Hacker News: _glass

New comment by _glass in "The effects of caffeine consumption do not decay with a ~5 hour half-life"

_glass — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:10:08 +0000

Yes, I also tried coffee first time when in England when 13, and it was like a revelation. I understand that beer and cigarettes are an acquired taste, they tasted terrible, but coffee was a love at first sip.

New comment by _glass in "“This is not the computer for you”"

_glass — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 10:16:42 +0000

When doing my Bachelor degree my dad gave me an old thinkpad to run on linux. It was a horrible experience for preparing powerpoints, papers, etc. But I still have that command line muscle memory and an eye to spot errors which really helped me in my career. In my final year I bought myself a macbook because I earned real money doing a consulting internship. But the unix muscle memory stayed, and I found working with IDEs so wasteful. In my first years at my job I rejected word and excel still to do everything in groff and awk.

New comment by _glass in "Big Data on the Cheapest MacBook"

_glass — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:07:13 +0000

Set up the machine yesterday. Everything runs just fine. Will use it mainly for academic writing, and light development work, only conceptual work, PoCs.

New comment by _glass in "BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time"

_glass — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 10:19:41 +0000

SAP is much better than the home-grown stuff Tesla, Space X, or Amazon are using. One needs to compare the "new" public cloud solution, rather than the outdated soon not supported ECC system.

New comment by _glass in "BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time"

_glass — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 10:13:18 +0000

I worked with several multinationals, and the Germans always had very complex processes, but cannot at all confirm that they were the least digitised. The Americans were always behind in integrations (lots of file-based stuff), using outdated software, etc. I think the US has this problem that in Germany working for a bigger company is attracting talent, vs. the US where the talent goes to tech, while the rest is really far behind, i.e., Fortune500.

New comment by _glass in "ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions"

_glass — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 10:27:24 +0000

Wait for the robots taking manual labor. Maybe there is some value in nursing them?

New comment by _glass in "Lead Limited Brain and Language Development in Neanderthals and Other Hominids?"

_glass — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 10:55:09 +0000

Sorry, the phrasing might not have been clear. Until that event, I was always propagating to drink tap water. After that I realized that research is important.

New comment by _glass in "Lead Limited Brain and Language Development in Neanderthals and Other Hominids?"

_glass — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 10:54:13 +0000

No, it is now nine years ago, but I think it was from some state government agency. I know it was not from Hamburg Wasser, as it concerned not the public lines, but from the house itself. And I just saw that beginning next year it will be not allowed anymore: https://www.hamburg.de/politik-und-verwaltung/behoerden/bjv/...

New comment by _glass in "GNU Octave Meets JupyterLite: Compute Anywhere, Anytime"

_glass — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 10:16:58 +0000

In Python you can use a library, then it is: x = np.linalg.solve(A, b). But yeah, Octave is nice, because it stays very symbolic.

New comment by _glass in "Lead Limited Brain and Language Development in Neanderthals and Other Hominids?"

_glass — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 07:22:38 +0000

Yes, in Hamburg, Germany there are a lot of lead pipes still. When moving there I got to find this out by a letter from the government, that I should know that I have many times over the limit drinking water which I was consuming. I was always telling others to drink the safe tap water ...

New comment by _glass in "Talent"

_glass — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 07:17:50 +0000

Yes, this is so true for me. Especially when I had this revenge arc, where I knew I could be good. Most of my strengths came later. Now people think that I am talented in that stuff, but there's always hard work behind it, and I was mostly the worst in class. But there was always a shining light in sight, where I knew I could, and that it is a good pathway.

New comment by _glass in "Ghosts of Unix Past: a historical search for design patterns (2010)"

_glass — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 10:27:35 +0000

Yeah, let's see how Xous fairs. Approach is interesting, and maybe the future is in those small, hardened microkernels.

New comment by _glass in "Don't Become a Scientist (1999)"

_glass — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 08:48:37 +0000

I did my PhD while working, so it's not even that either or. And just to add to your point, it is really so rare to get that kind of mentoring, feedback than in a PhD program. It might depend on the program, but you finally have access to the brightest minds in your field and get to socialize with them.

New comment by _glass in "Europe is locking itself in to US LNG"

_glass — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 16:27:44 +0000

Hard, but doable. Here is the analysis by an experience diver.

https://www-ostsee--zeitung-de.translate.goog/panorama/exper...

New comment by _glass in "I wasted weeks hand optimizing assembly because I benchmarked on random data"

_glass — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 07:59:37 +0000

SAP has also a fork: https://github.com/SAP/SapMachine.

New comment by _glass in "Mostly dead influential programming languages (2020)"

_glass — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 15:30:52 +0000

COBOL is very much alive as ABAP, the SAP scripting language.

New comment by _glass in "APL Interpreter – An implementation of APL, written in Haskell (2024)"

_glass — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 14:21:22 +0000

Done by Audrey Tang who later on became Minister of Digital Affairs of Taiwan.

New comment by _glass in "Monks Behaving Badly: Explaining Buddhist Violence in Asia"

_glass — Wed, 28 May 2025 15:06:29 +0000

I think it is a great insight that every ideology can be turned violent. I first heard this where Zizek cites the book has a story from: "During World War II, Zen Buddhism provided a strong foundation for Japanese militarism, including Imperial Japan's use of suicide warfare."[1] Where a Japanese soldier in WW2 wouldn't do the killing, but his sword (?) This is seen that all ideology can be turned violent.

[1] Brian Daizen Victoria, Zen at War (New York: Weatherhill, 1997).

New comment by _glass in "Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)"

_glass — Mon, 26 May 2025 22:12:01 +0000

Yes, and the project can be criticised by reducing until there's no value anymore. Well known instances of this process:

- Predicate Fronting in Free Relatives: In sentences like “What John saw was a surprise,” labeling the fronted predicate is not without problems, Merge doesn’t yield a clear head.

- Optional Verb Movement in Persian: Yes-no questions where verbs can optionally move (e.g., “Did you go?” vs. “You went?”) messes up feature-checking’s binary mode.

- Non-Matching Free Relatives with Pied-Piping: Structures like “In whichever city you live, you’ll find culture” mess up standard labeling, needs extra stipulations.

- Some Subjects in Finnish: Nominative vs. non-nominative subjects (e.g., “Minua kylmä” [me-ACC cold]) complicate that Minimalist case assignment.

New comment by _glass in "Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)"

_glass — Mon, 26 May 2025 08:35:20 +0000

I think it is important to realize, that we need to understand language on our own terms. The logic of LLMs is not unlike alien technology to us. That being said, the minimalist program of Chomsky lead to nowhere, because just like programming, it found edge case after edge case, reducing it further and further, until there was no program anymore that resembled a real theory. But it is wrong to assume that the big progress in linguistics is in vain, the same reason Prolog, Theorem provers, type theory, category theory is in vain, when we have LLMs that can produce everything in C++. We can use the technology of linguistics to ground our knowledge, and in some dark corner of the LLM it might already have integrated this. I think the original divide between the sciences and the humanities might be deeper and more fundamental than we think. We need linguistic as a discipline of the humanities, and maybe huge swaths of Computer Science is just that.