Hacker News: baruchel

Rocq 9.2.0 Released

baruchel — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:41:57 +0000

Article URL: https://rocq-prover.org/doc/v9.2/refman/changes.html#version-9-2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47673663

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80

baruchel — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 05:53:04 +0000

Article URL: https://spectrum.ieee.org/eniac-80-ieee-milestone

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47435453

Points: 127

# Comments: 53

New comment by baruchel in "Using Thunderbird for RSS"

baruchel — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 09:32:00 +0000

I can confirm the TT-RSS app (found on F-Droid) is very good. I have used it for years. On the other hand, the web app is not very good, and each time I wanted to read articles on my computer from the web interface, I encountered huge issues (for some reason, the "right click / mark as read" never correctly worked on my computers, or at least with huge lags of several seconds). When my free TT-RSS provider closed, I decided to switch to FreshRSS and could compare several apps for Android; I finally set up the following workflow: free FreshRSS account + "Read You" (found on F-Droid also), and managed to achieve a very similar workflow than previously (with a much better web app).

New comment by baruchel in "Tony Hoare has died"

baruchel — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:09:10 +0000

Yes, but don't forget his formal work also (Hoare logic).

New comment by baruchel in "Self-Portrait by Ernst Mach (1886)"

baruchel — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 21:20:22 +0000

If I remember correctly, this picture is commented in the very good book "Exact thinking in demented times", together with Mach's ideas.

Can the Most Abstract Math Make the World a Better Place?

baruchel — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 15:48:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.quantamagazine.org/can-the-most-abstract-math-make-the-world-a-better-place-20260304/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47249231

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

How many steps in a "chain of victories" separate you from your favorite player?

baruchel — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:15:35 +0000

Article URL: https://mastodon.online/@lichess/116160234963901272

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220887

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Assigning Open Problems in Class

baruchel — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 06:43:46 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2026/02/assigning-open-problems-in-class.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47031656

Points: 18

# Comments: 5

Mathematicians find largest prime number to date

baruchel — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 18:27:34 +0000

Article URL: https://fediscience.org/users/fortnow/statuses/116047642454364522

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46964474

Points: 1

# Comments: 2

Any chess position with 8 pieces on board and one pair of pawns has been solved

baruchel — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 08:17:29 +0000

Article URL: https://mastodon.online/@lichess/116029914921844500

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46932396

Points: 18

# Comments: 2

New comment by baruchel in "In Praise of APL (1977)"

baruchel — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 13:19:56 +0000

I’ve practiced array languages extensively myself, including for code golfing, and I fully understand the intellectual joy they can provide. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to see a deep mismatch between what these languages present as “elegant” and what I find truly elegant from a computer science perspective.

Sure, realizing that the foobar of x is nothing more than the transpose of the 15th foo of x, combined via an inner product with the 7th bar of x raised to the power of baz, can be an ineffable intellectual delight. But actually computing that, rather than writing a “boring” loop, feels horrible to me. To my eyes, a “boring” piece of code written by Dijkstra in some Algol-like language contains more beauty than all these dazzling sleights of hand that hide zillions of loops under the rug while pretending that the actual computation doesn’t matter.

New comment by baruchel in "Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center"

baruchel — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 10:18:54 +0000

When you compute some nice and elegant result, dissipated heat is an undesired side effect. But let's face it: we are speaking about proof of work. Proof of work means that a computed has run during some "required" time. In other words, you have to prove that enough heat has been dissipated. Waste of energy actually is "by design" here.