Hacker News Reader

bemeureron NixOS 21.05

Please don't recommend that people use nix-env. It's one of Nix's biggest footguns and a huge support burden for the maintainers.

We've been actively trying to remove mentions of it from the documentation.

If you want something "installed" use home-manager. If you just want something for quick dev use nix-shell.

bemeureron Ask HN: How many of you are employed, self-taught SWEs?

I'm almost completely self taught. Went to uni for a couple years and changed directions a bunch (CEng -> CS -> Math) before dropping out.

> Why did you get into the field? What did you focus on at first?

A friend back in high school pointed me at the problem of brown numbers (Brocard's problem), which are pairs (n,m) where n!+1 = m^2. Known pairs are (4,5), (5,11), (7, 71). I became obsessed with this and attempting to find a new pair, and spent most of high school learning programming to improve my searching programs. Things went from there, since I knew that's what I wanted to do.

> What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?

I'm a systems engineer working with Rust on AI infrastructure. It's what I expected to be, it's a good job in that it pays well and I enjoy it. It's not perfect, and I wouldn't describe it as a 'dream'.

> How did you break that first-job barrier?

Got an internship by emailing around, that transitioned into a full time position.

> What were you doing before this?

Uni, mostly.

> Any tips for the rest of us?

Find a cool problem and use it as a 'north star' when learning, I think that helped me a lot. Also, it's a big field, you may find that you don't like a corner of it, but don't take that to mean you won't/wouldn't like any other parts of it.

bemeureron Mozilla lays off 70

If you’re interested in non-compiler, HPC Rust work reach out at bernardo at standard dot ai

bemeureron Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

Nice endorseyment

bemeureron San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless

Why was this flagged?

bemeureron Ask HN: Best Laptop for Developer?

I wrote about my experience with a Thinkpad here[1]. It was the P1, a great laptop on paper.

[1]: https://lovesegfault.com/post/2019-01-24-thinkpad-nightmare/

bemeureron Richard M. Stallman resigns

For what it's worth he retracted that statement. https://www.stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_Septe...

bemeureron SVG Is Turing Complete

You don't need a "looping construct" to be able to perform looping. GOTO is not a looping construct, but with it you can perform looping.

bemeureron Sebastião Salgado: Gold

I feel like the difference is that Vale actively destroys forests, and Salgado wanted to rebuild a forest, the damage and the good are related. Epstein and Media Lab don't share that same relation.

bemeureron Free Open Source VPN – AES 256 – WireGuard and OpenVPN

Not OP, but I've used Mullvad for a couple years and have 0 complaints.

bemeureron Inside a Poundland computer mouse [video]

This video of his made laugh for about an hour straight. I must've rewatched it at least a hundred times by now. [profanity warning] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLWKNTUHiEU

bemeureron Intel to Slash Desktop Processor Pricing Up to 15 Percent as Ryzen 3000 Nears

GCC has `-march` and `-mtune` flags for arch-specific optimizations. Just because the compiler is agnostic doesn't mean it can't have, or welcome, arch-specific optimizations.

bemeureron Leukemia Has Won

The fact that he mentions GvHD would indicate that not to be an option, unfortunately. IANAD.

bemeureron Perl 11

That is a _lot_ of yak shaving to be done

bemeureron Sir Michael Atiyah Claims to Have Proven the Riemann Hypothesis

Papers: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17NBICP6OcUSucrXKNWvzLmrQpfU... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPsVhtBQmdgQl25_evlGQ1mmTQE...

bemeureron The JPEG Committee Is “exploring Blockchain” to Put DRM into JPEG

This is just sad.

bemeureron Ask HN: Which book have you re-read the most times? how many times?

I must've read "The Tale of The Unknown Island" at least 30-40 times. A 30 minutes read that you take for your whole life.

bemeureron Build your own X: project-based programming tutorials

Glad I wasn't the only one!

bemeureron An Open Letter from Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel, to Technology Industry Leaders

"There has been a disturbance in the kitchen..."

bemeureron Baking Bread with the Romans: Part II – Panis Quadratus

Am I the only one who read "Breaking Bad with the Romans" and was really confused?

bemeureron An Explanation of Shor's Quantum Factoring Algorithm

OP mentions on the post how it's a simplified explanation. I don't think he's trying to write a textbook on Shor's algorithm here.

Also, a subject's complexity is no excuse to not try and explain it in an accessible way. I find it far-fetched that someone would read a blog post on QC and then assume they're a specialist; and if they do it's not the author's fault. Articles like this help present the field to non-specialists, it allows people to have a basic understanding of Shor's without having to go through years of education/training.

Finally, saying "these kind of articles are ultimately "popular science"" makes me question whether you actually put in the work to read this.