Hacker News: leephillips

New comment by leephillips in "Meta deletes popular 1M follower account after Kuwaiti request"

leephillips — Sun, 17 May 2026 18:57:43 +0000

Google (including YouTube) has black-holed content at the request of the Chinese and Pakistani governments and in response to domestic Muslim pressure groups. This effects content shown everywhere, including within the United States:

https://lee-phillips.org/youtube/

Julia Stability vs. Rust for Scientific Computing

leephillips — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:21:49 +0000

Article URL: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-stability-vs-rust-for-scientific-computing/137094

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121573

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by leephillips in "They Live (1988) inspired Adblocker"

leephillips — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:37:55 +0000

Hilarious because it never ends.

New comment by leephillips in "They Live (1988) inspired Adblocker"

leephillips — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:36:29 +0000

He’s had that in place for years. Yes, it’s special treatment for visitors from HN.

New comment by leephillips in "Unknowable Math Can Help Hide Secrets"

leephillips — Mon, 11 May 2026 17:27:49 +0000

This is pretty mindblowing stuff. And the presentation, although necessarily at a popular, schematic level, does a good job of making the ideas clear.

Al-Khwarizmi didn't in any way originate, invent or create the algorithm

leephillips — Sun, 10 May 2026 18:03:01 +0000

Article URL: https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2026/05/06/al-khwarizmi-didnt-in-any-way-originate-invent-or-create-the-algorithm/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48086278

Points: 18

# Comments: 1

New comment by leephillips in "Show HN: Countries where you can leave your MacBook at a random coffee shop"

leephillips — Sun, 10 May 2026 14:27:09 +0000

My first day in Japan (early 90’s) I was in a train station in Tokyo. A suited businessman waiting in a long line put his briefcase on the floor and left the line for a few minutes. He returned to his spot with a newspaper. The case was still there. He had not looked around nor displayed any doubt nor hesitation. Nobody reacted or noticed.

I was born and raised in New York City. This was science fiction to me.

New comment by leephillips in "Making Julia as Fast as C++ (2019)"

leephillips — Sat, 09 May 2026 19:59:38 +0000

And yet Julia is used for large-scale simulations on giant HPC machines and Rust is not.

Recent versions of Revise let you redefine structs in the REPL.

You are not forced to use the REPL, ever. It’s a fantastic convenience, however.

My dev workflow is to write my code in Neovim, sometimes with a REPL attached to the editor to try out code snippets. I don’t need or use LSPs. I do enjoy the Aerial plugin, which pops up an outline of my code for easy navigation.

New comment by leephillips in "Do I just forget everything I've learned?"

leephillips — Wed, 06 May 2026 17:19:23 +0000

You are more fortunate than you can possibly understand right now, because you’re asking yourself these critical questions at the perfect time. Almost no one worries about these things until it’s too late; but because you are worrying about them now, you will have a richer life.

I got my B.A. in 1980. Life is full of regrets for everyone, but some of the things I regret the most are skills and knowledge that I allowed to decay and disappear. I used to be able to carry out rudimentary conversations in French, but, from disuse, no more.

Yes, it is absolutely worth knowing chemistry just for the sake of knowing it (and I say this as a physicist who never liked chemistry). As you know, it takes sustained, active effort to really learn anything about a subject, but, without some kind of knowledge maintenance, that knowledge will disappear over time without you even realizing it. Keep your textbooks (do colleges still use textbooks?). Make an outline of the subject and the parts that you don't want to forget. Make flashcards (I use Anki) with facts that you want to keep in active memory. Periodically, for the rest of your life, consult your outline and refresh your understanding of the subject, through your textbooks or any online resources that seem useful. Have conversations with people interested in chemistry or anything else that you want to keep alive in your brain.

The advantages surpass “for the sake of knowing it”. All of human knowledge is connected in a vast web whose nature we can barely see. If you maintain your knowledge of everything you have learned, you’ll eventually able to see some connections that neither you nor anyone else can imagine now. This, increasingly, is where new knowledge is created: at the boundaries between what we believe are separate disciplines.

More fundamentally, it feels good to know things, and to see the connections among things. Do it for this pleasure.

You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough

leephillips — Wed, 06 May 2026 16:53:42 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.tjll.net/you-dont-love-systemd-timers-enough/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48038479

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by leephillips in "Your Terminal Is Burning Battery Like It's Mining Bitcoin"

leephillips — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:07:36 +0000

I‘m not sure I understand the question. Some people use similar kinds of sessions in terminal multiplexers such as tmux (is that what you have in mind?), but this leads to problems (interpretations of key sequences, etc.) that the Kitty solution sidesteps.

New comment by leephillips in "Your Terminal Is Burning Battery Like It's Mining Bitcoin"

leephillips — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:11:46 +0000

Aside from its well-known features, such as displaying images directly in the terminal over ssh, I use it to create TUI applications. The application is a saved Kitty session, with a defined arrangement of windows. Each window runs a specified program, and communicates with the other windows over a Unix socket. Kitty has a convenient tool to create these sessions. Once created, I can start the session-application like any other program. The sessions are defined in a text file, so I can edit it to adjust the window arrangement or other details.

I also use its shell integration features, such as putting the scrollback into a pager, constantly.

New comment by leephillips in "Your Terminal Is Burning Battery Like It's Mining Bitcoin"

leephillips — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 04:09:29 +0000

I don’t use MacOS or Claude Code, but I do use Kitty terminal on Linux, which the author suggests has the same issues that plague him using Ghostty.

Kitty is a magnificent piece of software that has radically enhanced the interface between me and my computer. And it does this while consuming negligible resources.

New comment by leephillips in "Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers"

leephillips — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:17:05 +0000

I agree with your preference, also largely because of filters. But note that the intermediate format is Pandoc’s internal abstract syntax tree, not JSON (https://lwn.net/Articles/1064692/).

The older filter mechanism acted on a JSON serialization of the AST, but the current recommendation is to use Lua filters that work with the internal AST directly.

New comment by leephillips in "Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers"

leephillips — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:07:45 +0000

By “The HTML generated by LaTeX” do you mean by latexml (the tool used, I think, by arxiv) or something else?

New comment by leephillips in "Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers"

leephillips — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:58:36 +0000

Almost nobody uses TeXmacs it because those who might be interested need LaTeX and its packages. This is not LaTeX. (In the future these authors might all be using Typst, but not this thing.)