Hacker News Reader

paulmooreparkson Kagi Translate now supports LinkedIn Speak as an output language

Input:

> Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.

Output:

> Unlocking the power of synergy: Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.

> It’s all about leveraging local ecosystems to drive impactful results. When we talk about buffalo from Buffalo who intimidate other buffalo from Buffalo, we’re really talking about the competitive landscape of modern leadership.

> Are you intimidating your peers, or are you empowering them to scale? Let’s disrupt the status quo together. #Leadership #BuffaloMindset #Synergy #Networking #GrowthHacking

Not too shabby. Weird that it just repeated it in the first paragraph but then understood it in the second one.

paulmooreparkson Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

Exactly. Even if I hammer the erstwhile reviewer with Teams/Slack messages to get it moved to the top of the queue and finished before the 5 hours are up, then all the other reviews get pushed down. It averages out, and the review market corrects.

paulmooreparkson C++26: The Oxford Variadic Comma

Note to the author of TFA: The moment I get a sign-up modal on any site, I close the tab and move on.

paulmooreparkson Antarctica sits above Earth's strongest 'gravity hole' – how it got that way

> in fact, no one knows what gravity is

Albert Einstein has entered the chat

paulmooreparkson New Nick Bostrom Paper: Optimal Timing for Superintelligence [pdf]

There is no "should" in the relevant section. It's making a mathematical model of the risks and benefits.

> Now consider a choice between never launching superintelligence or launching it immediately, where the latter carries an % risk of immediate universal death. Developing superintelligence increases our life expectancy if and only if:

> [equation I can't seem to copy]

> In other words, under these conservative assumptions, developing superintelligence increases our remaining life expectancy provided that the probability of AI-induced annihilation is below 97%.

paulmooreparkson I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

I'm 55 and I started at age 13 on a TI-99/4A, then progressed through Commodore 64, Amiga 2000, an Amiga XT Sidecar, then a real XT, and on and on. DOS, Windows, Unix, the first Linux. I ran a tiny BBS and felt so excited when I heard the modem singing from someone dialing in. The first time I "logged into the Internet" was to a Linux prompt. Gopher was still a bigger thing than the nascent World-Wide Web.

The author is right. The magic has faded. It's sad. I'm still excited about what's possible, but it'll never create that same sense of awe, that knowledge that you can own the entire system from the power coming from the wall to the pixels on your screen.

paulmooreparkson Child prodigies rarely become elite performers

The saying isn't "The only way..." but "The best way...". Of course one may improve with all the things you mention, and it's a tongue-in-cheek statement anyway, but there's a grain of truth to it. I saw it quoted by one of the greatest teachers in golf, Harvey Penick.

paulmooreparkson Child prodigies rarely become elite performers

There's a saying about golf that probably applies to chess: The best way to improve is to go back in time and learn it at an earlier age.

paulmooreparkson A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch

Exactly what I came here to say. I've been programming for 40 years, 35 professionally, and I didn't find my ergonomic, no-pain, no-RSI happy place until I stopped following advice to sit up straight. I set my chair with just enough resistance, set the head rest where it puts my eyeline directly on my monitors, which are set considerably higher than average and about a metre from my head. I can work for hours like this now, with no pain.

I could never use an app like this. Maybe I should write one that blurs the screen when I don't slouch.

paulmooreparkson I'm 34. Here's 34 things I wish I knew at 21

I can honestly say that this happened to me, but the feeling did leave me. It required a massive change of lifestyle and the habits that went with it.

paulmooreparkson I'm 34. Here's 34 things I wish I knew at 21

This is well done. I can't say I agree with all of them, but I agree with the fact that you sat down and thought about them, and that you wrote them down. Good job.

> Adults make a lot more sense when you realise they're just children in big bodies.

That one, I absolutely agree with.

I'm 55. I would have a hard time limiting myself to 55 things I wish I knew when I was 34. When I'm 105, I still will have too many for now. :)

paulmooreparkson Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://parkscomputing.com/

I wrote the engine for this so that I can just write bare HTML or Markdown files, put them into the content folder, update the index, and away we go. It also internally uses a JSON replacement I wrote, XferLang, so it's quite an experimental platform.

paulmooreparkson You need a kitchen slide rule

Yeah. Heck, you can just prop the slide rule up somewhere and look at it without even moving the slider. No button punching required.

paulmooreparkson You need a kitchen slide rule

Bases for cases. One of the advantages of Imperial measurements is that they are divisible by more factors than 2 and 5. This is where metric falls down for cooking. NB: I know the metric system and use it daily, but it's not perfect for every use case.

paulmooreparkson You need a kitchen slide rule

The point of the article is that he can set the C and D scales to the proportion he needs, one time, and then just move the slider around for each ingredient, rather than doing a different calculation for each ingredient. Knowing when to vary the proportion is just basic cooking knowledge which would have to be applied either way.

paulmooreparkson You need a kitchen slide rule

This is great! I actually just bought a slide rule a few weeks ago (a Pickett N902-ES), and I've been working through the original booklet. One reason I bought it was to get a different perspective on calculation, since I never used a slide rule in school. Case in point: I do a lot of cooking, and this use case never occurred to me.

paulmooreparkson Why Real Life is better than IRC (2000)

You didn't happen to hang out on #C++, did you?

paulmooreparkson The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

I'm running Windows (25H2, 26200.7462). I used the batch file you pasted and tried your repro steps, multiple times (I started writing this comment, in fact). It didn't steal focus. (Edit: See below). I'm quite sure that I haven't had a steal-focus issue at the OS level for many years, and I use Windows all day, every day. I'm also a Visual Studio user.

Edit: I tried it with Firefox and got a repro there. No stealing with Edge.

paulmooreparkson The virtual AmigaOS runtime (a.k.a. Wine for Amiga:)

AINU - Ainu Is Not UAE?

Just spitballing.

paulmooreparkson Show HN: Frockly – A visual editor for understanding complex Excel formulas

One of the best videos ever. This set me on the path to having respectable Excel kung fu that was the envy of all my colleagues.

paulmooreparkson Resistance training load does not determine hypertrophy

Body mechanics, leverage, and neuro-muscular connection definitely come into play. I could deadlift 430lbs for reps at my peak, and I while I was no string bean, I also didn't look all that muscular compared to the other lifters at my gym. I have ridiculously long arms relative to my height and relatively shorter legs, which gives me an advantage for deadlift. I had monstrous-looking guys watch me lift and then ask me what stack I was on. They didn't believe me when I said I was natural.

paulmooreparkson Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): An incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy

Same. I was singing this in the very early 80's, if not late 70's.

paulmooreparkson Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now

This is an entirely new level of performance art. Bravo!

Edit: I'm saving this so that I can compare it to the real one in ten years.

paulmooreparkson 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long

A 1d row of cells also affects nearby cells above and below the line. Consider a row of three cells:

https://parkscomputing.com/page/conways-game-of-life?boardSi...;

That produces a spinner, because the empty cells above and below the 1d row have three live cells nearby.

paulmooreparkson FileZilla Pro "Perpetual License" – A Warning to All Users

> If you’re considering FileZilla Pro, understand exactly what you are walking into: You can pay for a perpetual license, and later be denied any way to reinstall the product you legally own.

No. You are not denied any way to reinstall the product you legally own. It's on you to maintain backups of your installers. If you have that backup, you may install it and run it legally.

> Their excuse: “For security reasons we do not provide older versions.”

I can understand that logic. If an out-of-date version is found to have a vulnerability, then if they provide that version but don't update it, they are exposing themselves to lawsuits. Whether or not the lawsuit makes sense is another matter, but I can imagine the company's lawyers putting the kibosh on providing an archive of outdated installers.

paulmooreparkson Bring bathroom doors back to hotels

It's not a function of price. One of the most expensive hotels in Southeast Asia has this problem. I've complained. They said they're fixing it in an upcoming design refresh.

paulmooreparkson Bring bathroom doors back to hotels

One of my favourite hotels in SE Asia has this problem. (I won't name and shame, since when we complained they said it's going to be fixed soon in a redesign.)

On the topic, though... I want a desk that isn't made of glass so that I can use a mouse. Optical mice have been the standard for years, and of course I don't carry a mousepad. Who thinks glass desktops are good?

paulmooreparkson Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

I remember hacking the "Start" button in 95 through 7 to say "Whee!" instead of "Start". Childish and silly, but I liked it. I miss being able to make little hacks like that.

paulmooreparkson My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

I'm not entirely sure what constitutes "normal" anyway. A frequent tongue-in-cheek topic of conversation between my wife (a counselling psychologist) and me is how we're weird, and everyone else seems to be normal, where "normal" in this thread of conversation usually describes some sort of puzzling behaviour.

paulmooreparkson Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

I'm still running the old version, and it's using 171MB of memory. That seems excessive already. Granted, I have 128GB, but still....