HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

narwally

330 karma · joined May 4, 2013

submissionscomments
narwally··on ‘America does so much more to subsidise affluence than alleviate poverty’
> The private sector will almost always deliver a better result as you mitigate market power abuse.

Yeah, and feathers fall at the same speed as baseballs if you mitigate friction.

narwally··on Modern software performance is firmly in its “beyond parody” stage
I believe emacs chunks large files and then lazily loads them to enable this. I remember having to mess around with a specific mode to get it to work in the past, but I think it's included in base emacs now.
narwally··on Parsing the .DS_Store File Format (2018)
I don't even use finder and I still find these things popping up every now or then.
narwally··on Parsing the .DS_Store File Format (2018)
It took me forever to figure out that windows defender was what was slowing emacs down to a crawl on windows. I even went through the trouble of compiling native-comp and it was still slow.
narwally··on Ask HN: Is Google Slowly Dying?
I wish I could tell it I always want English language wikipedia results first regardless of which language I search in. I'm tired of my top result being a poorly translated version of the English wikipedia page I actually want.
narwally··on GPT-4 performs significantly worse on coding problems not in its training data
If I were talking about sentience I would definitely be including goldfish. What about them is so different to us that we would have sentience while they would not?
narwally··on Autodoc: Toolkit for auto-generating codebase documentation using LLMs
Remember that dude that wrote the vast majority of Scots wikipedia while not being able to speak Scots? Yeah, just waiting for the first LLM to make headlines by hallucinating it's own version of human history and publishing it to wikipedia.
narwally··on Autodoc: Toolkit for auto-generating codebase documentation using LLMs
I wasted two hours yesterday just to track down a bug that was in the documentation, not the code. It's so frustrating. Maintaining good documentation is incredibly hard especially when you're trying to document how your program interacts with other software because now you have to change your documentation when a third party changes their code.
narwally··on We ran a phone check at a Y Combinator event in SF
It shouldn't, that's wage theft and is very much illegal.
narwally··on Judge decides against Internet Archive
Trademark and copywright aren't quite the samee things. We can get rid of copywright while still allowing trademarks.
narwally··on Judge decides against Internet Archive
Do we actually need monetary incentives to get people to create new things. Won't people naturally keep creating new things as long as they aren't constrained by a more fundamental need? So we really just need to create a society where nobody has to worry about their basic needs like housing, food, healthcare, etc...and then people are free to create and are even free to fail while doing so.
narwally··on Judge decides against Internet Archive
More Lord of the Flies than Anarchy. There's definitely hierarchy in our system.
narwally··on Use the XDG Base Directory Specification
I shove them all into ~/docs and then edit my ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs file to match.
narwally··on We can't all use AI. Someone has to generate the training data
Can you really not imagine any kind of system where everyone can pay their bills and knowledge isn't guarded behind a paywall?
narwally··on We can't all use AI. Someone has to generate the training data
Misattributed. It was actually Kurt Tucholsky who was himself quoting an unnamed French Diplomat.

"Der Tod eines Menschen: das ist eine Katastrophe. Hunderttausend Tote: das ist eine Statistik!"

narwally··on Using a Raspberry Pi to add a second HDMI port to a laptop
until you get to the one actually tricky part and you need to pause it for sec so your brain can catch back up.
narwally··on Show HN: Using GPT-3 and Whisper to save doctors’ time
Hell, it's hard enough these days to identify which physicians are actually physicians. I recently had an NP introduce herself to me as "Dr. So-and-so."
narwally··on Meta plans to lay off 10k employees
Yep, google published a bunch of research about their hiring processes and it basically said "we've tried everything and nothing works... anybody else have any ideas?"
narwally··on Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4
I mean, I'd say that about regular Duolingo.
narwally··on GPT-4
Hell, I can learn that just by chit-chating with my redneck neighbor.
narwally··on Do no harm: can school mental health interventions cause iatrogenic harm? [pdf]
Would that also include side affects from medications?
narwally··on Do no harm: can school mental health interventions cause iatrogenic harm? [pdf]
> CBT can be helpful, but it 'intellectualizes' problems too much. How about teaching these kids how to increase their self-confidence? How to identify their emotional needs? How to build their social skills, resolve conflicts in relationships, and assert their personal boundaries? Most sure aren't learning that from their parents.

All the things you listed are already directly addressed within CBT.

narwally··on The Sumerian Game
The Royal Game of Ur?
narwally··on Overcoming Tab Overload
I find that the more you use emacs the more you get frustrated that nothing else works the way it does in emacs. You either deal with it, try and hack some emacs functionality into your favorite tools, or end up living full-time inside of emacs--relegating your desktop environment to a glorified emacs launcher.
narwally··on Lima: Linux-on-Mac
My solution for this on linux has been to run Linux Mint Debian Edition while using Nix for package management of stuff I want to stay reasonably up to date.
narwally··on Brain-Computer Interface User Types 90 Characters per Minute with Mind
Since it uses the neural signals for handwriting, I'm not sure this is going to allow me to achieve my dream of using emacs with my mind.
narwally··on The Missing Semester of CS Education
Yeah, I feel like a lot of us emacs users have been using it for so long that we don't even realize how different even the basics feel to people that are used to doing things the 'new fashioned' way. I picked it up after reading all of Steve Yegge's emacs blog rants, so I already had my interest peaked and had a good idea what I was getting myself into. I also wasn't expecting to get any serious work done with it, I was just curious about lisp and functional programming and wanted to dick around with emacs to see what all the fuss was about. After that I was hooked. I count all the hours of rewriting my emacs configs from scratch or typing in every function from SICP as time well 'wasted', but I fully understand why not everyone considers that type of thing to be something fun to do on a lazy Sunday.
narwally··on The Missing Semester of CS Education
I agree with you to an extent, but learning lisp is a bit more involved than just picking up another programming language; it's learning to program in a completely new paradigm. I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect students to pick up things like syntax and standard libraries on their own, but to expect everyone to seamlessly pick up the functional paradigm with no help from the instructor is a bit much. For something like this there should be at least one lecture that goes over some of the fundamentals of functional programming and gives students the vocabulary they'll need to find the solutions to any roadblocks they run into.
narwally··on The Missing Semester of CS Education
I wouldn't say they're esoteric, but there is a learning curve because they're incongruent with the UI we've been taught by our graphical desktop environments. I do concede the somewhat dogmatic tone, but that's honestly just par for the course with any GNU software, though emacs is for sure one of the worst offenders. I still love it though, but wouldn't recommend it to anyone that isn't already expressing interest in giving it a try.
narwally··on The Missing Semester of CS Education
>And then tweaking assignments to not be video game focused

Our only program of any significance in CS101 was a space invaders clone, but because we were so inexperienced, they provided a project template where we really just had to fill in some methods with a bunch of for-loops. When we got to the later courses and had to write our programs from scratch, we really had no idea where to begin because the 101 coursework had done all of that for us.

The video game assignments were asinine because they were beyond our skill level to do from scratch, so their templates handled all the I/O for us and that part of the program was treated like a bunch of magical incantations. As a result, we never fully internalized how all the moving parts fit together, and it kept us from learning useful stuff like how to read/write from files or execute system commands.

Page 1 of 8Next →