HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

nlehuen

198 karma · joined December 4, 2010

submissionscomments
nlehuen··on Does Computer Science Need Computers?
Call it "Computing Science". There, problem fixed!
nlehuen··on Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?
While they were at it they should have explored whether those kings were actually the cause of those global climate events. You never know, with enough slicing, dicing and p-hacking you can get interesting conclusions :)
nlehuen··on Turbo Pascal on CP/M, MSX-DOS and MS-DOS
I purchased Turbo Pascal 3 for Amstrad CPC 6128 with my pocket money back in 1989(?). That was 1000 FF back then (~275€ today) so quite a big sum for a teenager. My dad took pity on me and funded 50% of it. Best investment ever!

Learning Pascal after Locomotive Basic was night and day. And the speeeeeed! I could finally compute 320x200 Mandelbrot set renderings in reasonable amounts of time (few minutes IIRC).

I still have the disk & manual somewhere, as well as a couple related books. And for whatever reason Ctrl-K Ctrl-W still haunts my mind.

It's really mind boggling that the entire thing (CP/M + IDE + compiler + libraries) fit on one side of a 3" floppy disk (<180 kB).

nlehuen··on France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls
French video explaining how one particular telemarketing scam works in France:

https://youtu.be/1HoU17dIEos?is=8giBMS_TRJEvmzM3

I'm really curious to see what impact the new law will have on this scourge.

nlehuen··on Our position on open-weights models
Please reconsider this comment. Calling one side superior and the other side insects really doesn't help with the discussion, and dehumanizing a whole swath of people really has dark consequences.
nlehuen··on Echoes (Live at Pompeii) (1972)
This song is a wonderful >24 minutes psychedelic trip and reading lyrics on genius.com is missing out a lot

You can listen & watch it on https://youtu.be/JQ2pTamaqQ4?is=T8TaqnsHRx0rqGyZ for instance.

nlehuen··on Scrcpy v4.0
I think it's implemented now. Last time I transferred from one Android phone to another, I connected them with an USB cable and the new phone prompted me to enter the old phone's PIN. I was confused why, I guess that's the reason?

The old phone's screen was OK though, and I don't remember if I had to use it to initiate the transfer.

nlehuen··on Show HN: Hallucinopedia
https://halupedia.com/spatial-bowel-movement-observatory
nlehuen··on Show HN: Hallucinopedia
I'm having a blast adding new seeds :)

https://halupedia.com/fcuk-spellchecking-society https://halupedia.com/characterization-of-the-reluctant-peng...

nlehuen··on Show HN: Hallucinopedia
Looks like some single quote escaping issue? I suspect the first link to be "Archduke Ferdinand VII's Bureau of Non-Demographic Surveys" and the apostrophe breaks the link.
nlehuen··on Show HN: Hallucinopedia
This is excellent, congrats!

FYI I manually created this page and some link markup looks malformed: https://halupedia.com/list-of-uninhabited-countries

nlehuen··on We replaced Node.js with Bun for 5x throughput
The SQL query they replaced was extremely cringe and amateurish ("let's sprinkle DISTINCT until all those pesky redundant rows that come from our inefficient KV metadata schema go away"). The fact they did not acknowledge that and somehow blame it on SQlite made me stop reading on the spot, and be very worried for whoever depends on their products.
nlehuen··on Boomloom: Think with your hands
See also: writing a design doc before writing code :)
nlehuen··on Ghostmd: Ghostty but for Markdown Notes
> Diary entries get a path: diary/2026/march/03/

Date paths should use at least a double digit numerical index so they are naturally ordered when sorted lexicographically. Numbers also give you i18n for free (assuming Gregorian calendar of course, but it seems that's what this non configurable tool does here).

nlehuen··on In praise of –dry-run
And just like that, you find yourself implementing a compiler (specs to plan) and a virtual machine (plan to actions)!
nlehuen··on Show HN: 48-digit prime numbers every git commit
Actually there are π(N) ~ N / ln(N) primes less than N per the Prime Number Theorem, so π(2 ^ 160) ~ 2 ^ 153.2 - this only drops 7 bits. So that does increase the odds of collision but much less than what I expected!
nlehuen··on Show HN: 48-digit prime numbers every git commit
I came here to write that :-)
nlehuen··on Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
There are at least some in the Paris subway, including one that went at 12 km/h but was decommissioned in 2011:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_walkway#Trottoir_roulan...

nlehuen··on My original Palm IIIx
I initially thought that this space was encumbered with parents but Gemini Deep Research says the main patent expired in 2018: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GmWGZMe_cjszV5eEegeFiWXK...
nlehuen··on AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
China is west of the USA.
nlehuen··on Initialization in C++ is bonkers (2017)
Not to worry, there is a 278 page book about initialization in C++!

https://leanpub.com/cppinitbook

(I don't know whether it's good or not, I just find it fascinating that it exists)

nlehuen··on Let's Quit X
Holy cow, I created my account in May of 2007. What a different world we live in now.
nlehuen··on Let's Quit X
I left on 2022-12-18 after some of the muskian shenanigans and I haven't missed it since, quite the contrary in fact. Before that I had to put a time limit on using the app to fight off the dark patterns.

Now I'm going to actually delete my account.

nlehuen··on Sora is here
You are posting this under a pseudonym. If you did publish something horrific or illegal, it would have been the responsibility of this web site to either censor your content, and/or identify you when asked by authorities. Which do you prefer?
nlehuen··on Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
Yes it does. Internally Google uses C++20 (https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#C++_Versio...) and the model picks the style from training, I suppose.
nlehuen··on Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
I also work at Google and I agree with the general sentiment that AI completion is not doing engineering per se, simply because writing code is just a small part of engineering.

However in my experience the system is much more powerful than you described. Maybe this is because I'm mostly writing C++ for which there is a much bigger training corpus than JavaScript.

One thing the system is already pretty good at is writing entire short functions from a comment. The trick is not to write:

  function getAc...
But instead:

  // This function smargls the bleurgh
  // by flooming the trux.
  function getAc...
This way the completion goes much farther and the quality improves a lot. Essentially, use comments as the prompt to generate large chunks of code, instead of giving minimum context to the system, which limits it to single line completion.
nlehuen··on Something's Poisoning America's Farms. Scientists Fear 'Forever' Chemicals
I found this article to be interesting and well sourced: https://examine.com/articles/are-cast-iron-pans-unsafe/

It doesn't find documented evidence of harmful effects of oil seasoning. Buy likewise for Teflon coating in normal heat conditions.

What I didn't expect is the part about iron leaching and its effects!

nlehuen··on Escaping from Anaconda (Python)
OTOH it's sad that a Nobel-winning macroeconomist has to write a blog article about fixing Anaconda's hostile takeover of student machines and setting up a basic Python environment.
nlehuen··on Something's Poisoning America's Farms. Scientists Fear 'Forever' Chemicals
> Learning to coat steel pans in oil to make them non-stick-ish has been a great help.

Doesn't this involve cooking oil into harmful polymers?

nlehuen··on Matching dinosaur footprints found on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean
This video puts things into perspective, mapping the whole of 4.5B years of Earth history to 1 hour: https://youtu.be/S7TUe5w6RHo?si=9rkHNaXA2PXXMJjN
Page 1 of 2Next →