Hacker News: b0rsuk

New comment by b0rsuk in "Stanisław Lem's vision of artificial life"

b0rsuk — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 20:33:49 +0000

> Their tiny size notwithstanding, their awesome potential illuminates the profound ambiguity of the work’s title, which can be taken to refer either to the spaceship’s proud name or to the swarms of alien automata that threaten it.

Err, no. The language of the original - Polish - doesn't have such ambiguity. "Niezwyciężony" is in masculine singular form. Plural would be "Niezwyciężeni" for masculine plural and "Niezwyciężone" for non-masculine plural (includes neuter).

New comment by b0rsuk in "How to make a roguelike"

b0rsuk — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 10:57:13 +0000

"Roguelike" is nowadays commonly defined by having a meta progression system (unlocks). Scroll through reviews of a game like Noita or DCSS (Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup) and you will see some people complaining the game doesn't have (enough) permanent unlocks.

New comment by b0rsuk in "How to make a roguelike"

b0rsuk — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 07:59:50 +0000

There's a mini discussion on HN about them here, when I last mentioned them. Crucially, they know alternative names such as "Flow Fields".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22848106

New comment by b0rsuk in "Heroes of Might and Magic"

b0rsuk — Sun, 26 Dec 2021 22:34:00 +0000

You've found a secret area!!

The best, most addictive spiritual successor I've found to date is Eador:Genesis. Although it has a bunch of other inspirations such as Master of Magic.

https://eador-masters-of-the-broken-world.fandom.com/wiki/Ea...

It mostly has very bad AI for which it compensates with insane material advantages, but tactical layer is stellar and strategic layer has some VERY interesting ideas as well. Your actions have far reaching consequences, such as you choose only 3 tier II units from about ten or so, and they have very different niches and work to a varying degree with each of the 4 basic classes.

New comment by b0rsuk in "Writing maintainable code is a communication skill"

b0rsuk — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 17:06:35 +0000

If you have one group of coders writing new functionality, and another doing maintenance work on the application, you have diverging interests. The "new functionality" people have an incentive to rush stuff, because bugfixes won't be their responsibility anyway. The most cynical way to do this is writing a lot of new functionality, put it on CV, and leave for another company.

New comment by b0rsuk in "China removed Lithuania from its customs registry"

b0rsuk — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 17:05:14 +0000

Poland's last foreign ministers (Waszczykowski and Rau) have been inane. Nature doesn't like vacuum. Poland more or less left the stage, and Lithuania is trying to fill the niche.

New comment by b0rsuk in "A 41,500 year-old decorated ivory pendant from Stajnia Cave (Poland)"

b0rsuk — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 12:07:51 +0000

This is especially surprising because the common idea is that civilization arrived later into northern, colder Europe. Bushcraft like on the wonderful Primitive Technology youtube channel is harder when you don't have a year-round growing period. You need not just warmer clothes, but ways to stockpile and preserve food. Traditional Polish cuisine has many ways - preserves in glass jars, salt, pickling... Actually the cuisine is the aspect that positively surprises visitors the most. So many peoples and empires were present in the region, so many culinary influences. It's only lacking in saltwater fish because historically there was limited sea access.

Maybe the climate was different?

New comment by b0rsuk in "Writing is networking for introverts"

b0rsuk — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 07:14:46 +0000

What you call "low-quality conversation", smalltalk, is particularly disliked by people with Aspergers.

New comment by b0rsuk in "How to grow sodium chloride crystals at home"

b0rsuk — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 13:04:58 +0000

I think the best part is not the recipe itself, but the error handling of the article. It goes into detail into what conditions are optimal, what kind of tools to use, how various mistakes look like (with photos!).

New comment by b0rsuk in "The metaverse is bullshit"

b0rsuk — Sat, 30 Oct 2021 07:25:24 +0000

I'm patiently waiting for the desktop metaphor to die. I'm a very happy user of i3 (tiling) window manager and it's beautiful how efficiently it uses space. Meanwhile in the "desktop metaphor" world, interface designers have settled on fullscreen applications (skype, even music players) and tabs. Because no one wants to bother moving application windows around with mouse.

i3 is explicitly for power users, but someone will eventually take the idea of tiling window managers and make something with a low learning curve. And that will be the end of desktop icons and movable windows.

New comment by b0rsuk in "Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)"

b0rsuk — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 08:24:40 +0000

What you just did sounds like an interesting "Show HN" project. Automate the thing, so that a HN bot posts a comment with previous talk about the topic.

New comment by b0rsuk in "Willingness to look stupid"

b0rsuk — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 13:43:11 +0000

There's a song about this:

"Dare to be Stupid" - Weird Al Yankowich https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMhwddNQSWQ

Asking questions is really putting print statements(or functions) in ordinary, physical world. It's debugging yourself or your surroundings.

Asking questions is crucial when you're doing sports and trying to improve your personal best - for example pull ups or squats. Eventually a joint or tissue starts to hurt and you need to figure out why or you get an injury. Am I doing it too often? No warmup? Bad diet? Sleep? Does your joint rotate too much and in which axis?

And you will absolutely not get far in a puzzle game like Baba Is You if you're not good at asking questions. When I got stuck in that game, it was almost always due to a wrong assumption I made early on and failed to recognize. Solving the game is similar to tree traversal. If one approach doesn't work, and you don't have another idea, you need to re-examine your assumptions.

DuckDuckGo said no. But when I reapplied as a black lesbian, they wanted me

b0rsuk — Sun, 26 Sep 2021 16:07:52 +0000

Article URL: https://lulz.com/community/thread/social-experiment-duckduckgo-hiring-racial-discrimination/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28662037

Points: 42

# Comments: 2

New comment by b0rsuk in "Quran API"

b0rsuk — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 17:15:27 +0000

Likely because Muslims are very prickly.

New comment by b0rsuk in "Large Unix programs were historically not all that portable between Unixes"

b0rsuk — Sat, 04 Sep 2021 10:29:55 +0000

Isn't it true for all programs? Not just _unix_ programs?

Firefox is portable and it's a large program, but a LOT of effort went into that.

New comment by b0rsuk in "The World of Medieval Dogdom (2019)"

b0rsuk — Sun, 29 Aug 2021 09:20:15 +0000

And here Ratramus, a 9th century monk researches the matter:

"Do the Dog-Headed Men Have Souls?" I also learned a human head is round.

New comment by b0rsuk in "Plants, heavy metals, and the lingering scars of World War I"

b0rsuk — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 07:38:51 +0000

Chemical weapons are used for assassination, but not for large scale warfare. More like terror weapons on civilians (Syria?) and guerilla fighters with limited resources and few alliances.

New comment by b0rsuk in "The Ancient Persian way to keep cool"

b0rsuk — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 19:36:40 +0000

I think the parent might be suggesting that sleeping on a wet bed might trigger peeing reflex.

New comment by b0rsuk in "The Ancient Persian way to keep cool"

b0rsuk — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 19:14:28 +0000

It appears you've read the article to the very end - I'm glad you've enjoyed it.

High ceilings - absolutely. Warm air goes up, can it get simpler than that? Primary/Elementary school physics.

If you watch some videos on lost African civilizations and traditional architecture, it's full of them (and curtains rather than doors). Some examples are Basil Davidson's "Africa" serries (on youtube, if you don't mind low quality) and I think Stefan Milo on his channel, the video about coral cities ("Swahili Culture").

Interesting experience with Katrina. You could call it having a house that "fails gracefully" and doesn't rely completely on any one system.

There are downsides to modern, well-isolated houses. When air is the primary medium of heating your house, opening a window means almost literally letting money out. Aside from crap like emissions from furniture (I believe they're called VOC - not a native speaker), dust, bacteria and fungal spores pile up. People develop allergy and respiration-related diseases more easily.

New comment by b0rsuk in "The Ancient Persian way to keep cool"

b0rsuk — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 11:54:12 +0000

If you're interested in low tech, passive and energy efficient technologies, I recommend the

LOW TECH MAGAZINE

For example, Revenge of the Circulating Fan: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/09/circulating-fans-air...

Frequently discussing topics like thermal comfort, energy needed to heat up a person, sustainability, solar-powered websites, mist showers, wind power, compressed air power, medieval methods of heating and what we can learn from them...