Hacker News: hyperpallium2

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "The Emacsification of Software"

hyperpallium2 — Fri, 15 May 2026 02:54:37 +0000

What does clocks mean here? A new usage?

    “Emacsification” clocks that everything now works this way, not just baroque text editors.

Coding Adventure: Simulating Smoke [video]

hyperpallium2 — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 08:52:09 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q78wvrQ9xsU

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45566243

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans"

hyperpallium2 — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 02:42:15 +0000

IANAG but the idea is that women get two copies of the X chromosome (XX), and men only one (XY). This explains why women have squared the colour blindness rates of men - women have to get two bad copies, men only one.

Many intelligence related genes are on the X chromosome, so it makes sense you get more variation in men. However, not all genes interact in this way.

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "On the efficacy of online proctoring using Proctorio (2021) [pdf]"

hyperpallium2 — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 01:52:00 +0000

Thanks - looks like this has already changed in line with GGP since my time. https://peer.asee.org/open-book-problem-solving-in-engineeri... [pdf]

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "On the efficacy of online proctoring using Proctorio (2021) [pdf]"

hyperpallium2 — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 01:37:53 +0000

New degree: B.Goo.

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "On the efficacy of online proctoring using Proctorio (2021) [pdf]"

hyperpallium2 — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 01:36:08 +0000

Law exams are open book; Engineering exams are not.

I'm not sure exactly what the distinction is - apart from law being "soft" and requiring argument - but it's deeper than inability to reuse past papers.

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "Premature optimization caught up with me as well"

hyperpallium2 — Mon, 05 Sep 2022 23:58:58 +0000

He's making a more general statement, with "root of all evil", that improving some aspect of something without understanding its effects on the whole outcome, is literally the root cause of evil in the world, in general. Winning the battle but losing the war. Not seeing the forest for the trees. Getting lost in the weeds. Unenlightened self-interest. Not hyperbole, but a particular instance of a general concept.

But on code optimization, k deeply nested loops are not a bad guide to O(n^k), and a candidate for optimization.

That said, I once cached something that obviously needed to be cached - so obvious in fact that a deeper level in the system already cached it.

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams"

hyperpallium2 — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 10:56:17 +0000

It's more a research question.

I think it'll be more like ordered keys in JSON - not ordered, according to the spec, but very useful in practice, because easier to compare, locate keys by eye etc. This order might not merely be "the same" as the input happened to be, but an order customarily used - and there might be a semantic reason for that order in the first place, used in some original, non-JSON, representation.

Tenuous.

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams"

hyperpallium2 — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 23:24:41 +0000

A problem with semantic markup is when it doesn't do what you want, and you need to wig-wam it. Does this mean you actually wanted presentation markup? Or, since you are trying to convey meaning, does it mean that the semantics aren't rich enough to describe what you mean?

In this D2 example (https://d2-lang.com/assets/images/intro-example-a917149ff3b7...), the diagram is nicely designed to be centered on the nexus node crawler. But the choices of which side the tributary nodes are on is not. You might want cron below and ps->express below - or to the sides.

The grammar can be extended to accommodate this (maybe already has been), but what is the semantic meaning of above, below, left or right?

One semantic choice is made: the "persists" arc is unidirectional, and is presented left-to-right - a natural order for many languages.

(Technically, "declarative" needn't be "semantic", but arguably is the most useful one)

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "The Making of a Prophet"

hyperpallium2 — Sun, 28 Aug 2022 00:30:59 +0000

It does seem wrong that nature would use irrational numbers - the fault is more likely in our concepts. Our mathematics may be more parochial than we realize - than we can realize. Alien mathematics may have taken a different route.

pi is not irrational in base pi

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "Common tech jobs described as cabals of Mesoamerican wizards"

hyperpallium2 — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 23:48:06 +0000

https://web.archive.org/web/20220811213920/https://etiennefd...

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "Gojq: Pure Go Implementation of Jq"

hyperpallium2 — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 23:55:28 +0000

FYNI jq was originally implemented in Haskell.

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "Gojq: Pure Go Implementation of Jq"

hyperpallium2 — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 23:53:09 +0000

jq uses bison (gnu's yacc), which is a nightmare for error diagnosis. Additionally, the founder (though brilliant - or maybe because brilliant) wouldn't accept improvements in error reporting.

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "Gojq: Pure Go Implementation of Jq"

hyperpallium2 — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 23:45:32 +0000

jq used to do this, but changed to preserve key order.

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "I love my GPD Micro PC"

hyperpallium2 — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 23:07:40 +0000

Android tablet + termux + bluetooth keyboard is cheaper, and better performance in some ways...

The only problem is Google slowly locking down and squeezing the life out of termux.

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "The Essence of Programming (2021)"

hyperpallium2 — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 08:01:12 +0000

Pedantry: the only exception I could think of is a timer (delay, alarm clock), where the output is when, not what. sleep 10

Yes, information technology is for processing information.

Any transformation can be decomposed into lossy and lossless components (aka bijectve and non-bijective; reversible and non-reversible). The nice thing is that the lossless component can be automatically checked for that property.

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected"

hyperpallium2 — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 00:46:45 +0000

The Story of a Fisherman https://www.highview.com.au/the-story-of-a-fisherman/

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "No More “Insight Porn”"

hyperpallium2 — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 18:34:34 +0000

> Luck is when opportunity meets preparedness.

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence (2019)"

hyperpallium2 — Sun, 07 Aug 2022 16:56:58 +0000

There's an interesting approach to "consciousness", as what you are aware of, consciously. i.e. attention management. Animals are conscious of their environment in this way. But because humans also have a lot of models going on internally, the mechanism adapts to that (perhaps higher mammals too; I don't recall). This fits nicely with your experience and the submission. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31373806

I wonder if our "conscious reasoning" is really just attending to a column that does that? Certainly, formal reasoning is a skill that is learnt and practiced - perhaps not so different from a manual skill. We can also suppose pattern-matching on this, to get intuition and hunches. All old ideas, but perhaps neuroanatomy is advancing sufficiently to test them?

Also: Minsky's Society of Mind

New comment by hyperpallium2 in "The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence (2019)"

hyperpallium2 — Sun, 07 Aug 2022 16:45:46 +0000

The Top Idea in Your Mind https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1536356