Hacker News: baruz

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.

New comment by baruz in "The Color of the Future: A history of blue"

baruz — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 11:24:21 +0000

Or manganese blue?

New comment by baruz in "The Last Vestal Virgin and the Fall of Rome"

baruz — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 23:32:01 +0000

Aeneas is several generations removed from Rhea Silvia, as the founder of the ruling dynasty of Alba Longa whence Rhea Silvia emerged.

New comment by baruz in "Show HN: Clearcam – Add AI object detection to your IP CCTV cameras"

baruz — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 17:07:17 +0000

The author states elsewhere that the payments are for the use of their server, which can be reconfigured.

New comment by baruz in "SQLite (with WAL) doesn't do `fsync` on each commit under default settings"

baruz — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 16:52:37 +0000

Is there a performance hit for f_fullfsync?

New comment by baruz in "The Missing Protocol: Let Me Know"

baruz — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 21:16:35 +0000

https://xkcd.com/927/

You know which one.

New comment by baruz in "Lists and Lists: Basics of Lisp through interactive fiction (1996)"

baruz — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 04:51:32 +0000

I did the same thing, used setq and set ' before I did :r and saw the “define” verbiage.

> assumed to know the difference

:m for the manual and it’s under Comparisons

New comment by baruz in "The Gen Xers Who Waited Their Turn to Be CEO Are Getting Passed Over"

baruz — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 18:06:05 +0000

An earlier Gen X reporting in to agree with this eloquently-written comment. I only want to add that my Silent parents never tried to sell me on the Baby Boomer dream retirement, having been raised by Lost Generation parents still shell-shocked from the effects of the Great Depression. They taught me to save, invest, and, as immigrants, to always keep family in mind.

New comment by baruz in "The Gen Xers Who Waited Their Turn to Be CEO Are Getting Passed Over"

baruz — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 17:48:49 +0000

That was not Gen X saying that—we don’t say anything, like our Silent parents—we just sulk in our rooms playing grunge to relieve the overwhelming dread and to root out whatever ear-worms Clear Channel has been feeding us. Baby Boomers were the ones who put out the narrative of the avocado-toast eating Millenial, to which we just said, “Whatever.”

In case it was not made abundantly clear, that was stereotypical GenX sarcasm, but as a Gen Xer I cannot figure out how to write a sarcasm tag into this stupid machine.

New comment by baruz in "Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room"

baruz — Thu, 15 May 2025 21:09:02 +0000

I wonder whether TFA author never saw it again because the fifty-minute bookers wised up and started booking the extra ten minutes or whether the ten-minute stand-up pirates finally got a talking-to.

New comment by baruz in "Former Supreme Court justice David Souter has died"

baruz — Fri, 09 May 2025 17:18:38 +0000

I remember that decision and am still indignant about it. Why should the government give private land to a different private party? If the government is going to take it for public use, I can see the reasoning, but using eminent domain to transfer to private owners is fraught.

New comment by baruz in "ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC"

baruz — Fri, 09 May 2025 17:04:35 +0000

Huh. It was grayed out for me as well, but I have no recollection of having had to look up moles, Avogadro, or even chemistry-related topics in Wikipedia for at least several months.

New comment by baruz in "How to start a school with your friends"

baruz — Fri, 09 May 2025 11:46:03 +0000

> Who decides

Councils formed by the currently accredited schools decide.

> what right

The government started relying on these accrediting bodies with the GI Bill in 1952. They did not want the GIs to spend the money on bad educations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_accreditation...

> are employers really looking into

Didn’t yours? If they’re not body shops, companies will rely on the reputation of the school or pick out people from their own school. Unaccredited schools typically have poor reputations and usually churn out “graduates” who can’t attract the money to start businesses and hire people from those schools.