinged from all of the people programming it or owning it. That was unthinkable until recently.

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