Hacker News Reader

bluepointon Will Qatar Always Be Rich?

It is a nice read about Qatar and covers diverse topics. What I found interesting cause I did not know is that there is such a thing as islamic economics, which is trying to avoid the inequality between creditors and debtors and also derivatives and gambling:

> So the obvious way of doing this is simply various types of share participation where rather than making a loan, a bank takes a stake and then the person receiving the money from the bank has the option of buying the bank out progressively like it’s essentially an equity-stake type model.

Would that work in the west?

bluepointon Disputing a Parking Fine with ChatGPT

I agree with you and I was thinking the same. It may work as some form of wordy search engine. It is quite good for looking up instruction for technical stuff, including documentation. It might take google’s job? I am so curious!

bluepointon Ask HN: Does AI progress also fill you with dread?

Yup, I should have checked it!

bluepointon Ask HN: Does AI progress also fill you with dread?

All right, I did not know that, thanks! But then, I am not sure what this means. You have to speak in a particular way to get the output you want. For the next question, how do I know what key phrase to use? Is it like a programming language where you have to speak in code to get what you want? Still sceptical.

bluepointon Ask HN: Does AI progress also fill you with dread?

Not really. I saw so many posts on ChatGPT these days that I went to try it out.

Input> There are 3 events, A, B and C. They happen at different times. Event A happens after event B. Can you give me all the possible orderings of the three events?

Output> Sure! There are six possible orderings of the three events, A, B, and C. These are:

A, B, C

B, A, C

B, C, A

C, B, A

A, C, B

C, A, B

In each of these orderings, event A happens after event B. It is worth noting that the orderings are different depending on whether event C happens before or after event A. In order, the possible orderings where event C happens before event A are:

B, C, A

C, B, A

C, A, B

And the possible orderings where event C happens after event A are:

A, B, C

B, A, C

A, C, B

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.

Like someone here said: it is the plausible idiot. It is nice that it can produce text, but I am not sure I can trust it much or worry that it will replace even mindless jobs.

bluepointon Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

I was trying to save that search, but I accept your advice.

bluepointon Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

Some people here a few days ago recommended kagi, a paid service with a limited free option. I have been trying it and so far the results seem great!

bluepointon Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

I don’t know if everyone knows that SEO stands for search engine optimization and it is

> the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.

bluepointon Ask HN: Why the Linux Kernel doesn't have unit tests?

Thank you! In a previous job I was doing the equivalent of integration testing and the very young collaborators were bashing me and demanded that I contribute to small random and useless (according to them even) tests that were not really testing anything.

bluepointon HelenOS: a microkernel-based, multiserver OS from scratch

http://www.helenos.org/wiki/FAQ

I find the FAQ to be more enlightening than this page. It explains what it is used for (OS research research in Charles University, Prague) and how it is different than other operating systems (genode, minix, hurd).

bluepointon Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

> Twitter reportedly no longer has a communications department to relay information to the media.

Doesn’t look good.

bluepointon Lisp-stick on a Python

My relatively amateur take is that the REPL and the debugging experience seem powerful. I would like to know how they compete with other languages.

The REPL is the center of everything and it enables you to change functions on a running program. Tracing a function (shows function arguments on every call) is a simple as calling trace(function-name). If a program crashes, it does not really crash... it enters some debug mode which offers possible resolutions, including change the function that failed. The REPL can trivially show you the assembly code of individual functions. You can also add declarations for each function with hints for the compiler (and then check the size of the resulting assembly).

I believe this series of articles highlights some of the debugging features.

https://malisper.me/debugging-lisp-part-1-recompilation/

There is also a story called "debugging code from 60 million miles away".

Other things that I did not manage to explore yet are the macros, which allows you to create your own domain specific languages.

My general impression so far is that it is a really powerful language, for lonely hackers. :)

bluepointon School of Haskell: Basics (2013)

Let alone that it appears on any forum that ever mentions haskell these days.

bluepointon “14-hour days with no break, no bathroom”: Jeff Bezos sued by former housekeeper

Next time I see reels of fancy houses or hotels I will imagine that there are maid-ghosts running away from the camera’s view.

bluepointon “14-hour days with no break, no bathroom”: Jeff Bezos sued by former housekeeper

Interesting. I would suppose however that hotels have facilities (like, many backdoors) that can support such work, but households not necessarily?

bluepointon “14-hour days with no break, no bathroom”: Jeff Bezos sued by former housekeeper

> She was hired in 2019 for a housekeeping role that required her to "work around a family without being seen", according to the complaint.

Is this is a common requirement for a housekeeper to act like a burglar?

bluepointon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2022)

Ex physicist (PhD, theory and computation). Limited experience as a data scientist. I love computational challenges. Interested in algorithms and computer languages (spent my time with lisp and haskell even) Can work independently without supervision and I can investigate. I enjoy challenging problems, where not even the problem it self is well defined and I like to try to help make sense of it. I enjoy writing documentation!

Location: Argentina (CABA)

Remote: Ideally

Willing to relocate: maybe

Technologies: Python, Julia, Mathematica, C and C++ (but a long ago), React (a bit).

Speaks: English/Spanish/Greek

Desired roles: Software development, data analysis, simulations, technical writing, testing.

Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/galanaki/

Email: dimig at pm dot me

bluepointon Greece runs on renewables for the first time in its history

I am not sure, but greece has its own low quality and extremely cheap carbon so I doubt that they would import anything. The most likely relied on hydro powerplants for a few hours (they have several).

bluepointon Greece runs on renewables for the first time in its history

> On Friday (7 October), for a period of around five hours, the country was running off entirely renewable power, reaching a record high of 3,106MWh at eight o’clock (GMT).

It was for 5 hours.

> Renewables made up 46% of Greece’s power mix in the eight months to August this year, according to Greek climate think-tank The Green Tank, which was up from 42% in the same period in 2021.

In my opinion this is the greatest news. In a period of high demand they can still do 46% on renewables.

> The country is targeting 25GW of installed renewables capacity by 2030, up from around 10GW today.

With such an update they can be almost self suficient.

bluepointon Ask HN: What to do to be healthy when old?

In my opinion any activity that requires flexibility, force, coordination and speed is necessary for aging well. It can be acrobatics, martial arts, dancing, yoga, many sports. It is important to find something that you enjoy it by it self. That’s why I avoid plain running or plain weight lifting, unless they are meant to support another activity. And from experience, flexibility and speed really make living in my body enjoyable.

bluepointon Ask HN: LaTeX is great. Has anyone tried to build something better?

Latex is there and it works. People learn how to create their favorite macros and style files and once you have that you can mostly focus on the text. If you are interested in note taking you can try markdown with equations and when you need to publish or share with others you can convert the relevant parts to latex with pandoc or manually. Actually the process of transcribing notes may sound like a waste but helps rephrase and improve things catch errors or sloppy logic so it is good if you have to do it imho.

bluepointon The new “Intel Processor” will replace Pentium and Celeron CPU branding in 2023

No, it should be “Intel’s processor”, since Intel is not an adjective.

bluepointon Nobody wants to teach anymore

yes.

bluepointon Quebec moves to protect French amid Canada’s shift towards English

> The primary factor in the decline of French in Quebec is, according to Castonguay, the significant increase in immigration since 2000.

Most immigrants speak english.

bluepointon AirTag leads to arrest of airline worker accused of stealing from luggage

People respond on motivations, therefore reporting about someone else’s lost item without any reward for them is unlikely.

bluepointon Page was served from Nginx on ReactOS

When I read this, my first thought was that by the time it made it to the front page it already has crashed then I clicked on it and yes indeed.

bluepointon I wish I could organize my thoughts

I have a radical proposal. How about taking a drawing class which will allow your hand to express your thoughts in a better way and then scan the result? I believe that there is art in note taking and also visual communication and a skilled hand is probably still the best creative medium. Just saying, cause I am thinking of taking drawing classes for a similar reason.

bluepointon Seven megatrends that will shape the next 20 years

Is this like digital coupons?

bluepointon What can $100k get you nowadays?

You can live relatively comfortable in Argentina for 7-8 years without working.