Hacker News: iafisher

9/11's Impacts on Critical Infrastructure

iafisher — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 18:02:24 +0000

Article URL: https://chrisgillett.org/9-11

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43805763

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

What the hell is REST, Anyway? (2019)

iafisher — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 19:18:07 +0000

Article URL: https://programmingisterrible.com/post/181841346708/what-the-hell-is-rest-anyway

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41964886

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by iafisher in "Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court"

iafisher — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 00:17:19 +0000

On-wiki discussion here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#T...

Everything we know about LLMs doing Arithmetic

iafisher — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 14:38:53 +0000

Article URL: https://loeber.substack.com/p/21-everything-we-know-about-llms

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41417320

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

The Strangeness of Grief (2019)

iafisher — Thu, 23 May 2024 11:43:06 +0000

Article URL: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/06/the-strangeness-of-grief

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40453467

Points: 93

# Comments: 49

Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

iafisher — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 19:46:46 +0000

Article URL: https://outsiderart.substack.com/p/cyc-historys-forgotten-ai-project

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40069298

Points: 287

# Comments: 141

New comment by iafisher in "Apple's APFS Migration: A Feat of Engineering"

iafisher — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 19:12:04 +0000

Reminds me of Google flipping Nest devices from a Linux-based OS to Fuchsia: https://9to5google.com/2021/08/17/google-fuchsia-update-roll...

A lot fewer devices than Apple, but with changing a device's entire operating system a lot more can go wrong. I wasn't on the team at the time, but maybe someone else can chime in with more details.

Raw Linux Threads via System Calls (2015)

iafisher — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 00:28:57 +0000

Article URL: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2015/05/15/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40027565

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

Ancient Computers in Use Today (2012)

iafisher — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 20:40:42 +0000

Article URL: https://www.pcworld.com/article/468250/if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it-ancient-computers-in-use-today.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39995487

Points: 13

# Comments: 2

Statistical Shortcomings in Standard Math Libraries (2014)

iafisher — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 02:09:11 +0000

Article URL: https://www.evanmiller.org/statistical-shortcomings-in-standard-math-libraries.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39569171

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Would Rust secure cURL? (2021)

iafisher — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 02:25:57 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.timhutt.co.uk/curl-vulnerabilities-rust/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39237062

Points: 16

# Comments: 2

totally_safe_transmute, Line-by-Line (2021)

iafisher — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 21:38:45 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.yossarian.net/2021/03/16/totally_safe_transmute-line-by-line

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918554

Points: 80

# Comments: 40

Why apps fail in some African countries

iafisher — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 14:36:18 +0000

Article URL: https://uxdesign.cc/5-reasons-why-our-apps-fail-in-some-african-countries-a331ff7934c6

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36404668

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by iafisher in "Why soda bottles have gaps in their threads (2000)"

iafisher — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 17:25:44 +0000

Wikipedia offers a similar service: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk

New comment by iafisher in "Nepalese student learns HTML, JavaScript, CSS using just a mobile phone"

iafisher — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 20:05:46 +0000

> I appreciate your story, but this comment bothered me, because it's something people repeat a lot and it's actually not true. There's no good evidence that adults have more difficulty acquiring language than children. There were some older studies that claimed to show such, but as has become all too familiar these days, their methods were spurious and there have been some replication issues.

According to a 2018 paper [1], the ability to acquire new languages declines steeply after age 17.

[1] Hartshorne, Joshua K., Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Steven Pinker. 2018. A critical period for second language acquisition: evidence from 2/3 million English speakers. Cognition 177:263-277. https://l3atbc-public.s3.amazonaws.com/pub_pdfs/JK_Hartshorn...

New comment by iafisher in "I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot"

iafisher — Sun, 04 Jul 2021 01:25:20 +0000

In your hypothetical 100% of completions are copied verbatim from existing code. But if GitHub is to believed, only 0.1% are.

New comment by iafisher in "Type-safe generic data structures in C"

iafisher — Fri, 09 Apr 2021 03:31:11 +0000

Author here. I wish I had made it clearer that the intent of the post was "this is an interesting and surprising thing you can achieve in C" and not "this is a good idea for a real software project" or "this is a reason to use C instead of C++/Rust/Go".

Show HN: How many U.S. cities can you name?

iafisher — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 19:38:20 +0000

Article URL: https://iafisher.com/projects/cities/usa

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24496685

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by iafisher in "Ask HN: What's a starting point for learning how to write programming languages?"

iafisher — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 20:28:18 +0000

Build Your Own Lisp (http://buildyourownlisp.com/) is as good a starting point as any. You learn to implement a high-level dynamic programming language in C, which is a common choice of implementation language for interpreters (e.g., CPython, Ruby). I really can't recommend the book enough.

New comment by iafisher in "Shavian alphabet"

iafisher — Mon, 27 Aug 2018 03:18:10 +0000

The problem with making spelling more phonetic is that not everyone pronounces English the same. Even a single country like the United States or the United Kingdom counts a range of accents and dialects. A phonetic spelling is always going to be non-phonetic for some speakers.