raddan

> Aren’t high-level programming languages very refined encodings of “logic, interfaces, and data models?”

I feel like I would be hard pressed to explain what I want in English more concisely than just writing a SQL query.

You are right about high entropy short-ish passwords but almost nobody does that. Virtually everybody chooses something not just low entropy but often easily crackable with good search heuristics. Why not give people another way to produce passwords that are harder to crack? With luck, at least a few people will choose a correct-horse-battery-staple.

> I don't think anyone would care about "hand made software", arguably no one ever did. You need a tool to do X.

I absolutely do. Perhaps this is a product of my first exposure to computers, but I vividly remember the early Macintosh computers coming on the scene. The care and attention to detail on every level of the machine was special. They were so different than everything before. And it inspired many developers to produce beautiful, weird, awesome software. Does anybody remember the Talking Moose? After Dark? Spaceward Ho! HyperCard? RoboWars? Heck, even MSWord 5.1a was an amazing piece of software whose grammar checker literally taught me grammar.

Now we have “software that does X”, but that X is so bland and enshittified nearly all the joy of computing has been erased. I love writing software. I love writing good and clever software. Perhaps the world no longer cares, but I do.

I suspect that the iPod nano is somewhat un-hackable, but the iPod mini and earlier models actually had physical mini EIDE spinning disks in them. The interface was electrically identical (or close enough) to CompactFlash cards that a little service I ran on the side for beer money was upgrading people’s iPods to CF. Nowadays you can get absolutely gargantuan CF cards. I put a 256GB CF card in my iPod mini and the firmware, to my surprise, had no trouble recognizing the capacity. I also personally love that form factor, but obviously, different strokes for different folks.

I do appreciate that you said that you enjoy curating your 8GB but I got tired with that way back in 2003 when I bought my first iPod. I never want to go back to that.

It’s funny, I proposed essentially this idea on HN awhile back and the pigpile of commenters who said it was a stupid idea made me reconsider whether I really wanted to share ideas here. It’s great to see that you actually did it. I’d love to read a blog post if you ever get around to it!

I bought a FranklinWH, both for technical reasons and because I could not in good conscience purchase a Tesla battery. I like the FranklinWH. However, I discovered that it is extremely chatty with a large number of hosts located in China. Most of the hosts it chats with are hardcoded IP addresses. This worries me a bit, not for xenophobic reasons, but because it strikes me as brittle. That said, I did end up putting the device on its own (firewalled-off) subnet. Although the app is kind of opaque, it works fine, and I mostly get the information I want via HomeAssistant, which has a FranklinWH plugin. I'm not sure if I would buy it again but it gets the job done.

My other equipment is mostly SolarEdge, which is excellent and well-behaved. SolarEdge now has batteries too-- I would probably look into them were I to buy a battery again.

A couple things to note. If you get a battery do not put it near your house. Generally, energy storage has a good safety record, but if they do experience thermal runaway, the fire effectively cannot be extinguished until all the fuel is consumed. Mine is 75' from my house because I have a solar groundmount array. Second, my solar installer initially set everything up using wifi, including a high-gain antenna because the array was so far from my house. I pointed out that I had an ethernet switch in my basement, so they ran hardwired networking through the power conduit to my house. Much more stable. Just ask for ethernet upfront if you can.

The only drawback, really, is that sometimes you _want_ the charge in the battery for yourself. If you take out a loan with a ConnectedSolutions clause (e.g., a MassSave loan), you are obligated to make your home battery available as a VPP under the terms of the loan.

Fortunately, one of the valid reasons for opting out from a "VPP event" (which is what my battery mfgr's app calls it) is a coming storm. In fact, in my system a "storm hedge" (where the battery tops itself up before a storm) trumps a VPP event, so for all practical purposes, there is little inconvenience. So there aren't really any drawbacks. And when you are done paying your loan you can either stay enrolled in ConnectedSolutions or not.

I say go for it. A 0% loan is great, and it was the deciding factor for us to buy the battery. Honestly, I wish I had bought a bigger battery! 15kWh is good for an evening, but not quite enough if the following day is rainy.

Wow, super cool. I wish I had the time to dig into one of these. If I do, I will buy one in a heartbeat. Thanks for making this!

I don’t know if this is considered a classic, but I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed Daphne Du Maurier’s “Rebecca”. I think I might have read it in a single sitting.

I was lead to Rebecca after I found and read a discarded copy of Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History”. I wanted more and Googled “books like Rebecca”. Sadly, I thought Tartt’s “The Goldfinch”, which lots of people raved about, was not very good.

Hash tables are awesome. They are both an incredibly simple data structure and a seriously deep rabbit hole. Most of the complexity comes from collision resolution [1], and how you handle resolution largely determines what kind of hash table you have. There are at least dozens of collision resolution approaches. The simplest, and probably the one you implemented in your undergrad C class was open addressing. That’s also what I implemented as an undergrad. But there are many more approaches, some quite a bit more complicated, and many of them let you continue to shave off asymptotic costs when you run collision resolution, or they improve locality for typical lookups, allowing better cache utilization, etc. Hash tables are super fun to play with, and for full effect, you really do need to implement them in something like C.

I only skimmed the linked article, but I do wonder whether the author ever realized that they needed to think about scope rules. I searched for the word “scope” but never found it. Closures seriously complicate language design and things get painful and counterintuitive unless you use lexical scope (or… you know… you like pain).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table#Collision_resolutio...

I live just over the border in Massachusetts and we have something similar, called ConnectedSolutions. It is essentially the same kind of program except that the benefit is a 0% loan on the battery purchase. I have a 15kW battery that allows me to power the entire house overnight without drawing from the grid. When the power company wants to draw from my battery, they send me a notification through my battery’s app. I can opt out some fixed number of times, too. And, just as when my solar runs net negative, the power company pays me (in bill credits) whenever the virtual power plant draws power.

Agreed. In the pre-LLM days, students always asked me how to "maximize" their hirability. The standard response was "have a passion project" and yeah, that did help people get hired in some ways. But the project was almost never the point of the demonstration. It was more to show that you are _the kind of person_ who sweats the details, who likes taking deep dives. For many of the best jobs, that's _still_ what they want; it's just now, a Github repository is no longer sufficient. That should not stop a passionate person from pursuing their passions.

> I'm not asking for an oracle that can determine whether a paper is correct, I want an oracle that can find real mistakes in papers (thus invalidating them).

What's the difference? How do you find real mistakes without a model? Either you have a trusted mathematical model (in which case you already have a complete explanation) or you have to compare it against the ultimate oracle: the world. Or are you proposing something like "let's use an LLM to convert this hand-wavy English paper into a formal proof and then check it for logical fallacies?" In which case, fine, that would be useful, but that's not exactly the same thing (and also not as important) as saying that a paper advances a bad explanation. Just that the explanation is flawed in some way.

There are obviously exceptions (e.g., the specification for the Java programming language is well over 100 pages [1] and is extremely low on filler), but most ideas don't work like this. In my area, 10 pages really is enough most of the time.

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se17/html/index.htm...

I know that your post is an amusing take on communication, but I find the post you responded to be kind of a horrifying idea. Until recently, writing was like a time machine: somebody, from almost at any time in human history, wanted to tell you something. By writing it down in a common language, you could read what they wanted to say. Writing is flipping amazing.

There has always been bad writing, but historically it has been easy enough to filter the garbage out. Now we get garbage that looks so much like real thoughts that it's hard to tell. This is not a positive development. Separating the wheat from the chaff is extra work, and the overhead is a burden on humanity. I suspect that this is a burden that almost nobody actually wants, but we're getting it anyway.

> That is not realistic, but I suppose where things are heading ...

And to expand on this, it's not realistic because science is not armchair philosophy. You have to go out and measure the world.

Sometimes, through force of will, a person can think deeply about a problem and come up with beautiful theories that explain our measurements. Many scientists had careers like this, probably most famously, Einstein. But it's worth noting that Einstein also got a lot wrong! [1]

Even if we somehow give an LLM the ability to go out and measure things, I seriously doubt that the role of humans in science is done. There's a big difference between "an explanation" and "a good explanation." Ask any physicist. There's a surprising amount of aesthetics involved. Good theories are consistent with the evidence, but it's more than that-- there's a great deal of "taste" involved. And there's a good reason for that. For any real problem, there are effectively an infinite number of alternative hypotheses. From a "theory of science" standpoint, this should cause scientists nightmares, but it doesn't. Because by the time you are a practicing scientist, you've developed a feel for what constitutes a satisfying explanation. If you spend time with scientists, especially in the "hallway track" at a conference, "taste" is a frequent topic of conversation!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%27s_unsuccessful_inve...

My wife and I used to drive around aimlessly when I was in grad school and she was just starting her career as a doctor. We found that it was a good way to relax, and we sometimes discovered fun local gems when we did this.

One weekend we stumbled on a local apple orchard doing a cider making demonstration. We were the only people there so the orchardist (he called himself a “pomoculturist”) personally showed us around, picking an occasional apple, telling us about it, and then encouraging us to take a bite.

At one point he picked a deeply dark purple, almost black, apple and handed it to me. “Black Oxford” The flavor was intense: acidic, sweet, floral. Then another, dark red and fragrant. “Winesap” Then “Belle de Boskoop”. And on and on.

None of these apples are sold commercially except at small scale directly from orchards. The flavors, appearances, and aromas of apples is truly astonishing. So I think that’s why Red Delicious gets all the hate. The world of apples is amazing and huge.

I prefer to see Red Delicious as yet another miracle of apple genetics, just one that I don’t personally care for. But if you have the opportunity to visit an heirloom orchard, please do.

For me, it was a life-changing event: I now have a small heirloom orchard of my own.

Yes. All you really need are paths. This is a bit of an overgeneralization since forests in different places have different growth habits, but many old growth forests have less underbrush. During the winter, these forests are pretty easy to navigate on Nordic skis. If he wants to skate instead of doing the classic stride, I’m sure he can afford to groom the paths. Grooming really just requires a fancy snowmobile.

Wow, that was very charitable of you. I don’t have the wheelsmithing skills to even attempt that repair.

I also met a number of homeless people while on a long bike pack (C&O + GAP). They were usually pretty hard up: they lived in junky tents off the side of the trail and used their bikes to commute to work. It’s hard for me not to think that we have failed in an important way if somebody is dragging themselves to work while living out of a tent.

I hadn’t heard of this, so here’s more context [1] for the curious.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/articles/cqx41x3gn5zo

I disagree with the downvotes. As an American I ALSO think that we should be doing the opposite.

Nonsense.

Mississippi: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPCPI

Belgium: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

And that is not counting the substantial safety net that your average European has. I would MUCH rather live in Belgium than Mississippi, and I say this as an American.

In high school (in the 90s) I was badgered by military recruiter phone calls. I’m not sure why they were fixated on me, but I had several military in my family (including my mother) and I was a good athlete so maybe that was a part of it. I don’t know. Finally, out of frustration I told one of the recruiters that I was gay (which is not true) and he quickly responded “the modern military takes all kinds” and then I followed up with “and I have asthma.” (which IS true) Click. They never called back after that.

My freshman year cross country course record still stands, 34 years later. I’ve always thought how strange it was that the merest whiff of asthma was disqualifying.

And? Did you turn out OK?

> (And here I thought "Alice in Wonderland" was a Disney film—who knew it was a book first?)

Really? I thought that this was common knowledge. On the other hand, my parents loved to quote Lewis Carroll at me and brother when we were growing up so perhaps this knowledge is not as universal as I imagine. “‘Twas a boojum!” was often used in conversation in my household when you expected one thing but discovered another (potentially dangerous) thing.

How does wallabag know about your bookmarks? Or do you mean that you're using a wallabag extension for firefox?

Yes

For what it’s worth, it’s the analogy I use, and for the twenty or so college sophomores I taught on Tuesday, the analogy is sufficiently understandable that they were able to generate and use SSH key pairs to do their homework.

I think the reason we (the HN crowd) don’t like it is that the analogy starts to break down when you start thinking through all of the operations you can do with public keys. But this does not matter much for somebody learning to use them for the first time. I’ve had to grow comfortable with the idea of giving people imperfect explanations so that they can build an intuition. Once that happens I can return with the mathematics so that they can really understand what is going on.

As a programming languages researcher I disagree. HTML is not just a programming language (a declarative one), it literally has the word “language” in the name. The world of programming languages is much larger than general purpose languages.

Also, whether JavaScript is interesting is a matter of opinion. Given that for a long time it was the only web language, I’d say that makes it interesting. It’s also in my opinion a poorly designed language but that also makes it “interesting” because its behavior is sometimes hard to predict.

If the author is an LLM, it’s a really bad one.

> wind appears to be going out of the sales of “AI.”

is a sentence that virtually no AI would write since the most probable word here is “sails.” I can’t read the article though since it appears that the site is down.

I suspect that it’s just a bad/dated analysis.