Hacker News Reader

alichapmanon Andrew Wiles on proving Fermat’s Last Theorem (1995) [video]

When I was at uni my number theory lecturer said that if Fermat had a solution, it was only valid for regular primes.

alichapmanon A new bridge links the math of infinity to computer science

Computer science isn't concerned with the uncountable infinite though, which is what measure theory is mostly concerned with as countable sets all have measure zero.

alichapmanon Queen Elizabeth II has died

Yes but the last time a monarch vetoed a law was in 1707, and that was only because parliament asked Queen Anne to veto the law.

In reality, if King Charles started vetoing then after a short constitutional crisis, parliament would basically just change the rules of the game to say that the monarch no longer has the power to veto laws.

alichapmanon New York rolling out noise law, listening tech for souped-up speedsters

Is it the noise that makes it exhilarating though? If you had to use an electric motorcycle would your enjoyment be decreased that much? I'm sure you're right that it's a small amount of people riding obnoxiously, but those people make walking around a city stressful and unenjoyable for a far greater number of people.

What I'm saying is that although this will be a bit crap for you, to the average person that's probably worth the trade off.

alichapmanon Why Northern Ireland has no flag

Northern Ireland has its own football team, although players from both sides of the border can play for either team.

alichapmanon Venmo forces binding arbitration unless you opt out by mail before June 22

I live in the UK and I've never come across any company that does shitty stuff like this. Is there some EU law we've still got that explicitly prevents this?

alichapmanon On Being Indispensable

Yes but if the number of people on the bus dropped to zero do you think their employers would keep running the route?

alichapmanon Some notes on using esbuild

The author of the article

alichapmanon Part of Windows 11 is a revamped Windows Subsystem for Linux

* You can't run your distro of choice unless you build it yourself

* Lots of programs don't work properly (citation needed, can't remember specifics)

* You can only run command line programs, although I understand this could be different in Windows 11

My last job mandated windows laptops so I used WSL for a couple of months before I got too frustrated and just ran a virtualbox VM.

alichapmanon Rugby: Head impact study shows cognitive decline after just one season

I agree. I also can't imagine that World Rugby would consider removing one of the two elements of the game that differentiate it from Rugby League (the other one being contested rucks).

As a League fan I'd love it - I don't care what it's called I'd just like more people to play and watch Rugby League.

alichapmanon Rugby: Head impact study shows cognitive decline after just one season

I'm not confident that any rule changes will have a meaningful impact. It's thought that it isn't just collisions to the head that cause a problem, but all tackles. This is because your brain gets damaged when it moves around in your skull, and this will happen every time your velocity suddenly changes e.g. when being tackled to the ground. This is also the reason that headguards/scrumcaps aren't effective in cutting down on head injuries.

What can be done to protect the players is limiting the number of contact training sessions they can attend, and also limiting the number of games a season each player is allowed to play.

Another option could be to seriously limit the number of substitutes each team is allowed to make, as this will mean the players will have to be fitter and therefore not as big, and hopefully this will reduce the impact each tackle will have. However Rugby League is also having to deal with head injuries and that game requires a lot more fitness than Rugby Union.

alichapmanon S.Korea parliament committee votes to curb Google, Apple commission dominance

I can't imagine that sovereign nations like being blackmailed by tech companies, so whilst in the short term this could work it seems like the exact move that would cause the country to go the other way and outright ban Google and Apple products.

alichapmanon Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

https://www.ox.ac.uk/research/research-in-conversation/how-l...

Really interesting conversation about the nature of happiness. For a lot of my life I was convinced that if I achieved my goals then I would become happy - "if I get into this uni, get this grade, get this job, etc...".

Then when I started working I couldn't work out why career success wasn't translating into feeling better. In hindsight it's obvious that getting paid more money doesn't automatically make you happy, but it was only after reading this article that it really clicked for me.

alichapmanon Vue 3.2

I think my favourite thing about Vue 3 and the composition API is that VueX is essentially obsolete - you can manage your global state by calling real life functions.

This means instead of doing `dispatch("action")` you just call `action()`.

When using Typescript this is a godsend, as the action functions keep all of their type information.

alichapmanon The Elasticsearch Saga Continues

Amazom were contributing changes back to Elasticsearch before the license change - the license change basically explicitly says "you can't run this as a service and sell it to people".

With this in mind what could Amazon do? Their options were: A. Stop selling their Elasticsearch service, or B. Fork Elasticsearch.

This change from Elastic is really shitty though, and sort of proves that all their finger pointing at Amazon saying that they're acting against the spirit of open source was all bullshit.

alichapmanon An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning

I'm not usually the most idealistic when it comes to FOSS, but it's stories like this and Apple's stance of "trust us, we promise we know what we're doing and that nothing is going to go wrong" that makes me think all software should be legally required to be open source.

alichapmanon Warning Signals for Collapse of The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation

It will be far worse than europeans having to buy a winter jacket. From [0]:

> Such an event would have catastrophic consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and West Africa; increasing storms and lowering temperatures in Europe; and pushing up the sea level off eastern North America. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/05/climate-...

alichapmanon Show HN: Neverinstall – A platform to bring desktop applications to the browser

Could you explain why it's a bad trend? I've had crap laptops in the past that have struggled to run the desktop apps I need, and something like this would have really helped me out.

alichapmanon An impersonator issued a fake Reddit take down notice against SaveVideo

You can use one of these addons below to always redirect to the old subdomain.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

alichapmanon No More Movies

For anyone who finds themselves getting bored scrolling through the film options on Netflix, or utterly disinterested in watching Marvel film #593 then I'd recommend Mubi [0]. It mainly shows independent films from around the world and it cycles through them relatively quickly - they add a new movie every day so there's always something you haven't considered watching yet.

0: https://mubi.com/showing

alichapmanon Vivaldi 4.0

Anyone else getting 500s trying to access this?

alichapmanon Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

I disagree with this. There are certain things that the Israeli government have done that are worthy of being criticised - the same can be said for every government in the world. Brushing off all criticism as antisemitism is unhelpful.

alichapmanon Sevenhugs exits the universal remote business

This sounds like LinkedIn without all the fake positivity

alichapmanon Europe’s Super League scores an own goal

I think this is akin to children wishing everyday was their birthday. Watching Juventus vs Man City for the 6th time in one year would get boring very quickly.

The reasons the later rounds in the champions league are so great is because the teams so rarely play each other, and also there's the outside chance that a team like Ajax will surprise you and beat one of the giants.

I agree that the ESL has only been postponed, but when it arrives I don't think it will be here to stay.

alichapmanon UK government: no more smart motorways without stopped car detection

It's definitely not just you. Even worse than the hybrid hard shoulder is one stretch of the M5 where the road is 4 lanes at all times, and the occasional lay-by for if you break down.

alichapmanon How to fight back against Google FLoC

Does this change anything that the author has said? You haven't commented on whether or not you agree with them, you've just (rightly or wrongly) attacked their character.

alichapmanon Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

Surely politicians aren't using social media as the main driver for policy? The demographic who votes the most (the elderly) is also the demographic that has the smallest presence on social media, so only listening to Twitter seems like shooting yourself in the foot.