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AlbertoGP

2,095 karma · joined December 8, 2013

Personal:

  http://matracas.org
  web@matracas.org
Work:

  http://sentido-labs.com
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/albertogp; my proof: https://keybase.io/albertogp/sigs/FC3caIoRcNTC8tURVvHe_2MUkalyvcJ97B4QIkUp2Zo ]
submissionscomments
AlbertoGP··on Looking for a Remote Full-Time, full stack developer Job
First I thought this post was someone looking for a job, then seeing that it was only a link to a company's About page and that your user name matches its co-founder's name it seemed as if you were offering a job and the question mark got lost somehow.

But then I do not see any indication in your website that you are expanding and given the current situation it sounds more likely that the link is meant as a portfolio to show what you have done lately.

Then again, the lack of a jobs/careers listing might be a way to prevent a flood of automated applications.

I would suggest to clarify it in any case.

AlbertoGP··on Jaguar XJ220 Jail Broken
> After all that work, and the expense of getting an original Zytek interface, giving it away for free seems almost as socialist as Britain’s NHS. But the potential market is limited to fewer than 400 owners. “You don’t have to be a mathematician to understand the very limited upside of trying to sell something like this,” Radom explained. “The better approach is to increase the value of the car itself by giving away the technology.”

I learnt about the XJ220 from the Amiga game and many years later got to see a real one at the Technikmuseum in Speyer, Germany. What a beautiful machine!

AlbertoGP··on Project Xanadu
For a more detailed technical description you can see my 2019 edition of Chip Morningstar's “Xanadu Hypertext Documents” architecture and data structures from 1986, that got some comments in HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30905524
AlbertoGP··on Show HN: I created a search engine to quickly find things in my source code
For my own selfish purposes I would like to have a license that allowed me to reuse parts of SearchEngineSuite as if it was a library, for instance Apache 2.0 which I used for my C preprocessor at https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/cedro/202106171400/

I am preparing a pull request adding the Apache license in case it is acceptable for you.

AlbertoGP··on Show HN: I created a search engine to quickly find things in my source code
This is absolutely relevant to my interests and I will try it out in a few hours as it is early morning in Europe now.

So far I do not see any licensing terms, the source file headers only state the copyright notice. Do you have any plans about that?

> I came up with the idea while waking up from a nap and then was so blinded by how great this feature would be to have.

This has happened to me many times. In my case I forget how my program works fron all the approaches I have tried while writing it, then get excited to try a great idea which then does not work because it relies on some feature from one of the alternatives that I rejected for some other reason.

I will indeed waste a few hours trying the PDF indexing idea, there has to be some way to make it work. I have done some feeble attempts in this direction by myself before using the C library pdfio ( https://github.com/michaelrsweet/pdfio) which would work also on Windows. I will probably crash again on that wall but if the code search works as described I will still use this program every day.

AlbertoGP··on The safest job from AI may be writing
Thank you for the clarification.
AlbertoGP··on Omarchy and My Security Sweet Spot
The article does not promote it on security grounds:

> This article however will focus on the technical reasons why I won't be installing Omarchy yet. It boils down to what I call the security sweet spot.

> ... Most of the improvements I read about seem to focus on the desktop and UX, but I wish this humble list gives some food for thought about deeper OS architecture in terms of security and privacy.

AlbertoGP··on The safest job from AI may be writing
> The person who used to edit things for me has not been replaced,

I assume you meant "now" instead of "not": "The person who used to edit things for me has now been replaced,"

AlbertoGP··on Why Everybody Hates Palantir
Might be your ISP's DNS censoring the domain name, it happens to me for different ones depending on whether I am in Spain or in Germany at the moment when I click the link.

It might work if you manually change the TLD part of the URL.

What I did was get the IP address when it worked and add it to "/etc/hosts" so it works when on another network.

AlbertoGP··on Letter addressed to 'woman in Cornwall shed' arrives at its correct home (2021)
> A town, street name or postcode were omitted, but a highlighted note – presumably written by a postie – chirpily added ‘Royal Mail, we never fail!’ to the front of the letter.

I think the note was written by the sender because the handwriting looks the same as in the vague "woman in Cornwall shed" address.

My guess is that it was intended to motivate Royal Mail to figure it out by quoting what might have been their slogan at some point. Now the highlight could have been added by a post office worker as a way of saying "indeed we never fail". The sender's style of higlighting things seems rather to be adding asterisks.

AlbertoGP··on Why web browsers don't support Markdown
Which one of the Markdowns should each browser support?
AlbertoGP··on Show HN: DocDrift – Use Tree-sitter and Local LLMs to fix stale documentation
Alright but where is the link? Can you put in a comment?
AlbertoGP··on Show HN: µCSS, a CSS framework with 17 components, 20 themes, no build required
I will try this out later, but for now the address https://mucss.org/ does not work for me. The Github link does.
AlbertoGP··on One day, a computer will fit on a desk (1974)
In 50 years, people will be equally amazed that we could afford having our own computers on our desks.
AlbertoGP··on Ask HN: How to Structure Gnarly PDFs
I might be missing something, but parsing the HTML, even with the different formats, should be much simpler than the PDF form.

In 20 years I would guess they used no more than 20 formats, which is doable even if writing XPath (perhaps CSS selectors would suffice) by hand.

Do you mean that the mutual fund complex includes many funds and you get as many different formats for a same time period?

AlbertoGP··on PhDs Can't Find Work as Boston's Biotech Engine Sputters
Thanks for the information, I have observed this in some of those links before (others worked, I do not know what the diffference is) and it might be the case. I am indeed outside the U.S.A.
AlbertoGP··on James Dyson: Britain is a nation of doers – let's unlock our potential
The move to Singapore has been mentioned in several comments but he does address it in the linked piece:

> Some might say: “Hang on, it’s all very well James Dyson telling Britain to support doers and makers, but he took his company’s manufacturing to Malaysia in 2002 and then set up a global headquarters in Singapore in 2019.”

> The answer is worth exploring. In 2002 Dyson was expanding rapidly and urgently needed a new factory, but planning permission was refused. We were able to use empty factories in Singapore and Malaysia.

> However, Dyson now employs about 2,000 people in Britain, which is about twice the number we employed at the time of the move.

AlbertoGP··on Quantum-floor compression: Achieving GPT-4 capability at 1/120th the model size [pdf]
I get 404 from the link.
AlbertoGP··on PhDs Can't Find Work as Boston's Biotech Engine Sputters
This link shows me the paywall, I have not investigated why.
AlbertoGP··on The Quickshot II Joystick
We had several Quickshot II's at home for our Commodore 64; each broke after a while and we had to get a new one.

It looked and felt fantastic and was cheap, but the garbage switch mechanism was a thin metal cross pushed down onto contacts on the board in such a way that it would inevitably snap and render the joystick useless.

I did what I could as a kid without proper materials or tools to repair them but nothing lasted.

I ended up building my own from scratch with steel and wood, reusing the cable of one of them, and could finally play without fear of breaking and leaving me high and dry.

From my experience with a previous product from Retro Games Ltd, The A500, I expect this one to be much better than the original.

AlbertoGP··on The Return to Full-Fat Dairy
The URL is wrong, the right one is https://rodgercuddington.substack.com/p/the-return-to-full-f...

> UK retailers are reporting a striking reversal in dairy consumption patterns. Waitrose searches for full-fat milk increased 417%, full-fat yogurt 233%, and block butter 280% in a single month, while skimmed milk and low-fat yogurt are being left on shelves. This shift represents more than a dietary preference change – it signals a fundamental breakdown in public trust regarding nutrition guidance and reveals profound frustration with decades of conflicting advice.

> This analysis examines the scientific evidence, economic factors, processing implications, and psychological dimensions driving this trend, with particular attention to how changing advice may have eroded consumer confidence in nutritional expertise itself.

AlbertoGP··on I caught Google Gemini using my data and then covering it up
That comment to which you replied, and the other thread of responses to it, are quotations of the malfunctioning and homicidal HAL computer from the movie “2001: a space oddisey”.
AlbertoGP··on Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics (2000)
Around the time this website was made, I was building an application for a big company in Spain that was to run as a Java applet and required the code to be signed.

They did not yet have their own certificates so I had to make my own CA during testing and sign the code, and I wanted to make sure that they did not forget to switch to their certificates later, so instead of signing the code with my name which some bureaucrat might decide to not bother changing, the code was signed by Britney Spears.

They noticed it, got the joke and made sure to switch certificates for the release. Everything went well thanks to Britney.

AlbertoGP··on Hacker News rewrites post without consent?
> Then apparently the editors renamed it to the (less interesting/more convoluted) title of the page it linked to.

It is part of the submission guidelines:

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

AlbertoGP··on The brain navigates new spaces by 'darting' between reality and mental maps
A particularly interesting part that I did not expect from the title:

> Before the rats encountered the detour, the research team observed that their brains were already firing in patterns that seemed to "imagine" alternate unfamiliar mental routes while they slept. When the researchers compared these sleep patterns to the neural activity during the actual detour, some of them matched.

> “What was surprising was that the rats' brains were already prepared for this novel detour before they ever encountered it,”

AlbertoGP··on Mapgen4 Renderer
> Overall, I don’t think the LLM saved me any time. I didn’t end up keeping the code it gave me. But it got me unstuck, and that meant I actually made progress.

I haven't tried LLMs yet but this sounds valuable.

AlbertoGP··on Review: Project Xanadu – The Internet That Might Have Been
In 1984 one of the developers of Xanadu at the time, Chip Morningstar, wrote a technical description to apply for funding.

In typical Xanadu fashion it was kept secret, protected by Dark Magick:

> He who transgresses against the propriety of the Information contained herein shall be Cursed! Woe unto all who reveal the Secrets contained herein for they shall be Hunted unto the Ends of the Universe. They shall be afflicted unto the Tenth Generation with Lawyers. Their Corporate Bodies shall be Broken and cast into the Pit. Their Corporate Veil shall be Pierced, and Liability shall attach to the Malefactors in personem. They shall suffer Ulcers and Migraines and Agonies Unimagined. Yea, Verily, for such shall come to pass against all who would Dare to Test the Powers of Xanadu unto their Doom.

It was believed to have been lost forever but in 2019 he found the only known remaining copy, a printout he had at home buried in old stuff, and posted it with OCR in his blog. He wrote:

> At the time, we regarded all the internal details of how Xanadu worked as deep and dark trade secrets, mostly because in that pre- open source era we were stupid about intellectual property. As a consequence of this foolish secretive stance, it was never widely circulated and subsequently disappeared into the archives, apparently lost for all time. Until today!

I took it and made a cleaned-up augmented HTML edition, with additions like Engelbart’s structural statement numbers which allow linking to individual paragraphs:

https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/201904240732/Xanadu%20Hy...

It includes a glossary of terms and detailed explanation of the content addressing “tumblers”, and is the best technical description of Xanadu that I know of.

AlbertoGP··on German warning day 12th September
It is indeed the 11th of September, here is the German Government's page about it: https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/leichte-sprache/11-se...
AlbertoGP··on The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]
That man, Rex Malik, participated in (among other things) the 1982 BBC series “The Computer Programme” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Programme), typically in a small section at the end on an episode but also as narrator in other parts and is credited as “Programme Adviser”:

Episode 1 - “It’s Happening Now”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtMWEiCdsfc

Episode 4 - “It’s on the Computer”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkXqb1QT_tI

Episode 5 - “The New Media“: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GETqUVMXX3I

Episode 10 - “Things to Come”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLL7HmbcrvQ

AlbertoGP··on Show HN: Stb_zip – header-only C ZIP parser, zero dependencies, fast
I tried it out to see if I would want to use this instead of miniz which I am using at the moment, but the example seems to be missing some includes.

I filed an issue with the details: https://github.com/Ferki-git-creator/stb-zip/issues/1

Edit to add: I see now that you also did the Uprintf submission from a few days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44960664) which had some baffling bugs, and then you mentioned that you were using AI for some of it. That might explain the missing parts here too.

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