Viewing profile — nialo

In case anyone here hasn't seen it, I want to share this very cool youtube series of an Australian clock maker creating a replica of the Antikythera device using only tools believe…

I want to second this, I worked as a mechanical engineer and never had accurate time estimates there either. Estimates of how long the work will take will be wrong whenever there a…

I spent some time helping someone get this set up for their music group, and it's really really nice just as a voice chat program. It's amazing how much of the unpleasantness of so…

The vague impression I get is that maybe the answer is "Because Apple's software people and chip design people are in the same company, they did a better job of coordinating to mak…

I have walked out of pharmacies without buying Sudafed that I would have wanted because the "ask for a pack of Sudafed" step was too uncomfortable. Buying liquor is easier because …

I work on another music file management system, my personal special hell is playlist files. An m3u playlist file is just a new-line separated list of file paths, which can be relat…

I switched also recently, the thing that helped me was adding this: alias rg='rg -S' to my .bashrc so that rg had the same default case sensitivity as ag.

In the spirit of learning about these things, you might want to try these: https://cryptopals.com/ In particular, problem number 17 from set 3 is an attack against CBC mode AES use…

CVD in general is slow and time consuming, but because graphene is just one atom thick growing graphene specifically might not be too bad. Also the process gas/chemistry requiremen…

Asking honestly because I would like to know: What is wrong with writing a state machine using gotos? Assuming that one is solving a problem that definitely needs a state machine f…

Do you know if this is still true with the newer "concurrent" garbage collector in more recent Mono versions? I work on an audio player app rather than games, but also have problem…

Have you tried implementing the length extension attacks? Truncating from 512 bits to 256 bits hides 256 bits of the state from the attacker, so in order to use a length extension …

In addition to being a better analogy, I am told it is possible to replicate the effect with a physical capacitor and a gas-discharge lamp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460…

SHA-256 truncated to 224 bits is vulnerable to length extension attacks if the attacker can brute force the remaining 32 bits of the state. Some use cases will make this possible o…

This is somewhat self correcting. HFT firms are make money by taking a spread, which is effectively the cost of making a single trade. As they compete and get better and better at …

Is your suffix array implementation open source/available online anywhere? I'm always curious to see what other people's version of these sorts of things look like. (I wrote an imp…

I haven't read this paper, and haven't worked with the compressed variety of suffix trees/arrays. That said, I'm confident it's possible to retrieve the original file from a normal…

They solve different problems. In particular, ripgrep and friends are designed to search arbitrary and potentially large directories with no pre-computation. They run in time ~line…

Asking because I don't understand: What's the difference between the seller owing me money back and me having a property right in that money? They seem similar to my not-at-all-a-l…

I wasn't particularly talking about software engineers. I have a mechanical engineering degree, and none of the ~20ish engineers at the first place I worked had a PE licence. If yo…

This may be a reason why, but it's not a great one. The vast majority of people employed in the US with "engineer" in their job title are not Professional Engineers.

In one of the Mill talks, I've long since forgotten which, someone asks Ivan Godard a question about RISC. His response is something like "there was a brief window in the eighties …

I think this is correct but maybe not quite far enough. I am much more willing to give out my social security number than my Gmail password.

I don't think it's worse. The (possibly missing) context of this post is a Compute Shader running on a GPU spending more time writing out the results of a computation than actually…

I went to Georgia Tech for Mechanical Engineering, I think generic engineering has approximately the same set of sexism problems as CS. I wouldn't try to use it as a way to say tha…