lilyball

Joined 17 years ago

Karma
19,295
Submissions
6,771
Member since
May 8
My opinions are my own and do not reflect those of my employer

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/lilyball; my proof: https://keybase.io/lilyball/sigs/okmRsMzqujmfu5cZO3uh8L1hmbSarnLcQJTjev7R60c ]

View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 6 months ago
At the very least the author's submission and follow-ups to Product Security looks written by AI.
Comment · 7 months ago
This claim sounds vaguely familiar to me (though the documentation on Dictionary does not state any reason for why the iteration order is unpredictable), though the more common reason for languages to have unstable hash table iteration orders is as a consequence of protection against hash flooding, malicious input causing all keys to hash to the same bucket (because iteration order is dependent on bucket order).
Comment · 7 months ago
> If you formalize, you'll end up with one rigorous definition

Can't you just formalize both definitions and pick the one to work with based on what you want to do? Surely the only obstacle here is the time and effort it takes to write the formalization?

Or, alternatively, just because you've formalized the advanced calculus version doesn't mean you need to use the formalization when teaching basic calculus. The way we've proven something and the way we teach that something don't have to be the same.

Comment · 7 months ago
"View types" addresses one of the top pain points of the borrow checker, which is disjoint borrows on a single value. The compiler can understand values where only some fields are borrowed, so e.g. you can mutably borrow the currently-unborrowed fields, but there's no way to write these partial borrows and so you cannot write functions that either take or return these borrows. This often means having to restructure code to split up one struct into several child structs just to be able to borrow those substructs independently.
Comment · 8 months ago
The argument against PRNGs this paper makes isn't that the PRNG produces results that can be distinguished from TRNG, but that the 256-bit seed deterministically chooses a single shuffling. If you need 300 bits to truly shuffle the assignment but you only have 256 bits, then that's a lot of potential assignments that can never actually happen. With this argument it doesn't matter what the PRNG is, the fact that it's deterministic is all that matters. And this invalidates the p-value because the p-value assumes that all possible assignments are equiprobable, when in fact a lot of possible assignments have a probability of zero.

I imagine you could change the p-value test to randomly sample assignments generated via the exact same process that was used to generate the assignment used by the experiment, and as you run more and more iterations of this the calculated p-value should converge to the correct value, but then the question becomes is the p-value calculated this way the same as the p-value you'd get if you actually went ahead and used equiprobable assignment to begin with?

Ultimately, this all comes down to the fact that it's not hard to use true randomness for the whole thing, and true randomness produces statistically valid results, if you use true randomness for assignment then you can't screw up the p-value test, and so there's no reason at all to even consider how to safely use a PRNG here, all that does is open the door to messing up.

Comment · 8 months ago
This sounds nice, but since you're talking about using it with agents, to what extent was AI used to actually write the app?
Comment · 9 months ago
For new implementations, sure. But it's harder to change existing implementations (anything not already CommonMark-compatible will introduce unexpected changes to existing content if you switch to CommonMark), and especially for anything that's not being actively developed it's unlikely to ever change.
Comment · 9 months ago
Not all markdown implementations are CommonMark
Comment · 9 months ago
Apple Keychain syncing is end-to-end encrypted, Apple cannot see the contents of your synced keychain.
Comment · 11 months ago
Is it? Why? If a NixOS module doesn’t support what you need, you can just write your own module, and the module system lets you disable existing modules if you need to. Doing anything custom this way still feels easier than doing it in an imperative world.
Comment · 11 months ago
In Pattern: Defensively Handle Constructors, it recommends using a nested inner module with a private Seal type. But the Seal type is unnecessary. The nested inner module is all you need, a private field `_private: ()` is only settable from within that inner module, so you don't need the extra private type.
Comment · 11 months ago
I haven't used Homebrew in a long time, but if I ever did it would be in the way that you describe (so far I've always found reasonable alternatives for the software I want). What I'm wondering is if this is entirely to support unsigned casks, why does Homebrew not simply resign the software itself at install time with an adhoc signature as though it had just built it?
Comment · 1 year ago
If you don't use ANC, then why is an ANC issue that only appears on flights a reason for you to not buy a product? If someone said they have weird ears and the AirPods Pro 3 simply doesn't fit their ears, would that be a reason for you to not buy it even though it fits yours?
Comment · 1 year ago
I'm fascinated by ASN.1, I don't know why it appeals to me so much but I find working with it oddly fun. I've always wanted to find the time to write an ASN.1 compiler for Rust, because for some reason all of the Rust implementations I've seen end up just either being derive macros on Rust structs (so going the other direction), or even just providing a bunch of ASN.1 types and functions and expecting you to manually chain them together using nom.
Comment · 1 year ago
LaunchDaemons don't rely on GUI login state so they should come up. If you use LaunchAgents then they won't start this way, but LaunchDaemons should be enabled once the data volume is unlocked and booting finishes.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton