randomsilence (u/randomsilence)

randomsilence commented on James Webb telescope's coldest instrument reaches operating temperature phys.org/news/2022-04-jam... · Posted by u/wglb

WJW · 4 years ago

Hmmm. It would be cool to discover that, but also pretty worrying. Any civilization powerful enough to build a megastructure could wipe out humanity without any effort whatsoever, so we'd have to hope they are friendly enough not to do so.

randomsilence · 4 years ago

Nature could act as a filter. If you reach industrial production and you destroy nature, your entire planet may die. So only civilizations that have some level of respect for life itself may pass the barrier where they can build megastructures and reach other planets.

randomsilence commented on Ask HN: How can this happen without the phone covertly listening? · Posted by u/MobileVet

randomsilence · 4 years ago

Do all participants have iPhones?

Apple could have an almost complete social graph. If Y Smith is the common acquaintance between you and your friend, then it would be the best second suggestion if you want to share something in that part of your social graph.

randomsilence commented on The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten quuxplusone.github.io/blo... · Posted by u/db48x

teaearlgraycold · 4 years ago

I YOLO’d the Google interview two times. First time I failed. Second time I somehow passed. It can be done. Might have gotten a higher level with studying but I don’t think I would have ever studied.

randomsilence · 4 years ago

Off-topic: If YOLO and you want to join Google, wouldn't that be motivation to study?

randomsilence commented on My Life as a Mentalist zocalopublicsquare.org/20... · Posted by u/crapvoter

randomsilence · 4 years ago

>and psychokinesis (which consists of effects like metal bending). Can I bend cutlery and coins? Sure, but I heed Cassidy’s advice, and I don’t. If I step onstage and bend a fork with my brain, it makes everything too unbelievable. “You can pick up on thoughts and you can bend spoons?” an audience member might say, the seeds of suspicion creeping in.

So why does he not heed the advice for the article itself?

I think this is the core sentence of the article:

>My wife volunteered in a couple more demonstrations, and I knew she wasn’t in league with the mentalist. (Or, perhaps she was, which would explain our eventual divorce.)

He still doesn't know and he has spent all his life to find out.

>I probably acquired close to a thousand books on mentalism, and several hundred videos.

randomsilence commented on Show HN: How to compile C/C++ for WASM, pure Clang, no libs, no framework github.com/ern0/howto-was... · Posted by u/ern0

hobo_mark · 4 years ago

That's fast! But it looks like it still needs a server, and I'd rather avoid giving the internet arbitrary code execution rights to some server I pay for and risk having my bill explode or my account terminated for abuse.

randomsilence · 4 years ago

Choose a supplier with a 100Mbit limit and unlimited bandwidth.

randomsilence commented on Show HN: How to compile C/C++ for WASM, pure Clang, no libs, no framework github.com/ern0/howto-was... · Posted by u/ern0

hobo_mark · 4 years ago

That is half of what I would need for a project, the other half being Clang itself running in the browser (to use for teaching). In theory there is [1] since many years, but in practice it never worked for me (even now I get "Runtime error: memory access out of bounds").

[1] https://tbfleming.github.io/cib/

randomsilence · 4 years ago

Do you know https://webassembly-studio.kamenokosoft.com/ ?

I don't know if it compiles in the browser or on a server.

randomsilence commented on I liked the idea of carbon offsets until I tried to explain it climateer.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/gk1

randomsilence · 4 years ago

>Some offsets may come down in price due to economies of scale, but they will never be cheaper than “no offset”

There is one: pricing carbons out of the energy market.

If there is e.g. so much progress in carbon fibers that all construction is done with carbon, then all available carbon will be used for that and nobody will waste it to create energy.

Cement will cease to be used because there is not enough rough sand available. If carbon fibers replace that usage, emissions will be stopped.

It's actually stupid to store CO2 in saline storage because in 20 years or so, we will pay good money to get it back.

It should be possible to calculate the price of carbon in 100 years when each of the 10 billion global citizens demands their share of carbon. Offering investment opportunities now in a venture that stores carbon e.g. in the arctics like people store aluminum in the Mexican desert, should provide the funds to create extraction technologies and facilities to make carbon emissions a non-issue.

*edit: Looking at wikipedia, this doesn't make sense. There are 54tonnes available per person.

Maybe humanity has to grow to 1000 billion people to question carbon emissions.

>Proven sources of natural gas are about 175×1012 cubic metres (containing about 105 gigatonnes of carbon), but studies estimate another 900×1012 cubic metres of "unconventional" deposits such as shale gas, representing about 540 gigatonnes of carbon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon

randomsilence commented on What if Sun Microsystems acquired Apple in 1996? alternatehistory.com/foru... · Posted by u/Apocryphon

DonHopkins · 4 years ago

I used to wonder about that at the time, but they would have both wanted to be in the driver's seat, and it simply wouldn't have worked.

But the world would have been a better place if IBM had bought Sun instead of Oracle.

Which bring me to this old joke:

Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?

A: IBM.

randomsilence · 4 years ago

IBM has Eclipse. Not only is it an underhanded offense towards Sun, but IBM has shown that they are not willing to push the software to its best possible state. Eclipse is nice but JetBrains' products and Visual Studio Code are nicer.

IBM is struggling with cloud computing. Adding SUN, they would have tried to turn it into a SPARK offer and burned much more resources.

Both SUN and IBM couldn't continue as before. How could IBM have used SUN to create something better?

At SUN's scale, there was no way forward for their OS or their chips. They were too late in open sourcing their OS, which could have created the market for their chips. Oracle did what SUN's management should have done years before.

In my opinion, Steve Jobs chose to build consumer products because that brings the scale to produce chips. It's in IBM's name to serve businesses, not consumers. The cultural change to create the foundation for SUN's hardware business is almost impossible to pull off.

I would like to argue that the world is a better place because Oracle is maintaining Java, something that SUN didn't fully achieve.

Instead of browsers and Javascript, we could have a jvm everywhere. We are building the full stack with technologies like react and virtual DOMs anyway. It's too late for that, but it's in Oracle's own interest to make Java shine.

randomsilence commented on The Joy of Small Projects schroer.ca/2022/04/10/the... · Posted by u/dschroer

ransom1538 · 4 years ago

My last projects were controversial. lol. Finished it in 3?ish days. Ruby/Rails/mysql. The elevator pitch: "You place your github project on the site, you rate atleast 5 people's github project, people will view and rate your github project ". It was a fun way to view rando github projects and share feedback.

Github security reached out. Banned. All accounts locked. Creepy lawyer emails. Threats. Then i remembered we are in a closed garden now. It isn't 1998.

Then I was like oh! I will try another one. What if we allow people to automatically delete comments under 0 points on HN. I had a simple script anyone could run on their laptop. Posting was Flagged. Removed from front page in 10 minutes.

randomsilence · 4 years ago

HN makes sense because votes shouldn't decide about the value of a comment. That's why the votes are hidden. You would destroy threads where people reply to your 'bad' comments.

Github on the other hand doesn't make sense at all. People participate voluntarily. Which infringement did the lawyers bring up?

This is still such a nice idea. Have you considered relaunching it with gitlab and sourcehut?

*edit: You have pitched your project differently: "Show HN: Give and Get more GitHub stars" [1]

That's ranking manipulation. No social network can tolerate that. I would restart the project and keep the ranking on my site. People will still benefit because their projects get known. Additionally, they will receive genuine stars from the people who discovered and liked their projects.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17593827

randomsilence commented on My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing castel.dev/post/research-... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

rcap · 4 years ago

Author here, if you have any questions, feel free to ask them.

It really is amazing how hard it is just to retrieve the currently opened pdf file and its page number in a pdf viewer. Some pdf viewers (Like Zathura) provide this via DBus, but even very common ones like Evince don't. I managed to find a way using gvfs, although it's a bit of a hack.

For others (e.g. Mendeley), I have no idea on how to do this... Anybody have ideas? it is Qt based, maybe I can hook into that via some debugging tool?

randomsilence · 4 years ago

Have you tried contacting the developers? This seems like a feature that every pdf viewer should have.