magila (u/magila) - Readit News

magila commented on NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/magicalist

beej71 · 7 months ago

Every DEI program I've ever been involved in has been 100% about selecting people _purely_ on merit. Not race, not gender, not whether or not they're trans. The DEI trainings are about completely ignoring those factors when hiring. I'm curious what they call your trainings on the matter.

magila · 7 months ago

My experience is that discrimination in hiring is never openly advocated for obvious reasons. Instead you get what could be called "stochastic discrimination" where there is pressure to "increase diversity" without elaboration on how that should be achieved in the face of a not so diverse pool of qualified candidates.

magila commented on The GPU, not the TPM, is the root of hardware DRM mjg59.dreamwidth.org/7095... · Posted by u/DvdGiessen

jsheard · a year ago

I think there's some kind of watermarking going on, so once a rip is released to the public they can trace it back to which device keys were used to decrypt it.

magila · a year ago

Watermarking was a problem when Widevine L1 was first introduced. Pirates seem to have found a way to scrub the watermark from their releases. Either that or someone is burning a _lot_ of cash on playback hardware judging from the rate of 4K WEB-DL releases.

magila commented on Reaching the Unix philosophy's logical extreme with WebAssembly xeiaso.net/talks/unix-phi... · Posted by u/xena

ilaksh · 2 years ago

Wasn't there some kind of components proposal that would let modules written in different languages running in web assembly interop with each other?

WASI is great but there was an opportunity to standardize on something much more powerful.

Anyway I think the logical extreme of Unix philosophy started with Unix, moved on to Plan 9, and continued to improve from there. It's just that those further advancements are less popular and well known.

An old-fashioned file is not the logical extreme of anything. Not that it isn't useful or interesting.

I stead we don't even have a good way to do any kind of networking.

magila · 2 years ago

The WASM Component Model

https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model

magila commented on Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf ericdraken.com/pfsense-de... · Posted by u/rolph

kl4m · 2 years ago

Creator gets 55% of ad revenue, and 70% of direct contributions like superchats. Premium revenue is shared as well. Ad-blocked views count for analytics but not in ad impressions.

magila · 2 years ago

Source? I've seen a variety of claims about the revshare split on youtube, but I've never seen any official source of those numbers.

magila commented on Cloudflare Registrar now supports .dev domains twitter.com/eastdakota/st... · Posted by u/seized

throitallaway · 2 years ago

Especially considering that their core product is MITM.

magila · 2 years ago

I've never quite understood this idea that Cloudflare is an MITM. An MITM is by definition a covert intermediary. Cloudflare is a service provider that's deliberately employed by a site operator. If CF is a MITM then so is AWS, GCP, and every other CDN service provider.

magila commented on Numbering Should Start at Zero cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/t... · Posted by u/miqkt

drbaba · 2 years ago

> Computing the bounded index from an arbitrary index is simply i % c with zero based indexing, but becomes (i-1) % c + 1 with one based indexing.

Arguably, this is because the common definition of modular arithmetic is itself zero-based: “modulo N” maps all integers into the numbers [0,N-1]. It is fully possible to define a “%” operator that instead mapped the integers into the range [1,N], which might be more natural in 1-based languages?

magila · 2 years ago

Great, now you've messed up all the other math that uses the modulo operator. The mathematical operators behave the way they do for well established reasons that long predate the invention of computers. It's going to be a tough sell to get everyone to adopt a wholesale refactoring of modulo arithmetic (and likely number theory in general) just for the "convenience" of one based indexing.

magila commented on Numbering Should Start at Zero cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/t... · Posted by u/miqkt

FullyFunctional · 2 years ago

Once you flatten multidimensional arrays the folly of starting at 1 becomes apparent (much like mathematics got so much simpler when we switched to logarithms with the "obvious" log a + log b = log ab which was a breakthrough at the time).

If you have a two dimensional array A (1..N X 1..M), then flattening it becomes A[i][j] = flat[i + (j-1) * N]

Continuing to higher dimensions it only gets uglier.

0-based arrays are far simpler. When flattening A (0..N-1 X 0..M-1) A[i][j] becomes flat[i + N * j].

It's completely analogous to how our base-10 positional system works. Each digit doesn't start at 1, they start at 0, which is why 237 is just 2*10^2 + 3*10^1 + 7*10^0.

ADD: TIL HN supports escaping the astrix.

magila · 2 years ago

In fact the vast majority of algorithms which involve doing computation on indexes beyond increment/decrement are naturally implemented with zero-based indexing. When using ones based indexing you end up having to convert to zero based, do the computation, then convert back to one based.

Another common example of this is circular buffers. Computing the bounded index from an arbitrary index is simply i % c with zero based indexing, but becomes (i-1) % c + 1 with one based indexing.

magila commented on Asus Zenfone 10 asus.com/mobile-handhelds... · Posted by u/ksec

klausa · 2 years ago

I find the regularly scheduled "ooh, a small(er) phone" HN posts very amusing.

Hundreds of comments from nerds with niche obsessions and preferences yelling into the ether about "why won't anyone make this?!".

Inevitably followed up by seven replies crying out for other, mutually exclusive, similarly niche nitpicks.

magila · 2 years ago

I'd be willing to overlook a lot for a new Android phone with dimensions similar to the Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact. The market for small Android phones is extremely thin right now. There are only two phones which can run Android 13 and are less than 145 mm tall, and they're both less than a year away from EoL (Pixel 4a and Pixel 5).

magila commented on XTS-210 25hp rotary engine; 1/5th size/weight of diesel piston engines greencarcongress.com/2023... · Posted by u/mpweiher

inamberclad · 3 years ago

Nit: it's not a turboprop if it's no longer using a turbine.

magila · 3 years ago

It's also not a turboprop if it's using a ducted fan. Chuck keeps using that word, I do not think it means what he thinks it means.