Top all-time · #9240
Sinan Unur
Personal blog · nu42.comprogrammingdata
Sinan Unur writes ν42, a personal blog at nu42.com about programming and data. Since 2015, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 74 times, most often “How to average floating point numbers (2015)”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link a post whose URL asks whether Perl users are unable to write well-formed code, cited by one commenter against Stefik's claims about Perl's learnability.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
ν42: ν42 is about information technology, programming, data analysis. The name is inspired by the 'Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy': I know it's geek and it's cliché, but I like geek and I like cliché.
Most-linked posts?
- How to average floating point numbers (2015)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-06-09
- Optimization story: Switching from GMP to gcc's __int128 reduced run time by 95%2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-01-15
What Hacker News says?
This is a neat article. I do have comments about testing in general though. IME most developer do not understand each test has four possible outcomes: * Code is good and test passes * Code is bad and test fails These are the only two possible outcomes developers focus on: When I ask what they should do if a test that used to pass now fails, they always tell me stories about how to debug the code under test. There ar…
Comment linking /2015/08/fix-2950-test-failures.html
on “TDD from the Factorio Team”Submitted How to average floating point numbers (2015) as a story · 145 points
HN discussionI did not know there was a name for this[1]. I am regularly using a T400 which started life as a Lenovo 3000 N100.[2] Upgrades since then include a 2 TB SSD, 3.06 Ghz CPU, and WiFi. I do enjoy tinkering, but I also like the keyboard :-) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus [2]: https://www.nu42.com/2016/12/another-one-bites-the-dust.html
Comment linking /2016/12/another-one-bites-the-dust.html
on “I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012”Submitted Optimization story: Switching from GMP to gcc's __int128 reduced run time by 95% as a story · 129 points
HN discussionI am having a hard time seeing how having the option of distinct codepoints would break anything. Consider, İ/i where it is _possible_ to do lossless case conversion: > lc( 'İ' ) becomes i followed by COMBINING DOT ABOVE which means uc(lc 'İ') becomes LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH DOT ABOVE as a by product of the fact that perl6 deals in graphemes[1] say 'İ' eq 'İ'.lc.uc.lc.uc; True If an extra codepoints existed for…
Comment linking /2017/02/for-your-eyes-only.html
on “Your code displays Japanese wrong”Submitted Switching from GMP to GCC's __int128 reduced run time by 95% (2016) as a story · 71 points
HN discussion> huge drive towards HTTPS since Snowden’s 2013 releases Note that HTTPS everywhere in conjunction with HR 4681[1] means there are no limits on how long US government can retain captured communications of US citizens: > Covered communication.–The term ``covered communication’’ means any nonpublic telephone or electronic communication acquired without the consent of a person who is a party to the communication, inclu…
Comment linking /2014/12/https-everywhere-and-hr4681.html
on “Security researcher found Wi-Fi vulnerabilities that existed since the beginning”Submitted Can C++ become your new scripting language? as a story · 50 points
HN discussion> > Perl is as hard for novices to learn as a language with a randomly-designed syntax Stefik is a hack fraud, and he claimed another victim with Wilson. HN readers, beware. https://www.nu42.com/2013/11/are-perl-users-unable-to-write-... http://redd.it/39buec http://redd.it/38i1pr
Comment linking /2013/11/are-perl-users-unable-to-write-programs.html
on “Software Engineering's Greatest Hits [video]”Submitted Cygwin and MinGW utilities may lose files as a story · 42 points
HN discussionThis seems pdf2tohtml combined with GROBID[1]. It seems to me the masheen learningz technikz boil down to a generalization of my lightbulb moment here[2]. [1]: https://grobid.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ [2]: https://www.nu42.com/2014/09/scraping-pdf-documents-without-...
Comment linking /2014/09/scraping-pdf-documents-without-losing.html
on “Show HN: Paper to HTML Converter”Submitted Use your own WiFi connection test server in Windows as a story · 14 points
HN discussionAgreed. Growing up in a country and at a time with personally accessible computers and very little literature, I was able to learn stuff that withstood the test of time and did not subject me to switching costs. Already, differences in menus and keyboard shortcuts make the skills of trained office workers less relevant when they immigrate. We do not need more barriers to trade. Some related thoughts: https://www.nu4…
Comment linking /2014/08/replacing-hash-keys-with-values-does.html
on “Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)”Submitted Fun with an ATTiny85, Liyafy HC-35 with 8 LEDs, & a serial to parallel shifter as a story · 12 points
HN discussion> sum(x)/n is much faster than using pythons built in mean function. `statistics.mean` uses `_sum` which tries to avoid some basic round-off errors[1]. I think the implementation of `_sum` is needlessly baroque because the implementors are trying to handle multiple types in the same code in a not so type-aware language. Regardless, using `statistics.mean` instead of `sum(x)/len(x)` would eliminate the most common ro…
Comment linking /2015/03/how-you-average-numbers.html
on “Perl Data Language: Scientific Computing with Perl”Submitted Know what you are testing: Case of the test for median in Boost.Accumulators as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> Can anybody suggest what might be the motivation for this? The push for HTTPS everywhere started with HR4681[1] both of which were reactions to Snowden revelations. > Beyond the silly "bad people might tamper with the cat picture you're shown" one that is always given? Someone who is able to tamper with the cat picture you are seeing can also inject arbitrary code into your computer, so there is that. Also, thanks…
Comment linking /2014/12/https-everywhere-and-hr4681.html
on “Increasing HTTPS Adoption”Submitted Perl 5.24 comes with performance enhancements as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> The main reason is probably that ISO-8859-9 / Windows-1254 already only had a single I and i so it would be impossible to know which Unicode character to convert them to. The alternative codepoints I proposed could coexist with the previous ones. After all, it is not like Unicode does not offer different ways of representing what humans consider to be the "same". For example, 'İ' ≡ uc( lc 'İ' ) can be preserved by…
Comment linking /2017/02/for-your-eyes-only.html
on “Life Before Unicode”Submitted A discrepancy P-square implementation in Boost.Accumulators and the original paper as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAs I pointed before[1], Turkish and computers don't really get along. The beauty of Turkish lies in its irregularity, not the rules you learn. That irregularity is amplified by the shrinking vocabulary in use owing to the disappearance of many Arabic and Persian words which people used to use as recently as the 30s, 40s, and the 50s. Understanding a Turkish speaker requires a grasp of the entire context at all times…
Comment linking /2014/08/replacing-hash-keys-with-values-does.html
on “Turkish Grammar by Predicate Logic”Submitted Descriptive Stats with C++ and Boost as a story · 4 points
HN discussionTrue story: Some years ago, a consulting assignment involved analyzing a bunch of data saved on a slow as molasses NAS using SAS's data format. The work was CPU intensive but IO throughput was the bottleneck. The analysis was close to being embarrassingly parallelizable[1] given an appropriate partitioning of the data. The only thing installed on the remote system I was given access to via RDP was SAS whose macro fa…
Comment linking /2013/12/happiness-is-making-most-out-of-limited.html
on “Jsc: My New Best Friend”Submitted A first look at zsun WiFi SD card reader as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAmong pathological AI behaviors I have personally observed at work: * Repeatedly asking for AI reviews for highly context specific code for which AI has zero training data and asking developer for fixes. Managers don't understand the issue so defer to AI and the blocking reviewer. Allows reviewer to work on their priorities while holding co-workers back. * People jumping into topics in which they have no background.…
Comment linking /2014/08/are-you-code-monkey_11.html
on “AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder”Submitted Looking back at the scary DJIA crystal ball as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Simple: use mocker.patch to patch out random.randrange and have it return a fixed sequence of results that would imply a known result. Thank you for this. Another way to put this is "your tests for code that uses a 3rd party API should not amount to an uptime test for the 3rd party API." Some time ago, I observed that tests in the Boost.Accumulators library were similarly confounding tests for the code one wrote v…
Comment linking /2016/12/cpp-boost-median-test.html
on “Solving Algorithmic Problems in Python with Pytest (2019)”Submitted Perl Is Spreading to Windows via Visual Studio as a story · 3 points
HN discussionNote that soon after I posted this, Someone noticed[1,2] that it is possible avoid a whole lot of work, but I am still glad I realized how much performance one can gain by dropping GMP in favor of `__int128`. It seems like for numbers on this side of 1024 bits, writing purpose-built routines using `__int128` or SSE/AVX instructions rather than general functionality is likely to pay off. [1]: https://news.ycombinator…
Comment linking /2016/01/excellent-numbers-explicit-solution.html
on “Switching from GMP to GCC's __int128 reduced run time by 95% (2016)”Submitted How to get TPP in a single PDF as a story · 3 points
HN discussion