Hacker News: kwoff

New comment by kwoff in "Ask Jeeves Shut Down"

kwoff — Sat, 02 May 2026 04:41:53 +0000

Exactly. Before google came out in I think 1998, I had several bookmarked sites like excite.com, altavista, dogpile, yahoo, and yes askjeeves. You kinda had a feeling for which one would be good for which kind of search. But then google came along...

New comment by kwoff in "Clicks Communicator"

kwoff — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 01:57:30 +0000

> Without them making a statement of how long they will provide security updates

They said this:

  What version of Android will be supported?

  Communicator will run Android 16. We’re comfortable committing to 2 years of Android updates and 5 years of security updates.

New comment by kwoff in "Perl's decline was cultural"

kwoff — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 04:27:16 +0000

Perl's "decline" means there is some metric to measure how high Perl is. It was higher, but now it is lower. I don't think the metric is well-defined, though.

New comment by kwoff in "Perl's decline was cultural"

kwoff — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 03:40:49 +0000

I hope this doesn't come off as argumentative. You said that with Python "In two days I had what I wanted", but another way of looking at it: in a week of not succeeding in Perl plus those two days in Python, you had what you wanted.

New comment by kwoff in "Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you can do about it"

kwoff — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 04:00:52 +0000

https://www.toyota.com/privacyvts/#:~:text=Declining,analysi... so you apparently have to opt-out of consenting to them tracking you...

New comment by kwoff in "What Killed Perl?"

kwoff — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 02:57:21 +0000

  - weird sigil rules where the 0 element of @x is $x[0] not @x[0]

'@' and '%' indicate containers, while '$' is a scalar (which containers can contain). So '$x[0]' is referring to a scalar within the '@x' container. If you operate on a container, like 'push @x, 2', it uses the container sigil.

I guess "weird" triggered me a bit, heh. I know it's subjective.

New comment by kwoff in "My stages of learning to be a socially normal person"

kwoff — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 04:37:34 +0000

11 em dashes

New comment by kwoff in "Ask HN: Where to begin with "modern" Emacs?"

kwoff — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:57:49 +0000

Not sure if it counts as "really works", but on Windows with PowerToys you can enable Keyboard Manager and 'Remap a key'. (Might want to remap right-Ctrl to CapsLock, in case it turns CapsLock on.) There's also old Registry hacks to do the same thing.

New comment by kwoff in "Chen-Ning Yang, Nobel laureate, dies at 103"

kwoff — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 01:46:16 +0000

(re OG physics) Sheldon Glashow is still around, I think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Glashow

New comment by kwoff in "Learning Persian with Anki, ChatGPT and YouTube"

kwoff — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 18:11:47 +0000

I haven't incorporated Anki yet, but I guess a similar idea would be Memrise. My experience with that for Korean was that it was too intense in the beginning, since it was throwing random (though basic) phrases of like 9 syllables at me, and I couldn't keep them straight. I am considering trying Memrise again, since I've gone through A2 level on Busuu since then, and know more basic phrases and grammar. I do think I should be building my own Anki set by this point, but I've been too lazy.

Helping with language learning is one of the things I think ChatGPT is excellent for. I have a long-term conversation only about Korean, and I can ask questions like "how would a Korean understand [some grammatical structure]?" and it gives very insightful answers, and even refers back to vocabulary that I've already used or other discussions about similar topics.

New comment by kwoff in "Try and"

kwoff — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 02:20:15 +0000

"However, De Vos (2005:59) points out that try and may not be preceded by both: " [example] "John will both try and kill mosquitos."

Then the next sentence has "try and is available only when both try and the verb following and are uninflected". (only when "both try and") I know the italicization of "try" and "and" makes it a different thing grammatically, just thought it was amusing.

New comment by kwoff in "Programmers aren’t so humble anymore, maybe because nobody codes in Perl"

kwoff — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 21:50:31 +0000

It's kinda ironic, since one of the three "virtues" of a Perl programmer is hubris, heh.

(re nobody codes in Perl: I still do professionally, and I'll probably never understand why it draws so much hate)

New comment by kwoff in "Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria"

kwoff — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 03:41:12 +0000

"This also strongly suggests that sleep and hunger are both tied to mitochondrial function and energy balance (the latter was already pretty clear!), and that aerobic organisms are constantly adjusting for both fueling their mitochondria and giving them (especially the ones in the central nervous system) some down time for repair and recovery. As the authors say, rather eloquently, “electrons flow through the respiratory chains of the respective feedback controllers like sand in the hourglass that determines when balance must be restored”. There could well be many other functions that have since joined in with the sleep cycle (such as memory consolidation), but the authors hypothesize that mitochondrial function is the process that underlies all of them. If you need oxygen, then you need sleep!"

yawn :) I was wondering if sleep and hunger are tied to mitochondrial function, then wouldn't breathing be affected? If you're hungry, you're not getting enough glucose for respiration. If you're suffocating....

New comment by kwoff in "Daniel Kleppner, Physicist Who Brought Atomic Clock Precision to GPS, Has Died"

kwoff — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 02:30:05 +0000

"He also helped to create an advanced physics course for M.I.T. freshmen with more than a rudimentary knowledge of the subject. He and Robert J. Kolenkow wrote a 2013 textbook for the course, “An Introduction to Mechanics.”"

I used Kleppner/Kolenkow's intro to mechanics (copyright 1973) in 1993 or so, not at MIT. Seems 2013 is referring to the 2nd edition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kleppner#Books Maybe the 1st edition was created for the "mechanics for masochists" MIT course.

New comment by kwoff in "Why Do Swallows Fly to the Korean DMZ?"

kwoff — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 04:34:39 +0000

"She wrapped her arms around my shoulder and said, “My father too.” She gently reached for my hands and introduced me to the group. “She’s a third-generation sirhyangmin (실향민). She’s traveled across the ocean to join us here today. She is a jebi (제비).”" - who's cutting onions?

New comment by kwoff in "You Must Listen to RFC 2119"

kwoff — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 04:05:11 +0000

That was hilarious. Also kudos for paying a person instead of using AI to generate it.

New comment by kwoff in "Features of D That I Love"

kwoff — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 03:42:04 +0000

Dlang always makes me think of two things: Walter Bright, resident of Hacker News. And awesome games I played on Linux in the 2000s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_Games

New comment by kwoff in "When the sun dies, could life survive on the Jupiter ocean moon Europa?"

kwoff — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 03:30:28 +0000

There's a paper that suggests that de-oxygenation might happen in around a billion years, so before the sun swallows the earth: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00693-5

New comment by kwoff in "MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0"

kwoff — Sat, 24 May 2025 03:14:07 +0000

"MCP is very nearly just a vague set of ideas, a hallucination of a specification, appropriate to the current era, where even the constitution is just a suggestion. A ~~ vibe protocol ~~."

Oh, goodie.

New comment by kwoff in "What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Know"

kwoff — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 02:16:51 +0000

"Carnot’s book was largely disregarded by the scientific community, and he died several years later of cholera. His body was burned, as were many of his papers." Poetic? albeit depressing.