Hacker News: hypersoar

New comment by hypersoar in "A new bill takes aim at government pressure to silence lawful online speech"

hypersoar — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 21:52:39 +0000

The case which originated the "yelling fire in a crowded theater" analogy, Schenk v. US, was overturned more than half a century ago. And in that case, the proverbial fire-yellers were socialists distributing pamphlets.

New comment by hypersoar in "Kiki – a tiny homepage construction kit with a small footprint"

hypersoar — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:45:27 +0000

This is a tangent to this post, but...

I happen to have a cat named Kiki who looks rather like the mascot for this project. Her health is failing, now. I just spent the night on my living room floor next to her. I'll, likely have to put her down, today.

I might use this project to make a memorial page for her.

https://ibb.co/7dRCnWrp https://ibb.co/1GWwDKLY

New comment by hypersoar in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

hypersoar — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 04:15:43 +0000

The article says that California "will require identity verification at the operating system level starting in January 2027", but that isn't true. The bill [0] only requires that operating systems collect age information on account setup and then provide which of four buckets the age falls into. It's not requiring any kind of identity verification by the OS. It's just a box you fill in when you set up the computer.

I think that this is actually a reasonable approach. It minimizes the information shared and doesn't create any identity tracking regime.

[0] https://media.reclaimthenet.org/docs/california-ab-1043-digi...

New comment by hypersoar in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

hypersoar — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:58:36 +0000

I can find no evidence that California ever tried "banning high school calculus". The chapter in the much-maligned mathematics framework on high school [0] makes no such proposal, and indeed suggests consolidating the prerequisite classes to make it easier to reach calculus without acceleration in middle school:

> An alternative to eighth-grade acceleration would be to adjust the high school curriculum instead, eliminating redundancies in the content of current courses, so that students do not need four courses before Calculus. As enacted, Algebra II tends to repeat a significant amount of the content of Algebra I, and Precalculus repeats content from Algebra II. While recognizing that some repetition of content has value, further analysis should be conducted to evaluate how high school course pathways may be redesigned to create more streamlined pathways that allow students to take three years of middle school foundations and still reach advanced mathematics courses such as calculus.

Nor can I find any evidence that they "reject the idea that some kids are more talented at somethings than other kids". Instead, their FAQ [1] includes:

> All students deserve powerful mathematics instruction. High-level mathematics achievement is not dependent on rare natural gifts, but rather can be cultivated.

> All students, regardless of background, language of origin, learning differences, or foundational knowledge are capable and deserving of depth of understanding and engagement in rich mathematics tasks.

This is not remotely the same as the silly framing of "if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination". It's about not giving up on students who are undeserved by mathematics education as it is currently constituted.

I myself have mixed feelings on "de-tracking" mathematics courses. I benefited from accelerated math classes and would have been bored to tears if forced to take classes at the standard pace. But I also understand that accelerated classes have tended to allocate more resources to students who are already succeeding. It's a thorny problem. But this comment adopts the framing of right-wing propaganda rather than the actual contents of the framework.

[0] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathframeworkch8.p... [1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/mathfwfaqs.asp

New comment by hypersoar in "Googlebook"

hypersoar — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:49:13 +0000

I attended Google I/O in 2013 and was given a Chromebook Pixel, their $1300 laptop. The hardware was very, very nice, and I quite enjoyed using it for a while. One day, I dropped it and damaged the screen well outside of its warranty period. "Oh no," I thought. "This is probably going to be pretty expensive to fix." So, bracing for the damage, I called up Google and told them what had happened. They replied that there was no fixing it. They would replace the laptops under the warranty, but there was no repairing to be done. I was welcome to call around and ask local repair shops if they could do it. That went nowhere, of course.

I've been pretty skeptical of Google laptops ever since.

New comment by hypersoar in "The Century-Long Pause in Fundamental Physics"

hypersoar — Sat, 02 May 2026 13:25:51 +0000

The author (who is also the submitter; it seems nearly all his submissions are his own blog posts) is not a physicist, so it's hard for me to take seriously his sweeping dismissal of the field. Then I see he links to his own Revolutionary Theory, and it starts to look like outright crankary.

New comment by hypersoar in "Nowhere is safe"

hypersoar — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:42:47 +0000

That choice is doubly false. On the one hand, there was a diplomatic option. It was working until Trump decided to kill it. On the other, it's insane to think that you can bomb a large, industrialized country of 90 million people out of the ability to make nuclear weapons short of wiping them out of existence.

New comment by hypersoar in "A Nationwide Book Ban Bill Has Been Introduced in the House of Representatives"

hypersoar — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 05:01:26 +0000

That's not what this is about. The bill explicitly defines "sexually oriented material" to include anything that "involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism".

New comment by hypersoar in "Keybee: A Keyboard Designed for Smartphones"

hypersoar — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 04:49:12 +0000

This is what immediately popped into my mind. I remember using this back in the early 2000s.

New comment by hypersoar in "Show HN: Elecxzy – A lightweight, Lisp-free Emacs-like editor in Electron"

hypersoar — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 03:15:55 +0000

Oh, I don't have much at all, yet. I decided to use a piece tree, which is what VS Code calls the data structure they used. I implemented part of that, then realized that VS Code does it that way partly because of limitations with V8. So now I don't even know if I want to go forward with using it or switch to something simpler.

New comment by hypersoar in "Show HN: Elecxzy – A lightweight, Lisp-free Emacs-like editor in Electron"

hypersoar — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 12:22:49 +0000

I don't mean to tear down your project at all. If you want to make an editor, I think that's great. I'm actually working on a text editor of my own. But I think that you've fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Emacs. It has little to do with the key-bindings, or even any particular part of the user interface. Many people don't even use them. Doom, a very popular Emacs distribution, enables Vim-like bindings by default. It's an old joke that Emacs is a great operating system in need of a good text editor.

The appeal of Emacs is that I can, at any time, with only a few keystrokes, dig in to how it does something and then modify it. The self-documenting and customizable behavior is extremely pervasive. Emacs Lisp is not just there for extensions. Every single layer of the application--save for core primitives--is implemented in it. All of it can be inspected, modified, swapped out, wrapped, hooked into, and basically do anything you want. There's absolutely nothing else like it.

New comment by hypersoar in "CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC"

hypersoar — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:22:41 +0000

Bari Weiss cut her teeth in college trying to get professors fired for criticizing Israel. She's hardly an advocate for free speech.

New comment by hypersoar in "America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital"

hypersoar — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:19:20 +0000

Using overall life expectancy here is misleading, as it includes the risk of childhood mortality. You have to look at life expectancy at a given age. According to the SSA's life tables[0], life expectancy for men at 65 in 1930 and 1940 was about 12 years. In 2020, it was about 17. A significant increase, but not nearly as extreme as you're saying.

[0] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/pdf_studies/study120.pdf

New comment by hypersoar in "The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]"

hypersoar — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 03:09:57 +0000

From the Wikipedia article on the Cray 1:

"The 160 MFLOPS Cray-1 was succeeded in 1982 by the 800 MFLOPS Cray X-MP, the first Cray multi-processing computer. In 1985, the very advanced Cray-2, capable of 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance

...

By comparison, the processor in a typical 2013 smart device, such as a Google Nexus 10 or HTC One, performs at roughly 1 GFLOPS,[6] while the A13 processor in a 2019 iPhone 11 performs at 154.9 GFLOPS,[7] a mark supercomputers succeeding the Cray-1 would not reach until 1994."

New comment by hypersoar in "Some users have noticed settings that let Meta analyze and retain phone photos"

hypersoar — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 13:56:45 +0000

Years ago, I installed the Facebook app on my phone. I immediately uninstalled it when I saw, horrified, that it had hoovered up all my photos and uploaded them to Facebook (there was no fine-grained storage permission at the time) "for my convenience". I never ran their app on my phone, again.

New comment by hypersoar in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2025)"

hypersoar — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 19:13:49 +0000

  Location: Seattle, WA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Maybe to the SF Bay Area
  Technologies: Java, Spring, TypeScript, React, Node, SQL, Rust, Python, Clojure, Solid-JS, Nix
  Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NzYmjFItbxdlewYL_Lz--ZnE24_CqXvH/view?usp=drive_link
  Email: mail@requirenathan.com

I'm a mathematician-turned-programmer looking for my next software engineering role after being laid off. I have professional experience as a full-stack developer working on a Java/Spring backend with a React/Next.js frontend. My background has given me lots of practice working away at difficult abstract problems. I'm an information sponge and a ferocious, self-directed learner. My portfolio can be found at requirenathan.com.

New comment by hypersoar in "My bank keeps on undermining anti-phishing education"

hypersoar — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 16:49:52 +0000

I briefly worked on a product related to this. It was a chatbot meant to replace the human phonecall in just this situation. The user would get a text from the bank with a link to the chatbot. They ended up not being able to sell; the common complaint from the banks was that they'd been training their users to never click links like that.

New comment by hypersoar in "Edamagit: Magit for VSCode"

hypersoar — Thu, 29 May 2025 15:23:00 +0000

I've just started with jujutsu, as well. Jjui fills a little bit of the gap. Among other things, it allows for quick selecting and splitting of changes. But it's no Magit. I'm thinking of having a go at making an emacs interface for jj myself.

New comment by hypersoar in "Ask HN: What's your experience with Cursor and Sonnet 3.5 for coding?"

hypersoar — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 13:56:02 +0000

I haven't tried Cursor, but I've been messing around with Aider (aider.chat) with interesting results. With it, you add files to its context and then describe the edits you want. It then writes a commit with (hopefully) those changes. You can use it with pretty much any model, though only close-to-SOTA models work well. I've had pretty good results with Deepseek Coder, which is tens of times cheaper than Claude.

New comment by hypersoar in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2024)"

hypersoar — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 03:05:18 +0000

  Location: Seattle, WA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Maybe to the SF Bay Area
  Technologies: TypeScript, React, Node, SQL, Rust, Python, Clojure, Solid-JS, Nix
  Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fxsejocFHalsDcW4VXSeBSSbMdstCs6P/view?usp=sharing
  Email: mail@requirenathan.com

I'm a mathematician-turned-programmer looking for my first professional software engineering role. My background has given me lots of practice working away at difficult abstract problems. I'm an information sponge and a ferocious, self-directed learner. I'm returning to the workforce after time away dealing with (now under control) health issues. My portfolio can be found at requirenathan.com.