A reverse engineer friend once taught me I could patch an x86 function with `0xEBFE` to get the CPU to spin forever. It wasn’t until much later that I understood that (IIRC) 0xEB is the “single byte” jump instruction and that of course 0xFE is -1 as a signed byte. Hence the spin.
Readit Newsryanschneider commented on x86 architecture 1 byte opcodes sandpile.org/x86/opc_1.ht... · Posted by u/eklitzke
ryanschneider commented on Frozen DuckLakes for Multi-User, Serverless Data Access ducklake.select/2025/10/2... · Posted by u/g0xA52A2A
Even cooler, let's say you need to "update" a subset of your parquet files after they are written. Once you have your parquet files in a ducklake, you can "virtually" update them (the files themselves aren't touched, just new ones created). Something like:
- create your frozen ducklake
- run whatever "normal" mutation query you want to run (DELETE, UPDATE, MERGE INTO)
- use `ducklake_rewrite_data_files` to make new files w/ mutations applied, then optionally run `ducklake_merge_adjacent_files` to compact the files as well (though this might cause all files to change).
- call `ducklake_list_files` to get the new set of active files.
- update your upstream "source of truth" with this new list, optionally deleting any files no longer referenced.
The net result should be that any files "touched" by your updates will have new updated versions alongside them, while any that were unchanged should just be returned in the list files operation as is.
ryanschneider commented on Notion's mid-life crisis jjinux.com/2024/09/notion... · Posted by u/krishna2
Not that I expect them to fix it at this point since it seems to be a known issue, but just in case anyone from Notion is watching please fix the macOS app’s CPU usage. On a brand new M3 MacBook Pro each tab takes about 10% of one core _non-stop_ even in the background. I have to constantly cull tabs or my machine becomes noticeably less responsive.
ryanschneider commented on Show HN: Wadzilla. Play DOOM in Zork github.com/scottvr/wadzil... · Posted by u/ycombiredd
This seems interesting to me in the context of ML research (not that I know anything about that). We have generative AI and this is sort-of the reverse doing compression like turning an interactive movie into an interactive book. I know it's reading the code of the graphics, but that could serve as labelled data for training image to text generation. Image to text isn't new, but if the sequences of images to text could tell a coherent story that could be interesting. Perhaps we need many people playing Doom with running commentary on the evolving story for data.
Or we could do the same for an adventure game which has more story than Doom.
It’s fun to guess what something is on HN just from the title before going there or the comments. In this case my guess was that someone was
- rendering Doom then using an LLM to get a text description of the scene
- asking the user what to do
- converting their text action into a couple seconds of doom input
- re-render and repeat until dead or stage clear.
I was wrong but still fun to think about!
I really thought this was going to be a new LLM-backed GOOG-411 type thing.
ryanschneider commented on Desperately Trying to Fathom the Coffeepocalypse Argument astralcodexten.com/p/desp... · Posted by u/feross
Right. There is no proof on either side—either that AI is capable of organically morphing into a super-intelligence or that it inherently isn’t. It’s not formal. It’s people burning cycles telling each other about their intrinsic risk tolerance.
Aha! This post finally made it click for me that that is exactly what’s going on, thanks for putting it so succinctly.
I think one of the big differences between AI and most other previous technologies is that the potential impact different people envision is very high variance, anywhere from extremely negative to positive with almost all points in between as well.
So it’s not just different risk tolerances its also that different people see the risks and rewards very differently.
Have you had this for a long time, or are you speculating that it’s the type of software you like?
This looks very cool to me, though. If you have used it, can you share how you’ve used the generated diagrams? I can imagine a screenshot of the diagram, but the raw text would probably be too big in (e.g. a terminal).
As other have mentioned I’ve used it for diagrams in code comments and READMEs (before GH added mermaid integration).
Making readable diagrams with 80 character width can be a challenge.
I bought it back in either late 2017 or early 2018 and used it a fair amount at first but will admit it’s been a couple years since and haven’t tried reinstalling since my last clean OS wipe.
ryanschneider commented on Nebula Genomics – First to offer consumer anonymous sequencing nebula.org/anonymous-seq/... · Posted by u/all2
If you have a publicly available photo of yourself (e.g. public social media), it's possible to match that to your genomic sequence. I.e. you already have to be anonymous online to have a chance that a private company cannot reidentify you.
Seems like the technique only works in highly controlled scenarios (e.g. you have tens of phenotypes and images and want to have a better than random chance of assigning one to the other):
> Nevertheless, re-identification risk in the wild does not appear to be especially high. While we observe a success rate as high as 25%, this is only achieved when the genomic dataset is extremely small, on the order of 10 individuals. In contrast, success rate for top 1 matching drops quickly and is negligible for populations of more than 100 individuals. Moreover, it should be kept in mind that this result assumes that we can predict the phenotypes perfectly.
I just wish they would make more compact shows that tell their entire story in a single self contained season. If 1899 for example had only been given a single season from the outset it actually might’ve been a much better show.
ryanschneider commented on A Brief History of Tricky Mathematical Tiling quantamagazine.org/a-brie... · Posted by u/ColinWright
Anyone interested in tiling and science fiction should absolutely read Anathem by Neal Stephenson, it’s an excellent book that does an unexpectedly deep dive into tiling mathematics.
I just took a break from reading a scene from Anathem revolving around tiling and came across this thread. :)
This sort of “HN coincidence” has happened to me several times this week, is there a term for it I don’t know?