Hacker News Reader

lambdason RISC-V single-board computer for less than 40 euros

I don’t think it’s dumb - hasty and premature perhaps. Manufacturers have been shipping boards with flaky RVV support, a years old kernel and undocumented blobs on in house baked OS and calling it a day.

Feels like a step towards strong arming them into shipping products that can be supported easier/not being left to rot in a drawer.

lambdason Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

The only time a labour majority voted against this bill was when an amendment to make category 1 sites have optional controls for users (something that would have prevented this).

I’m going to guess that our MP’s are tech illiterate enough as it is, that when an opaque term like “what is a category 1” came up, someone hand waved over it and said “think Facebook or Twitter”

lambdason Hyprland – An independent, dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

I’ve been using it for a year and can’t say it does anything I couldn’t do with dwm, xmonad, i3wm over my past 18 years of tiling WM experience.

lambdason Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

That and the paragraph above:

> What makes this powerful is that these aren’t just type definitions - they’re live, reactive objects that sync automatically.

Is what twigged my AI radar too. LLM’s seem to really love that summarisation pattern of `{X is/isn’t just Y. Pithy concluding remark}`

lambdason A list is a monad

Actions compose, types (generally) don’t. So Monad X and Monad Y may not make a valid Monad Z, but Kleisi composition very much exists for actions within a monad.

lambdason Algebraic Effects: Another mistake carried through to perfection?

To which implementation is the author referring, I wonder?

I can’t say I recognise any of these issues from freer, polysemy, nor bluefin.

lambdason 'Nobody has done this before': Britain's beloved steam trains trial technology

Yeah, the steam operators raised hell over having to follow the central locking for doors and sealing of windows passengers could stick their head out of.

Wasn’t even prospective, preventative action. There was pretty rash series of decapitations/fatalities in the past decade of people who think sticking their head out of a moving train is risk free that lead to this ruling being made mandatory.

They kicked off claiming it would ruin the ambience, but really it cost a very pretty penny.

They’d do anything to save a few quid; it’s amazing how they used to get cheap oil lube and coal from Russia, and since the war they’ve miraculously been managing to procure the same rates from new companies that have appeared overnight/moved production to sanction-less countries just over the border like Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan etc.

lambdason 'Nobody has done this before': Britain's beloved steam trains trial technology

I’m a dynamics/kinematics engineer who gets consulted by steam locomotive companies often, and they’re very much worth doing financially speaking.

They certainly wouldn’t be your only venture, more “you have a lot of money and love trains” but seats on these things can run for £2k a head and they run basically every day from Spring through to end of Summer.

lambdason UK IT job searching broken

Glad I’m not alone in this; I’ve seen niche roles up for 16 months. Do these roles even exist? Are they waiting on the most golden of geese?

lambdason Fold-... and Monoids

> Is that so? Sounds very wrong to me. If we want to go the monad joke way, monads have to have an operation (a -> m b) that composes, but those are just normal functions, and there’s nothing curried about it. It’s a statement that one could bend enough so it’s kind of right, but what it really does is raise eyebrows.

I can see where they’re coming from, but they certainly haven’t set the stage for it to be a something you could deduce without already knowing what they’re referencing.

So to me, it seems they’re referencing the Free Monad, recursion schemes and a little of HomFunctor/Yoneda Lemma.

The free monad gives a coproduct of functions, where the value is either a recursive call or a value (branch vs node). To get from a set to a free monad, you need to define a Functor over the set, and given most things are representable, this is trivial.

Given this free monad, an algebra can be formed over it by providing a catamorphism, where the binary function would indeed be composition.

lambdason Rosetta 2 creator leaves Apple to work on Lean full-time

we aim to tackle the challenges of scalability, usability, and proof automation in the Lean proof assistant https://lean-lang.org/

Yep. Truly a mystery.

lambdason Category Theory in Programming

As primarily an engineer doing maths, with code on the side, I feel the exact same.

It’s been way more of use to me in pulling together parts of topology, linear algebra, geometric algebra, homology et al than discovering furtive programming abstractions.

lambdason Doctor-prescribed videogame for ADHD

I couldn’t disagree more. I went to the doctors at 20 for suspect ADHD, I loved Maths more than anything but my degree was going terribly. I couldn’t focus on the correct things to get the work done, I had no sense of time or organisation, everything was an eternity away until it was due now.

Time went on and it got worse and worse. Even non-academic, fun became a chore. Making music, playing games, going out; thinking about them became this litany of choices and todos I’d spiral down and I’d end up just sat there. Wasting time. But thinking how I could be enjoying myself, but unable to break myself labouring in thought of the gravity of execution needed.

I got diagnosed last year, and a year ago on Thursday, at 31, started Elvanse. I can’t for a second understate how much my life has changed for the better. Not only can I now do the boring stuff that life needs (who knew mechanical engineers did so much dull paperwork and standards), the fun stuff came back too.

I have no doubt that even if the rat race didn’t exist, if we lived in some languorous, indulgent utopia where we could do as we please every second, that I would be in bed. Miserable and crippled with option paralysis.

It’s so one dimensional and offensive to whittle ADHD down to “everyone has a lack of focus, they need to do something else”. I don’t see any difference between that statement and saying “depression doesn’t exist, just be happy”.

lambdason Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns

I’d rather have to wait a while for shiny new feature, than dive head first into the unknown.

We made that mistake with social media, not taking it seriously enough. I can wait a hot minute for my iPhone to summarise paragraphs whilst we try and avoid rampant, democracy breaking technology 2.0.

lambdason Psilocybin Effective as Antidepressant

Well, at risk of causing you ire, I won’t regale anecdotally how that one course of mushrooms was somehow better than 15 years of boner weakening, orgasm preventing, suicide ideating, hunger spiking, ever rotating slurry of anti-depressants.

Just can’t put my finger on why they didn’t make me feel better, you know.

lambdason British Placename Mapper

I would also like the people of Frome to stop being churlish and admit that’s not how you pronounce that combination of letters

lambdason Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

Shame. Purchased a V2 suite licence despite being perfectly happy with V1 because I wanted to support them, I don’t see anything good coming from merging with Canva.

lambdason Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

Looks like it isn’t routing it correctly without the `www.`

https://www.glidermag.com/ <- this works.

Off topic, and if I may be so bold, check out Whitelands. They’re my friends band and they just toured with Slowdive, one to watch out for! (I am 100% biased though).

lambdason Suno, an AI music generator

>thousands to millions of writers/producers are going to use this to rapidly block out pop songs

I’d never considered how the inevitable dystopia would sound, and it’s worse than I ever dared to fear

lambdason How do computers calculate sine?

A lot get antiquated by instruction additions, like the infamous inverse square root

lambdason A game magazine that spent two years taunting a Final Fantasy VIII hater

Huh? Nobody shared a mother, you set a limited amount of abilities in battle, one of which could be use item, but there was no restriction to your backpack out of battle.

I’ve played it basically every year since release, it scratches an itch that no other Final Fantasy does. It’s very marmite but it’s far, far from bad at all.

lambdason SymPy: Symbolic Mathematics in Python

You wouldn’t say “my oldest child was born today” in reference to your family of six children born between 2008 and today though.

lambdason Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose

That’s ridiculous. It’s the antithesis of RTFA; you have to read an argument for yourself else you’re just parroting the opinions of others.

lambdason Apple iPod Shuffle USB interface pinout

They use USB-C to the host, the TRRS simply communicates the two halves of the split between each other. You don't plug the keyboard into the 3.5mm jack on your PC!

lambdason Obsidian 1.5 Desktop (Public)

Really? The sole feature/plugin I’ve noticed not available is git, but working copy fills that hole for me.

Not noticed a single other thing, I’ve been super impressed with parity between the platforms in fact.

lambdason 2024 could be the year the PC dumps x86 for Arm, thanks to Windows 12

There were lots of devices called “Portable Computers” before x86 and there’ll be lots after.

lambdason Germans among the unhappiest people in Europe

Given the way things are going round here, I think we have much to complain about.

We don’t put that complaining into action though. A nation of boiling frogs.

lambdason What Transport for London can learn about us from our mobile data

Eh? How? 15 quid for the congestion charge, (and potentially £12.50 for ULEZ if you don’t meet the requirements).

And that’ll get you infinite journeys from zone 1-6, (£14.90 daily cap for that distance with oyster).

That same journey by car, if we count fuel (average of 52mpg and 162p per litre of diesel) - it’ll cost you ~£5 each way from Epping to Tottenham Court Road.

So £25/potentially £37.50 with ULEZ vs £14.90. And then I hope you have parking space paid for you in zone 1…

lambdason UK Parliament undermined the privacy, security, freedom of all internet users

Their opposition was that the motion was still in flux on the wording, and could have outright said “E2EE is illegal, we want either A) a backdoor into encryption if you use it B) on device monitoring for harmful content”.

It came to pass that MP’s realised they couldn’t do that… yet. So what has actually gone in is some vague wording on “should the technology become available you’ll have to implement it”.

Now most people are taking that as a win, that the wording is admitting defeat. Surely you can’t circumvent privacy whilst maintaining freedoms, you may as well put in “when 1+1=3”. And the companies are saying that’s fine, it doesn’t affect us.

But you can’t help but feel pessimistic. That clause is Chekhov’s gun, it’s put in there in its nebulous state exactly to be vague. I’ve no doubt in the coming years there’ll be a consensus where “the technology is available” comes down to MITM or something.

lambdason Modern Computer Architecture and Organization - Second Edition (2022)

Have packt got any better?

I’ve always steered clear as they seem to publish anything, regardless of quality.