Arainach (u/Arainach)

Arainach commented on Burner Phone 101 rebeccawilliams.info/burn... · Posted by u/CharlesW

tmpfs · 41 minutes ago

This is nonsense. By your logic me and the majority of people using Signal are criminals.

As the other commenter mentioned please provide proof for these hyperbolic claims.

Arainach · 2 minutes ago

>By your logic me and the majority of people using Signal are criminals

False. "The majority of X are Y" does not imply that any particular X is Y.

I don't have data for Signal. I use it extensively. Even setting aside that the American legal system makes everyone a criminal several times a day so that the laws can be selectively enforced against anyone who becomes a target, I have no data on whether the majority of Signal users are criminals, but given that criminals have significantly higher interest in secure communications than the general population it wouldn't shock me if evidence came out that it was the case.

Arainach commented on Why you can’t grow cool-climate plants in hot climates crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt.... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

lumost · 2 days ago

What is the proposed mechanism for implementing a cut back? A global population with 8 billion people and 1950s carbon emissions implies an average living standard somewhere in the realm of the 1900s. Are you volunteering to move back to the horse and buggy?

Bear in mind that the industrialized world of 1950 was only inhabited by a small portion of the global population at most a billion people.

The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.

Arainach · 2 days ago

We could start by banning things that explicitly waste resources such as proof of work cryptocurrency and adjust tax incentives to punish huge energy consumers for things like AI. Make the energy cost factor in the long-term externalities and maybe companies will hesitate before burning the world for things that aren't necessary.

Things don't have to be perfect - you start with the biggest polluters/consumers and use trade incentives to convince other nations to join. We've seen this work under Democratic administrations (China's outputs are dropping) before Trump etc. threw it all away.

Arainach commented on What is going on right now? catskull.net/what-the-hel... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

mensetmanusman · 3 days ago

Not being a programmer, I have a question.

Can any program be broken down into functions and functions of functions that have inputs and outputs so that they can be verified if they are working?

Arainach · 3 days ago

Not without extraordinary cost that no one (save NASA, perhaps) is willing to pay.

Even if you can formally verify individual methods, what you're actually looking for is if we can verify systems. Because systems, even ones made of of pieces that are individually understood, have interactions and emergent behaviors which are not expected.

Arainach commented on I Prefer RST to Markdown (2024) buttondown.com/hillelwayn... · Posted by u/shlomo_z

chrismorgan · 6 days ago

> Natural language is easy to do for a human and a hard computing problem.

You ever see someone learning a new language? They struggle hard on more complex sentences.

It’s easy for us because we’ve practised it so much.

> + * - 15 6 / 20 4 ^ 2 3 - + 7 8 * 3 2

To begin with, you’re missing an operator. I’ll assume another leading +.

  + + * - 15 6 / 20 4 ^ 2 3 - + 7 8 * 3 2

Now, if you use infix, you have to have at least some of the parentheses, in this case actually only one pair, given rules of operator precedence, associativity and commutativity:

  (15 - 6) * 20 / 4 + 2 ^ 3 + 7 + 8 - 3 * 2

But you may well just parenthesise everything, it makes solving easier:

  ((((15 - 6) * (20 / 4)) + (2 ^ 3)) + ((7 + 8) - (3 * 2)))

And you know how you go about solving it? Calculating chunks from the inside out, and replacing them with their values:

  (((    9    *     5   ) +    8   ) + (  15    -    6   ))
  ((         45           +    8   ) +          9         )
  (                      53          +          9         )
                                    62

Coming back to Polish notation—you know what? It’s exactly the same:

  (+ (+ (* (- 15 6) (/ 20 4)) (^ 2 3)) (- (+ 7 8) (* 3 2)))
  (+ (+ (* 9 5) 8) (- 15 6))
  (+ (+ 45 8) 9)
  (+ 53 9)
  62

For arithmetic at least, it’s not hard. You’re just not accustomed to it.

Arainach · 6 days ago

This is a really weird hill to die on. HP tried hard to make RPN a thing and even among engineers eventually lost out to notation that is easier to work with.

People read in one direction - in English left to right. They read faster and comprehend better when they can move in that direction without constantly jumping back and forth.

> (15 - 6) * 20 / 4 + 2 ^ 3 + 7 + 8 - 3 * 2

(15-6)*20/4 can be read as one block left to right

2^3 can be read as one block left to right. Jump back to the operator (count: 1)

7 + 8 continue left to right

3*2 is a block, jump back to operator (count: 2)

So that reads left to right as speakers of most western languages do with only two context shifts. Now let's try RPN:

> + + * - 15 6 / 20 4 ^ 2 3 - + 7 8 * 3 2

ignore, ignore, ignore, ignore.

15, 6, context shift (1)

ignore?

20, context shift (2)

4, context shift (3)

ignore?

2 (wait, am I supposed to use that caret? I'm already confused and I've used RPN calculators before. Counting this as a context shift (4))

3, context shift (5)

two more operators and I don't really understand why any more

basically, RPN makes you context shift every single time you enter a number. It is utter chaos to understand of jumping back and forth and trying to remember what came before and happens next. Even if you're used to it it's dramatically worse for humans, and no one cares how much software it takes to parse.

Incidentally from my experience with RPN calculators I'd have expected

15 6 - 20 * 4 / 2 3 ^ + 7 + 8 + 3 2 * -

Though it's not really better since instead of context shifting after every number you have to context shift after ever operator to try to remember what's on the stack

Arainach commented on When Fascism Comes Wrapped in the Flag and Carrying a Cross wisewolfmedia.substack.co... · Posted by u/douchecoded

shazbotter · 7 days ago

> Anyone who claims there is no difference between the parties at this point is trolling or sufficiently ignorant as to be indistinguishable from a troll.

Good thing that's not what I said.

Biden dramatically increased Arctic oil drilling, shut down labor strikes, increased police funding and militarization, declared the Covid pandemic over prematurely, deported 4.6 million people (vs Trumps 2 million), reduced protections for lgbtq individuals, and enabled a genocide.

> Not have the federal government trying to criminalize their existence.

Biden is a big part of why we have "truth in sentencing" and "three strikes" laws. See the 1994 violent crime control and law enforcement act. He's literally one of the poster children for the carceral state.

Biden deported over twice as many people as Trump, he eliminated protections for trans youth, he bombed Gaza. Clean air? The man pushed oil drilling. The concessions in the IRA alone will be polluting for generations.

You can convince me there are good Democrats, but not Biden. Biden was a right wing politician. One left of Trump, no doubt, but he would fit right in with a Bush or Reagan.

Arainach · 7 days ago

>shut down labor strikes

Biden could have done better about the railroads, but his administation and his appointees increased union protections, dramatically increased enforcement of punishments for union busting, extended overtime wages to huge classes of new workers and more. You're cherry picking things to complain about and again, if you don't think any of the last three Democratic nominees were any good you're not arguing in good faith.

Holding out for perfection gets you fascism.

Arainach commented on · Posted by u/kan101

Arainach · 7 days ago

>96. Which file defines a Github Actions pipeline?

How is this a Golang question?

Arainach commented on I Prefer RST to Markdown (2024) buttondown.com/hillelwayn... · Posted by u/shlomo_z

chrismorgan · 7 days ago

> How easy it is to parse doesn't matter.

How easy it is to parse does matter, because there’s a definite correlation between how easy it is to parse for the computer and for you. When there are bad corner cases, you either have to learn the rules, or keep on producing erroneous and often-content-destructive formatting.

> How easy it is to extend is largely irrelevant.

If you’re content with stock CommonMark, it is irrelevant to you.

If you want to go beyond that, you’re in for a world of pain and mangled content, content that you often won’t notice is mangled until much later, because there’s generally no meaningful way of sanity-checking stuff.

As soon as you interact with more than one Markdown engine—which is extremely likely to happen, your text editor is probably not using the parser your build tool uses, configured as it is configured—it matters a lot. If you have ever tried migrating from one engine to another on anything beyond the basics, you will have encountered problems because of this.

Arainach · 7 days ago

It's miserable to parse C++ and that's fine, because only a few people have to write a parser while 5 orders of magnitude more have to read and write it. Same thing with markdown - the user experience is what matters.

Edge cases largely don't matter, because again I'm not trying to make a book. I don't care if my table is off by a few pixels. 50% of the time I'm reading markdown it's not even formatted, it's just in raw format in an editor.

Arainach commented on I Prefer RST to Markdown (2024) buttondown.com/hillelwayn... · Posted by u/shlomo_z

Arainach · 7 days ago

Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41120254

Copying my thoughts from there which haven't changed:

>To which I say, are you really going to avoid using a good tool just because it makes you puke? Because looking at it makes your stomach churn? Because it offends every fiber of your being?"

Yes. A thousand times yes. Because the biggest advantage of Markdown is that it's easy to read, and its second-biggest advantage is that it's easy to write. How easy it is to parse doesn't matter. How easy it is to extend is largely irrelevant.

Markdown may or may not be the best tool for writing a book, but Markdown is the best tool for what it does - quickly writing formatted text in a way that is easy to read even for those who are not well versed in its syntax.

I don't want to write a book. If I did I'd use LaTeX before RST. I want something to take notes, make quick documentation and thread comments.

Arainach commented on When Fascism Comes Wrapped in the Flag and Carrying a Cross wisewolfmedia.substack.co... · Posted by u/douchecoded

nailer · 7 days ago

The hacker news guidelines haven’t been enforced for at least a year at this point, but as personal attacks on somebody that wrote that there were was a successful coup in America it’s pretty tame.

Arainach · 7 days ago

Saying someone has "severe brain trauma" is never tame. Particularly for someone who never said "there were was a successful coup in America". The person you responded to said that "the coup leaders won" and they absolutely did. Republicans blocked any meaningful investigation of the attack or significant punishments, and what meager punishments were handed out to a handful of participants were all pardoned, with one of the most egregious participants being placed to a senior position in the Department of Justice while qualified DoJ staff who merely were assigned to investigate were fired. The coup leaders ABSOLUTELY won.