Hacker News: gnubison

New comment by gnubison in "ReFrame – The EPaper Camera"

gnubison — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 19:08:22 +0000

GP’s “Ascenseur pour l’Échafaud” means “elevator for the gallows.” I think they are familiar with the composition, you might be missing the point of their comment.

New comment by gnubison in "Egg consumption inversely correlated with Alzheimer's"

gnubison — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 06:27:36 +0000

Big Egg

New comment by gnubison in "This blog is written in en-GB"

gnubison — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:15:13 +0000

I think everyone says “couldn’t care less”. But Wiktionary does say “could care less” is “American, nonstandard, proscribed”, so I guess only Americans have that (defective) alternative phrase.

New comment by gnubison in "This blog is written in en-GB"

gnubison — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:08:39 +0000

What is ISE?

New comment by gnubison in "Zig's new bitCast semantics and LLVM back end improvements"

gnubison — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 05:17:38 +0000

The behavior is agnostic of the endianness of the target platform.

New comment by gnubison in "LuaJIT 3.0 proposed syntax extensions"

gnubison — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 03:01:27 +0000

    cond1 ? res1 :
    cond2 ? res2 :
    cond3 ? res3 :
    or_else_res

If they are truly nested, then that is confusing. But if you have an if-else chain, then it can be quite readable.

New comment by gnubison in "Unauthorized alert sent to cell phones across Brazil"

gnubison — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 23:37:43 +0000

As programmers in programming culture, we have a distinction between hacker and, potentially, cracker that no ordinary person has. ESR’s prescriptivism is pretty much worthless in this respect: words mean what people think they mean and what people use them for, and programmers do not have a monopoly on how people use the term.

OED has the “computer intruder” sense first cited in 1963, and the “enthusiastic programmer” sense first in 1969 (“now much less common than sense 3a”). Cracker first appears in 1968.

Besides, it is easy to disambiguate which meaning people mean. “Hacker attack” can only refer to the common usage of the term, not programming-culture usage.

New comment by gnubison in "Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers"

gnubison — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 04:18:39 +0000

Where did you leave to?

New comment by gnubison in "I made a terminal pager"

gnubison — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 21:55:35 +0000

If you want ‘git diff | pager’ to work like that, you’re out of luck. There is no way for the pager to communicate with git or the shell to rerun the command; the pager doesn’t even know what program is on the writing side of its stdin pipe. You would need something like ‘pager --command "git diff"’, where the pager invokes a command producing output. I do agree that it would be nice.

New comment by gnubison in "Bird brains (2023)"

gnubison — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 01:32:27 +0000

Pronounced octópodes, /ɒkˈtɒpədiːz/, with the -es rhyming with Heracles etc.

New comment by gnubison in "Five disciplines discovered the same math independently"

gnubison — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 07:59:03 +0000

Maybe the Briggs-Rauscher reaction?

New comment by gnubison in "Feynman's Hughes Lectures: 950 pages of notes"

gnubison — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 22:05:00 +0000

To clarify, these aren’t the normal Feynman lectures. He lectured at a different institution and the author of this webpage transcribed those lectures to produce this set of notes. The content covered is different from the famous set of lectures.

The normal Feynman lectures are here: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

Feynman's Hughes Lectures: 950 pages of notes

gnubison — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 10:43:29 +0000

Article URL: https://thehugheslectures.info/the-lectures/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46419273

Points: 213

# Comments: 45

New comment by gnubison in "Apple to focus on 'quality and underlying performance' with iOS 27 next year"

gnubison — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 09:30:50 +0000

iOS repeated “learns” new words that I use that are misspellings of real words (because I mistype things in a predictable way). It becomes so convinced that it will autocorrect the real word into the typo. And knowing how the keyboard works, I wouldn’t be surprised if it enlarges the touch targets for the typo once it thinks I meant to use the typo.

The cause is obvious: Apple is training on what I type, not what I send. Apple does not consider that I actually care about the accuracy of what I send and will fix errors; perhaps they optimize for people who are careless enough to send typoed messages, yet niche enough to commonly use words not in the default dictionary.

It is infuriating that I have ~50 manual corrections telling Apple to leave words alone and correct certain typos to the real words.

New comment by gnubison in "An Illustrated Introduction to Linear Algebra, Chapter 2: The Dot Product"

gnubison — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 03:25:01 +0000

Strang does include that. I just checked the fourth edition, like you say you did. Scrolling down two pages to get to the first page of the table of contents, I see the heading “cosines and projections onto lines”. I navigate to that section and it explains all the logic, proof, and intuition behind the connection between angles and dot products. Please don’t spread misinformation…

New comment by gnubison in "Why English doesn't use accents"

gnubison — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 18:32:19 +0000

It would be like a speaker who can’t distinguish the uh sound in “but” with the ih sound in “bit”. Is it really the native English speaker’s fault if he can’t understand that personal dialect?

France’s vowel inventory is bigger than (or just as big as) English’s, and it has a lot more homophones. I imagine all the context goes toward disambiguating the actual homophones and not the arbitrary sets of words foreigners can’t pronounce because they don’t want to learn the accents (the system is not that hard and completely predictable).

New comment by gnubison in "Hilbert's sixth problem: derivation of fluid equations via Boltzmann's theory"

gnubison — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 18:29:45 +0000

> the solution of any one of which would change not only the career of the person who solved the problem, but possibly life on Earth. Many have stood like mountains in the distance, rising above the clouds, for generations.

Whether or not this is AI, this comment is not true. An axiomatic derivation of a formula doesn’t change how it’s used. We knew the formulas were experimentally correct, it’s just that now mathematicians can rest easy about whether they were theoretically correct. Although it’s interesting, it doesn’t change or create any new applications.

New comment by gnubison in "Microsoft Edit"

gnubison — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 08:33:18 +0000

I think ed is what you’re looking for (possibly with -s).

New comment by gnubison in "Spaced repetition systems have gotten better"

gnubison — Sun, 18 May 2025 17:40:06 +0000

The article specifically points out WaniKani as an example of a very bad implementation of spaced repetition (see the "FSRS in practice" heading, under the paragraph "for Japanese language learning specifically...").

New comment by gnubison in "Writing that changed how I think about programming languages"

gnubison — Wed, 14 May 2025 13:40:45 +0000

Click the time (next to the author) to go to a page for the comment, where you will be able to favorite it.