Hacker News: kzrdude

New comment by kzrdude in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

kzrdude — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:15:37 +0000

There are 5 different levels and 20 words per level. I think it was ok, just hold out for it if you think it is fun.

New comment by kzrdude in "Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst"

kzrdude — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 17:46:00 +0000

It is fun how in computer science terms, TeX and Typst are so incredibly far apart. TeX is a macro language that could be implemented in very little memory, while Typst literally memoizes every typst function's result; to the point where it will eat all available memory if the document and its editing increments needs it.

This reflects the time in which they were developed.

New comment by kzrdude in "I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer"

kzrdude — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:54:16 +0000

If the rest of the tweet is ai-generated, why not the picture?

In fact, if you ask me, I think the tweet's picture is semi-real; I trust the computer history museum to have the original and the tweet has an AI-upscaled photo with artificial details.

New comment by kzrdude in "New way of making espresso with ultrasound"

kzrdude — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 09:35:18 +0000

I like good quality coffee.

But I also need my coffee: I'll drink whatever quality coffee is being offered, as long as it's the best I can get that morning.

New comment by kzrdude in "I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer"

kzrdude — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 08:34:44 +0000

The picture appears to be real, if we trust this source:

https://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/january/6/

New comment by kzrdude in "A dumpster arrived behind my university's library"

kzrdude — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:49:30 +0000

I fear that the availability of e-books will lead to more libraries getting rid of their last copy, not just the penultimate one.

New comment by kzrdude in "A dumpster arrived behind my university's library"

kzrdude — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:48:49 +0000

I picked up a fun university library discard the other day (month). This one is about Lunar geology. The concept of the book is so inspiring to me: "it's 1975, we brought home a lot of samples from the moon now; so what did we learn". It was fun to look through that one - a snapshot of a very exciting time.

(Taylor, Lunar Science: A post-Apollo view)

New comment by kzrdude in "What the fuck happened to nerds"

kzrdude — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:38:12 +0000

Much of the mundane world - tv, bus stops, and so on seems to have ads. While in my nerd domain, my computer, I don't see ads at all. So it would seem that open source software is letting me live without ads on the internet, from home.

I was even annoyed at the ads in a paper newspaper I was leafing through, I'm not just used to them and I think some of them were a bit dishonest and scummy.

New comment by kzrdude in "DeepSeek V4 Pro beats GPT-5.5 Pro on precision"

kzrdude — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:00:09 +0000

That's a better score than I'd give my own thinking.

New comment by kzrdude in "DeepSeek V4 Pro beats GPT-5.5 Pro on precision"

kzrdude — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:56:48 +0000

A 'lede' is just an intentionally differentiated spelling of 'lead'; the origin of the word is just lead. Collins dictionary defines lede: a variant spelling of lead

New comment by kzrdude in "The Smallest Brain You Can Build: A Perceptron in Python"

kzrdude — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:51:30 +0000

I think Karpathy's microgpt blogpost is the best in this genre in a long time, and it also includes a multi layer perceptron. It's a step up in the hierarchy, so reading both is helpful, of course.

https://karpathy.github.io/2026/02/12/microgpt/

New comment by kzrdude in "Python JIT project was asked to pause development"

kzrdude — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:13:49 +0000

The short answer is that CPython didn't want to break compatibility with lots and lots and lots of Python modules implemented in C, so it was never viable to let PyPy seamlessly replace CPython.

New comment by kzrdude in "The back cover of C++: The Language raises questions not answered by front cover"

kzrdude — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 19:12:00 +0000

It has a bad reputation but judging books by their cover is increasingly useful.

New comment by kzrdude in "How LLMs work"

kzrdude — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 18:24:34 +0000

I think that's why pen and paper is such a good tool for thinking. :)

New comment by kzrdude in "Python JIT project was asked to pause development"

kzrdude — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 18:10:44 +0000

The JIT project already lost a lot of momentum when the people working on it lost their jobs (at Microsoft)..

New comment by kzrdude in "Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software"

kzrdude — Sun, 31 May 2026 08:44:46 +0000

We could tell, if someone did independent work of reviewing a sample of the contributions and recent changes (and published in a blog post for example).

New comment by kzrdude in "Pandoc Templates"

kzrdude — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:23:20 +0000

I'm a programmer and even I like writing in a non-programmable environment. Programming in the document system just stimulates the more primitive parts of my brain that love the processing and programming more than the writing itself. So it's distracting in that way.

New comment by kzrdude in "Zot now supports Claude Opus 4.8"

kzrdude — Fri, 29 May 2026 07:42:07 +0000

Claude models are usable through certain github copilot plans, so that's a counterexample, isn't it?

New comment by kzrdude in "Matrix Multiplications on GPUs Run Faster When Given “Predictable” Data (2024)"

kzrdude — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:47:59 +0000

Good point but this forum leans heavily towards software, so we are used to the latter! I have worked close to IC development so had to learn and tangle with the former idea too, was interesting.

New comment by kzrdude in "Python 3.15: features that didn't make the headlines"

kzrdude — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:15:22 +0000

Ah, thanks for the update. My only check before asking was to check if the future feature for annotations had been enabled by default yet. It has then effectively been abandoned instead, I guess.