Hacker News: egl2020

New comment by egl2020 in "Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)"

egl2020 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:24:22 +0000

When I did a small concrete project at home, I was advised not to over do the vibrator.

New comment by egl2020 in "Consider the Greenland Shark (2020)"

egl2020 — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:11:34 +0000

The Greenland shark appears, if I remember correctly, in her book "Golden Mole", which is about many interesting creatures. This is published as Vanishing Treasures in some countries. Her "Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne" is interesting and also not a children's book.

New comment by egl2020 in "US SEC preparing to scrap quarterly reporting requirement"

egl2020 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:43:54 +0000

Accounts receivable, revenue, and cash are related, but separate, accounting items.

New comment by egl2020 in "Notes on Baking at the South Pole"

egl2020 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 04:47:01 +0000

I enjoyed Werner Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the World" at many levels, not the least of which was how different it was from "Aguirre, the Wrath of God".

New comment by egl2020 in "Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package"

egl2020 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:22:18 +0000

I used to ask myself the same question, but then I realized that for these people it doesn't matter how much they spend. When you are worth billions of dollars, the difference between spending $10M or $50M on your home Does Not Matter. You still have many other $M to spend on other things. It's perfectly rational for them to spend what seems like a large amount of money for an apparently small marginal improvement.

New comment by egl2020 in "We might all be AI engineers now"

egl2020 — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:28:49 +0000

"You can learn anything now. I mean anything." This was true before before LLMs. What's changed is how much work it is to get an "answer". If the LLM hands you that answer, you've foregone learning that you might otherwise have gotten by (painfully) working out the answer yourself. There is a trade-off: getting an answer now versus learning for the future. I recently used an LLM to translate a Linux program to Windows because I wanted the program Right Now and decided that was more important than learning those Windows APIs. But I did give up a learning opportunity.

New comment by egl2020 in "Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust"

egl2020 — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 16:30:42 +0000

There's a mystique around Mathematica's math engine. Is this groundless, or will you eventually run into problems getting correct, identical answers -- especially for answers that Mathematic derives symbolically? The capabilities and results of the computer algebra systems that I've used varied widely.

New comment by egl2020 in "What Happened to Fry's Electronics"

egl2020 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 05:14:26 +0000

The surge in laptops contributed, too. The opportunity or need for expansion cards, additional memory or storage upgrades, and peripherals disappeared or shrank.

I used to think of the sales staff as the United Nations of Fry's. It was always thrilling to see someone starting their American dream, even if the service was haphazard.

New comment by egl2020 in "Hello Worg, the Org-Mode Community"

egl2020 — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 23:01:42 +0000

Why can't a parser be written? Is there a halting problem or a grammar conflict? Or is "can't" short-hand for "too much trouble"?

New comment by egl2020 in "Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems"

egl2020 — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 01:31:17 +0000

I was at G when "mobile first" was the slogan, and it led to "odd" choices such as designing and leading with a travel app rather than the web site. Perhaps locally suboptimal, but in the long run brutal forcing functions were needed to move a company as big and successful as Google into something new. I hear that going all-in on AI was internally disruptive and probably had some bad side-effects that I'm ignoring, but in hindsight it was the right thing to do. When ChatGPT, perplexity, and you.com came out, my immediate thought was "Google is toast", but they've recovered.

New comment by egl2020 in "Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors"

egl2020 — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 03:31:36 +0000

yes, that's my question: am I compromised? What should I do?

New comment by egl2020 in "Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors"

egl2020 — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 02:29:07 +0000

This all fascinating, but in the end: I have notepad++; what should I do?

New comment by egl2020 in "Chuck Klosterman on why we've never actually seen a real football game"

egl2020 — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 05:51:46 +0000

Is Marshall McLuhan in the house? Calling Marshall McLuhan.

New comment by egl2020 in "Stargaze: SpaceX's Space Situational Awareness System"

egl2020 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 18:36:01 +0000

Maybe coverage, too?

New comment by egl2020 in "Stargaze: SpaceX's Space Situational Awareness System"

egl2020 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 17:16:38 +0000

Does anyone know what the "30,000 star trackers" are? There are about that many satellites in orbit, so does this mean almost everyone is contributing data?

New comment by egl2020 in "Spanish track was fractured before high-speed train disaster, report finds"

egl2020 — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 04:20:55 +0000

Regardless of Cryptonomicon's utility in understanding Japan, the statement that "none of that book takes place in Japan" is not true.

New comment by egl2020 in "Tao Te Ching – Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin"

egl2020 — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 19:43:42 +0000

Well, her three children might care.

New comment by egl2020 in "Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries"

egl2020 — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:14:27 +0000

Mercator projection aside, Greenland is not tiny. The ice-free area is about as big as California. If you include the icy areas, it's bigger than any U.S. state.

New comment by egl2020 in "The recurring dream of replacing developers"

egl2020 — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 04:28:17 +0000

This is looking at the wrong end of the telescope. The arc has been to move computing closer to more and more end users. In the 1960's, FORTRAN enabled scientists and engineers to implement solutions without knowing much about the underlying computer. Thompson and Ritchie got a PDP11 by promising to make a text processing system for patent applications. Many years later desktop PC's and programs like VisiCalc and PageMaker opened up computing to many more users. The list goes on and on. With this movement, developer jobs disappeared or changed.

New comment by egl2020 in "My Gripes with Prolog"

egl2020 — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 01:05:32 +0000

Maybe it's just me, but my gripe is that it looks declarative, but you have to read the code in execution order.