Hacker News: earthicus

New comment by earthicus in "Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android"

earthicus — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 03:24:53 +0000

This certainly won't solve the problem, but I would at least like to banish the term "side load", which is a kind of Orwellian word that takes something everyone used to do all the time and makes it sound obscure and a bit nefarious. Maybe we, the tech literate, can start calling sideloading a "free install" or something. When asked, we can clarify that the 'free' stands for both freedom, and not paying middlemen 30%.

New comment by earthicus in "Ergonomic keyboarding with the Svalboard: a half-year retrospective"

earthicus — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 05:36:21 +0000

I’ve thought quite a bit about getting a teacher, but have hesitated for a few [somewhat legitimate] reasons. Among them, I’m partially disabled and can’t practice consistently. However, having a teacher berate me about my posture would actually probably help that at least a little bit, now that you mention in :-) Thanks for taking the time to share your experience and encouragement with me! Best of luck on your lessons as well.

New comment by earthicus in "Ergonomic keyboarding with the Svalboard: a half-year retrospective"

earthicus — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 06:56:34 +0000

I recently started learning the piano as an adult, and from what i've gathered from reading and watching videos, the 'folk wisdom' about how to avoid rsi-type injuries is to minimize tension in your wrist by maximizing relaxation of your fingers and wrists (especially the thumbs, which tend to get locked into a permanent state of mild tension on the piano keyboard). So you want to do your best to develop more finger independence, so that you can press with one finger while keeping the neighboring fingers relaxed. It's really hard.

New comment by earthicus in "Releasing weights for FLUX.1 Krea"

earthicus — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 22:14:17 +0000

Describing it as "Octopus DJ with no fingers" got rid of the hands for me, but interestingly, also removed every anthropomorphized element of the octopus, so that it was literally just an octopus spinning turntables.

New comment by earthicus in "Gemini with Deep Think achieves gold-medal standard at the IMO"

earthicus — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 20:13:49 +0000

I don't think that characterization is fair at all. It's certainly true that you, me, and most humans can't solve these problems with any amount of time or energy. But the problems are specifically written to be at the limit of what the actual high school students who participate can solve in four hours. Letting the actual students taking the test have four days instead of four hours would make a massive difference in their ability to solve them.

Said differently, the students, difficulty of the problems, and time limit are specifically coordinated together, so the amount of joules of energy used to produce a solution is not arbitrary. In the grand scheme of how the tech will improve over time, it seems likely that doesn't matter and the computers will win by any metric soon enough, but Tao is completely correct to point out that you haven't accurately told us what the machines can do today, in July 2025, without telling us ahead of time exactly what rules you are modifying.

New comment by earthicus in "Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system"

earthicus — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 00:25:36 +0000

I looked at the Typst documentation and from what I could tell, it has 3 hard-coded "Modes" for 3 hard-coded kinds of syntax (normal, math, code). I couldn't find any way to add any custom syntax - is there a way to do this?

Tex/LaTeX are completely syntactically extensible. For example, a logician might want to use the software with any number of their notations, or a physicist drawing Feynmann diagrams, etc. I think at one point Lillypad used it for typesetting sheet music.

Edit: i found it! https://typst.app/docs/guides/guide-for-latex-users/#package...

New comment by earthicus in "Linguists find proof of sweeping language pattern once deemed a 'hoax'"

earthicus — Tue, 20 May 2025 14:20:51 +0000

"The researchers analyzed bilingual dictionaries between English and more than 600 languages, looking for what they call “lexical elaboration,” in which a language has many words related to a core concept. It’s the same phenomenon that fueled the Inuit debate. But this study brings a twist: rather than the number of words, it measured their proportion, the slice of dictionary real estate taken up by a concept."

This seems inadequate to make the kinds of claims the researchers are quoted as asserting in the article.

New comment by earthicus in "Researchers infiltrated a popular Reddit forum with AI bots"

earthicus — Sun, 18 May 2025 20:22:54 +0000

The researchers discussed the study here (also linked towards the end of the article):

https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1k8b2hj/meta_...

A Retrospective on Region-Based Memory Management (2004) [pdf]

earthicus — Sun, 18 May 2025 15:44:03 +0000

Article URL: https://elsman.com/mlkit/pdf/retro.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44022188

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by earthicus in "“A calculator app? Anyone could make that”"

earthicus — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 19:58:53 +0000

I think the issue was that they are representing a real as a product of a rational and that more complicated type, so without a symbolic representation for 1, when representing and rational, they would have to multiply it by a RRA representation of 1 which brings in all the decision problem issues.

New comment by earthicus in "Hofstadter on Lisp (1983)"

earthicus — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 23:52:57 +0000

It was discovered that the procedure mechanism of Algol 60 was effectively equivalent to the lambda calulus. This insight was written out in a famous paper by Peter Landin, "Correspondence between ALGOL 60 and Church's Lambda-notation: part I"

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/363744.363749

(Half-True) Stories about the B5000 and the people who were there (1979) [pdf]

earthicus — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 22:54:20 +0000

Article URL: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don_X4100/PDF_index/k-8-pdf/k-8-u2779-B5000-People.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40861227

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by earthicus in "Quantum entangled photons react to Earth's spin"

earthicus — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 15:44:40 +0000

Frank Wilczek has argued for something similar to this point of view. Here's a non-technical 'op-ed' where he discusses it:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7pl5V0YU9taaXE0ZWJNRzlHNlU...

New comment by earthicus in "I rewired my brain to become fluent in math (2014)"

earthicus — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 15:48:57 +0000

A mathematics degree will have some kind of 'transition to higher mathematics' course that you take your freshman or sophomore year. You meticulously work with sets, definitions/theorem/proofs in a simple setting, and especially adding 'structure' to sets with axioms.

In regards to the article, the course of this type that i took had frequent quizzes that required nothing but reproducing precise definitions or proofs we had learned. Of course the ideal would be for the student to be able to reproduce these from understanding. But in practice i was doing a lot of brute force memorization of definitions - i just hadn't internalized the language of mathematical logic well enough to reconstruct a concept's definition yet. however, it got my foot in the door and having those definitions in my head made the next courses easier, so if i retook that transition course a few years later on, i would not have needed to do so much memorization. i got better at learning those kinds of basic definitions.

So my answer to your question is yes to some extent - the memorization aspect of learning described in the article is useful for learning the first step to Math B as well. Also if you want to make another learning attempt, be sure and go back and start at that freshman/sophomore level transition course i was describing!

Merge Strategies: From Merge Sort to TimSort [pdf]

earthicus — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 06:35:21 +0000

Article URL: https://hal.science/hal-01212839v2/document

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36917531

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by earthicus in "The First Map of the Moon"

earthicus — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 18:21:07 +0000

It's amazing how far we've come in a few centuries. From sketching a few visible features with the help of a telescope, to mapping out the microscopic variations in the moons gravitational field[1] with robot satellites!

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/grail/multimedia/latest-i...

New comment by earthicus in "We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom (2021)"

earthicus — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 18:28:08 +0000

I agree with you that academic summary works are probably the best way for a non-researcher to learn what exists, what's known (and what isn't). Since i've never seen them discussed or referenced on this website, let me also point out the existence of academic encyclopedias, such as the Springer encyclopedia of algoriths[1] (each entry is essentially a slightly more pedagogical review article about a subfield or important problem in CS, along with loads of references to the literature for digging deeper), and the delightful encyclopedia of distances [2](800 pages long!). A couple others i've seen that may be of interest to this audience are the encyclopedia of systems and control[3], and the encyclopedia of unconventional computing[4]

Unfortunately some of these are absurdly expensive, so if you don't want to go the piracy route the cheapest way to access them is to get a membership to your local public university's library system, which in the US typically costs like $100 a year or something.

[1] https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-1-4939-2...

[2] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-52844-0

[3] https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-3-030-44...

[4] https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-1-4939-6...

New comment by earthicus in "50 years Smalltalk anniversary celebration at Computer History Museum"

earthicus — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 14:09:13 +0000

"Python's predecessor, ABC, was inspired by SETL -- Lambert Meertens spent a year with the SETL group at NYU before coming up with the final ABC design!" --Guido van Rossum

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-August/008...

New comment by earthicus in "Timsort (2019)"

earthicus — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 19:26:16 +0000

Here [1] is a great (short, readable) paper from 2015 that explains Timsort and similar stack-merge sorting algorithms. It also gives a runtime analysis, and a simplified version of the algorithm that they call 'alpha-sort'.

[1] https://hal-upec-upem.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01212839/file...

New comment by earthicus in "Stanford requires booster shots for all students"

earthicus — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 18:44:32 +0000

My vulnerability is that I take immunosuppresants, which makes the vaccines significantly less effective (last I heard a few months ago, fully half of the breakthrough infections of the vaccinated were in the small population of immunosuppressed people).