Hacker News Reader

stcredzeroon Secret meeting between Apple and TSMC reported to reserve all 2nm capacity

This risk should be evaluated iteratively. It won't kill Apple if some small fraction of the time, their releases are delayed. Overall, if their record is that they have stuff their competitors can't even get their hands on, they win.

Even though it's not technically illegal, there's something about this that feels unfair and bad for the market.

stcredzeroon D-Expressions: Lisp power, Dylan style [pdf]

What makes Lisp macros so intuitive is not the prefix notation

The culture is the ultimate "reality distortion field." Prefix notation would be seen as intuitive, if that were culturally established. We'd see something like PEMDAS as arbitrary and silly.

Just look at how much content there is around PEMDAS and interpretation of math problems. Clearly, it really isn't "intuitive." We just have this enshrined in the culture. (That said, one of the biggest UX mistakes the designers of Smalltalk made, was to eschew operator precedence!)

stcredzeroon D-Expressions: Lisp power, Dylan style [pdf]

We could potentially get over the bikeshedding by letting everyone configure their IDEs per their own taste for syntax.

We Smalltalkers were discussing doing this at Camp Smalltalks in the 2000's.

I'm currently working in golang, and I've noticed that Goland IDE expends quite a bit of compute indexing and parsing source files. Not only that, but, a significant portion of the bug fixes have to do with this, and the primary motivation for restarting Goland has to do with stale indexing.

Wouldn't tools like git simply work better, if they were working off of some kind of direct representation of the semantic programming language structures? Merging could become 100% accurate, for one thing. (It's not for some edge cases, though many might mistakenly think otherwise.)

stcredzeroon The M4 iPad Pros

I think there's some connection between your comment:

For example, if outside developers had more capability to explore different ways...

...and these 2 sentences from the article:

For the sake of this argument, let’s posit that there exist tens of millions — perhaps 100 million — users who love the iPad for what it is. People who feel empowered, not hamstrung, by how it works, and who have no or very little need for a computer that exposes the complexity of a desktop OS like MacOS or Windows. And that there exist tens of millions more people who enjoy having an iPad to complement, not replace, their desktop computer.

If someone did come up with an iPad competitor that had all of the ease of use, UX simplicity, and ecosystem benefits, but also better enabled power users with something nearer a desktop replacement, then this would simply kill the iPad.

The fact that Apple seems reticent to do this themselves, indicates that there is a kind of organizational blind spot there, driven by self interest. Either that, or there are typical Apple long term plans that we're not fully aware of, and they're taking their own sweet time.

stcredzeroon I couldn't escape poison oak, so I started eating it

> I tried everything to make it more tolerable, and hot water was by far the best. The effect didn't last forever, but it was remarkable how it a) was actually pleasurable and b) muted the itchiness

I've been thinking of a "low fantasy" story, which is actually Sci-fi under the covers. In it, the "fey" characters are just indigenous people who have immunity to a plant which is similar to poison oak, but which grows in nigh impenetrable hedge like clumps and walls. Your mention of hot water for relief gave me an idea for a story beat, where another character discovers the hot water effect, and simultaneously discovers how to infiltrate the "fey" character's territory and bathing practices similar to Japanese and Finnish bathing.

stcredzeroon Mini ponds are 'tiny universes' of biodiversity for gardens and windowsills

I suspect hermetically sealed enclosed mini ecosystems are going to take on tremendous economic and technological importance as we move out into the solar system.

I've started to wonder why there aren't more closed loop experiments out there. These would be very cheap to make! (By space research standards.) A closed water loop habitat could be built in the middle of isolated land, like West Texas. Go from there to incrementally incorporating more of an ecosystem. Try and recycle the air last, of course, as that is potentially life threatening.

stcredzeroon Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds (2019)

One thing I've noticed about Liu Cixin's books, is that for people who follow futurism and hard Sci-fi beyond the shallow level of a typical mainstream layperson, there are huge glaring plotholes. Here's perhaps the big one: Ask, what if instead of doing [X], [certain characters] put those resources instead into building space industrial infrastructure space colonies?

This also applies to The Wandering Earth.

stcredzeroon Man impersonated law enforcement, sought to investigate own crimes, police say

Law enforcement impersonation is apparently, "a thing." To the point, where police talk about the phenomenon as something they expect to see in the course of a normal career.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6nQyuP0RU4

I had my own run in with a police impersonator in Texas. I was held up very early in the morning at gunpoint by a guy who came out of a white pickup truck. I had to explain to him that I needed to take my foot off the brake and lower my hands in order to shift into park, before I could get out of the car. His story, was that he was staking out the ATM because a number of robberies were happening there.

Later on, I told the story to a musician friend of mine who happened to be a judge, and he told me that wasn't a police officer. There were absolutely no unmarked pickup trucks being used by the police.

Some impersonators apparently go to great lengths to equip themselves, even to the point of building their own fake police cars.

stcredzeroon How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland?

I keep on noticing moments bad UX creeping into apps, more and more, for little possible benefit. Do frontend people simply not think about 2nd and 3rd order consequences anymore?

Here's an example: Disappearing affordances. For some reason, the button to remove the background from Google Meet went from being its own "Remove Background" button, to all background thumbnails becoming a toggle button.

This is fine, so long as the selected background is visible. But if it's not, perhaps because the selected background is outside the viewport of the scrollable selector, then what's happened, is that the affordance of the "Remove Background" button simply disappeared.

stcredzeroon 93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (2019)

"is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?"

This is just a matter of syntax, right? So could it be determined by a stack machine? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Perl is not context free!

https://perlmonks.org/?node_id=663393

As just a guess, this question maps to the Halting Problem. (EDIT: That would have to be the question where the input is a programming language, not just for Perl. That question has been answered empirically.)

stcredzeroon Angle-grinder: Slice and dice logs on the command line

Not to be juvenile, but I firmly believe that "computer log processing" is much more comparable to sewage treatment than converting trees into lumber.

I now have another facet to add to my appreciation of "Log" from the Renn & Stimpy show.

stcredzeroon US Post Office phishing sites get as much traffic as the real one

The Post Office leaves themselves open to this, because their site is at a level of tech that makes it hard to distinguish from a spam site from 5 years ago. It's too easy to make the phishing site look more legit than the actual site.

stcredzeroon Digital Wood Joints

constrain joints so that they can be cut with a tool on a CNC with the material secured on the machine in a convenient fashion in a reasonable period of time

Could one make that a part of the evaluator/fitness function?

stcredzeroon New evidence found for Planet 9

If it's so relatively close

Relatively close is still frightfully far away.

why wouldn't it be observed optically hiding some known objects? Mostly stars.

It's angle subtended is still awfully teeny.

stcredzeroon New evidence found for Planet 9

It's boring? It's like when an old person makes a joke they make every time you see them. It's utterly boring and devoid of joy.

Whenever I see this situation, there's the one person who is joyous, and the other one who is resentful. It makes more sense that the emotional energy is much more the function of the negativity of the resentful party, than it is any fault of the joyous one.

stcredzeroon Digital Wood Joints

Here is what immediately comes to my mind.

    - Figure out a way to parameterize joints
    - Create an automated evaluator that uses finite element analysis
    - Evolve joints with a genetic algorithm

stcredzeroon Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

The idea that you just mark your work as MIT/GPL/CC0 may have made open source more popular, but it also ruins lives when that thing you worked on for years and never made you anything makes a random drive-by asshole more than your annual salary.

[Citation Needed] (and a couple of questions)

1. How has this ruined someone's life? That mechanism isn't easy for me to see.

2. If the license allowed for it, why should any one see something wrong there?

3. Aren't you putting short shrift on the effort it takes to productize something?

stcredzeroon Tribler: An attack-resilient micro-economy for media

Indeed, its not about the tech. Changing the business model is key.

It might be hard to re-imagine the content industry without the current monopolists. Linux showed how disruptive an open model can be.

There is a stark difference between the case of Linux and content. In the case of Linux, ROI is measurable in dollars. In the case of content, value is in large part the perception of customers.

This is going to be very difficult in the particular use case of news media, which is arguably the most critical area. We're already in a situation there where "value" is in the form of the strengthening of biases and misinformation.

The point here, is that to succeed, Tribler might have to find a niche where superior value generation becomes undeniably obvious to some sizable segment. (Perhaps music can serve this function.)

stcredzeroon The Theory That There Is Only One Electron in the Universe

It was about the status of theories, not the status of reality.

What is the difference?

stcredzeroon Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

I was one of the first hires on the Cyc project when it started at MCC and was at first responsible for the decision to abandon the Interlisp-D implementation and replace it with one I wrote on Symbolics machines.

Yes, back then one person could write the code base

A coworker of mine who used to work at Symbolics told me that this was endemic with Lisp development back in the day. Some customers would think there was a team of 300 doing the OS software at Symbolics. It was just 10 programmers.

stcredzeroon Why the OpenSSL punycode vulnerability was not detected by fuzz testing (2022)

Would it be possible to attach an LLM to a debugger sessions executing all of the fuzzer seeds, and ask it to figure out how to expand coverage?

stcredzeroon Weird monitor bugs people sent me in the last 5 years (2022)

Two weird ones I see here in the office.

I have an old HP 1440p monitor that will retain the screen image when I unplug the HDMI cable from my laptop. (My solution is to plug it into a power strip, and I just shut it off when I leave.)

There's a new Dell monitor that somehow produces a sort of halo of short vertical lines a few to several pixels long around text.

stcredzeroon Half of Ireland's young people have low level of mental wellbeing

I am curious. Please give us more information on what you are referring to and your specific point of view.

stcredzeroon Embezzlers Are Nice People (2017)

embezzlers are far more likely to think that "everyone does it" as well

Funny, but I have observed this with regards to lying.

stcredzeroon Embezzlers Are Nice People (2017)

More like offering a potential counterpoint, motivated by general experience that people generally aren't stupid

I would say that everyone is smart and stupid at the same time, about different things at different times. Being a smarter person is attaining greater competence at keeping the stupid in check.

stcredzeroon Zooming User Interface (ZUI)

like a REPL but in the style of Smalltalk image

Funny, but in my comment above, I'm referencing a Smalltalk program!

Smalltalk environments are actually full of things that are functionally just about a REPL.

until I got to a code browser for part of subsystem I wanted to change

There are a variety of query languages for code repos. VisualWorks Smalltalk had two versions of this. One was based on the RefactoringBrowser code. There was another one that was a VisualWorks library. These could be used to pop up a very specific browser. For example, you could have a browser that just showed all of the implementers of a certain method X and referenced instance variable Y and called a method Z.

I wish "modern" IDEs could support something like that. This would actually be very useful for providing context to LLMs.

stcredzeroon Zooming User Interface (ZUI)

Hint: it's a dead end people! Been around forever as an idea, lots of academic studies and some industry apps.

Is it, though? For one thing, many feel that projects like Dataland led directly to the modern Windowed User Interface. One can think of opening windows as a kind of limited zooming with very specific affordances. The iOS UI is cited in the Wikipedia article on ZUI as being another example.

Basically, any UI in which one can "drill down" into greater detail or smaller/more specific contexts is effectively a kind of zooming. The problem, is losing the connection to the larger context.

Another thing to consider: At the time many of these things were tried out, there wasn't enough capability in the CPU and UI to render complex data fast enough. In fact, I was involved with a round-trip UML DB to UI product dating from the 1990's, which looked great in demos. However, it became dog slow when actually given someone's company database. This was a problem which dogged many projects with innovative UI ideas. (A problem which many CAD software apps deal with, and which seem to have been solved to some degree.)

semantics in 2D isn't something that's easy to grasp cognitively unless you specifically arranged things that way

Do you have specific examples?

stcredzeroon Textual Healing: iOS Text Editing Minutiae

Text work is real work!

stcredzeroon Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

Isn't there some kind of voice or video generation model that says "be sure to like and subscribe" given an empty prompt?

stcredzeroon US Government funds pilot project for heated sand energy storage

because you can't directly use heat for anything else other than for heating

There's Stirling Engines. If the solar collection is pure thermal, and if that collection and the storage can be made dirt cheap, then the 37% or so efficiency of conversion to electricity stops being a problem. But what are currently problems with Stirling Engines -- Hardly any of the industrial optimization has been applied to them Re: Wright's Law. So they are quite costly! Heat pipe solar thermal could be made dirt cheap through economies of scale, and it works very well, even in climates like England's.

I could envision house construction changing to include sub-basements which are just polystyrene insulated boxes filled with sand. By over-provisioning storage by 4X, houses in cold climates could have huge electrical power stores, especially in summer. (Especially if the house uses heat exchangers which can draw directly from the thermal store.)