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mbf

Re:Ask HN: GCP Outage? on Friday July 18, 2025 @01:30PM (#44607517)
I forgot all about pager duty... been retired over a year now. I don't miss pager duty.
How fast is that new feature growing? Is it a killer feature?
Re:Show HN: Pets for Cursor on Saturday April 05, 2025 @08:41AM (#43593004)
This seems perfect for streaming while vibe coding before an audience like Twitch or maybe sharing screen in a classroom setting.
Re:Nintendo Obtains New Anti-Palworld Patent and Seeks Even More on Saturday February 15, 2025 @12:14PM (#43060178)
I wonder how many Roblox games might exist as prior art. Pet Simulator and Fishing simulator come to mind, as do many thousands of other hatching / catching games on Roblox.
Re:First look: adding type annotations to JavaScript on Thursday March 10, 2022 @09:44AM (#30627454)
Erasable types are good enough with source mapping. TypeScript workflows are fine. ECMAScript really doesn't need to absorb a TypeScript syntax. It's not necessary to keep bloating the runtime with a feature only useful to the developer.
Re:Donald Knuth on P=NP at CMU-SV (2014) [video] on Thursday March 10, 2022 @09:36AM (#30627354)
Knuth is brilliant. Who cares if P = NP if you can't find a P time solution without a huge degree.

We know that an exponential time solution exists. Given problems in NP have simplifying heuristics that can significantly reduce the search time space for a good answer on real data.

I took an optimizing hard problems class in college, 22 years ago. The professor led with a joke that if a student found a polynomial time solution to any of the problems to come see them for extra credit. The class taught us approaches for finding heuristics to get good performance against sample data sets of practical applications in reasonable time.

We were graded by how large a data set of the sample sets we could compute by the time the assignment was due. It was a competition against our peers to see who could solve the largest data set.

No it isn't. Google is playing. Just like Microsoft in the early 2000's with prototypes that others look at, copy, and release.