Hacker News: PopePompus

New comment by PopePompus in "Nobel Prize in Physics 2026: Francis Halzen"

PopePompus — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 11:30:31 +0000

Every year a few of the Nobel Prize winners attend the IgNobel Prize ceremony and dance on stage.

New comment by PopePompus in "Disney+ and Hulu raise prices by up to 13 percent after doubling profits"

PopePompus — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 17:08:54 +0000

I'm old enough to remember that the original pitch to get people to pay for cable TV (which was a big barrier in the 1960s/70s) was "Yes, there's a monthly fee - but no ads!). The only time I see cable TV is when I'm staying in a motel, and I'm just astonished by the ad load.

New comment by PopePompus in "Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon"

PopePompus — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:49:36 +0000

I loved Nokia's Linux phones, and bought several of them. I drove to New York (from Boston) twice to get an N900 as early as possible. But I wonder what they would have had to do to make that line of phones a mass-market success. Users of the N900 had root privilege. Can you imagine a support nightmare that would have been for T-Mobile et al.? To sell Linux phones to the general public, I think they would have had to lock down the OS to the point that it resembled what Android is today.

New comment by PopePompus in "Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon"

PopePompus — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:42:38 +0000

Don't forget the N950! It was an aluminum body successor to the N900, with a glorious slide-out keyboard. Built like a tank. They were never released for sale to the public, perhaps because Nokia's leadership had already decided to kill its line of Linux phones. But I've got one.

New comment by PopePompus in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

PopePompus — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 01:39:36 +0000

I'm still alive, and college wasn't really sold primarily as a financial investment when I attended in the 1970s.

New comment by PopePompus in "A brief tour of the PDP-11, the most influential minicomputer of all time (2022)"

PopePompus — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 10:57:23 +0000

What happened if you used auto-decrement addressing with the PC? Did that hang the computer?

New comment by PopePompus in "What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]"

PopePompus — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:32:06 +0000

I've read this paper several times, over the years, and I've never understood why its considered such a landmark. I think it could be losslessly compressed to one paragraph of modest length.

New comment by PopePompus in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

PopePompus — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:36:49 +0000

I had an old astronomy app I wrote for pre-iPhone app store era Nokia phones (N900 etc.). I decided to get Claude code recreate it as an Android app. The old app produced several display pages for things like the positions of the planets. I was having Claude code recreate the app display page by display page, describing the display that should be produced, with no reference at all to the original app's code (or even its existence). After having it reproduce several pages, it added another one unprompted. The page it added was in the original app, but I had not gotten around to adding it to the Android app. The Nokia app's code is still on github, and somehow Claude must have made a connection between what I was asking it to code (without ever mentioning the Nokia app) and my github repository's Nokia code. It correctly implemented the page without me even mentioning the missing page. My jaw hit the floor.

New comment by PopePompus in "Claude Code login fails with OAuth timeout on Windows"

PopePompus — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:25:33 +0000

How do you do the cleanup? Just /simplify or something you rolled yourself?

New comment by PopePompus in "NASA announces overhaul of Artemis program amid safety concerns, delays"

PopePompus — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 21:09:26 +0000

Testing wasn't really the issue with the loss of the two shuttles. In both cases, it was mostly a management issue. For Challenger NASA had seen o-ring erosion in earlier launches, and decided it was not a big risk to the crew. Then they launched Challenger against the recommendations of the engineers in charge of o-ring seals. For Columbia, they has seen foam strikes in earlier launches, but since they had not caused catastrophe in the past, they decided that foam strikes were acceptable. Even when it was clear that a large foam strike had occurred on the launch of Columbia, management wasn't concerned enough to try to get ground-based images of the shuttle to check for damage. Could Columbia's crew have been saved had they known the extent of the damage? No one can say of course, but not even trying to do everything possible was inexcusable.

New comment by PopePompus in "Testing Ads in ChatGPT"

PopePompus — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:41:42 +0000

This probably signals the beginning of the end for OpenAI. Eventually all of the AI chatbots will have Ads at least on the free and low-cost tiers. But there's a strong incentive not to begin enshitification until the number of competitors has dwindled, and an oligarchy has been established. Google, Meta et al. can afford to lose money on AI for a long time, because they have real revenue from other business products; they can stay Ad free until the small-fry go bust.

New comment by PopePompus in "Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone"

PopePompus — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:31:28 +0000

On my unrooted Pixel, I get "Permission denied" errors if I ls /sys, /dev, /proc and / within Termux. And /usr and /var don't exist.

New comment by PopePompus in "Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone"

PopePompus — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:24:41 +0000

I don't think it's actually the VM crashing, it's the Android OS killing what it thinks is an idle app.

New comment by PopePompus in "Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone"

PopePompus — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 22:39:23 +0000

Because, wonderful as Termux is, it has a very nonstandard filesystem layout, so installation scripts for something like Anaconda will not run without extensive modifications. And Termux has no access to /proc, /dev etc., so lots of utilities fail. Since Terminal provides a full Linux VM, all programs that will run on Linux just work as expected.

New comment by PopePompus in "Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone"

PopePompus — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 20:53:58 +0000

Also, if your Android phone is a Pixel, you can run the recently added Terminal app, which runs a plain vanilla Debian distribution within a VM. So you then have a pocketable Linux machine to develop code on. Not only does Python run on it, you can install the entire Anaconda Python suite.

New comment by PopePompus in "The Going Dark initiative or ProtectEU is a Chat Control 3.0 attempt"

PopePompus — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 12:34:13 +0000

Mass surveillance by corporations, bad as it is, is less of a threat than mass surveillance by the government. Google can't put you in prison.

New comment by PopePompus in "Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices"

PopePompus — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 23:36:26 +0000

Yes, but all problems with tainted food are not as visually obvious as mold. After some bad surprises, I've decided to never eat anything I ordered from Amazon.

New comment by PopePompus in "John Giannandrea to retire from Apple"

PopePompus — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:31:14 +0000

The current situation on Google's Android Pixel phones is odd. The old non-LLM Google Assistant works well in a limited domain: Things like setting alarms, phoning by name, etc. It's similar in scope to Siri, but with better voice recognition, and better context awareness. However, Google is desperate to kill Google Assistant and force all Pixel users to use Gemini instead. Gemini 3 is a very good LLM, and far, far, far more versatile than Google Assistant. But Gemini won't do the simple things as reliably as the old Assistant. Setting an alarm works maybe 90% of the time with Gemini. If you asked the old Assistant "What time is it?" it would respond "It's 4:40 PM". If you ask Gemini "What time is it?" it will sometimes respond "It's 4:40 PM CDT in {your city}", but sometimes it will say "It's four four zero Pee Em in {your city}" and sometimes it will do a web search. Results are spotty in other areas like voice dialing. I've retained the old Assistant, because I want to do the basic things far more often than I want to verbally vibe code. But rumor has it Google is going to disable the old Assistant in March, forcing all users onto Gemini for voice commands. Unless Gemini gets much better at handling simple tasks by then, Pixel users will end up with a voice assistant much more frustrating than Siri.

New comment by PopePompus in "Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good"

PopePompus — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 13:18:32 +0000

I'm sure grateful that you did that. I've been surprised by how little online discussion of this app I've seen. It's just extremely cool to be walking around with a real gnu/linux computer in my pocket, which cost nothing to add to the phone, and has no ads or in app purchases.

New comment by PopePompus in "Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good"

PopePompus — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 11:55:38 +0000

There is a third option (in addition to the native app and Termux) to get emacs running. The recently added (to at least Pixel phones) "Terminal" app runs a standard Debian distribution inside a VM. emacs can be installed there in exactly the same way it would be on any other Debian machine.