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hyperion2010on ACM signed letter opposing open access

Personally I cannot wait for the dissolution of the modern publishing industry. HN might find it of interest that many large academic publishers are trying to pivot to providing a variety of data management services to universities. The academics thus far have not been fooled, but we will see how the politics plays out.

hyperion2010on The Inquirer reaches end-of-life

I'm fairly certain that exposure to The Inquirer during my youth is what fostered my interest in the tech industry. Though I have not read it regularly in years I would not be the person I am today without it. It will be missed.

hyperion2010on Lab chimps were dumped on Liberia's Monkey Island – their caretaker saved them

Now there's something that went of my head as a child when I read the books.

hyperion2010on Lab chimps were dumped on Liberia's Monkey Island – their caretaker saved them

Don't know if you did this on purpose, but it got a good chuckle out of me because the NIMH has quite a few lab rats.

hyperion2010on To Wash It All Away (2014) [pdf]

If you have never read Mickens out loud, I highly recommend it, the humor is even more visceral on performance.

hyperion2010on How to annotate everything

One thing that seems to be missing from the list is org-capture, which is lightly documented bit can duplicate quite a bit of the hypothes.is functionality, though the tweaking required is quite high.

hyperion2010on Replace Windows 7 with Linux

Ah, reading a sibling I see they mean decoding not just 3d acceleration. Indeed that is a pit, though youtube-dl and mpv do a pretty good job for a subset of content.

hyperion2010on Apple’s Great GPL Purge (2012)

No emacs on iOS is thus a sad song that may be sung til the end of time.

hyperion2010on Replace Windows 7 with Linux

This is blatantly false.

hyperion2010on BorgBackup: Deduplicating Archiver

https://github.com/borgbackup/borg

62% C 35% Python

hyperion2010on The Power of Shower Thoughts

If I have a problem I need to solve, I think about it before I go to bed, and in the morning when I wake up I will often find it solved. I am pretty good at remembering my dreams, and on many of these occasions I will recall a dream of writing code related to the problem. I never remember the code itself, but often the structure of the problem will be much more apparent to me the next day.

Thinking actively about a problem is often all we have time for, but if you can let something stew and let your brain work on it, especially while working on other problems that might turn out to have some similar structure, the results can be quite satisfying.

hyperion2010on SpaceX and Boeing Still Need a Parachute That Always Works

It seems like the minimal possible complexity of a sheet of fabric is always going to be higher than the minimal complexity of an engine simply because the physics of cloth are much harder to simulate accurate so you will never be able to find all the edge cases. Yes engines are initially more complex to build, but their minimum complexity once they are well understood should be lower -- even with the code needed to run them. You can't exact attach a debugger to the universe.

hyperion2010on Eliud Kipchoge Breaks Two-Hour Marathon Barrier

For those of us who have only ever run shorter distance, this is an average mile time over the whole course of about 4:33.84 minutes.

The current world record for a single mile is 3:43.13, which would shave about 22 minutes off the two hours, for a hypothetical 1:38:00 minimum time if we assume perfectly linear extrapolation of human physiology given the proper training techniques (seems unlikely, given that you would need 26 pacers that could all run at world record pace or something like that). Said another way this would allow one to run about 6 additional miles in the same time if you could sustain the pace for the duration rather than the distance.

hyperion2010on Collapse OS

Will have to look over these more carefully, but your post reminded me that there is a potential 3rd candidate which is FORTH, but it seems like it might be just a bit too bare bones in some cases. Maybe with an accepted standard library or something it could work.

hyperion2010on Collapse OS

Like other in this thread I have been thinking about this problem on and off for a while. I think that many of the comments stating that the Z80 is probably not the best choice are right (I know nothing about the Z80) and would like to extend some of their thinking.

The primary design requirement for a stand alone computer system in a post-* world is simplicity, maintainability, and debugability. It must be possible for a single user to do _everything_ in situ. There are very few existing systems that meet all three of these criteria across the whole hardward-firmware-software stack, and modern technology companies are actively moving away from this.

At all levels this requires extensive and open documentation and implementations, and ideally a real standard.

The hardware level would probably need a complete rethink, and if you want good peripheral support (e.g. to be able to try to access whatever data device you come across) then you need a solution that doesn't require a subsystem kernel maintainer for everything, or you just give up on that. A potential 4th requirement here could be a large supply of parts since in most scenarios it is extremely unlikely that anyone will be able to get a fab working again for hundreds or thousands of years. Maybe radiation hardened large feature size ICs or something like that. The alternative would be a zillion RPis (with some alternate data storage interface) so that hopefully some of them survive and continue to work after 100s of years, but this seems like a much riskier bet than trying to actually engineer something to survive for a very long time. Above the IC level the ability for someone to replace parts without special tooling beyond maybe a soldering iron also seems like it is probably also important.

At the software level there are two existing systems that might serve, one of the Smalltalks, or one of the lisps (my bias says common lisp, despite the warts). Assembly and C are just not a big enough lever for a single individual, and other things like Java seem to have been intentionally engineered to deprive individual users of power. The objective here is not to be fast, the objective is to retain access to computation at all so that the knowledge of how to work with such systems is not lost. Also at the software level the requirements pretty much preclude things like browsers that are so monstrously complex that there no hope than an individual could ever hope to maintain a legacy artifact (or probably even compile one of the monsters) for interpreting modern web documents.

I do not think that we can expect the current incentive structure around software and hardware to accidentally create something that can meet these requirements. If anything it is going in the other direction as large corporations can employ technology that can _only_ be maintained by large engineering teams. We are putting little computers in everything, but they are useless to anyone in a world without a network.

hyperion2010on Birds Are Vanishing from North America

Since I almost never see it mentioned in any threads related to this subject, am I thrilled that the main article actually references Silent Spring. I remember growing up that people thought that we had somehow managed to avoid the future it portrayed, but no, we have not. Another generation and the purveyors of death are back selling the cure for other species some people haven't learned to live in balance with.

hyperion2010on The elements of algorithms

Darn and here I was hoping that it did it by reading a bunch of chemistry papers from the 19th century.

hyperion2010on How common was it for parents to lose a child?

I think about it this way: until about 3 or 4 generations ago, every single one of my ancestors running back to the time before they were 'human' experienced the loss of a child.

hyperion2010on How common was it for parents to lose a child?

I have said for a long time that having a child die is one of the most human experiences (more flagrantly "welcome to being human"). We are fortunate to live in a time where it has become a rarity. Nice to see someone try to put numbers on it.

hyperion2010on Newly identified electric eel is the most powerful ever found, say scientists

doi for the paper https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-11690-z

relevant passage

We further expand our knowledge on the incredible strength of high-voltage electric organ discharges (EOD’s) produced by living organisms; herein demonstrated at 860 V. The discharge recorded of E. voltai is distinctly higher than any voltage previously cited for Electrophorus2,3, making it the strongest bioelectricity generator known.

hyperion2010on Are spies more trouble than they're worth?

The repeated destruction of US humanint networks over the past 50 years is probably one of the single largest threats it faces. Between the dismantling of the CIA hint networks by ourselves and complete destruction of our Chinese hint network by the Chinese, the US is blind in a huge number of situations.

This is not about the quality of any one channel, it is about needing multiple channels with distinct provenance that can be used to cross-reference each other. The fact that this article even frames the question as it does means that they have completely missed the point -- there is no such thing as bad intel, only intel that you are too blind to know is inconsistent.

hyperion2010on Maybe Warren Buffett Is Warning Us About Something

The analogy that I have started to use recently is that of a pressure gauge. Money has to flow somewhere. The US just dumped a ton of money into the economy when the pipe (ability of the economy to move a lot of money between a large number of people, aka bandwidth) is essentially static, not much wage growth, little hiring, etc. That money has to go somewhere, so it goes to the stock market, because that is where the pressure is the lowest (very easy to call up a broker or go online and dump money into an account, compared to say, hiring and employee that can add real value to your company and the economy in exchange for a paycheck). Most of the time people assume that companies are going to take the money they get from stocks and invest it in growing the company or in paying salaries or paying for goods that pay salaries, etc. Unfortunately the corps are all sitting on loads of cash, and buying back stock, and not hiring or expanding (on average). As a result? Money that we normally expect to be growing the pipe, increasing the bandwidth of the economy to do real work, is instead flowing back into the pressure gauge and up goes the pressure, zoom! The economy is doing great! Right?? No. It is hard to get a good measure of the bandwidth of the pipe, and trying to interpret the pressure without it is folly, especially with regard to the impact of reducing the money supply (incoming volume of water). When the flow through the pipe is large and there is high bandwidth and the pressure is high, and the money supply drops, then we would expect the pressure to come down a bit, but in general to be stable essentially due to high inertia in the primary pipe, but if the total bandwidth is low? Then the pressure gauge is going to plummet, because the increased pressure (stock value) was due to a large flow trying to fit into a small pipe, and that pressure increase was due primarily to the change in the money supply, not due to fundamental soundness of the current economy (inertia).

Not a perfect analogy, with plenty of mixed metaphors, but simple enough to reason about and see where it breaks down.

tl;dr economy is flow in pipe, stock market is pressure gauge, if you don't know the flow through the primary pipe (hard to measure directly), then your pressure gauge could be extremely, dangerously misleading

hyperion2010on Why Clojure?

Hahahahah. The inheritors of my python code who are not my future self would beg to differ. I have so many opaque patterns that are vital and yet purely conventional it hurts. They will miss the intention and go off and do something else to solve a similar problem and now we have two patterns.

hyperion2010on Static Type Checking in Common Lisp

Fantastic. Apparently I am not the only one that has been digging around for more detailed information about how CL implements static typing. There is so much FUD out there from the ??? community(ies) that I ended up sitting down and finding the relevant sections in my lab's copy of CLTL2. This article does an excellent job of laying out the consequences of the standard in a way that is clear and understandable, and probably that also includes knowledge about those consequences that was not entirely known at the time (or maybe it was, but just not documented).

I kind of wish the author had named his type defun `defunct` though!

hyperion2010on Ignition: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (1972) [pdf]

The full title has a bang (!) in it, pun most assuredly intended. One of my favorite books about science of all time, and don't miss the author of the forward.

hyperion2010on The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

We must have posted at the same time ;)

hyperion2010on The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

This seems perhaps over stated and the second half is extremely elitist in its phrasing. I think my favorite version of a character like this is Wonko the Sane from HHG who lives 'Outside the Asylum.'

hyperion2010on Python Is Eating the World

Quite welcome. I think you are on to something. The thought that comes to mind is "Python is a great language if you want to do exactly what everyone else is doing." Most of the love has nothing to do with the language itself, but rather the fact that people can make use of some library that a big engineering effort produced in another language entirely. Thus they conflate Python with access to that functionality. All of my code bases are pure python (in part because of the packaging issues), so maybe that is the difference, people aren't really Python users, they are numpy, pandas, django, sqlalchemy, or requests users. It would be interesting to compare the view of library maintainers vs just 'users.'

hyperion2010on Python Is Eating the World

I am about to hit a decade of python experience. I work with it daily, all my major codebases are written in it.

I hate it.

It has an ok object system which is possibly its only redeeming quality. I found Racket about 4 years ago, and any new project that I work on will be in Racket or CL.

I could go on at length about the happy path mentality of python and the apologists who are too ignorant of other people's use cases to acknowledge that maybe there might be some shortcomings.

The syntactic affordances are awful and you can footgun yourself in stupidily simple ways when refactoring code between scopes. Python isn't really one language it is more like 4, one for each scope and type of assignment or argument passing, and all the sytactic sugar just makes it worse.

Not to mention that packaging is still braindead. I actually learned the Gentoo ebuild system because pip was so unspeakably awful the moment you stepped away from the happy path.

Blub blub blub, someone help I'm drowning in mediocrity.

hyperion2010on Cybersecurity Pros Name Their Price as Hacker Attacks Swell

I'm out here imagining all the unethical hackers drooling over the sweet sweet vectors that are snap and flatpak. Unfortunately the qa and auditing aspects of distro packaging seem to be taken for granted, and the resources for that are surely not sufficient to counter motivated adversaries.