Hacker News: joshuaissac

New comment by joshuaissac in "The Orange Pi 6 Plus"

joshuaissac — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:53:57 +0000

There are some projects to port UEFI to boards like Orange Pi and Raspberry Pi. You can install a normal OS once you have flashed that.

https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/master/Plat...

https://github.com/edk2-porting/edk2-rk3588

New comment by joshuaissac in "72% of the dollar's purchasing power was destroyed in just four episodes"

joshuaissac — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:56:09 +0000

Inflation is about what goes on inside the country. So you can have inflation internally while the domestic currency strengthens against foreign currencies, and vice versa.

If your currency is falling against foreign currencies but prices are also dropping domestically, you get deflation. This was happening in China a couple of years ago, and they were exporting this deflation to other countries.

New comment by joshuaissac in "Using calculus to do number theory"

joshuaissac — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:40:28 +0000

The mathematical field of tackling number theory problems in this way is called analytic number theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_number_theory

The prime number theorem, on how prime numbers are distributed amongst the integers, was first proved using analytic techniques.

New comment by joshuaissac in "Revealed: Face of 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal from cave"

joshuaissac — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:58:13 +0000

If first-order hybrids made up only a small proportion of the total population of humans and Neanderthals, then the probability that a pairing between a member of a modern human tribe and a member of a Neanderthal tribe would involve a first-order hybrid is quite small. Like if there are 2 hybrids in a 150-strong tribe at the frontier, and a cross-tribe pairing happens, there is about a 1.3% chance that it involves a hybrid, and half of that that the gender matches up. Even with a higher estimate of 5% hybrids in a tribe, it's a 1.67% chance for a match with the right gender.

And when that chance is realised, and a second-order hybrid is produced, the high child mortality rates of the time would put downward pressure on their numbers. Not zero, but a couple of orders of magnitudes lower than first-order hybrids.

First-order hybrid being having one parent from a Neanderthal tribe, other from a human tribe. Second-order hybrid additionally having at least one parent as a first-order hybrid (as in your step 3).

Also, there actually is Neanderthal DNA in the modern X chromosome. If in your step 2, Ann gives birth to a daughter Andrea, the daughter would have a Neanderthal X chromosome, and she can pass it on within her tribe. But she would have no Neanderthal mtDNA, which is only passed on maternally.

But there is other data that this model does not explain. Like, why is there no Neanderthal contribution to the modern Y chromosome?

New comment by joshuaissac in "Revealed: Face of 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal from cave"

joshuaissac — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 19:03:59 +0000

Or Neanderthal women lived with their tribe and their hybrid children died with that Neanderthal tribe, whereas modern human women and their hybrid children (or at least the ones who have living descendants) lived with modern human tribes and had a better chance of survival.

New comment by joshuaissac in "Making WebAssembly a first-class language on the Web"

joshuaissac — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:05:58 +0000

That was something else entirely. Not for scripting but to write compiled ActiveX browser add-ons.

New comment by joshuaissac in "It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard"

joshuaissac — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:51:16 +0000

It was Wingdings.

But they do use Unicode emojis now.

New comment by joshuaissac in "Making WebAssembly a first-class language on the Web"

joshuaissac — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:25:58 +0000

Internet Explorer used to support any language that Windows Script Host could run. By default, that was JScript and VBScript, but there were third-party engines for Python, Perl, Ruby, Lua, and many others.

Possibly disabled now as they announced VBScript would be disabled in 2019.

New comment by joshuaissac in "It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard"

joshuaissac — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 15:31:57 +0000

> short-lived

Outlook was doing this even 3-4 years ago.

New comment by joshuaissac in "Ubuntu Planning Mandatory Age Verification"

joshuaissac — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:59:16 +0000

And how many of them are using desktop Linux?

New comment by joshuaissac in "Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS"

joshuaissac — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 19:48:32 +0000

According to their site, they used to support Samsung a long time ago but Samsung made changes in newer handsets that closed off access to the secure element.

New comment by joshuaissac in "The normalization of corruption in organizations (2003) [pdf]"

joshuaissac — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 18:27:48 +0000

> Oppression would be quite impossible throughout history if people weren't willing to oppress their own kind to the benefit of others.

Isn't the opposite far more common? When oppression happens, it is typically people oppressing the out-group for the benefit of the in-group.

New comment by joshuaissac in "What does " 2>&1 " mean?"

joshuaissac — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 02:51:51 +0000

If all of your scripts run in the same venv (for a given user), can you inject that into the PATH and rely on env just finding the right interpreter?

I suppose it would also need env to be able to handle paths that have spaces in them.

New comment by joshuaissac in "Towards Autonomous Mathematics Research"

joshuaissac — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 21:50:12 +0000

My reading of their comment is that a proof space is a concept where a human guesses that a proof of some form q exists, and the AI searches a space S(q) where most points may be not valid proofs, but if there is a valid proof, it will hopefully be found.

So it is not a space of proofs in the sense that everything in a vector space is a vector. More like a space of sequences of statements, which have some particular pattern, and one of which might be a proof.

New comment by joshuaissac in "Show HN: Data Engineering Book – An open source, community-driven guide"

joshuaissac — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 22:58:13 +0000

English version: https://github.com/datascale-ai/data_engineering_book/blob/m...

New comment by joshuaissac in "Show HN: I speak 5 languages. Common apps taught me none. So I built lairner"

joshuaissac — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:45:37 +0000

Something strange I noticed with the Malayalam course (maybe also other languages with a non-Latin script): when a word is shown, two Latin transliterations are shown underneath. The second one looks like an IAST or ISO-15919 transliteration. The first one is often wrong and sometimes even nonsensical. Why not have only the second transliteration?

New comment by joshuaissac in "ai;dr"

joshuaissac — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:29:43 +0000

AI-generated code is meant for the machine, or for the author/prompter. AI-generated text is typically meant for other people. I think that makes a meaningful difference.

New comment by joshuaissac in "Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users"

joshuaissac — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:48:54 +0000

Following Postel's law results in the normalisation and proliferation of defective implementations. The actual standard becomes irrelevant, and new implementations have to be coded against the defective ones.

My opinion is that Postel's law should be approached in the same way that Linus Torvalds did CVS when designing Git. If in doubt about an implementation decision, consider what Postel's law would recommend, and then do the exact opposite.

New comment by joshuaissac in "Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability"

joshuaissac — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 12:53:31 +0000

> FIPS-compliant bindings (OpenSSL)

Using FIPS mode can be insecure because the latest FIPS-compliant version can be years older than the latest non-FIPS one with all the updates.

The only time it makes sense to use the FIPS version is where there is a legal or contractual requirement that trumps security considerations.

New comment by joshuaissac in "Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors"

joshuaissac — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 08:15:50 +0000

You can also sponsor the development of Neovim. The money goes to funding developers.

https://neovim.io/sponsors/