Hacker News: baruz

New comment by baruz in "Aging Brains Blend Memories Together Instead of Just Forgetting Them"

baruz — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 19:11:08 +0000

Anecdatum: I confidently told a woman that her son, who was looking for a research opportunity in Berne, Switzerland, was heading for the birthplace of the World Wide Web, which is actually a couple of hours west and south at CERN.

New comment by baruz in "An implementation of Conway's Game of Life for Windows 3.1x and later"

baruz — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 19:36:03 +0000

Thank you!

New comment by baruz in "An implementation of Conway's Game of Life for Windows 3.1x and later"

baruz — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 17:00:06 +0000

I am not too familiar with Windows development in the 16-bit era, so I do not understand what Raiter means when he writes that he “de-Petzoldized” the code. I thought Petzold’s work on documenting the Windows API was foundational. Was it the style?

New comment by baruz in "Fences, Not Sandboxes"

baruz — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 23:28:25 +0000

He’s using a $5k/month account to access the “equivalent” of $122k worth of tokens.

New comment by baruz in "Scrap"

baruz — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 23:26:07 +0000

Reminds me a bit of some of Dave Secretary’s TIME FOR SOME STORIES.

New comment by baruz in "I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers"

baruz — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 04:53:35 +0000

But let’s not pretend that the plastic and painterly arts are so much more self-evidently “thick” than literature is. Despite their immediacy, these arts have their own conventions, motifs, and demands that must be understood to “find the treasure in the dark cave.”

I have tried to convince someone I know that an art museum merits more than a one-minute-per-painting, four minutes-max-per-room, pretty/not-pretty approach. She still does not understand why I linger over books or works of art, and I have not the wherewithal to lead her through the techniques, the conventions, or the history that makes this worthwhile for me.

New comment by baruz in "Seven books I keep close because I love them"

baruz — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 23:01:30 +0000

A lot of books that call themselves Roget’s have abandoned the dual structure (classification-index) in favor of a single index structure built like a dictionary, basically constructed for people who want a different word than what they would normally use, as mjd writes, rather than people who are interested in the store-house (thesaurus) of the English language.

New comment by baruz in "Earth.nullschool.net"

baruz — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 19:14:00 +0000

A quick trip to Wikipedia says that the Spanish name was Río del Espíritu Santo, River of the Holy Spirit, and the initial French name was fleuve de l'Immaculée Conception, River of the Immaculate Conception, and later the fleuve Colbert or the rivière Saint-Louis.

New comment by baruz in "Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it"

baruz — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 04:32:39 +0000

I was interested in astronomy as a six-year-old, which led me to Greek myths, which led me to Greek poetry, all of that in translation, as well as Gene Wolfe’s Latro books as they came out.

I was learning to program at the same time, following along A K Dewdney’s Computer Recreations column. I went into college to learn pre-med but always found myself more interested in the humanities, like my survey of Greek literature, which was supposed to accelerate my prerequisites. Also hung out with friends in the engineering labs on Sun Sparcstations playing netrek and MUDs, which did for me.

Anyway, I pivoted and started taking computer courses, like artificial intelligence, reading from Russell and Norvig, Clocksin and Mellisa, and Paul Graham.

I learned Greek while consulting for companies across the country, programming network performance tests, to have something to do in the hotels.

Fast forward to 2008, 2009, and I see that the Lispy Hackers and Painters guy had a new website. I started an account but lost it. Or did they reset it after disuse? Anyway, that’s me.

Oh, I did take Latin in Catholic high school, but did not really use any of it for reading, just vocabulary, but it did help with the old-style grammar-first Greek texts I learned from.

New comment by baruz in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

baruz — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:04:07 +0000

Many of the things you mention, crossing out, circling, I do not think of as actively engaging with the material, which a quick skim of the underlying research pointed out in the TFA (or maybe an earlier 2017 paper of theirs) requires using the fine motor control of actually writing. Writing marginalia is good for the brain; if you disagree, write out why, if you agree, write your reaction. Highlighting, circling, crossing out are mere consumption and only useful for finding passages later, not engaging your brain.

New comment by baruz in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

baruz — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 19:57:51 +0000

Those are called commonplace books.

New comment by baruz in "Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion"

baruz — Sun, 31 May 2026 15:06:26 +0000

People keep saying that Microsoft invested in Apple to defeat anti-trust measures. They did not. They lost the Video for Windows lawsuit (Apple v San Francisco Canyon Company, Microsoft, Intel). Buying the non-voting stock was part of the remedy. Microsoft would gladly become a monopoly if they could get away with it.

New comment by baruz in "Writing on Mount Hymettos in Duplo"

baruz — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 10:18:46 +0000

I thought the use of the eta in ΣΗΜΙΟΙ ΔΙ to be later, like the late fifth century, at least in Athens, than the eighth century implied by the text. Before that, they would have been writing ΣΕΜΙΟΙ ΔΙ with what is now called simple E, epsilon.

New comment by baruz in "I’m joining OpenAI"

baruz — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 02:55:26 +0000

What got acquired?

New comment by baruz in "Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits"

baruz — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 21:39:30 +0000

_Pride and prejudice_ hits for me similar notes as those for fantasy and historical fiction, though of course it is commenting on contemporary issues with no magic (except the magic of love), alas. It’s like entering a foreign society where you may have to infer why people are acting the way they do. Now that you’re not in school, no one is forcing you to write essays on what you read, or even to understand or interpret what is going on in the narrative! Cool, huh?

New comment by baruz in "Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits"

baruz — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 23:46:47 +0000

I think you mean romance? A romance used to be a Roman-style long narrative fictional work that described extraordinary deeds, soap opera plots. Novels were more concerned with realistic narratives describing the nitty gritty of everyday life.

New comment by baruz in "Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits"

baruz — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 23:32:56 +0000

Not with that attitude you won’t! But dip your toe in, _Pride and prejudice_ is pretty light and breezy while having some depth to it.

New comment by baruz in "The Eggstraordinary Fortress"

baruz — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 02:11:46 +0000

I do not know about TFA and the egg cooker, but I usually boil the water first so I can pull the eggs out at a specific time (6:30 to 7:00) so the yolk is gooey. When I put an egg into boiling water without putting a hole through to the air sac, I think there's a higher chance that the egg will crack and spew albumen throughout the boiling water.

New comment by baruz in "Matrices can be your friends (2002)"

baruz — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 16:58:33 +0000

This was part of Steve Baker’s (“Omniverous Hexapod”, sic) extensions to a long-standing Usenet FAQ about graphics programming, put out by “Carniverous Hexapod” (sic). It’s at least two decades old, and the FAQ from which he it on may be from the 1990s? I have the niggling recollection that the Carniverous name may have been based on Vernor Vinge’s _Fire upon the deep_ aliens.

He did not invent it, but he probably had to deal with aspiring graphics programmers who were not very math-savvy.

New comment by baruz in "Helium Browser"

baruz — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 06:08:16 +0000

In the 1990s Microsoft “invested” in Apple because Steve Jobs allowed them to save face by giving them the option to settle their part of Apple v San Francisco Canyon Co by calling part of it—$150 M—a stock purchase that only lasted a few years. I do not know how much the total cash settlement from Microsoft was, but industry rumors went up to $1B.