Hacker News: aperrien

New comment by aperrien in "SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format"

aperrien — Thu, 07 May 2026 16:43:52 +0000

If the file is that important, it shouldn't be stored in the VM, but on some sort of more robust storage system.

New comment by aperrien in "447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane"

aperrien — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 21:34:53 +0000

Remarkable. If this material works and is flexible enough, we could someday see tape drives with hundreds of exabytes of capacity.

New comment by aperrien in "R3 Bio pitched “brainless clones” to serve the role of backup human bodies"

aperrien — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:47:57 +0000

> In general, the idea of producing a body that lacks the brain but has everything else intact is very rational. Its doubtless creepiness may wane with time.

I'm old enough that I remember when artificial hearts and heart transplants were considered creepy. Now they're considered heroic and vital life-saving treatments.

New comment by aperrien in "Sed, a powerfull mini-language from the 70s"

aperrien — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:14:09 +0000

Thanks for the blast from the past. SED led me to AWK, which led me to Perl, which lead me to Python. An interesting chain that brought me back to the interpreted languages like BASIC that I programmed in when I was a kid. Even though my formal training in college was Pascal and C.

New comment by aperrien in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans."

aperrien — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:04:00 +0000

Maybe. But it can also help people find their voice. And I'd rather have comments from someone knowledgeable but unrefined with some good guidance than their silence on that same topic.

New comment by aperrien in "The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory"

aperrien — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 19:58:55 +0000

Are there any attempts to start geo-engineering to fix this? I'm assuming there will be no attempt to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere, can we at least do something to take it back out? Can we use solar or renewables to possibly do that at scale?

New comment by aperrien in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

aperrien — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 04:46:01 +0000

We build our own with data that we've collected ourselves ethically. Then we execute once the big guys are distracted.

New comment by aperrien in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

aperrien — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 03:09:17 +0000

Have you tried asking one of your peers who claims to get good results to run a test with you? Where you both try to create the same project, and share your results?

New comment by aperrien in "An attempt to articulate Forth's practical strengths and eternal usefulness"

aperrien — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 03:58:18 +0000

What I like about Forth is that it can be expressed at the lowest level of computation, and that it can be used to bridge that to the highest level of computation. For example, Forth only requires about 12 opcodes to run, which can be implemented in a few dozen chips. But now that you have that, since it's Turing-complete, you can now pull across a lisp or C compiler, and build a working operating system from there. Granted, that would be a lot of work, but it's relatively straightforward work, and that's always impressed me.

New comment by aperrien in "Inflatable Space Stations"

aperrien — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 19:05:00 +0000

We could just leave them up there and add more stations nearby. It may even be possible to use tethering lines to travel from one to another.

New comment by aperrien in "Jeep pushed software update that bricked all 2024 Wrangler 4xe models"

aperrien — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 16:22:50 +0000

Large planes are all fly by wire. In a commercial airplane, you're talking about moving maybe a quarter-ton of metal for the rudder alone, and against high wind speeds. There is no way to move those without powerful servo motors.

New comment by aperrien in "WinBoat: Windows apps on Linux with seamless integration"

aperrien — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 22:56:03 +0000

I didn't know about Pinta, and now I do. Thank you!

New comment by aperrien in "Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account"

aperrien — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 21:48:28 +0000

There is a range between less profit and no profit. As a shareholder, I'd rather have a functional society for all at the cost of a bit less profit, rather than being the richest in a world of ashes.

New comment by aperrien in "ML on Apple ][+"

aperrien — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 21:12:06 +0000

An Aeon ago in 1984, I wrote a perceptron on the Apple II. It was amazingly slow (20 minutes to complete a recognition pass), but what most impressed me at the time was that it did work. Since that time as a kid I always wondered just how far linear optimization techniques could take us. If I could just tell myself then what I know now...

New comment by aperrien in "Lab-grown salmon hits the menu"

aperrien — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 02:38:49 +0000

If it tastes good and reduces harm to salmon, I'm in.

New comment by aperrien in "Smalltalk-78 Xerox NoteTaker in-browser emulator"

aperrien — Wed, 14 May 2025 19:48:35 +0000

Is it possible to download this for offline use? Or to view the source code for it?

New comment by aperrien in "Gemini Robotics"

aperrien — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 21:28:15 +0000

Man, we shared our knowledge via books long before the internet. And a lot of those AI models train off of thousands of books as a base before they try to incorporate less accurate knowledge from the wild internet. The cat was out of the bag on that long ago.

New comment by aperrien in "Mistral OCR"

aperrien — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 18:26:07 +0000

Is this model open source?

New comment by aperrien in "Solarpunk"

aperrien — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 19:35:43 +0000

I can't contribute that much yet. I'm working on a set of real estate investments to hopefully start the chain within 5-6 years. One of the things that would help for now is to experiment with small projects and hopefully identify something(s) that could make a good long term investment engine.

New comment by aperrien in "Solarpunk"

aperrien — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 04:57:43 +0000

I really wish there was a finance group for solarpunk stuff. It's a constant problem, and when I join any of the many groups online, no-one seems to acknowledge it. If there was some sort of fund that we could contribute to that handled the financing, and looked strictly for long term investments, I'm sure that it would make money, that could then be put back into more long-term solarpunk investments, for the good of all. I don't know how to set such a thing up, or I'd do it myself!