Hacker News: jasperry

New comment by jasperry in "The AI backlash is only getting started"

jasperry — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:53:08 +0000

The proper backlash should be not about its capability level but how it's being used. AI is being adopted to deploy mass surveillance on an unprecedented scale, and to make decisions that affect people's lives without being evaluated by a human first. Those seem worthy of lashing back against.

New comment by jasperry in "Aging and Eye Problems"

jasperry — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 23:28:36 +0000

Retinal detachment is one thing that can cause vision loss as we age. My optometrist says that people like me with a strong nearsighted prescription are especially susceptible to it.

Another is high pressure inside the eye, which can lead to glaucoma. Get your eye exams regularly, folks.

New comment by jasperry in "Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars [video]"

jasperry — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:01:59 +0000

Oh, it's a hybrid Sienna minivian! Now I'm bitter, because I was looking at those for the family a couple years back, but stock was low and they were priced $15k higher than a 3-row gas-guzzling SUV.

Actually, another thing was that the visibility out of the Sienna seemed quite bad.

New comment by jasperry in "Blaise – A modern self-hosting zero-legacy Object Pascal compiler targeting QBE"

jasperry — Sat, 09 May 2026 14:11:09 +0000

That's good to know. Can you point to an example?

New comment by jasperry in "Blaise – A modern self-hosting zero-legacy Object Pascal compiler targeting QBE"

jasperry — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:14:54 +0000

Excited to see another project targeting the QBE back end, from what I can tell it's a great lightweight alternative to LLVM.

New comment by jasperry in "The Secret Life of NaN (2018)"

jasperry — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 23:50:52 +0000

This is super useful, thanks. So if I were implementing a programming language, and wanted to have symbols to specify NaN in source code, I'd really only need quiet NaN, right? Because signaling NaN is supposed to always to raise an exception anyway?

New comment by jasperry in "Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen"

jasperry — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 03:21:45 +0000

Looking at the Wikipedia article, it seems naproxen is a NSAID like ibuprofen and can cause all the same gastrointestinal issues.

New comment by jasperry in "Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen"

jasperry — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 03:00:40 +0000

This is some of the most useful information I've received in a while. Like the author, the low overdose threshold of acetaminophen made me avoid it, even though I always take low doses anyway and ibuprofen gives me acid reflux almost every time.

New comment by jasperry in "The seven programming ur-languages (2022)"

jasperry — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 15:11:07 +0000

Does anybody know whether Fortran is older or younger than Algol? From Wikipedia, it looks like they were both developed around 1957. Was there any overlap in the design?

New comment by jasperry in "Solitaire simulator for finding the best strategy: Current record is 8.590%"

jasperry — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:43:25 +0000

I don't know of any algorithm to cull non-winnable Klondike games. Playing deal-1 instead of deal-3, and with unlimited flipping of the stock, the win chance is probably close to 50%, but that still makes 2000 in a row statistically impossible.

My guess is that the poster's mom was actually playing FreeCell, in which nearly every game is winnable and people do get streaks like that.

New comment by jasperry in "John Bradley, author of xv, has died"

jasperry — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:50:22 +0000

Even though I hadn't thought about xv in decades, as soon as I read the headline, the image of those 3d buttons with the crisp outlines resurfaced from my memory.

New comment by jasperry in "No Semicolons Needed"

jasperry — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 23:40:24 +0000

Those are functional languages that generally don't use statements, so it makes sense to leave them out of a discussion about statement separators. If you think more people should use functional languages and so avoid the semicolon problem altogether, you could argue that.

New comment by jasperry in "No Semicolons Needed"

jasperry — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 23:34:09 +0000

Indeed it does, by showing how many different and confusing types of parsing rules are used in languages that don't have statement terminators. Needing a parser clever enough to interpret essentially a 2-d code format seems like unnecessary complexity to me, because at its core a programming language is supposed to be a formal, unambiguous notation. Not that I'm against readability; I think having an unambiguous terminating mark makes it easier for humans to read as well. If you want to make a compiler smart enough to help by reading the indentation, that's fine, but don't require it as part of the notation.

Non-statement-based (functional) languages can be excepted, but I still think those are harder to read than statement-based languages.

New comment by jasperry in "“It turns out” (2010)"

jasperry — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:52:42 +0000

It turns out Palpatine returned!

New comment by jasperry in "Textadept"

jasperry — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 23:36:43 +0000

I've looked into TextAdept a few times. It appeals to me because it's got a standard Qt UI, is fast and lightweight and highly customizable with Lua. But I could never commit the time to fully customize it for daily use. Anyway, I'm committed to emacs. Other Scintilla-based editors with a similar feel (but missing the Lua angle) are Geany and Kate.

New comment by jasperry in "Neocaml – Rubocop Creator's New OCaml Mode for Emacs"

jasperry — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 15:06:34 +0000

I was satisfied with Tuareg + Merlin for OCaml development in Emacs, it just worked for me and didn't break when I upgraded packages, but yes, this being from bbatsov is a strong incentive to try it out. My only concern is that it uses tree-sitter, which I try to avoid because of the messiness of the JavaScript ecosystem.

New comment by jasperry in "Looks like it is happening"

jasperry — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 22:24:00 +0000

You're right that being a scientist is unlikely to result in personal wealth and so that's not the primary drive for those who seek faculty or research positions. However, it's not just curiosity, prestige and vanity either, because a big factor for promotion and tenure is how much grant money you bring in. That money is what keeps the university's lights on and buys the lab equipment and pays the grad students, so it's still money as a primary driver in the background.

New comment by jasperry in "Show HN: 3D Mahjong, Built in CSS"

jasperry — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 22:34:43 +0000

If you rotate it so the board looks like the traditional solitaire layout, the direction of free tiles is horizontal as it's supposed to be. But then the images on the tiles are rotated 90 degrees. Either way you look at it, something is non-standard.

The other thing is that this implementation doesn't seem to support overlapping tiles, which is kind of important. For instance, the topmost tile should overlap and block all four tiles under it.

New comment by jasperry in "Mathematicians disagree on the essential structure of the complex numbers (2024)"

jasperry — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 19:49:52 +0000

The author is definitely claiming that it's not just about naming conventions: "These different perspectives ultimately amount, I argue, to mathematically inequivalent structural conceptions of the complex numbers". So you would need to argue against the substance of the article to have a basis for asserting that it is just about naming conventions.

New comment by jasperry in "1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?"

jasperry — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 17:51:31 +0000

I agree in principle, but does anyone else feel super awkward saying "mebibyte" and "gibibyte"?