birn559 (u/birn559) - Readit News

birn559 commented on The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful iflscience.com/the-wow-si... · Posted by u/toss1

schneems · 10 hours ago

The somewhat counterintuitive rules for the best expected strategy to repeated conflicts:

- Nice

- Friendly

- Retaliatory/provokable

- Clear

https://youtu.be/mScpHTIi-kM At 15:00 in.

birn559 · 10 hours ago

Largely depends on the parameters. I believe it also assumes infinite resources. In general it's a very simple model not meant to explain all and everything.

birn559 commented on The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful iflscience.com/the-wow-si... · Posted by u/toss1

moomoo11 · 12 hours ago

Either way, I really hope that we establish contact with aliens in my lifetime. Hopefully they're chill, and like us lol.

birn559 · 10 hours ago

They can't be chill and like us at the same time. Chilled aliens most likely don't invent faster than light travel so I pretty much hope aliens won't find us or are not interested in us.

birn559 commented on Mathematical secrets of ancient tablet unlocked after nearly a century of study (2017) theguardian.com/science/2... · Posted by u/surement

numpy-thagoras · 2 days ago

Read Wildberger if you want to know what he thinks.

I can tell you that it is the output of a function, not a distinct entity that exists on its own independently of the computation.

The whole point is that as a theory for the foundations of mathematics, you do not need to assume numbers with infinitely long decimal expansions in order to do math.

birn559 · 2 days ago

> I can tell you that it is the output of a function, not a distinct entity that exists on its own independently of the computation.

Could you elaborate? What is the output of that function if not an entity in it's own? Having studied math with philosophiy minor long time ago I am curious.

birn559 commented on A visual history of Visual C++ (2017) malsmith.net/blog/visual-... · Posted by u/rayanboulares

birn559 · 4 days ago

When / How did versioning enter versioning the awkward state we have today? There is cl.exe, MSBuild and build chain at the very least (now at work computer at the moment, pretty sure I am wrong with the making here) with versioning that is close enough to each other to be confusing and related to each other in word ways. Naming itself also feels confusing to me. Documentation also only helps when you already have a good idea what's going on.

birn559 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

guappa · 5 days ago

well I don't speak german, I was asking

birn559 · 5 days ago

I see, wasn't clear to me on what level you were asking. The letter ß has never been generally equivalent to ss in the German language.

From a user experience perspective though it might be beneficial to pretend that "ß" == "ss" holds when parsing user input.

birn559 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

CorrectHorseBat · 5 days ago

>also believe parent is wrong as there are unambiguous rules about when to use ß or ss.

I never said it was ambiguous, I said it depends on the unicode version and the font you are using. How is that wrong? (Seems like the capital of ß is still SS in the latest unicode but since ẞ is the preferred capital version now this should change in the future)

birn559 · 5 days ago

> How is that wrong? Not sure where, how or if it's defined as part of Unicode, but so far I assumed that for a Unicode grapheme there exists a notion of what the visual representation should look like. If Unicode still defines capital of ß as SS that's an error in Unicode due to slow adaption of the changes in the German language.

birn559 commented on Go is still not good blog.habets.se/2025/07/Go... · Posted by u/ustad

roncesvalles · 5 days ago

I've always thought the point of the string type was for indexing. One index of a string is always one character, but characters are sometimes composed of multiple bytes.

birn559 · 5 days ago

You can't do that in a performant way and going that route can lead to problems, because characters (= graphemes in the language of Unicode) generally don't always behave as developers assume.

birn559 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

guappa · 5 days ago

should "ß" == "ss" evaluate as true?

birn559 · 5 days ago

I don't see why it should. I also believe parent is wrong as there are unambiguous rules about when to use ß or ss.

Never thought of it but maybe there are rules that allow to visually present the code point for ß as ss? At least (from experience as a user) there seem to be a singular "ss" codepoint.

birn559 commented on Why I'm all-in on Zen Browser werd.io/why-im-all-in-on-... · Posted by u/benwerd

williamscales · 8 days ago

In my recollection, Firefox used to ask you which profile you wanted to use on launch. I don't think I've seen that in years.

birn559 · 8 days ago

You can decide if you want to get asked at startup.

birn559 commented on BBC witnesses settlers attack on Palestinian farm in West Bank bbc.com/news/articles/cew... · Posted by u/mhga

birn559 · 8 days ago

HN (to me) has always mostly been about the other 5%.

u/birn559

KarmaCake day151May 21, 2025View Original