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emmelaich

8,284 karma · joined September 10, 2009

I'm a beardless unix greybeard who loves dabbling in new computer languages.

I'm also fascinated in the psychology of belief.

Philosophically a skeptic, but I don't attend their services :-)

email is my hn username at <popularprivatemailservice>.me

meet.hn/city/au-Sydney

submissionscomments
emmelaich··on Show HN: rm-safely – A shell alias that moves files to trash instead of deleting
You throw away stderr a few times: "2>/dev/null"; at worst this could hide real problems, at best it's not very helpful to the user.
emmelaich··on The MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge
I was wondering this myself. I've had three mac air/books that simply failed to turn the display on. I've heard (from a third party repairer) that it is not uncommon.
emmelaich··on What is the origin of the private network address 192.168.*.*? (2009)
(2009)
emmelaich··on Eels are fish
But literarily (not literally) they can be.

See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

emmelaich··on Making Minecraft Spherical
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2283580/Voxile/
emmelaich··on John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
I'd just quote Mourinho / Carlsen. "If I say anything I'm in big trouble".
emmelaich··on John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
I wonder how well that would play out. Surely you'd only do if you got a perpetual license or bought it outright. I can imagine RIM would fuck you over eventually with with any other arrangement.

(Actually I just realised you meant "buy")

emmelaich··on John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
I wonder whether an unarticulated desire of Meta's was to avoid any license issues that could incur by using Linux or any other existing OS.
emmelaich··on How to slow down a program and why it can be useful
I've used `tc` about three times in the last 15 years. Every time I have to relearn it.
emmelaich··on A bug saved the company
Having used similar software for one-offs I'm not surprised!
emmelaich··on The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
Yes. I don't when it happened exactly, but Chrome does a great job.

I remember trying a year or so ago and it couldn't. Or badly.

emmelaich··on Claim: GPT-5-pro can prove new interesting mathematics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/57_(number)

aka the Grothendieck prime!

emmelaich··on Cache of WW2 bombs found under a playground in Northumberland
Or WW1, which happens in Flanders/Belgium regularly. I think both. Farmers die from time to time plowing or handling old bombs. If you travel around there you may see bombs left by the front gates for a regular pickup service.
emmelaich··on Blurry rendering of games on Mac
What's the alternative? A camera on top of the screen? Fragile, unless you could fold it away. Which would be another point of failure.
emmelaich··on VC-backed company just killed my EU trademark for a small OSS project
I think you should be as annoying as possible within the confines of the law. No reason to make it easy for them.
emmelaich··on VC-backed company just killed my EU trademark for a small OSS project
If you keep the US trademark, they might eventually give up on the EU one.

Or .. maybe you could sell it to them or use it as a lever to get the EU one.

emmelaich··on Why are there so many rationalist cults?
Precisely! I'd even say they get intoxicated with their own braininess. The expression that comes to mind is to get "way out over your skis".

I'd go even further and say most of the world's evils are caused by people with theories that are contrary to evidence. I'd place Marx among these but there's no shortage of examples.

emmelaich··on Why are there so many rationalist cults?
I was reminded of Hubbard too. In particular the "[belief that one] should always escalate when threatened" strongly echoes Hubbard's advice to always attack attack. Never defend.

The whole thing reminds me of EST and a thousand other cults / self-improvement / self-actualisation groups that seem endemic to California ever since the 60s or before.

emmelaich··on How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
It's a choice to play for money and how much. When I play with friends, there's only a $20 buy-in and no rebuys. Makes for a far cheaper night than going to a pub or movie.

As a kid (~12 year old) I played for matchsticks.

emmelaich··on Jules, our asynchronous coding agent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly

Typically applied to mobile phone plans but applicable to many other markets.

emmelaich··on Ask HN: What trick of the trade took you too long to learn?
Use word of mouth. Or relative's recommendations. You're right that nothing is guaranteed.
emmelaich··on Hiroshima (1946)
Indeed! I can add "lower than the butchery and sadism of the Japanese forces in SE Asia?"
emmelaich··on Ask HN: What trick of the trade took you too long to learn?
Get a financial advisor that you trust.
emmelaich··on [dead]
Yet two days after this post, Starship delivered astronauts to the ISS. Seemed to work ok.
emmelaich··on The /o in Ruby regex stands for "oh the humanity "
Sometimes you want to blow your foot off.
emmelaich··on C++26 Reflections adventures and compile-time UML
And Youtube used Python almost exclusively at the start AFAIK.

Then again Scott Meyers said he's never written a C++ program professionally.

emmelaich··on Seed7 – The Extensible Programming Language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed7
emmelaich··on The Rickover Corpus: A digital archive of Admiral Rickover's speeches and memos
Yes, it mentions the energy crisis so dates it to late 70s at least. Also President Reagan, so after 1981. Probably well after.
emmelaich··on The Rickover Corpus: A digital archive of Admiral Rickover's speeches and memos
Quotables in in every paragraph!
emmelaich··on I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself
I'd love for this to happen for me. I lost my Amazon account because they miswrote my phone number - having a single leading digit invalid for international use. So couldn't use text MFA and my phone with the OTP app had died the previous day.
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