Hacker News Reader

d_tron When the sun dies, could life survive on the Jupiter ocean moon Europa?

Nobody can claim to have a clue about such a timeframe.

d_tron Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

Rust 0.1, the first public release, came out in January 2012. CFront 1.0, the first commercial release, came out in 1985.

The public existence of Rust is 13 years, during which computing has not changed that much to be honest. Now compare this to the prehistory that is 1985, when CFront came out, already made for backwards compatibility with C.

d_tron Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

C++ carries so much on its back and this makes its evolution over the past decade even more impressive.

d_tron Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

I thought Windows had a generic subsystem for "warming up" frequently used apps for faster launches.

d_tron Welcome to the Semantic Apocalypse

A major part of it for me has been taking a moment to relate to the artist, looking at various details and imagining the thought and care that might have gone into them.

d_tron Hands-On Large Language Models

You can all raise your eyebrows and appeal to authority all you want. Doesn't change the fact that as soon as I want to write a tight (or not so tight) loop to do something that is not covered by all these (undoubtedly great) libraries running underneath, I am very probably out of luck and have to use another language.

Doesn't sound like a very creative teaching environment to me.

Not to mention that, depending on what you count as "AI research", the vast majority of it is pure garbage (come on, we all know this).

d_tron Hands-On Large Language Models

Again, I am extremely well aware of all of this. You assumed too much.

d_tron Hands-On Large Language Models

I know all of these facts. Doesn't mean it is how it is for the right reasons, and even if it is, it does not imply that it is a good way to teach.

d_tron Hands-On Large Language Models

How so? Since when is Python a good language for numerical computation? What if the reader wants to try something that cannot be achieved by plumbing canned C++? They are out of luck I guess.

Good job teaching the sloppy semantics of a scripting language for numerics I guess.

d_tron Hands-On Large Language Models

I mean, what happened to "use the right tool for the job"? There is Rust, C++, Julia, D, and certainly many more. Are they hard or what? Are they harder than mastering the math and algorithms that are relevant to an LLM? The code is actually pretty simple, certainly simpler than many "boring" apps.

d_tron Hands-On Large Language Models

I guess it wouldn't sell shit if it used a language suitable for this type of work.

d_tron The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst

The latest Myst and Riven remakes are fantastic. The puzzles are the same, the environments are wonderfully made and the atmosphere is there 100%.

d_tron C. Elegans: The worm that no computer scientist can crack

> Has this been actually proven?

Neither proven nor disproven in any capacity.

Also I have no clue how anyone could assert that the universe being "continuous" (whatever that means) could be casually claimed by anyone to have any link to our universe being "a simulation" (whatever that means) or not.

d_tron C. Elegans: The worm that no computer scientist can crack

And even within the box the energy levels can be varied continuously if, for example, you squeeze the molecule or put it in an electric field.

d_tron Upcoming Windows 11 builds cannot install without internet and Microsoft Account

Too much fuss with community hacks to maybe get stuff working and end up having wasted time in any case. There is too much garbage to deal with in modern computing already. And some features are just not available with or without hacks.

If I want to use a decent OS, I can do most of my development on Fedora or Arch or some other Linux distro at my workplace.

For proprietary stuff that won't work there, honestly, Windows 11 is not that bad as far as Windows go. I do not get ads, I use a local account without problems and I can do development actually decently with PowerShell, vcpkg, VS Code which Microsoft offers for free and which work on all platforms.

TL;DR: There are hills with a much better view to die on.

d_tron World-first experimental cancer treatment paves way for clinical trial

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/25/business/china-biotech-gl...

Are you referring to this?

d_tron Show HN: I Built a Visual Workflow Automation Platform – FlowRipple

I think the front page is curated, while "new" is where you go to see the "autopilot" ranking.

d_tron Zed now predicts your next edit with Zeta, our new open model

Genuinely not sure whether you are joking or not. The thing is, I do not need a debugger very often, but when I need it, I need it.

I also have no idea what kind of code people "write" that they can rely on A.I. so much. I have found these tools helpful for gathering info but not for much more, yet.

d_tron Zed now predicts your next edit with Zeta, our new open model

> Other than that for anyone wanting to try Zed:

Also, no support for debugging yet.

d_tron When AI promises speed but delivers debugging hell

Identifiers are super important and should be chosen wisely, but a C program with English identifiers is still a C program, while an LLM prompt is in fact NL and a whole new layer of that between your brain and the bytes. Which is why I think that saying "we already put NL between us and the bytes" minimizes that difference and is a bad take.

d_tron When AI promises speed but delivers debugging hell

Bad take. Identifiers are just labels.

d_tron A FPGA friendly 32 bit RISC-V CPU implementation

Interesting. So, do you know what they'd choose now if they started over? SystemVerilog?

d_tron Today I learned that bash has hashmaps (2024)

It sounds like you don't even know what these words mean.

d_tron Aaron Swartz left us 12 years ago

Carmen Ortiz was leading these pieces of garbage AFAIK.

d_tron Tactility: OS for the ESP32 Microcontroller Family

I'd hate to be that poor little bastard, having to run 200 bullshit instructions for each useful one.

I'd probably just output a middle finger somewhere and halt forever.

d_tron A Puzzle about a Calculator

> If you allow zero width/height, you can also have 7777, 7887, 7997, 7447 and 7117.

Why not 7227, 7337, 7557, 7667 too?

The theorem holds for these as well.

d_tron Show HN: Resizer2 – i3/KDE window movement on Windows

Gnome supports this too, and I think lots of other Linux window managers as well.

I miss it on Windows.

d_tron Quiver: A Modern Commutative Diagram Editor

It would help if someone could tell what's wrong in my reply.

d_tron Quiver: A Modern Commutative Diagram Editor

It would help if you read the definition of a category. It is very abstract but also pretty simple with just a couple of axioms.

An example of a category is the "sets and functions" category. In that category, every conceivable set lives as an object (node) and every conceivable function between any two sets lives as an arrow between these two sets.

So, you can take an arrow from A to B and one from B to C and compose them like you would do with functions to get a function from A to C.

A commutative diagram would then be a subset of the whole category, where following all depicted paths between two sets X and Y would yield the same function if for each path you composed all the arrows belonging to it.

I haven't read anything on higher categories so I am not sure about pasting diagrams, but they are probably something along these lines, generalized in some way.

d_tron Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

> This kind of revolution in improving our health makes me proud to work in the tech industry.

I can say with some amount of confidence that the number of people wasting their talent and life in making up bullshit engagement algorithms, who thought about it as a way of getting people away from drugs, has been exactly zero. So, it is definitely not something to be proud of, but maybe something to think of as a funny coincidence, provided that the premise actually holds.

> The worst that can happen is ...

That you'll remain or become an idiot, or suffer physically and mentally as a result of being inactive while consuming the garbage your proud tech workers shove down your head.