Hacker News: j1mr10rd4n

New comment by j1mr10rd4n in "10 years ago, someone wrote a test for Servo that included an expiry in 2026"

j1mr10rd4n — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:25:53 +0000

There's another good reason that hasn't been detailed in the comments so far: expressing intent.

A test should communicate its reason for testing the subject, and when an input is generated or random, it clearly communicates that this test doesn't care about the specific _value_ of that input, it's focussed on something else.

This has other beneficial effects on test suites, especially as they change over the lifetime of their subjects:

* keeping test data isolated, avoiding coupling across tests * avoiding magic strings * and as mentioned in this thread, any "flakiness" is probably a signal of an edge-case that should be handled deterministically and * it's more fun [1]

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.01680

New comment by j1mr10rd4n in "The Case That A.I. Is Thinking"

j1mr10rd4n — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 23:26:09 +0000

You should definitely also read "Permutation City" by Greg Egan[1] if you haven't already! Amazing book...

[1]https://www.gregegan.net/PERMUTATION/Permutation.html

New comment by j1mr10rd4n in "The Case That A.I. Is Thinking"

j1mr10rd4n — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 23:11:41 +0000

Geoffrey Hinton's recent lecture at the Royal Institute[1] is a fascinating watch. His assertion that human use of language being exactly analogous to neural networks with back-propagation really made me think about what LLMs might be able to do, and indeed, what happens in me when I "think". A common objection to LLM "intelligence" is that "they don't know anything". But in turn... what do biological intelligences "know"?

For example, I "know" how to do things like write constructs that make complex collections of programmable switches behave in certain ways, but what do I really "understand"?

I've been "taught" things about quantum mechanics, electrons, semiconductors, transistors, integrated circuits, instruction sets, symbolic logic, state machines, assembly, compilers, high-level-languages, code modules, editors and formatting. I've "learned" more along the way by trial and error. But have I in effect ended up with anything other than an internalised store of concepts and interconnections? (c.f. features and weights).

Richard Sutton takes a different view in an interview with Dwarkesh Patel[2] and asserts that "learning" must include goals and reward functions but his argument seemed less concrete and possibly just a semantic re-labelling.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkdziSLYzHw [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21EYKqUsPfg

New comment by j1mr10rd4n in "VIM Master"

j1mr10rd4n — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 22:30:59 +0000

> learning when I can be doing something more efficiently

hardtime.nvim[1] (or vim-hardtime[2] if you're old-school) do exactly this but within your editing session. There's an associated blog post[3] explaining the rationale behind some of the workflow choices and you can of course bring your own.

[1]: https://github.com/m4xshen/hardtime.nvim

[2]: https://github.com/takac/vim-hardtime

[3]: https://m4xshen.dev/posts/vim-command-workflow

New comment by j1mr10rd4n in "Schemesh: Fusion between Unix shell and Lisp REPL"

j1mr10rd4n — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 05:51:25 +0000

LISPy REPLs are awesome.

Babashka is another amazing tool for interacting with a shell with clojure (or a very close dialect thereof).

https://babashka.org

New comment by j1mr10rd4n in "The Geomagnetic Storm Continues"

j1mr10rd4n — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 10:18:04 +0000

some amazing auroral displays seen from tasmania over the last couple of nights https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-24/strong-naked-eye-auro...

New comment by j1mr10rd4n in "Github Is Down"

j1mr10rd4n — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 08:54:59 +0000

i'm getting intermittent 200/500s - australia

New comment by j1mr10rd4n in "Deno Is a Browser for Code"

j1mr10rd4n — Fri, 29 May 2020 12:36:42 +0000

Rich Hickey's talk about this is enlightening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk

New comment by j1mr10rd4n in "Deno Is a Browser for Code"

j1mr10rd4n — Fri, 29 May 2020 12:34:25 +0000

I was just racking my memory and searching through my library of interesting links to find exactly this! Paul Chiusano gave a nice introductory talk at strangeloop last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCWtkvDQ2ZI

New comment by j1mr10rd4n in "Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?"

j1mr10rd4n — Sat, 28 Mar 2020 01:29:04 +0000

I thought Renegades of the Empire was a fascinating look into the internal machinations at Redmond and a bit of DirectX history too

https://www.amazon.com/Renegades-Empire-Software-Revolution-...

New comment by j1mr10rd4n in "Provably secure and high-rate quantum key distribution with time-bin qudits"

j1mr10rd4n — Sun, 26 Nov 2017 12:18:26 +0000

Some recent posts have been talking about what happens to classical encryption in a post-quantum scenario. This article demonstrates a system capable of creating and distributing quantum keys at megabit-per-second rates.

phys.org link here https://phys.org/news/2017-11-high-speed-quantum-encryption-...

Provably secure and high-rate quantum key distribution with time-bin qudits

j1mr10rd4n — Sun, 26 Nov 2017 12:18:14 +0000

Article URL: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/11/e1701491

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15780577

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

British IT contractor tells of 946 days as Iraqi hostage

j1mr10rd4n — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 04:15:28 +0000

Article URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/27/peter_moore_interview

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4840997

Points: 1

# Comments: 0