Hacker News: el_memorioso

New comment by el_memorioso in "NYC Mayoral Inauguration bans Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero alongside explosives"

el_memorioso — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 23:52:05 +0000

It is trivial to get an older, unlocked cell phone that you can root. You then have a device equally or more powerful than a Raspberry Pi with built-in radios.

New comment by el_memorioso in "NYC Mayoral Inauguration bans Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero alongside explosives"

el_memorioso — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 23:50:42 +0000

Any mobile computer can be easily and readily turned into a signal jammer/spammer with an off-the-shelf SDR. There is nothing particularly special about the Raspberry Pi. I didn't see laptops on the list.

New comment by el_memorioso in "Being poor vs. being broke"

el_memorioso — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 02:57:19 +0000

It's good you put "poor" in scare quotes. The truly poor are not complaining online all the time because they don't have the time and/or money to be bitching online. You seemed to have missed one of the primary points of the article.

New comment by el_memorioso in "From VS Code to Helix"

el_memorioso — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 17:45:59 +0000

As a long time user of both Emacs (since 18.52) and Neovim and now Helix, I find your last assertion to be false. While it is true that there are many options (though not as many as either Emacs or Neovim), in Helix you cannot write code or install someone else's code to modify your editor. In the past I've spent a good amount of time trying out, integrating, and debugging various packages for Neovim and Emacs. In Helix I might try a new option setting, but the time involved is minuscule compared to what you might spend customizing other editors.

New comment by el_memorioso in "Meta’s live demo fails; “AI” recording plays before the actor takes the steps"

el_memorioso — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 23:37:24 +0000

Except that he hadn't already combined the base ingredients.

New comment by el_memorioso in "US High school students' scores fall in reading and math"

el_memorioso — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 17:27:10 +0000

In what state are public high schools allowed to "how to pray"? It sounds like her new high school isn't that good. I have a daughter at a good public high school in California in a quite liberal area. There was none of what you mentioned. One day of reviewing the syllabi and rules and quizzes in most subjects starting less than a week later.

New comment by el_memorioso in "I want to be left alone (2024)"

el_memorioso — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 02:09:50 +0000

Yes, we can. A couple of years ago I drove through Maine and Vermont, and it was absolutely beautiful. Not only because of the natural beauty of those places, but because of the lack of billboards anywhere. It was nice to just enjoy the scenery without being constantly bombarded by ads. The city of São Paulo also banned ads a while back and it made the city a nicer environment to live in and revealed the beauty of some of the architecture that was previously hidden by masses of billboards.

New comment by el_memorioso in "KiCad and Wayland Support"

el_memorioso — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 22:35:19 +0000

I am a Kicad user, not just a random speculator. The problems are not solved by XWayland. For example, Kicad uses different windows to represent different views of the circuit and circuit board and warps the cursor according to the view you are looking at. XWayland doesn't solve this, because it only allows warping within a single window. I know there is new warping code coming out, but I don't know if it will ever get into the LTS OS we use at my work.

New comment by el_memorioso in "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"

el_memorioso — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 21:33:15 +0000

I agree with this. People who are writing Python, Javascript, or Typescript tell me that they get great results. I've had good results using LLMs to flesh out complex SQL queries, but when I write Elixir code, what I get out of the LLM often doesn't even compile even when given function and type specs in the prompt. As the writer says, maybe I should be using an agent, but I'd rather understand the limits of the lower-level tools before adding other layers that I may not have access to.

New comment by el_memorioso in "What does the end of mathematics look like?"

el_memorioso — Mon, 19 May 2025 22:34:41 +0000

The standard explanation of integrals as summing the areas of rectangles of decreasing width seems extremely intuitive to me without requiring the baggage of having to know some computer language. Generating functions in code are basically a rote repetition of the mathematical definitions, requiring that you also understand variables and functions and other things unrelated to the core idea.

New comment by el_memorioso in "Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI"

el_memorioso — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 18:50:33 +0000

I would go as far as to say being this hyper-focused on clothes rather than if the person is sociable and competent is a red flag itself. It is rather superficial. Vague platitudes about "culture" might get thrown out, but are we engineering and building things or are we putting on a fashion show?

New comment by el_memorioso in "What if we made advertising illegal?"

el_memorioso — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 19:29:59 +0000

São Paulo implemented "Cidade Limpa" which banned posted ads. It was said to renew the city.

New comment by el_memorioso in "All Lisp indentation schemes are ugly"

el_memorioso — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 01:57:39 +0000

For matching parentheses, Emacs users can use a package called rainbow-delimiters that colors matching delimiters. Different levels of enclosure use different colors. I've found this to be too much visual noise -- I am usually just interested on the delimiters for the current s-expressions. In this vein, having multiple different colored backgrounds would be garish and distracting for me.

New comment by el_memorioso in "Using coding skills to make passive income"

el_memorioso — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 17:06:07 +0000

Except for too many levels of indirection.

New comment by el_memorioso in "Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?"

el_memorioso — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 17:12:39 +0000

What happens later in the relationship when you reveal you lied about your favorite book as some weird social vetting process? It seems the insincerity would turn a lot of people off.

New comment by el_memorioso in "No evidence social media time is correlated with teen mental health problems"

el_memorioso — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 19:01:50 +0000

> Also, if putative negative effects from social media exposure were as strong and unambiguous as lung cancer in smokers, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

This is not necessarily true. Lung cancer was rare before cigarettes. Research had already revealed cigarettes to cause lung cancer in the 1940s and 1950s. Even so, in 1960, only 1/3 of doctors believed that cigarettes caused cancer. This was largely due to the tobacco industry's denialist propaganda. Even as late as 1972, the tobacco industry was putting out propaganda that was having a noticeable effect on teens and young adults. So, even with the "strong and unambiguous" negative effects of cigarettes, it still took 25+ years for most of the US population to accept that cigarettes are bad.

New comment by el_memorioso in "Diffusion models are real-time game engines"

el_memorioso — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 05:13:55 +0000

I applaud your erudition.

New comment by el_memorioso in "Okay, I Like WezTerm"

el_memorioso — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 18:28:59 +0000

I used WezTerm for a while and loved it, but then I discovered it had some strange interactions with other programs that use the GPU or OpenGL. In my case, when running WezTerm, the robotics simulation tool Gazebo Classic [0] would only launch properly 1/3 to 1/2 of the time. The rest of the time the simulation appeared to start, but no display ever came up and the program eventually segfalted. I thought this was a Gazebo problem, since it is a bit touchy, but switching to another GPU-accelerated terminal like Kitty or Alacritty solved the problem. I guess the lesson being, if your GL program is misbehaving when launching from WezTerm, try another terminal to see if that doesn't solve the problem.

[0] https://classic.gazebosim.org/

New comment by el_memorioso in "Hey Google, what happened to all the fun?"

el_memorioso — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 18:49:28 +0000

Add a settings page that allows you to set the day you want to ask about. Maybe include some more icon resources to reflect the set day.

New comment by el_memorioso in "Stop Eating Sugar (2020)"

el_memorioso — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 20:32:15 +0000

Actual research [1] says that just taking a photo of everything you eat helps awareness of food choices and portion sizes, which should contribute to healthier diets. Anecdotally, for me, just writing down everything I eat (without even counting calories) helps me avoid unnecessary eating.