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boscillator

Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa on Monday November 02, 2026 @01:55PM (#50341755)
Why did anyone even try and make this? It's fascinating what incomputable functions people try to shoe-horn into being computable.
Re:EMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @10:42AM (#50181870)
Applications thinking they should own the root of trust is one of my least favorite things in software. God help you if your IT department thinks they should MITM everything and now 8000 packages need there cert installed in some random location.
Re:San Francisco Onion Futures Company on Saturday September 19, 2026 @04:32PM (#49769882)
They have what appears to be a screenshot of an excel document (complete with sort and filter widgets), except I can select the text, so perhaps it's an embedded excel sheet inside a word doc?

Either way, I love it and I'm always excited to learn about what mundane functions the government and MS Office are keeping alive for society.

I wonder what counts as a complex theme? Surely that is a euphemism for something, but I can't figure out what it would be and certainly don't trust TikTok to do a good job of deciding what is too complex for the youth's minds.
The ruling seems fair and reasonable, and I'm surprised they couldn't come to the same conclusion without a court.
What is the point of predictive analytics for them? Surely they don't care about what one specific customer will do, only in aggregate? Since ML models can only learn from past aggregates, wouldn't traditional statistics on past transactions make more sense?
I believe that their are no multi-GNSS receivers certified for aviation, so Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou are out.
Re:The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @01:27PM (#49186034)
> You can't make investors have a hard on for a ramp that doesn't connect to the cloud.

Someone more inclined toward fraud than me should figure out how to make a cloud connected ramp as a way to get VCs to fund more ramps.

Re:Emacs Is a Lispboard on Thursday July 23, 2026 @03:39PM (#49026961)
> Suppose I want to work in a single place for all my contexts, both personal and professional.

This has always been my problem with adopting Emacs or Obsidian or any other app that purports to do this. Who are y'all working for that you can bring professional stuff onto the same system as personal stuff? I don't want my personal emails on my work computer, and my boss would be rather upset if I brought work emails onto my personal computer. I'd love one of these do everything apps that lets me tag and sync just stuff that ought to be synced.

Re:DOGE is done. What happened to its records? on Monday July 13, 2026 @01:52PM (#48896256)
Oops, thanks. Stupid dyslexia.

Yah, the government has a big problem with trying to do big upgrades when a ship-of-theseus would work. I suspect this can be traced all the way up to how congressional appropriations work and the acquisitions/sustainment distinction, in addition to usual resume-engineering and second-system-syndrome.

Re:DOGE is done. What happened to its records? on Monday July 13, 2026 @12:53PM (#48895430)
Even here, it can be hard to know what to cut. OCX kept getting funding because running a GPS ground segment is in the government's purview, and sometimes you need to update legacy systems. Obviously, OCX was still a disaster, and we still don't have a modern ground segment, but the answer isn't necessarily cutting programs, it's spending the money in those programs more wisely, and empowering civil servants to stop obvious contractor grift. Actually doing that is difficult and may require more money in the short term.

*edit: spelling

Re:TLS certificates for internal services done right on Thursday July 09, 2026 @12:02PM (#48848139)
The real answer here is that configuring HTTPS clients to trust a self-signed cert (or signed by an internal CA) shouldn't be as difficult as it is. I find it extremely annoying that every programming language has it's own idea of where certificates should live instead of just checking the os trust store.
> detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.

Good luck sharing that information with Max Planck. It's amazing how robotically humans can act sometimes. I suppose this could be an AI or automated response, but it's just as likely it's someone following the letter of the law without using any critical thought.

Re:The Coming Loop on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @09:20AM (#48644579)
> the right fix is not "handle every malformed case." ... [LLMs] will still attempt to handle now impossible errors.

This is the number one code smell from LLMs and I don't know why they are so obsessed with it. In python, it often comes as `hasattr` checks on types that are defined to have that attribute, in a code base that is fully type-checked.

Why do they do that? Is it from pre-training or re-enforcement? If that latter, can the labs please fix this?

Mostly unrelated, but what is going on with the "I specifically approve section ... of the terms and conditions" when you sign in without an account. Is this a new requirement somewhere?

Other than that, seems interesting! Simulink could always do with a competitor, although I'm always saying Simulink needs a text-based interface. Same signal flow programming model that supports scopes and continues time integrators, just with text instead of drag-and-drop.

Re:RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @08:58AM (#48475633)
> A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately. - Akin's 20th law of spacecraft design

I always really enjoyed making a slick presentation. It was a lot of fun figuring out how to scope the hardest problem you are sure you can finish in 24hr while still having time to polish your presentation and make the app look good. I find picking a problem that lets you put a big map on the screen helps with the latter.

Re:Dopamine Fracking on Monday June 08, 2026 @11:41AM (#48446830)
Huh, I've been to plenty of places were you could order it for an up charge and it came in it's own little bottle.
Tomas Pynchon has much to say about this in The Crying of Lot 49.
They show up as the #2 ad spot when you search "register a domain" and most people don't know any better.
Re:Notice of Collective Action Lawsuit Against Workday, INC on Monday January 26, 2026 @02:39PM (#46770454)
It will be fascinating to see the facts of this case, but if it is proven their algorithms are discriminatory, even by accident, I hope workday is held accountable. Making sure your AI doesn't violate obvious discrimination laws should be basic engineering practice, and the courts should help remind people of that.
Re:Show HN: Watch and Play Poker with LLMs on Saturday January 10, 2026 @06:32PM (#46571062)
No, I'm not super certain, but I believe most solvers are trained to be game theory optimal (GTO), which means they assume every other player is also playing GTO. This means there is no strategy which beats them in the long run, but they may not be playing the absolute best strategy.
Re:In Defense of Matlab Code on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @10:21AM (#46289609)
I wouldn't be so sure that writing those toolboxes is cheap. You need an aerospace engineer to write the aero toolbox, or you are going to miss subtleties. I assume you need a biologist to write the biology toolboxes. All of these domain experts are really expensive, and I would not trust a toolbox that hadn't been review by them.
Re:In Defense of Matlab Code on Monday December 15, 2025 @03:07PM (#46279795)
It doesn't seem to be the example here, but I know that X.transpose() does not work if X is a (3,) and not a (3,1), which is the common way to present vectors in numpy. MATLAB forcing everything to be at least rank-2 solves a bunch of these headaches.
Re:In Defense of Matlab Code on Monday December 15, 2025 @02:59PM (#46279677)
Interesting... I wrote a similar post about MATLAB's syntax a while ago, and I still think MATLAB is one of the best calculators on the market.

RunMat is an interesting idea, but a lot of MATLAB's utility comes from the toolboxes, and unless RunMat supports every single toolbox I need, I'm going to be reaching for that expensive MATLAB license over and over again.

Re:It's insulting to read your AI-generated blog post on Monday October 27, 2025 @12:41PM (#45723109)
Yah, it is very strange to equivocate using AI as a spell checker and a whole AI written article. Being charitable, they meant asking the AI re-write your whole post, rather than just using it to suggest comma placement, but as written the article seems to suggest a blog post with grammar errors is more Human™ than one without.

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