AlbertoGP

Indeed:

> The name came up from our usage of the platform Moodle throughout our university years. We wanted to build something with our idea for this platform and the name Noodle came up as a joke. We liked it and it stuck.

https://noodle.run/#faq

I guess the “N” commes from NodeJS, because this is written in TypeScript (JavaScript with type annotations) and runs on NodeJS instead of PHP as Moodle does.

Yes, you are right. I should have quoted that part too.

The connection to “humanity’s distant past” is quite tenous:

> But it is very real, showcasing the process of stars being born a mere 390 light years from Earth. This is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth.

> Given the nursery's proximity and Webb's unparalleled scientific instruments, we have never had this kind of crystal-clear view of these processes before. [...]

> This is a revelatory view of our own distant past. Our own star and Solar System formed a little more than 4.5 billion years ago, when a molecular cloud collapsed into what became our Sun.

Still worth taking a look, best through the zoomable image linked to by yread in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36721362

Turns out that raylib works quite well with FORTRAN:

"Tic-Tac-Toe in Fortran with Raylib”: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1861499073

“Fortran is the Next Rust”: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1864047709

https://github.com/tsoding/tic-tac-toe-fortran-raylib

Yesterday on a train in Germany going to another town we passed by a field where panels, which looked new, were mounted vertically, like open parallel fences, and I realized that the cost drop for solar panels means that they do not need to be mounted optimally to be cost-effective.

The separation between the solar panel fences was wide enough for a tractor, although too narrow for a combine harvester, and my impression was that it is intended to combine electricity generation with harvesting. It was a small field.

KISS is a feature indeed. I like to think that I can drive my tooling, and I do appreciate not having my choice of build system being affected by this library.

I understand that some libraries are themselves so big and complex that they need a build system. Each library I want to use that doesn’t is a blessing.

> The implication is that you would ask the owners for permission to reproduce the image for the article.

Indeed. The origin of the image is the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ Potsdam, http://icgem.gfz-potsdam.de/home) which has approved use of a very similar render under Creative Commons Attribution (cc-by) as noted in its wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Geoid_undulation_10k_scal...

The source of this picture is their interactive renderer: http://icgem.gfz-potsdam.de/vis3d/longtime

The author of the blog post from the European Geosciences Union was at the time a postdoc at GFZ Potsdam.

Talking about the Indian Ocean, and the first image in the article shows the Atlantic. This is not the Scientific American of my youth.

Further below they show a plain 2D graph with the Indian Ocean dip, but why pick the wrong version of the “Potsdam Potato” (fancy 3D picture at the beginning) when one showing exactly what they are talking about exists in a press release from the European Geosciences Union they link to in their own article?

“The Indian Ocean Geoid Low at a plume-slab overpass” https://blogs.egu.eu/divisions/gd/2021/02/24/the-indian-ocea...

> The monitor mounts screwed directly into the hull seem a likely starting point for the failure.

Nothing was screwed directly into the hull:

> These handle-lights aren’t attached to the carbon fiber. The sub is lined with a big insert, a perforated metal sleeve, that fits snugly against the carbon fiber, like a rolled-up poster in a mailing tube. “The thing with carbon fiber is you can’t cut holes in it. It doesn’t like that,” Rush says. “Nothing touches the carbon fiber.”

— David Pogue in “What I Learned on a Titanic Sub Expedition” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/what-i-learned-on-a-...

I watched Dark City years after watching The Matrix (on opening in the cinema) and I enjoyed it very much, have watched it multiple times over the years.

Here is Dark City’s director Alex Proyas: “Alex Proyas on: The Matrix copying Dark City” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytxjsetVIRM

And this is a juxtaposition of some scenes with background music: “The Matrix vs. Dark City.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moW17YHl6B8

This is Mr. Hand [Richard O’Brien] talking in ”Memories of Shell Beach”:

> It was a very groovy movie, you see?

> I remember saying to Rufus Sewell [who played the protagonist], I said, you know, it actually, truthfully, it really doesn’t matter, does it, whether it’s a box-office success because we’re going to get paid as actors anyway, sorry Alex [Proyas] but this is true, we’re gonna get paid as actors anyway and isn’t it nice to be part of something which is groovy?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrK4U6PEu94&t=1029s

> As a programmer, I never really understood why the people who designed keyboards wouldn't have done so in a way that allowed for more common technical uses - why didn't they throw in a row of common mathematical symbols?

Such keyboards were made in the 70/80s:

http://xahlee.info/kbd/lisp_keyboards.html

The current standard keyboards come from a different evolutionary branch with a much more limited view of the possible uses for a computer.

I’m also Spanish, living in Germany: the Spanish keyboard is actually rather nice, with it it’s easy to type Spanish, German, French, Italian etc. without even changing the layout. It’s even easier to type French than on a French azerty keyboard, but that’s a particularly bad one.

The German and Swedish keyboards mentioned above are rather bad for programming (in the German case, even for typing ß/ss): they have AltGr combinations at the top row, the numbers 7, 8, 9, 0 for instance to get the brackets and braces {, [, ], }. In the Spanish keyboard they are right of P and Ñ (; in US-English) and those positions are much easier to reach while pressing AltGr.

In addition, in the Spanish keyboard the plain Latin letters are in the standard qwerty positions.

After having had to deal with some terrible keyboard layouts over the years I’ve come to appreciate the Spanish one very much. It’s clear that a lot of thought went into designing it.

I do not see any informative documentation there, just four manpages for what seem to be standard components like tty.

How do you plan to make it " fast, usable, user-friendly, power-user friendly, unix-like, secure and stable"?

A couple of years ago someone built a model submarine with an actual MagnetoHydroDynamic drive:

“Magnet Powered Submarine - The Hunt for Red October IRL!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFsiydplCtw

The corresponding blog entry includes the STL files for 3D-printing the submarine’s hull:

https://www.kjmagnetics.com/blog.asp?p=red-october

The crucial moment when the neural network learns to generate one of the MNIST “8” digits, showing in real time the cost function curve, the neurons and synapses, and the output and input images:

https://twitter.com/tsoding/status/1659633987315179531

The previous parts, where he builds an educational machine learning framework in C from scratch, can be found edited in his YouTube archive: https://www.youtube.com/@TsodingDaily/videos

The original live streams happen on his Twitch channel, where this exercise has taken around 18 hours so far: https://www.twitch.tv/tsoding

His work has been mentioned before in HN, but not this series: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&query=tsoding&sort=byD...

It is fascinating to see the picture emerge as the network learns.

I get a 403 Forbidden for all URLs under laphamsquarterly.org, maybe they reject readers from Europe.

In this topic, as the article mentions those alternatives are other currencies:

> The US currency now represents about 58% of total global official reserves, down from 73% in 2001 when it was the “indisputable hegemonic reserve,” the Eurizon pair said.

> Spain [...] (unless you count them allowing US bases as "militarily involved", but that doesn't cause bad blood so doubt it)

The USA went to war against Spain on false pretenses, that was more than 100 years ago but not a small thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War#U...

The Wikipedia article presents different sides of the story, and my take is that the USA wanted to carve off the Spanish Empire and would use any excuse for that, a pattern repeated many times.

Not that the USA is unique in that. The point is that there are reasons for the rest of the world to resent the USA’s unchecked power, being wielded by small groups in there often to the detriment of the USA’s general population, as is happening now with de-dollarization.

The USA and its Western European puppets are becoming a much less reliable partner than we used to be, and the alternatives do not look as bad by comparison as they once did.

Yes, I’ve watched a bunch of them since I first saw one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3eFHyryopQ) a few weeks ago looking for TempleOS material.

It’s my favourite stream at the moment.

This is a livestream that just ended:

> Today we are exploring a completely different Paradigm of Programming: Machine Learning. Or as I personally like to call it Automatic Mathematical Modeling. In this Paradigm you are not writing the code of the Model directly. You code what you expect from the Model. And the Learning process finds the configuration of the Model that fits your description the best.

In 3 hours he goes step by step, starting from a blank file, building a small neural network that can learn the XOR logic gate.

The interesting part is how he builds it up from first principles, no handwaving, no libraries or frameworks, each step justified and he even discovers experimentally why it is useful to have bias in neurons.

From the linked article:

> "All working on the study are still amazed that we can predict how an adopted child is parented just from a knowledge of birth parent characteristics," said Reiss, a professor of clinical child psychiatry. For example, birth parents' lack of interest in social engagement predicts hostility in the relationships between the adopted children and their rearing parents. This appears to be due to the adopted child's indifference to engage with the adopted parents, a trait genetically influenced by their birth parents, the researchers say.

> In some cases, these birth parent-child-adoptive parent associations drove the child toward behavioral problems. For example, adopted children of birth parents with highly assertive temperaments showed more anger, which elicited more parental hostility. This parental response led to increased behavioral problems in the child. Sequences such as these could be curtailed when parents had a satisfying marriage.

> "The full impact of children's genetic makeup on their development depends on how parents respond to them," Reiss commented. "We were pleasantly surprised to observe that very troubling genetically influenced traits in children—such as a worrying mixture of callousness and fearlessness—could be offset by parental warmth. Favorable responses to children that offset genetic risk are enhanced if parents have a positive relationship with one another."

> The engineering of complex software systems is often the result of a highly collaborative effort. However, collaboration within a multinational enterprise has an overlooked legal implication when developers collaborate across national borders: It is taxable.

I guess this also affects employees of companies without multinational presence that work remotely from other countries.

> I decide to talk to some fellow applicants and by cross-referencing data, we can identify quite a few identifier numbers of quite a few beneficiary companies, and we observe that there are projects much less innovative than "Moons of Darsalon" that have obtained much higher scores. It is strange that no unknown companies are observed; it is normal that most of the winners are experienced companies, but it is also normal that there is some newcomer. The vast majority of beneficiaries are former students of the 2 expert evaluators from the academic world or have had a professional relationship with the 2 experts from the professional world. It is also strange that all the scores obtained are multiples of 0.33, and considering the number of evaluators who judged the projects, it is mathematically impossible for these scores to come from calculating the average score of a 0 to 10 rating from each evaluator.

I am Spanish and sadly this does not surprise me. Spain would be a great place for software development: things like universal health care help in taking risks during development, but then the actual business activity difficulties make such projects die in the vine.

From the abstract:

> Waterproof is based on the Coq proof assistant. As students type out their proofs in the program, it checks the logical soundness of each proof step and provides additional guiding feedback. Contrary to Coq proofs, proofs written in Waterproof are similar in style to handwritten ones: proof steps are denoted using controlled natural language, the structure of proofs is made explicit by enforced signposting, and chains of inequalities can be used to prove larger estimates.

Without a license, I do not know whether I can use it or even look at the source code. If you just do not care about licenses, using the MIT license will be the simplest solution.

> #embed is what I really want. And separators.

If you want to try out those features now, I made a pre-processor that translates that into standard C99:

https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/cedro/202106171400/use-e...

https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/cedro/202106171400/#numb...

It includes a cc wrapper called cedrocc that you can use as a drop-in replacement:

https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/cedro/202106171400/#cedr...

> TempleOS is a motorcycle.

> You know what’s pretty crazy? If you lean over on a motorcycle, it crashes. Don’t do that.

‐ Terry A. Davis, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dwgj9UtuDFY

Interesting, I don’t keep up with this space but maybe such hosting has got so cheap that it becomes a rounding error in their overall infrastructure.

Just opened an account to try it out and everything went smoothly, very clear instructions. Their ToS seem reasonable for a free service.

It seems that there are other similar free hosting services, someone else mentioned render.com that I also didn’t know about. This one might be better for those in the EU since it is hosted in Poland.

From their announcement last 4th of August: https://forum.serv00.com/d/1-serv00com-a-revolution-among-fr...

> Where's the catch?

> We will try to ensure that the services offered are of the highest possible quality but for this we must introduce a few restrictions:

> There cannot be more than 10000 active accounts on the server at the same time

> Accounts that will not be used for 3 months will be automatically deleted (logins to the web panel and SSH are counted)

> We do not give any guarantees and SLAs for the free hosting services we offer

> Help and support only on the forum - https://forum.serv00.com/

GPT models have been shown to get significantly more truthful when trained on the right data set:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efPrtcLdcdM&t=7m42s

The 30 million they are investing should be enough to reproduce that. Looking forward to it!

Very interesting. I quote here a small part about objective data:

> This has all had the unfortunate effect of deepening ignorance about American school spending. We know, for example, that majority-Black and Hispanic schools receive significantly more per-pupil funding than majority-white schools. This fact is so contrary to basic liberal assumptions that they often react angrily to hearing it. But this reality shouldn’t surprise anyone. After all, we’ve been shoveling money at the racial achievement gap for 40 years, to no avail. Part of the problem here is an assumption that public education is dominantly funded by local expenditure, which hasn’t been true for some time. In fact, state funding is at or near parity with local spending in the United States, and state funding is heavily tilted towards areas of perceived need (that is, failing schools or districts). Federal funding, including but hardly limited to Title I funding, is also dominantly directed towards poor or high-minority schools. The rising tide of think tank and foundation money that finds its way into public K-12 school is very hard to track, but we can safely assume that almost all of it is earmarked for the poorest students. We’ve been trying to spend our way our of this problem since before I was born! And yet people who should know better pretend not to understand this reality and repeat the complaint about local funding of public schools, despite the fact that that story is not true.