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How are you going to infer what's harmful if you're only going to research healthy people?

Just compare this with actual scientific findings and see for yourself: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-03570-5

adaszkoon Ask HN: Please recommend how to manage personal serverss

Check out Proxmox + https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/ + lxc container snapshots on the NAS and set up Proxmox backup server on the Pi. I find such a setup to be "all benefit, no giving up anything", contrary to NixOS.

adaszkoon Penrose – Create diagrams by typing notation in plain text

http://pikchr.org/ is great

adaszkoon Rethinking Diabetes – interview with Gary Taubes

Here's [1] how well the references check out for Taube's previous book. Is there any reason I should believe his newer books are any better?

Here's a study funded by Taubes himself (!) That disproves his earlier claims: https://examine.com/articles/low-fat-vs-low-carb-for-weight-...

[1]: https://thescienceofnutrition.wordpress.com/2014/04/05/good-...

adaszkoon Rename 'Val' to 'Hylo'

A new programming language based on "mutable value semantics" has been renamed from Val to Hylo. It was a frequent complaint that the former name was too similar to other existing languages like V, Vala, and Vale. Mutable value semantics is a new way to efficiently pass around data structures without having explicit references/pointers present in the language and complicating semantics. Pointers are basically relegated to a status of a possible optimization that the compiler can perform at the assembly level.

adaszkoon Anki SRS Algorithm : Spaced repetition explained with code

Oh, interesting. Is v3 just a new API or a new algorithm altogether?

adaszkoon Anki SRS Algorithm : Spaced repetition explained with code

There’s a Bayesian stats approach to spaced repetition: https://fasiha.github.io/ebisu/

AFAIU, SM2 computes the datetime of a next review, whereas Ebisu models a probability of remembering a given flashcard. It seems it’s a more straightforward representation that’s more amenable to implementing functionalities like “show me 10 least remembered cards”.

adaszkoon Using foot pedals for modifier keys in Linux (2014)

There was a point when this was joke poking fun at emacs users. With time, it makes more and more sense. Foot pedals offload some strain from your hands to your feet which in theory sounds healthier when it comes to joints. They may even improve blood circulation to your feet. Something which is quite desirable given the sedentary nature of computer work.

adaszkoon Debugging with GDB

This article goes into a little more detail which may be useful: https://www.dannyadam.com/blog/2019/05/debugging-in-vim/

adaszkoon On Anki's Database

It's astounding how much quality material and tools exist for learning Japanese, compared to eg Chinese. JPDB looks fantastic.

adaszkoon Show HN: Hndex.org – a full-text search engine of articles submitted to HN

There's also Falcon[1] Chrome extension which does full text indexing on your browser history so if you read something and can't either Google it or find it in the browser's history, Falcon will broaden the search scope.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/falcon/mmifbbohghe...

adaszkoon Ask HN: Must Read from ACM Library?

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327 followed by http://varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/notes.html have completely transformed how I view and architect software. I basically started to strive to leave as much memory management as possible to the kernel thus not only simplifying my code but also making it behave better as citizens in the country that the operating system is, if you will.

adaszkoon Actual Causality (2016)

Me too! Any other resources you can share?

adaszkoon How Rust optimizes async/await

> One of the major reasons behind the superior performance of async/await futures relative to threads/goroutines/etc. is that async/await compiles to a state machine in the manner described in this post, so a stack is not needed.

That's a great optimization but doesn't that mean it also breaks stack traces?

adaszkoon Browser tabs are probably the wrong metaphor

For my ideal work desktop, I want to have tools assigned per task that I can easily assemble until that task is achieved. As a spitball idea: Cmd-space, type in "research open sourcing my kindle", and get given a browser and some sort of note collector. Collect the various things from the session into my note, refile the entire stack as a project, and move on to the next task. In the future, I can access the actual project and receive a workspace with terminals, an IDE or whatever else I need to Get the Thing Done, archived versions of the sites I opened, etc. Ideally, the environment would be designed to reduce distractability.

I'd willing to donate money, work, or both. Is anyone working on something like that?

adaszkoon Ask HN: Which books teach mental models?

What mental models have you learned from it?

adaszkoon Pyright: Static type checker for Python

I wish there was one too, but programmer-oriented types are not the same thing as machine-oriented types. Compiling to fast code requires the latter one: types like u32, not Dict[String, int]. Current Python typing efforts tend to focus on programmer-oriented types.

adaszkoon PostgreSQL used fsync incorrectly for 20 years

Tomas Vondra goes over this in the talk. There's a rationale for that behavior: pulling out a USB stick out of the USB socket may have been what's triggered the fsync() failure. In that case, there's no way the kernel will be able to retry reliably.

adaszkoon Pipenv: promises a lot, delivers very little

With pip for instance, it often happens that a transitive dependency gets updated inadvertently breaking your code. This follows from the assumption that all packages follow semantic versioning perfectly and keep backward compatibility where they should. This is not the case in practice and experience has shown it is unrealistic to have that assumption. A better way is to rely on exact versions of packages (up to a single bit) and not on semantic versioning.

adaszkoon Ask HN: How can I learn to read mathematical notation?

Even if so, this is an acceptable incentive for people to comment with Amazon links. If find this a problem for services like http://hackernewsbooks.com/ (there are few others). If someone mentions just a title of a book, it doesn't get indexed.

adaszkoon Still in love with Rust

Does this matter anywhere outside of embedded software nowadays?

adaszkoon Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?

It was a superb piece of software back when I used it. Huge kudos!

adaszkoon reMarkable – The paper tablet for people who prefer paper

Some of the intriguing books appearing in the video:

* https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/sparse-distributed-memory

* https://www.amazon.com/Fluid-Concepts-Creative-Analogies-Fun...

* https://www.amazon.com/Theater-Consciousness-Workspace-Mind/...

adaszkoon Honour for overlooked Poles who were first to crack Enigma code

Thanks for pointing it out. Can one find some mathematics behind Enigma in it?

adaszkoon 'with' gets better with python 3.1

Since you can write your own "context managers," the with statement analogue from Lisp world would rather be unwind-protect.

adaszkoon Memristors in silicon promising for dense, fast memory

> The memory hierarchy can never completely flatten. Information takes physical space to store and the speed of light is finite. So the more information, the further things are apart, and the longer access times will take.

Not necessarily. Memristors were shown to be capable of performing logical operations [1]. Given that, one can imagine computations migrating through the circuit to stay physically as close as possible to the data thereby eliminating the need for caches.

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7290/full/nature0...

adaszkoon Lout: An alternative to LaTeX?

Mark Summerfield is known to use lout for typesetting his books:

* http://www.qtrac.eu/pyqtbook.html

* http://www.qtrac.eu/gobook.html

adaszkoon Concurrent Data Structures

This article is indeed very interesting. I've read somewhere that there's a more recent, extended version of it available via the ACM Digital Library.

For correctness proving, you may look for example in http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.101... . It is constrained to π-calculus though.

adaszkoon Why mobile apps suck when you're mobile (TCP over 3G)

Actually, SPDY is an application layer protocol -- as HTTP -- not an transport layer protocol like TCP.