Viewing profile — alynn

Unfortunately this article seems to be written in the same casual polymath style it claims to warn of, with people making broad generalizations without any deep knowledge of what t…

I wasn't aware that CDNs were much cheaper, and am genuinely curious what service you are using at what prices. When I look at AWS pricing, us-east-1 at Should I be looking at a di…

I never would have thought to check the webapp. Grepping for loadProto or .proto" does it. Thanks for sharing.

APFS supports on-disk compression, and the Mac App Store uses that when installing Xcode, so it can be tricky to compare storage amounts. Xcode 11: 10.3GB on disk / 17.1GB apparent…

As someone who’d already been a bit worried about future mass-car hacks, I found the zombie car hacking sequence in 2017's "The Fate of the Furious" particularly terrifying to see …

Thank you so much for posting this link. I already knew he’d written Mono, the open-source implementation of .Net, but am now in awe at seeing his many other accomplishments, such …

> With the US Department of Energy dumping money into SCYL and many in the industry congregating around it, the software front is accelerating rapidly. Anybody know what SCYL is? B…

If you want to compare with the manual process for crossing obstacles, here’s a little buggy with a gasoline motor, with the lineman hoisting it past an insulator with the help of …

I think you’re trying to express skepticism about this claim, but the way that it’s phrased, if the claim were true, directly answering your questions would be to doxx the author o…

By taking down the blog and writing the open letter, Alexander has made it extremely clear what his current anonymity preferences are. It must feel incredibly horrible to be asking…

macOS: /usr/share/misc/units.lib ubuntu: /usr/share/units, after `apt-get install -y units`

I coincidentally came across the following article a few hours after being puzzled by nothal’s comment: https://www.inputmag.com/culture/is-ghislaine-maxwell-secret... Summarizes t…

Have any other sources corroborated this story? Bloomberg News lost a ton of credibility with me after their “The Big Hack” cover story [1], claiming Apple and Amazon had been hack…

The technical deep dive was a great read, thanks! I think it would be a good submission. https://news.ycombinator.com/submit

Programming TypeScript has a section on “Simulating Nominal Types” [1]. You define a type that’s impossible to create naturally, and provide a function that asserts something is of…

Yes, and the medical professionals dealing with this are getting statistics about diagnosis and recovery rates and times by analyzing case histories, not applying estimation formul…

It depends on what the messes are. Separating into different services adds significant overhead to addressing cross-cutting concerns. If the modules of your system are already rela…

A typical UML-bashing article/comment doesn’t suggest some potentially superior alternative, but takes the “everything is awful” stance. The text of the article reads in that same …

Spot on. The metaphor I typically use here is cleaning up a mess vs spreading it around. If you have a really big mess and spend a year or two rearranging it into dozens or hundred…

I used Mathematica’s notebook interface quite heavily 15-20 years ago; Jupyter’s interface is a clone of that in many ways. At the time, my workflow was to use two different notebo…

I don’t believe this is correct; when I look up the details of transmitters, they’re often 100kW+, e.g., https://fccdata.org/?lang=en&facid=62331 for an arbitrary example in Montan…

Yeah, self-configured DNS blocklist. Some of the reasons I’m not a fan of twitter apply to hacker news as well; for example, both can be distracting and contribute to procrastinati…

One great thing about a $99/year ACM membership is that it includes full access to the O’Reilly service formerly known as Safari Books, normally $499/year. I have no idea what the …