RcouF1uZ4gsC (u/RcouF1uZ4gsC)

RcouF1uZ4gsC commented on It’s not wrong that "\u{1F926}\u{1F3FC}\u200D\u2642\uFE0F".length == 7 (2019) hsivonen.fi/string-length... · Posted by u/program

estimator7292 · a day ago

Stuff like this makes me so glad that in my world strings are ALWAYS ASCII and one char is always one byte. Unicode simply doesn't exist and all string manipulation can be done with a straightforward for loop or whatever.

Dealing with wide strings sounds like hell to me. Right up there with timezones. I'm perfectly happy with plain C in the embedded world.

RcouF1uZ4gsC · a day ago

That English can be well represented with ASCII may have contributed to America becoming an early computing powerhouse. You could actually do things like processing and sorting and doing case insensitive comparisons on data likes names and addresses very cheaply.

RcouF1uZ4gsC commented on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' theregister.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/JustExAWS

cambaceres · 2 days ago

> “I think the skills that should be emphasized are how do you think for yourself? How do you develop critical reasoning for solving problems? How do you develop creativity? How do you develop a learning mindset that you're going to go learn to do the next thing?”

In the Swedish schoolsystem, the idea for the past 20 years has been exactly this, that is to try to teach critical thinking, reasoning, problem solving etc rather than hard facts. The results has been...not great. We discovered that reasoning and critical thinking is impossible without a foundational knowledge about what to be critical about. I think the same can be said about software development.

RcouF1uZ4gsC · a day ago

Here is the thing though.

You can’t teach critical thinking like that.

You need to teach hard facts and then people can learn critical thinking inductively from the hard facts with some help.

RcouF1uZ4gsC commented on IQ tests results for AI trackingai.org/home... · Posted by u/stared

gpt5 · 7 days ago

The way human IQ testing developed is that researchers noticed people who excel in one cognitive task tend to do well in others - the “positive manifold.”

They then hypothesized a general factor, “g,” to explain this pattern. Early tests (e.g., Binet–Simon; later Stanford–Binet and Wechsler) sampled a wide range of tasks, and researchers used correlations and factor analysis to extract the common component, then norm it around 100 with a SD of 15 and call it IQ.

IQ tend to meaningfully predicts performance across some domains especially education and work, and shows high test–retest stability from late adolescence through adulthood. It is also tend to be consistent between high quality tests, despite a wide variety of testing methods.

It looks like this site just uses human rated public IQ tests. But it would have been more interesting if an IQ test was developed specifically for AI. I.e. a test that would aim to Factor out the strength of a model general cognitive ability across a wide variety of tasks. It is probably doable by doing principal component analysis on a large set of benchmarks available today.

RcouF1uZ4gsC · 6 days ago

Good point.

There is probably a correlation between how fast a human can do math problems and how intelligent they are in general.

But a very trivial python program running on a normal computer will beat the fastest human at math problems in terms of speed. Even though it does nothing else useful

RcouF1uZ4gsC commented on Greystar Makes Deal with DOJ to Settle Price-Fixing Claims in RealPage Case propublica.org/article/gr... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo

RcouF1uZ4gsC · 10 days ago

Is this at all similar to how companies share salary data with a third-party firm and then use that firm's data to determine how much they will pay their employees?

RcouF1uZ4gsC commented on The value of institutional memory timharford.com/2025/05/th... · Posted by u/leoc

RcouF1uZ4gsC · 12 days ago

This misses something very important.

Institutional memory is not information or documents - it's people.

Every single real-world process has implicit knowledge. And you can't always capture that knowledge of paper.

But, many corporations seem to want to get rid of their most experienced people to save money and have better quarterly results for the stock market.

RcouF1uZ4gsC commented on Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords blog.danielh.cc/blog/pass... · Posted by u/max__dev

DecoPerson · 17 days ago

The attack pattern is:

1) User goes to BAD website and signs up.

2) BAD website says “We’ve sent you an email, please enter the 6-digit code! The email will come from GOOD, as they are our sign-in partner.”

3) BAD’s bots start a “Sign in with email one-time code” flow on the GOOD website using the user’s email.

4) GOOD sends a one-time login code email to the user’s email address.

5) The user is very likely to trust this email, because it’s from GOOD, and why would GOOD send it if it’s not a proper login?

6) User enters code into BAD’s website.

7) BAD uses code to login to GOOD’s website as the user. BAD now has full access to the user’s GOOD account.

This is why “email me a one-time code” is one of the worst authentication flows for phishing. It’s just so hard to stop users from making this mistake.

“Click a link in the email” is a tiny bit better because it takes the user straight to the GOOD website, and passing that link to BAD is more tedious and therefore more suspicious. However, if some popular email service suddenly decides your login emails or the login link within should be blocked, then suddenly many of your users cannot login.

Passkeys is the way to go. Password manager support for passkeys is getting really good. And I assure you, all passkeys being lost when a user loses their phone is far, far better than what’s been happening with passwords. I’d rather granny needs to visit the bank to get access to her account again, than someone phishes her and steals all her money.

RcouF1uZ4gsC · 16 days ago

> 1) User goes to BAD website and signs up.

I think this is what Raymond Chen calls the other side of the airtight hatch.

The game is already over. The user is already convinced the BAD website is the good website. The BAD website could just ask the user for the email and password already and the user would directly provide it. The email authenticaton flow doesn’t introduce any new vulnerability and in fact, may reduce it if the user actually signs in via a link in the email.

RcouF1uZ4gsC commented on Using drone imagery and AI to rapidly assess damage after hurricanes and floods stories.tamu.edu/news/202... · Posted by u/rbanffy

imoverclocked · 19 days ago

I love that we are doing this but I hate that we aren't fixing the root cause of most natural disasters we will be seeing in the coming centuries.

RcouF1uZ4gsC · 19 days ago

Is it really most disasters as in more than 50%?

Aren’t earthquakes completely unrelated to climate change?

And hurricanes have happened long before climate change.

And flooding.

No matter what, this is a good technology to have and develop.

RcouF1uZ4gsC commented on Felix Baumgartner, who jumped from stratosphere, dies in Italy theinternational.at/felix... · Posted by u/signa11

RcouF1uZ4gsC · a month ago

> Baumgartner lost control of his motorized paraglider due to a sudden illness and crashed into a hotel pool.

He may have died while paragliding rather than from paragliding.

A heart attack or stroke could have been the actual cause of death

RcouF1uZ4gsC commented on Features of D That I Love bradley.chatha.dev/blog/d... · Posted by u/vips7L

RcouF1uZ4gsC · 2 months ago

The reason that D did not replace C++, IMO is garbage collection.

D was so far ahead of C++98 that it wasn't funny, but garbage collection kept it from being able to be used in the same niche.

D has gotten less dependent on garbage collection but

C++11 (and then 17, 20, 26 (reflection)) have closed the gap enough that it is not the quantum leap that it once was.

RcouF1uZ4gsC commented on Astronomers discover 3I/ATLAS – Third interstellar object to visit Solar System abc.net.au/news/science/2... · Posted by u/gammarator

ddahlen · 2 months ago

This one is coming in fast, it has an eccentricity of over 6 with the current fits. For point of reference, 1I and 2I have eccentricities of 1.2 and 3.3.

Right now it is mostly just a point on the sky, it is difficult to tell if it is active (like a comet) yet. If it is not active, IE: asteroid like, then the current observations put it somewhere between 8-22km in diameter (this depends on the albedo of the surface). From what we know, we would expect it to likely be made up of darker material meaning given that range of diameters it is more likely to be on the larger end. However if it is active, then the dust coming off can make it appear much larger than it is. As it comes in closer to the sun and starts to warm up it may become active (or more active if its already doing stuff).

It will not pass particularly close to any planet. It will be closest to the sun just before Halloween this year at 1.35 au, moving at 68 km/s (earth orbits at 29-30 km/s). It is also retrograde (IE, it is moving in the opposite direction of planetary motion), for an interstellar object this is basically random chance that this is the case.

Link to an orbit viewer: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=3I&vi...

The next couple of weeks will be interesting for a bunch of people I know.

Source: Working on my PhD in orbital dynamics and formerly wrote the asteroid simulation code used on several NASA missions: https://github.com/dahlend/kete

RcouF1uZ4gsC · 2 months ago

> Source: Working on my PhD in orbital dynamics and formerly wrote the asteroid simulation code used on several NASA missions:

This is one of the big reasons I love HN