Hacker News: baruchel

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.