HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

unknownian

250 karma · joined June 17, 2013

submissionscomments
unknownian··on Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
Lmao what a ridiculous response. Yes, some mathematicians and artists are in it to feel smart. But the vast majority also just enjoy the process. Having a computer do all the work for you and just typing prompts in ruins that completely. As Ronny Chieng said in his Harvard speech, the journey is the point.

>Any mathematician in academic or industry is more than likely not a "pure math" person (tainted by capitalism)

Ignoring that I meant pure as in non applied math, let's just make it clear: you agree that mathematicians who are against capitalism encroaching on this process should be allowed to dislike it without criticism of being pretentious?

unknownian··on Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
You shouldn't be getting downvoted for something that a majority of pure math and art enthusiasts believe to be true. The truth is many of these entrepreneurs and VCs are obsessed with AI not for money or human progress, but because it makes them feel closer to being a "god" rather than a mere mortal. Much of it (especially AI art) is out of spite for human creativity, which is done by mortals with limitations.
unknownian··on Pre-2022 Books
I’m vehemently anti-genAI in creative fields but even I think this metric is stupid and unfair to younger generations and generations to come, even if genAI writing gets better.

If you can’t trust a contemporary writer to not use genAI, then find another interest with true zero trust creative verification (like improv) because copying and cheating on writing has existed for decades.

However, my unpopular opinion is extremist in another way: societies should probably not tolerate AI in creative fields like creative writing at all, if Sora can be shut down, so can other useless and toxic parts of LLMs.

unknownian··on HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
>like the AGPL?

As I explained in an earlier thread, MongoDB tried using AGPL. AGPL is not a barrier for Amazon, they still will resell your product without contributing. MongoDB ended up using a variant of AGPL that is even stricter (requiring the entire tech stack to be under the same license) but is no longer considered FOSS. Until the attitude changes around what FOSS is, this will keep happening.

unknownian··on Please release nano under less restrictive license so we can use it
Are you disagreeing with me or just giving more detail? Because I think that's what I was saying. My opinion is that this is not fair to a company like MongoDB.
unknownian··on Please release nano under less restrictive license so we can use it
Then why did Mongo relicense? I assumed that AGPL was not enough to maintain their business which is why they are now using a more extreme form of AGPL that is no longer considered Free.
unknownian··on Please release nano under less restrictive license so we can use it
I enjoyed the post and this is off-topic but when I was younger I was very pro-GPL and I still like copyleft, but to me the logic behind it makes less and less sense as time goes on. RMS compares software to a physical book you can modify, make copies of, and share with your friends, but in my opinion, software is much more like a power drill, a tool you can modify with difficulty and let people borrow. The analogy for software as media is also ironic because the FSF themselves claim that the GPL is not intended for media works and recommend other licenses (like Creative Commons which I support).

I do like the idea that GPL prevents big corps from taking advantage of programmers, but the idea that a GPL program is inherently better than a proprietary program written by an independent developer no longer makes sense to me, though independent proprietary software is often abandoned. But more importantly, it doesn't seem fair when a company makes an AGPL devops tool and then a bigger corp just sells that product as a service. When companies like MongoDB decide to change their licenses so that Amazon doesn't steal all their customers, I don't feel bad about it at all. I have no skin in this game but it blows my mind that there are FSF people who defend massive corporations essentially reselling a smaller company's work solely for the sake of ideological purity. Someone can correct me if I've been misinformed here.

unknownian··on Anger Management: Why the Genius Founders Turned to Couples Therapy
I saw Tom be the awards emcee at Yale's hackathon and I don't really get why he acts the way he does. It's some persona that makes people hate startup founders even more than they already do. Add the Yale tag to that and boom you've got your classic Ivy privilege douchebag. I know people from Ivies (including my own) and it's really rare for people to act like this. Is he giving these groups a bad name? I don't know him personally, and he's probably a fine guy, but it seemed like by the end of the event people were sort of sick of his antics.
unknownian··on Ideas for Improving Ruby During Google Summer of Code 2015
>MRI executes Ruby via an interpreted stack-machine bytecode language known as YARV

On Wikipedia: >Since YARV has become the official Ruby interpreter for Ruby 1.9, it is also named KRI (Koichi's Ruby Interpreter), in the same vein as the original Ruby MRI, named for Ruby's creator Yukihiro Matsumoto.

So is one of them wrong? I'm confused.

unknownian··on Any good open-source self-hosted evernote alternatives?
>I don't think there's an app for Syncthing

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nutomic.sy...

Yeah, I knew about the middle device thing, but it seemed like a hassle when the Android app is a bit alpha-ish.

unknownian··on Any good open-source self-hosted evernote alternatives?
A problem is that if you want to sync regular text files to apps on your phone we have formed somewhat of a Dropbox monoculture where DB is generally the main or sometimes the only syncing option available in mobile apps. We should really start to move away from these tools.
unknownian··on Any good open-source self-hosted evernote alternatives?
Syncthing is great, but the devs say they can't develop a mechanism for sync between operating systems on the same computer, which is something I really need.
unknownian··on Lint for Math
Is there a word to describe the structure of the notation of mathematics versus programming syntax versus the English language?
unknownian··on A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status
Oh, I guess I read too quickly. Comments on those sites really are terrible.
unknownian··on A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status
The comments on that site are sickening. Yes, I do not agree with Eich's views. Mozilla owned up to it. Someone should tell them to disable JS everywhere because of Eich.

Plus, Firefox is a community project with more momentum than almost any FOSS project. It won't die.

edit: read that in reverse

unknownian··on My Weird Ruby
Is Rubinius X still a thing?
unknownian··on What happened to all the non-programmers?
I've never lived in SF but this is a reason why people sometimes mention how they prefer to live elsewhere. I've lived in Los Angeles and New York and I feel a nice sense of diversity in interests and backgrounds [of all forms] and I like it. And the tech communities aren't too small either.
unknownian··on Can We Please Stop Fighting the Native vs. Web App Wars?
Unbelievable that the author claims that Gruber is wrong about accessibility without offering any evidence.
unknownian··on Ember's Glimmer Engine
That's not just what it says. If it just said that, that would be fine.

It says making "any claim" against a Facebook patent will terminate your right to use the software. Facebook gets to protect its own software patents: "that any right in any patent claim of Facebook is invalid or unenforceable."

The other lines are okay, it seems.

I am not an IP law expert or lawyer though, but the writing seems pretty simple.

unknownian··on Anonymous one-on-one chat app for the Ivy League
Your innovation into this (the cross domain feature) sounds interesting, but Omegle has the basic design already down with popularity.
unknownian··on Anonymous one-on-one chat app for the Ivy League
While as an Ivy League student I relish in the potential that Stanford could be left out of this, heheh, these things are pretty inherently elitist and omegle has a similar function. Still, I signed up because I like meeting other Ivy students because there's some sort of weird vague bond between undergraduates, and that's at least something to make friends.
unknownian··on Comment sections are poison: handle with care or remove them (2014)
I used to be someone who defended comments in general. I think they are only good for a certain subset of usecases, such as college campus blogs, where different voices can and should be heard. But other sites often do comments rather poorly, and only on the occasional tech blog will one find useful information in a comment, but not usually.
unknownian··on “Implement text editor DOM updates manually instead of via React”
I get that they have a lot of JS devs and there's a big community but if they went with Ruby I would have been so much more inclined to stick with it. Performance-wise perhaps it would not have been better. Emacs it is for me.
unknownian··on Io.js and Node.js reconciliation proposal
Because they run the same package manager and roughly do the same thing for the same purpose? It's not a JRuby vs Rubinius debate, imo; it's more like YARV vs MRI, you just don't need both. If they were more different I'd agree.
unknownian··on Ask HN: Focus of a resume? (Writing vs. code, etc)
Thanks! I've done this, but my latest post is a rant and I wonder if that comes off as abrasive. I don't want the idea that a potential employer might turn me away for strong opinions to influence me. What do you think?
unknownian··on Show HN: Let's Chat, a self-hosted chat app for small teams
People have been working on stuff like that. I dunno if they are super baked yet but https://github.com/ircanywhere/ircanywhere
unknownian··on GitHut – Programming Languages on GitHub
So pretty much almost every well-designed language that I like or was curious about is losing popularity in favor of Java and JS. Sigh. I remember when Ruby was #2 on GitHub. Those were the days.
unknownian··on Why Is the Dollar Sign a Letter S?
Gawker Media turning wikipedia entries into articles. Well I do it sometimes as well.
unknownian··on µBlock dynamic filtering: default deny
The question is: is it more resource-efficient than RequestPolicy?
unknownian··on Jobs at Apple-Search
I was under the impression that large tech companies shift devs to different projects often, but Apple does seem like it is already strained by its number of software products.
Page 1 of 6Next →