nialo

8 ms·

1.
by nialo 3y ago
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 believed to be available to the ancient Greeks: https:/
2.
by nialo 5y ago
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 are new problems to be solved, which is all engineering wort
3.
by nialo 6y ago
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 something like a Skype call goes away with really l
4.
by nialo 6y ago
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 make good tradeoffs in the chip and software design.&
5.
by nialo 8y ago
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 don't have to say words to explain what I
6.
by nialo 8y ago
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 relative or absolute, and potentially encoded in whatever locale
7.
by nialo 9y ago
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.
8.
by nialo 9y ago
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 used with Mac-the-Encrypt. Maybe a fun exerc
9.
by nialo 9y ago
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 requirements are relatively very simple. For reference, I used t
10.
by nialo 9y ago
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 for some reason.
11.
by nialo 9y ago
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 problems with the GC in Mono on IOS. We're hopeful
12.
by nialo 9y ago
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 attack they would need to "guess" those bits.
13.
by nialo 9y ago
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=4600996
14.
by nialo 9y ago
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 or practical, some will not. It depends on the details of t
15.
by nialo 9y ago
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 there jobs, this spread well be reduced, the amount of mone
16.
by nialo 9y ago
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 implementation of Ukkonen's suffix tree al
17.
by nialo 9y ago
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 suffix tree, although it would be
18.
by nialo 9y ago
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 ~linear in the size of the files to be searched. The paper unde
19.
by nialo 9y ago
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-lawyer intuition, what am I missing?
20.
by nialo 9y ago
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 you want "engineer" in a job title to mean &q
21.
by nialo 9y ago
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.
22.
by nialo 9y ago
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 where if you had a RISC machine you could get the
23.
by nialo 9y ago
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.
24.
by nialo 9y ago
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 doing the computation. As I read this post, the
25.
by nialo 9y ago
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 that CS doesn't have a problem
26.
by nialo 10y ago
That is really cool, thanks for the link. I should apparently make fewer assumptions. I'm not sure why I thought there was a rubber seal, I have vague memories of seeing an exploded view with one somewhere.
27.
by nialo 10y ago
Helium does go through metal, although even in this case the amount is probably insignificant. Helium also goes through whatever the sealing gasket is made from, at a much higher rate. http://lpc1.clpccd.cc.ca.us/lpc/t
28.
by nialo 10y ago
I think the trick is that the glass actually doesn't need to bend much. Notice that the caption here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmidt_corrector_plate#/media... describes the plate as being hard to tell
29.
by nialo 10y ago
It feels to me like the root problem here isn't how many people are doing the homework problem or whatever. It's that this is increasing your time spent as a candidate relative to the in-person interview. I think your last paragr
30.
by nialo 10y ago
I am confused by this, could you help me to understand why this is so? In particular, it seems to me that take-home assignments are strictly better for candidate scheduling etc than in-person interviews, if time spent can be held equal. Ma

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