Hacker News Reader

laurentogeton O1 Visa Hacks for Founders

that was my favorite part too - anybody can get a visa to move to the US - just wire yourself a couple years of US level salaries. easy.

laurentogeton Writing JavaScript without a build system

saint augustine?

laurentogeton Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

i had totally forgotten about smit - good times

laurentogeton Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

i had a solaris workstation on my desk from 2000 to 2005 and we had an industrial fridge size IBM pseries running AIX to run big linear programming problems on. You could not run linux or BSD on those machines and you could not get close to the performance of those machines with intel CPUs. We also had an itanium HP box for a while, running Digital UNIX.

laurentogeton Beyond Functional Programming: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

I am happy to see i am not the only one who remembers Oz and i wonder if there are any connection between those projects.

laurentogeton Beyond Functional Programming: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

Functional logic programming was all the rage when i started my career 30 years or so ago, but besides some obscure use cases it did not have a lot of success - i wonder if this will be the killer app.

laurentogeton The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/ not to undermine the NYRB, but this is in the public domain, for anybody interested

laurentogeton The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

considering lafargue was born in 1842 in cuba on a coffee plantation and was of mixed race he probably had a pretty good idea of what slavery was.

laurentogeton Quantum winter is coming

"Problem is, a lot of CEOs in industry and the financial sector can’t tell a bra from a ket"

i do not know enough about quantum computing to judge whether this article is accurate or not, but it certainly is well written and entertaining

laurentogeton “Latour for Architects” is now open access

Latour pretty explicitely thinks of himself as a post Marxist - one of his latest work was "la nouvelle classe ecologique" where he was making the point that environmental questions were the new Class Struggle and his work a continuation of Marxism in another context.

Marxist intellectuals have been accusing him and his followers of using marxist tools while giving up on anti-capitalism

https://www.babelio.com/livres/Latour-Memo-sur-la-nouvelle-c...

laurentogeton My PhD Genealogy

we are cousins!

laurentogeton 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

If that is true, wouldn't that be a de facto monopoly which Apple could be sued for?

laurentogeton An OCaml and Type Theory Course: Program = Proof

I am surprised he is getting away with publishing this in english only - there was a time were you had to have french versions of everything at french government institutions, and this definitely is coming from one of those.

laurentogeton Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

Will there ever be more than a fringe of the population willing to be exposed to the mortality risks motorcyclists are exposed to? Last time i looked your chance of being killed is an order of magnitude higher on a motorcycle.

laurentogeton The untold story of Yugoslavia’s naturist paradise

I went to FKK camps in croatia in the 80s when it was still yugoslavia - in my memory they were mostly for German/Dutch/Swiss tourists, were way more expensive than the state campsites, had much nicer amenities (toilets and showers maintained to german standard of cleanliness) and were much less crowded.

laurentogeton The untold story of Yugoslavia’s naturist paradise

the mix of whatever is left of victorian prudishness with decades of agressively commercialized porn sure makes for a complex and unhealthy relationship to the human body

laurentogeton The untold story of Yugoslavia’s naturist paradise

FKK was and still is very much a german movement which seems to indicate you can have nude beaches and competent engineers in the same culture.

laurentogeton No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

Headline is "no one in the trial developed severe symptom" - i am not sure how your computation proves this wrong.

laurentogeton Geometric Algebra for Python

whereas AG is just as obscure and hard to utilize, even with a computer...

laurentogeton Geometric Algebra for Python

I find it fascinating that geometric algebra and algebraic geometry are two distincts and totally different things and i wonder which term came first.

laurentogeton Using the Linux kernel's Case-insensitive feature in Ext4

I have always felt putting case-insensitivity at the filesystem level was a bad idea which would have died in the 80s if it was not for some Apple product manager being stubborn.

But making it so that it requires a kernel compile time option to make your filesystem mountable is a level of absurdity that i would not have believed possible before 2020 made unbelievable the new normal.

laurentogeton A terminal-based presentation tool with colors and effects

Only for MacOS though

laurentogeton US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days

how is the executive order in the news today not preventing economic competition exactly?

laurentogeton US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a27813648/concentratio...

on concentration camps, experts happen to differ with your opinion

laurentogeton Show HN: Minimal Reader for the ESV Bible, Written in Janet

The fact that there is an API to publish verse by verse the text of one book, i.e. a handful of megabytes uncompressed, is interesting.

The fact that this book happens to be a book of which there is a copy in every hotel room makes it a bit paradoxical.

The fact that this book is the scripture for a religion which considers usury a capital sin makes it the best example of artificial scarcity i can think of.

laurentogeton Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst?

I moved to the US in 2000 with a Ph.D. in computer science to join a startup that was supposed to become the new Cisco. I had no kid at the time and had an H1B visa so i stayed on for the first paycut, the second paycut, the office downsizing and the third paycut. Had a rough few months when the investors finally pulled the plug and i had to find someone who would transfer my visa in 2005, but by then things were on the rebound.

A lot of the american guys who left around 2003 got in real estate and house remodeling, setting themselves up for another burst. The immigrants went to take on boring jobs maintaining legacy code or installing Oracle solutions for a few years before things warmed up.

laurentogeton Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

625 kwH is microwave oven running continuously for about 3 weeks. This is a lot of energy.

laurentogeton Lambda School fined $75k by CA for operating without state approval [pdf]

Training is different from Knowledge. My understanding is that what is regulated is an institution making promises that they will give you marketable skills against a substantial amount of money. This is regulated because a lot of people get abused in similar situations.

laurentogeton Python built-ins worth learning

i cannot remember the last time i used str() instead of a string format.

laurentogeton All Chromebooks will also be Linux laptops going forward

I wish there was a way to do this without being locked in with Google as the backend.