Hacker News: discmonkey

New comment by discmonkey in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

discmonkey — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:00:34 +0000

I got about two sentences further, it turns out another smoking gun is Mr. Back using c++ in his graduate studies, just like the original bitcoin implementation.

New comment by discmonkey in "CLion Is Now Free for Non-Commercial Use"

discmonkey — Wed, 07 May 2025 14:33:46 +0000

You may not be able to think of a worse experience, but a lot of "newer" programmers may not even know what an LSP is. While it's true that I no longer need to rely on some of the benefits of Jetbrains, when I was getting started jetbrains paving over toolchain difficulties was invaluable.

New comment by discmonkey in "CLion Is Now Free for Non-Commercial Use"

discmonkey — Wed, 07 May 2025 13:19:23 +0000

Assuming that the plugin is enabled for the free version, CLion is also amazing for Rust. Thanks Jetbrains!

Here's hoping this won't be abused by smaller companies that will no longer want to pay for the actual subscription. I also wonder if they are moving towards a different funding model, since the IDE space is pretty competitive with a free alternative (VSCode) out there.

New comment by discmonkey in "A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen"

discmonkey — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 15:14:59 +0000

I love the look and the idea, but I wonder if it will go the way of the small/budget phone?

Will folks revealed preference continue to be big and expensive?

New comment by discmonkey in "Why I Program in Lisp"

discmonkey — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 15:54:16 +0000

Good article. Funnily enough the throw away line "I don't see parentheses anymore". Is my greatest deterrent with lisp. It's not the parens persay, it's the fact that I'm used to reading up to down and left to right. Lisp without something like the clojure macro ->, means that I am reading from right to left, bottom to top - from inside out.

If i programmed enough in lisp I think my brain would adjust to this, but it's almost like I can't full appreciate the language because it reads in the "wrong order".

New comment by discmonkey in "AI will change the world but not in the way you think"

discmonkey — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 16:25:46 +0000

By definition if I knew how AI would change the world, I would invest/build things to that end. The fact that we still don't have a great AI product outside of chatgpt, shows that no one knows what will happen.

New comment by discmonkey in "The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad: Science and Sacrifice in a City Under Siege"

discmonkey — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 14:13:50 +0000

My great-grandmother and grandfather were in Leningrad during the siege. My great-grandmother continued to teach throughout. At some point she was given the option to evacuate with my (very) young grandfather over the "road of life".

As my mother tells the story, my great grandmother had the choice of either taking a bus, or hanging on to the back of some delivery truck. She chose the truck. The bus broke through the ice and disappeared under the water.

It's strange to realize how close one can be to not being "here" and how history weaves its way through your blood and ends up on the front page of hackernews.

New comment by discmonkey in "‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’"

discmonkey — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 16:24:04 +0000

Required reading for this theme, and one of my personal favorite short stories:

https://qntm.org/lena

New comment by discmonkey in "New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike"

discmonkey — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 14:04:20 +0000

Humans tend to like to stay at there they are, in the tech context especially. It takes a long time relative to the length of a career to learn new systems, make new connections, and achieve some level of independence at a new job. There's also relatively few jobs that at least pretend to be somewhat beneficial to the world while paying somewhat competitive salaries (I can't think of any that I've worked at). Then there's relationships you may have developed with your colleagues.

Finally, if everyone just leaves their jobs without trying to improve them, won't everyone run out of places to jump to eventually?

New comment by discmonkey in "Ask HN: What are some "toy" projects you used to learn neural networks hands-on?"

discmonkey — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 19:51:23 +0000

I did a research project on this a while back - and when it comes to understanding deep network learning rate, regularization, hidden layer effects, and activations, I don't think anything is better than [this little web app](https://playground.tensorflow.org/#activation=tanh&batchSize...)

New comment by discmonkey in "401(k) Will Be Gone Within a Decade"

discmonkey — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 02:37:30 +0000

Article seems to make the argument that is should happen (poorly), but doesn't provide any evidence that it will happen.

New comment by discmonkey in "Ask HN: How are you using ChatGPT for yourself?"

discmonkey — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 15:06:00 +0000

Essentially automating project boilerplate that is custom enough to need attention, but not quite custom enough where it's interesting. Some examples include creating dockerfiles, various database models and data parsers, openapi specs, etc.

New comment by discmonkey in "Watsonx: IBM's code assistant for turning COBOL into Java"

discmonkey — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 17:18:46 +0000

Classic misunderstanding of programming languages. The only thing stopping cobol from being "known" is these companies paying for it.

New comment by discmonkey in "System76's Lemur Pro Laptop Is Just a Nice Linux Laptop"

discmonkey — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 16:13:51 +0000

yeah - as seen from a few comments on my post, everyone has different opinions on non-objective stuff related to keyboard/trackpad. I feel like the keyboard is pretty responsive while the trackpad isn't, but the only way for you to know is to have tried it I guess.

New comment by discmonkey in "System76's Lemur Pro Laptop Is Just a Nice Linux Laptop"

discmonkey — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 16:03:41 +0000

Glad you are! I don't want to be overly negative. I am comparing my M2 work macbook trackpad with my 2 year old lemur pro trackpad - it's not really a fair comparison. The problem is that the pricing is similar enough where it's hard to justify the hardware downgrade.

I should also mention that my free time to work on projects has dramatically decreased in the past few years, so I am valuing the ability to seamlessly switch between my desktop and laptop on personal projects less than I used to.

New comment by discmonkey in "System76's Lemur Pro Laptop Is Just a Nice Linux Laptop"

discmonkey — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 15:25:45 +0000

Figure I might as well drop a quick review after 2 years with the lemur pro 11

Pros:

* Most things "just work", which you only appreciate after working with other linux laptops. For example, I can seamlessly plug this laptop in place of my work macbook with just one usb-c cable. That being said I think things have generally gotten better in the space so this may not be as much of a selling point anymore. Additionally this laptop doesn't have an nvidia gpu, which means its job is easier.

* Great compatibility for building software between my desktop and this laptop, makes my personal dev work a lot more portable.

* It's quite small and very portable.

* Nice keyboard

* Moral points for supporting a small company that focuses on security (whether this is actually significant is up to the reader)

Cons:

* Battery life is a lie, especially since it drains almost as much battery closed as it does open.

* Not great screen, terrible trackpad, and silly webcam considering the price of the laptop.

* As mentioned no gpu, while costing about the same as razor laptop.

Overall, I think I am probably going to switch back to a macbook after this, not being able to go a day without charging and your laptop always being on low battery is a bit anxiety inducing. Also (and this doesn't matter to a lot of people) I really value a laptop trackpad and this one is just plain bad.

New comment by discmonkey in "Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario"

discmonkey — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 14:25:40 +0000

Idk inventing convolutions and a bunch of other stuff we use everyday is somewhat significant. Machine learning, if we call it a field, is a whole lot newer than physics, and so a few people have contributed quite a bit in recent memory.

New comment by discmonkey in "The AI research job market"

discmonkey — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 16:03:11 +0000

I have to agree. Especially given the very real possibility that your ML project won't be cutting edge research grade. At that point someone who doesn't have bias and is willing to search for a reasonable looking approximation to the problem and try a canned solution may actually be an optimal candidate.

New comment by discmonkey in "Google changed ad auctions, raising prices 15%, witness says"

discmonkey — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 17:00:35 +0000

They do have this, you can choose to bid for a target conversion cost (I want to pay at most $x per conversion). In general I find all of this pretty silly as a Google employee.. I don't think you can distill the complexity of any change down to one article. Say for example that Google did just raise how much advertisers paid per click across the board, why would that lead to billions of dollars in profit? I would bet that the majority of advertisers on Google already spend their whole budget, so that would mean that now they would just be getting less clicks and conversions per dollar of budget spend. Logically they would then move some of this budget to other advertising channels such as Facebook. Charging more per impression always has second order effects, but who cares about that on hackernews

New comment by discmonkey in "You're Not Losing Fat Because You're Eating Too Damn Much"

discmonkey — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 18:25:36 +0000

I agree in general, but most people that run 50 miles a weeks also eat healthy. So there's a lot of correlation there. IE show me a person that runs 50 miles a week but also eats mostly process foods and drinks lotsa soda.