pge (u/pge) - Readit News

pge commented on GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation theverge.com/news/757461/... · Posted by u/Handy-Man

gmueckl · 14 days ago

This comment comes some 15 years late. Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.

IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.

They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.

I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open. I probably have missed a few instances.

Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.

pge · 14 days ago

I would add to your list that MSFT also makes decent hardware now - surface laptops and xbox have both done well

pge commented on The Ski Rental Problem lesves.github.io/articles... · Posted by u/skywalqer

svat · 22 days ago

In the secretary problem, you're trying to maximize the probability of selecting the absolutely best candidate. In other words you assume that you “win” if you select the best candidate and “lose” otherwise (even if you end up picking the second best who is almost as good!), and you're trying to maximize the probability of winning. (The optimal solution says you can win with probability 1/e ≈ 37%, meaning that ≈63% of the time you lose!)

This has always seemed the most unsatisfying assumption in the problem to me, with application to no real-life case that I can think of. The Wikipedia article has some stuff on relaxing this assumption, in its section titled “Cardinal payoff variant” (it seems that the optimal at least under one set of assumptions is √n rather than n/e, though those assumptions also seem unrealistic): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Secretary_problem...

pge · 22 days ago

I would add that (having simulated this problem in code myself), the reason you have bad outcomes is that you run out of candidates and take a bad one because you have no choice. In real life, at some point you would grab a decent candidate even if s/he were not as good as a prior passed candidate. It is also true that even under the original assumptions, there is a wide range of thresholds around 1/e that yield a similar outcome.

pge commented on Tour de France confronts a new threat: Are cyclists using tiny motors? washingtonpost.com/world/... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

stefs · a month ago

i'm unconvinced. EPO was undetectable, but not anymore. new undetectable substance would run the risk of being detectable in a few years. who would ignore whistleblowers today? and the USADA did bring the hammer down on LA at some point.

sure, they pay off is high, but the risk - at least in cycling - is even higher, exactly because they've been caught once and now all eyes are on them. if pog gets popped, nobody will trust cycling to be clean ever again; it's hard enough today, as this thread proves.

pge · a month ago

We can agree to disagree. People said cycling would be clean after the '98 Festina affair because all eyes were on them. All that happened was that teams (that could afford it) switched from EPO to blood doping. The next Tour after everyone said the Festina bust had cleaned up cycling was Lance Armstrong's first win (1999).

pge commented on Tour de France confronts a new threat: Are cyclists using tiny motors? washingtonpost.com/world/... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

stefs · a month ago

ah, the magic undetectable drug that's just the right kind of effective without the pesky side effects, which you'd need other undetectable drugs for.

this drug would be worth a lot of money, but we'll keep secret except just for the one top performer, because wide distribution would increase the risk of a leak substantially.

and remember: the top performers getting busted would probably mean the end of pro cycling as we know it for decades. cycling isn't a huge money maker for financial investors like football, rather it's a money pit for sponsors. do sponsors love a podium placement more than being forever associated with dirty cheaters? they'd risk it all for modest gains. a young superstar would trade a life of a good salaried position with some more money but also a high risk of being banned from the sport forever, thus no source of income at all and also the questionable title of being the killer of a whole sport.

so imo: it's possible, but unlikely.

pge · a month ago

I would argue that history suggests this is likely. The dopers have substantially more financial resources than the testers. EPO is a great example. It was widely used in cycling for almost 10 years before tests were developed. It was pretty much a miracle drug from a performance standpoint and undetectable. The very few cyclists that tried to blow the whistle were run out of the sport. Similarly, blood doping was widely used for a decade after the EPO test was developed and no one ratted out the teams doing it until USADA brought the hammer down on Armstrong.

It’s also worth thinking about the incentives to test and catch cheaters. Do the organizers of the Tour de France really want to bust the biggest names in the sport? That would destroy their livelihood. Do the national anti-doping authorities want the athletes from their country busted (look how many national antidopingborgs have successfully appealed adverse rulings through CAS)? It’s in everyone’s best interest to bust a low level doper here and there to make it look like they are watching but to ignore the big names that fans are coming to see. All of this is also why motor doping is unlikely. Motor doping leaves incontrovertible evidence of cheating. Positive drug tests can always be challenged as either inaccurate testing or unintentional contamination.

pge commented on I solved the century-old mystery of a shipwreck survivor thewalrus.ca/empress-of-i... · Posted by u/Thevet

LeifCarrotson · a month ago

A 6km swim in a 78F pool is a common workout.

I've repeatedly swum in Lake Michigan (looking online, it has comparable temps to the St Lawrence in Quebec) as early as Memorial Day. The water temp is often in the mid 50s, very cold even with a full wetsuit, hood, and prep, but feasible as a ritual with which to open the season and start the summer. This year, in May, it was 45F/7C. Insanely, painfully, shockingly, unsafely cold...I decided to break tradition.

In July, a 6km swim could be fun! In May, depending on the climate that year and the swimmer's metabolism and subcutaneous fat levels, it might be survivable. You might lose a few extremities to frostbite. Or it might not be survivable. 1 in 800-something odds, with an athletic 29-year-old being the only survivor, seems reasonable enough.

It is a good tall tale, out on the murky limits of credibility.

pge · a month ago

It's pretty impressive (and not always widely known) how much cold water impairs swimming ability. There are some good videos on this site - coldwatersafety.org - of Coast Guard volunteers trying to swim in 45deg water. They lose motor function before making it 20m or so. Only one is able to make the short distance to shore, and he is one of the largest guys and a professional rescue swimmer. A 6km swim in 45F water for someone that is not wearing protective clothing or well acclimated to cold water is not realistic.

pge commented on Trump administration halts Harvard's ability to enroll international students nytimes.com/2025/05/22/us... · Posted by u/S0y

pge · 3 months ago

The administration’s letter to Harvard (which they later claimed to have sent in error) made it clear that their intent is to root out what they perceive as liberal ideological bias at Harvard - nothing really to do with Israel, that was just an excuse. Whether there is a liberal bias is something I will leave others to debate (and if there is, whether that provides grounds for federal action, given the freedoms afforded by the first amendmemt), but I think the Administration’s actions had more to do with throwing red meat to the base than it did with an factual inquiry

pge commented on The Awful German Language (1880) faculty.georgetown.edu/jo... · Posted by u/nalinidash

Tainnor · 3 months ago

I do think English has deviated more from its Germanic roots due to the pervasive influence of French (there are people who call English a creole although I think that's taking it a bit far).

But I agree that languages with more complex morphology aren't somehow "better", that's just weird elitism coming from an era where every language was analysed as if it were some variant of Latin, Greek or Sanskrit.

pge · 3 months ago

The Norman invasion of England in 1066 led to extensive introduction of French vocabulary into English. That's a large part of the reason English has so many Latin cognates that you don't see in German (and German also has been purged of some Latin cognates at times as well).

pge commented on Why I stopped angel investing after 15 years, and what I'm doing instead halletecco.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/mooreds

bix6 · 4 months ago

SAFEs have also caused so many issues. They’re often poorly priced and can lead to legal issues or frustrations.

pge · 4 months ago

I feel like this is not talked about enough. SAFEs are not the trouble-free investment vehicle that many people seem to think they are.

pge commented on ICE Deports 3 U.S. Citizen Children Held Incommunicado Prior to the Deportation aclu.org/press-releases/i... · Posted by u/mandmandam

clusterfook · 4 months ago

<<Insert Rage>>

But for interesting HN discussion... anyone got any juice on why this is happening. Is there orders going down the chain of command from the president to do this sort of thing. Was this behaviour always there but less reported before? Are they more emboldened by the current environment?

pge · 4 months ago

The current administration has set targets for numbers of people deported(which ICE is currently behind on). That creates an incentive to skip due process in order to get more people deported more quickly (and the awareness that there will no consequences for doing so probably contributes as well)

pge commented on 43-year-old Family Canoe Trip paddlingmag.com/stories/f... · Posted by u/cameron_b

yimby2001 · 5 months ago

I’ve done a lot of canoeing. It doesn’t even seem possible that you could canoe in the Pacific Ocean for any amount of time without being swamped.

pge · 5 months ago

That part of the Pacific is very sheltered by islands so it is often fairly calm. The First Nations people have hunted and traveled in canoes there for many generations (unlike the Inuit on the eastern arctic and in Greenland that used sealed kayaks where the water was rougher).