HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

john-titor

425 karma · joined April 14, 2022

submissionscomments
john-titor··on Hang on to Your Firefox
Honest question: I recently bought a mac for the first time. A long-time Firefox user I quickly realized it is draining my battery like crazy. What do people do? My whole browsing ecosystem is on Firefox Sync and I would like to keep supporting it, but I am not willing to sacrifice battery life for that
john-titor··on StemDeck, a free, open-source and local AI stem separator
about time people started replacing Deck with something similar-but-not-quite-the-same for their project names
john-titor··on Framework downgrades RAM configurations on pre-orders due to price hikes
The recent price increase on the MacBooks tipped me towards pre-ordering a ~700 USD more expensive Framework because I believed in the product. Now, to keep my same configuration Framework is effectively asking me to dish out another 300 USD on top of that. Its very unfortunate but consumers really got the short end of the stick here. Unfortunately for Framework I am not willing to pay this delta and will go with Apple for now - bitter to not have pulled the trigger a few weeks earlier.
john-titor··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
> Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It belongs to us all

Imagine you're a professional writer and it's your main source of income. How would you feel if someone said this to you? Would you still want to write books?

john-titor··on Apple announces significant price increases for MacBooks, iPads, more
I was eyeing a 24GB macbook air configuration that used to go for ~1250 USD in my region, which was a fairly good deal. This went up by 500. I guess I'll be going with a frame.work instead. Was willing to pay the premium for repairability anyways and now this has made the price difference a no-brainer.
john-titor··on Steam Machine launches today
Care to explain what Omarchy has to do with Valve?
john-titor··on ArXiv declares independence from Cornell
I wonder what makes you feel that. I've been publishing preprints close to a decade on arxiv now and never had any particular feelings about it.

To me it's just a way to get out your work fast, so that there is already a trace of it on the Internets - nothing more and nothing less.

> That is, it's not readily parseable, it really gives an insider term vibe...

Isn't that normal with highly specialized research fields? I agree many papers could benefit from clearer wording, but working in a niche means you sometimes don't reach a broader audience

john-titor··on Reproducing DeepSeek's MHC: When Residual Connections Explode
great write up. it's been a while since I had the pleasure to read a straightforward blog post about ML tricks that feel genuinely applicable to many use cases.
john-titor··on Show HN: Wealthfolio 2.0- Open source investment tracker. Now Mobile and Docker
strange no one mentioned portfolio performance until now https://www.portfolio-performance.info/en/

lots of features, has been around for some time

john-titor··on Show HN: OpenTimes – Free travel times between U.S. Census geographies
Does something like this exist for Europe?
john-titor··on Show HN: A free alternative to Typora –– IF
Nice web page but after reading through the landing page I could not say for certain what the actual product is. There is no text that describes it, it just reads

>GTD for professionals

What does this mean?

john-titor··on alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv
Thanks a lot, will do!
john-titor··on alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv
Tried to sign up with my corporate email (life sciences, 100k+ employees worldwide with a big research arm). Says the institution is not known to the service. What's the process to get it known?
john-titor··on PyTorch Geometric – Graph Neural Network Library for PyTorch
A lot of exciting development happening in the package one has to appreciate. Also graphs as a modality in general :)
john-titor··on Jaccard Index
this is well-known to people working in cheminfornatics as the tanimoto similarity, used to calculate the similarity of two chemical structures based on their (folded) fingerprint
john-titor··on Jupyterlab Desktop
Atom + Hydrogen allowed for line by line execution and immediate output in regular .py files, no cell definitions needed. Haven't seen this functionality anywhere else yet and miss it a lot. If anyone knows an alternative, please let me know.
john-titor··on Sunsetting Atom
Can someone explain the hype around VSCode to me? I looked into it about a year ago and was immediately turned-off by the overwhelming amount of features that they throw at you right in the 'beginner's tour'.

What I appreciate about Atom is that it is very simple right out of the box and does not get in your way. You cold always beef it up with packages later, but that progression is much more pleasant to me than the VSCode approach.

The biggest selling point of Atom to me as a Python dev was the Hydrogen package. That tight integration of notebook features within the editor is something I have never seen before and a total game changer. Especially if you are working with data that you might need to visualize a lot. Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand there is no Hydrogen equivalent in VSCode? Sure, there are plug-ins that let you run your code through a jupyter kernel and display the output in a second terminal pane, but that is not the same as the ability to simply highlight a bit of code, run that and have the results displayed immediately on the next line below. Having pyplot figures displayed in such a way is also not possible from what I saw, or did I miss something?

john-titor··on Arc Browser Company: Chrome and Safari face a new challenger
firefox <3
john-titor··on Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer
I can relate, not necessarily as a software developer, but as someone who recently completed a PhD in natural sciences.

When working on something niche for a couple of years, it is natural that you become a specialist of some sort in your daily environment. This why in academia there are conferences and workshops where such specialists can gather and exchange ideas. It seems to me like you are passing up on opportunities to socialize outside of your day-to-day. Why not look up an event that might challenge you and ask your boss if you can participate? There is always room for improvement and companies should support that.

john-titor··on The Modos Paper Laptop
I honestly don't see an added value to such a product. Pushing for minimalism can be nice in a lot of situations, but to me, this seems like it's going a bit too far: The target audience for such a product can't possibly be that large. Visual applications aside, even coding without any syntax highlighting does not sound too great.
john-titor··on PikaPods – Instant Open Source App Hosting
Cool idea. Can you comment on who the owner of the actual server hardware is and on the locations of those?
john-titor··on Space Math
But let's be honest: If the notation is ambiguous, then the the authors did not do a good job explaining it in the first place. That's why scientific articles are not only equations but also text.
john-titor··on Cultural anorexia: The pursuit of thicker desires in a thinning world
this reads to me as a rant of someone who just finished their undergrad degree in sociology and wants to show it. some specifics aside, the same article might as well been a topic some 10, 30, 60 years ago. re-packaging an old opinion that our society is degenerating for whatever contemporary reasons without actually providing any constructive solutions does not feel very productive to me. ironic that the not very fitting metaphor of anorexia is used here.