Hacker News: aquafox

New comment by aquafox in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

aquafox — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 11:09:20 +0000

As someone who has written his PhD thesis in LaTeX, I wish Markdown, or more specifically Quarto, would have existed at that time. Spent too mich time setting up basic stuff that is now just 2 pre-defines styles away.

New comment by aquafox in "SSH certificates: the better SSH experience"

aquafox — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:53:09 +0000

I work in a corporate setting and the money and time we wasted because of Zscaler and its SSL inspection [1] is beyond your wildest imagination. Whenever I see a "SSL certificate problem: self-signed certificate in certificate chain" error, I know I'm in trouble.

[1] https://www.zscaler.com/resources/security-terms-glossary/wh...

New comment by aquafox in "Moldova broke our data pipeline"

aquafox — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 06:32:00 +0000

I really don't understand why people think it's a good idea to use csv. In english settings, the comma can be used as 1000-delimiter in large numbers, e.g. 1,000,000 for on million, in German, the comma is used as decimal place, e.g. 1,50€ for 1 euro and 50 cents. And of course, commas can be used free text fields. Given all that, it is just logical to use tsv instead!

New comment by aquafox in "The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform"

aquafox — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 21:51:40 +0000

There is a saying about Gauss: when another mathematician came to show him a new result, Gauss would remark that he had already worked on it, open a drawer in his desk, and pull out a pile of papers on the same topic.

New comment by aquafox in "The Q, K, V Matrices"

aquafox — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 06:33:54 +0000

Oh wow, I wish I could give more than one upvote for this reference!

New comment by aquafox in "Open Infrastructure Map"

aquafox — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 06:24:11 +0000

Or a good one, forcing governments to have robust infrastructure that this info isn't useful. Similar reasoning as with security and open source software.

New comment by aquafox in "Maybe comments should explain 'what' (2017)"

aquafox — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 11:58:42 +0000

I'm a data scientist and a lot of my R code are dplyr-chains a la data |> select(features) |> filter(low_quality) |> mutate(feature=...). It just saves time to comment on what those chains do instead of having go through them every time I want to change something.

New comment by aquafox in "A guide to local coding models"

aquafox — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 06:15:31 +0000

> I'll basically do

    $ man tool |

or even $ cat source |

Could you please elaborate on this? Do I get this right that you can set up your your command line so that you can pipe something to a command that sends this something together with a question to an LLM? Or did you just mean that metaphorically? Sorry if this is a stupid question.

New comment by aquafox in "GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT"

aquafox — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 05:21:15 +0000

Having gone through the explainations of the Transformer Explainer [1], I now have a good intuition for GPT-2. Is there a resource that gives intuition on what changes since then improve things like more conceptually approaching a problem, being better at coding, suggesting next steps if wanted etc? I have a feeling this is a result of more than just increasing transformer blocks, heads, and embedding dimension.

[1] https://poloclub.github.io/transformer-explainer/

New comment by aquafox in "Microsoft in court for allegedly misleading Australians over 365 subscriptions"

aquafox — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 16:17:41 +0000

I once bought an Office 2016 license and when I installed it this year on a new laptop, it turned itself into a trimmed down O365. After the first Office update, I got a non-closable ad next to my Excel spreadsheet to upgrade to a full O365. Even more, I was only able to save files to OneDrive and not locally. That was not what I originally paid for!

New comment by aquafox in "Space Elevator"

aquafox — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 18:51:19 +0000

> Our liveable breathable atmosphere is razor thin compared to the size of earth.

If earth were a grapefruit, our atmosphere would be ~1mm thick!

New comment by aquafox in "How to sequence your DNA for <$2k"

aquafox — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 13:46:27 +0000

The problem for me is not getting my DNA sequenced but not having to trust a third party with my genetic information. As wirtten in the article, they only achieved a 13% coverage (even less if because you have to assume that not all base calls are correct), which is not useful for any sort of genetic analysis. So the title is really misleading.

New comment by aquafox in "How to motivate yourself to do a thing you don't want to do"

aquafox — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 19:16:25 +0000

Terence Tao uses a trick, I think he calls "structured procrastination": When there is a thing he doesn't want to do, he recalls another thing he doesn't want to do more. This way he's procrastinating on the other thing by doing the not favoured one.

New comment by aquafox in "Left to Right Programming"

aquafox — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 20:18:01 +0000

The consensus here seems to be that Python is missing a pipe operator. That was one of the things I quickly learned to appreciate when transitioning from Mathematica to R. It makes writing data science code, where the data are transformed by a series of different steps, so much more readable and intuitive.

I know that Python is used for many more things than just data science, so I'd love to hear if in these other contexts, a pipe would also make sense. Just trying to understand why the pipe hasn't made it into Python already.

New comment by aquafox in "Cancer DNA is detectable in blood years before diagnosis"

aquafox — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 05:33:48 +0000

> This sort of thing is exactly like preventative whole body MRI scans. It's very noisy, very overwhelming data that is only statistically useful in cases we're not even sure about yet. To use it in a treatment program is witchcraft at this moment, probably doing more harm than good.

The child of a friend of mine has PTEN-Hamartom-Tumor-Syndrom, a tendency to develop tumors throughout life due to a mutation in the PTEN gene. The poor child gets whole body MRIs and other check-ups every half year. As someone in biological data science, I always tell the parents how difficult it will be to prevent false positives, because we don't have a lot of data on routine full body check-ups on healty people. We just know the huge spectrum on how healthy/ok tissue looks like.

New comment by aquafox in "Show HN: I'm an airline pilot – I built interactive graphs/globes of my flights"

aquafox — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 18:53:40 +0000

I would plot the destination matrix as a jeatap where each row is a departure and each column an arrival and color is the number of trips. Additionally, you could cluster the rows and columns of this heatmap.

New comment by aquafox in "Airpass – Easily overcome WiFi time limits"

aquafox — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 18:12:58 +0000

On a related note: Transporting a human in a car is (in relation to weight and size) like using a standard shopping cart to transport two 1L bottles of water. So the next time you walk through a pedestrian area, imagine everyone carrying a bag would use a shopping cart instead. That would be a huge traffic jam -- exactly like what you see on the road!

New comment by aquafox in "Last fifty years of integer linear programming: Recent practical advances (2024)"

aquafox — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 18:18:56 +0000

Could someone maybe give a high-level explanation into why commercial ILP solvers (e.g. Gurobi) are that much better than free/open-source ones? Is it because ILP is inherently that difficult to solve (I know it's NP-hard), that the best solvers are just a large ensemble of heuristics for very specific sub-problems and thus no general "good" strategy has made it's way into the public domain?

New comment by aquafox in "Show HN: Rv, a Package Manager for R"

aquafox — Fri, 16 May 2025 19:46:12 +0000

I had similar issues in the past. Setting up renv, everything seems good, but after working in a project for a few weeks and installing packages, renv constantly complains about the library being out-of-sync and resolving these complaints took way longer than new ones came around. I think renv has good intentions, but there are just too many edge cases (Bioconductor, installing an experimental package from Github, weird package dependencies etc.), that it always failed me in a real-world scenario.

New comment by aquafox in "Stack Overflow is almost dead"

aquafox — Thu, 15 May 2025 21:42:50 +0000

Until there is a radically new version of {popular programming language} with breaking changes and no new and correct answers to train on.