Hacker News: gradschool

New comment by gradschool in "WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996)"

gradschool — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 12:52:19 +0000

Story time. In college 40+ years ago my housemate wanted to impress this girl by inviting her to write an important paper of hers with a looming deadline on his computer with WordStar instead of her usual methodology involving a typewriter. She was using WordStar comfortably in less than five minutes but being completely new to it was unaware of the practice of periodically saving one's work. Around three in the morning it crashed and took all of her work with it. I was told she burst into tears and had left when I woke up the next morning to find my housemate busily trying to retype it from her handwritten notes.

New comment by gradschool in "Ask HN: How to introduce cloud computing to high schoolers?"

gradschool — Fri, 29 May 2026 11:33:50 +0000

Inform them that you've put the answer key to their upcoming final exam on a poorly secured EC2 instance or s3 bucket. This technique serves a variety of students in different ways. Those who have no idea what you mean get a valuable introduction to independent study. Those who have the chops might up their game enough to crack it. Those who are rich enough to hire a smart kid to do it for them impart a valuable lesson to the group on the nature of privilege. Those who are neither smart nor rich are incentivized to stay in school. To top it off, make the final exam consist of thought provoking essay questions whose answer key takes the form of detailed notes and citations.

New comment by gradschool in "The One Dollar Counterfeiter"

gradschool — Sun, 10 May 2026 08:30:05 +0000

A small leak can sink a ship. The fake dollars weren't knowingly accepted. If public confidence in the value of money is lost, we're all in big trouble. The Secret Service was right to pursue the case zealously.

New comment by gradschool in "Newcomb's Paradox Needs a Demon"

gradschool — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:33:26 +0000

I don't know about y'all, but this paradox was resolved to my complete satisfaction in a blog post some years ago, I believe by Scott Aaronson, though I can't find the link. If the predictor has such a good success rate, then it must be simulating people's brains, but since it's not always right, the simulation isn't perfect. The best strategy for playing this game therefore is to look for indications as to whether I'm the real me or the simulation when the question is posed to me, and choose accordingly. Am I floating in a sensory deprivation tank being asked my choice by a disembodied voice with no recollection of how I got there and no memory of my childhood? In that case maybe I'm the simulation, so my answer is that I'll choose just one box. Is it an ordinary day of my life and a plausible setting with all of my faculties and recollections intact? Then I'll assume simulated me had my back and take both boxes.

New comment by gradschool in "Ask HN: (Your) Request for Startups?"

gradschool — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:32:10 +0000

inspired by a recent thread on here, a usability testing service for apps and websites where the testers are old people

New comment by gradschool in "Ask HN: What should I do with my old laptop in 2026?"

gradschool — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 13:08:27 +0000

Take it to a charity shop or thrift store near you that accepts donations of electronics so that it finds its way to some smart kid who wants to teach himself or herself about computers.

New comment by gradschool in "How wolves became dogs"

gradschool — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 15:38:23 +0000

For another example of betrayal, one of the cronies in Katherine the Great's court always gave a dog to his girlfriends whenever he started a new relationship. Then if the dog ever greeted some other guy familiarly, he inferred he was falling out of favor. He probably learned that trick when someone did it to him, because he would let the other guy know how he was rumbled before graciously bowing out.

New comment by gradschool in "Ask HN: How does one get involved in FPGA development?"

gradschool — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 16:02:18 +0000

I worked for a company that made dedicated FPGA based hardware for high frequency trading by deep-pocketed customers. You can certainly implement trading strategies running directly on the board with crazy fast turnaround times, but if a retail trader could benefit from them we all would have quit our jobs and become independent high frequency traders. Interestingly, at that point the Linux network stack becomes a bottleneck so you'll want to go for a proprietary alternative whose name I don't remember any more (not cheap), which I imagine might also apply to a Mac, but that's neither here nor there unless you have a server in close physical proximity to the exchange. Meta-advice: If you want to learn about FPGAs as a matter of interest, more power to you. Otherwise, skip the bikeshedding and learn enough about financial markets to find a niche where you might have an edge.

New comment by gradschool in "Ask HN: What open source projects are you grateful for?"

gradschool — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 16:42:00 +0000

FreeTube [1], and yt-dlp [2], especially in combination with a ready supply of VPNs. Switching them around to avoid being blocked by Google reminds me of adjusting the tuner for better reception on an old analog tv. Infant me might have imagined a malevolent being who inhabits the airwaves deliberately causing interference, and in the world we've created since then that's not far from the truth. Many thanks to the developers tirelessly compensating for Google's frequent deliberate breakage.

[1] https://freetubeapp.io/

[2] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

New comment by gradschool in "Ask HN: Hetzner asking for passport for new account? just me, or everyone?"

gradschool — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 14:59:43 +0000

It happened to me too, and I was unable to verify myself by any acceptable means due to being based in a country other than that of my passport. Having been redirected somewhere else for the identity verification onboarding, I think the process is outsourced by Hetzner to a firm of security specialists apparently oblivious to edge cases. Nice work if you can get it.

There's some other specific character besides spaces that's also not permitted in passwords. It's a normal printable ascii character but I can't remember what it is any more, and sometimes it's not caught. Let's hope nobody signs up with it by mistake.

New comment by gradschool in "Breakthrough in antimatter production"

gradschool — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 11:46:41 +0000

That cloud of laser-cooled beryllium ions would probably be great for overclocking.

New comment by gradschool in "Mount Proton Drive on Linux using rclone and systemd"

gradschool — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 02:31:20 +0000

I have, and the technical support representative at Proton confirmed it, but not without implying that it was my fault for using rclone. I asked the official recommendation for Linux users to do automated or scriptable backups onto a Proton drive and the answer was that some kind of SDK was planned for the future. Proton drive stopped working completely with rclone shortly after that, which was about two months ago.

New comment by gradschool in "Programming with Less Than Nothing"

gradschool — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:16:31 +0000

I know everyone says SK combinators can express any computable function, but I don't get it. How do we write this function foo in terms of SK combinators alone? Is there some obvious programming trick I'm missing that makes it trivial? (It wouldn't be the first time.)

foo(x) = if (x == K) return S else return K

New comment by gradschool in "Farming Hard Drives (2012)"

gradschool — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 16:26:50 +0000

Former backblaze customer here, the trick is that you can't copy and paste your password as one might do with a password manager. You have to type it manually so that the web page can interactively tell you how strong the password is getting as you type it.

Backblaze lost me as a customer due to the new password and 2FA requirements, which would lock me out if I were to lose my devices, the exact scenario I'm trying to mitigate. Not affiliated, I'm now trying my luck with pixeldrain, mega, and koofr (having quit proton lately as well since it broke rclone compatibility a few weeks ago).

New comment by gradschool in "Minds, brains, and programs (1980) [pdf]"

gradschool — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 00:07:27 +0000

tl;dr:

If a computer could have an intelligent conversation, then a person could manually execute the same program to the same effect, and since that person could do so without understanding the conversation, computers aren't sentient.

Analogously, some day I might be on life support. The life support machines won't understand what I'm saying. Therefore I won't mean it.

New comment by gradschool in "Our efforts, in part, define us"

gradschool — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:14:52 +0000

I used to enjoy dancing but I don't any more because Boston Dynamics invented a robot that can dance better than I can.

I used to enjoy writing but now it's so easy for anyone to self-publish a book on Amazon that I don't see the point.

I used to enjoy running but all the fun has gone out of it now that motor vehicles exist that can move faster than I can run.

I used to like sky-diving, but then hail stones ...

New comment by gradschool in "Plex Update: Notice of a potential security incident"

gradschool — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 14:24:01 +0000

> What are some Plex alternatives?

I started using Jellyfin recently when the machine with my very old never-to-be-updated pre-en**ified Plex died. I ran Jellyfin in trials natively on Debian and Arch for about a year in anticipation of the switch, and with Docker on Manjaro. It seemed to be going strong on Debian but lost the plot on Arch over the course of several system updates. Currently I'm sticking to Docker on Manjaro. I'm using the same Intel N150 box for the Jellyfin server and playback without any performance problems. The video library is NFS mounted over wifi from a separate home file server.

New comment by gradschool in "The Relativity of Wrong (1988)"

gradschool — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 15:24:08 +0000

Lockhart's Lament

New comment by gradschool in "Ask HN: What are your favorite obscure but brilliant C/C++ libraries?"

gradschool — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 18:15:26 +0000

The judy array library is amazing for hardcore high performance with large memory resident data structures in C, and now there's no more patent on it. Somebody on here took issue when I asked about it once. Disclaimer: no, you don't need judy arrays and no they aren't better than your favorite thing.

https://judy.sourceforge.net/

New comment by gradschool in "What would you name a new programming language?"

gradschool — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 17:54:00 +0000

spagbol