Hacker News: mcshicks

New comment by mcshicks in "US national level OS-level age verification bill proposed"

mcshicks — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:47:42 +0000

There have been bills in the past like "The improved digital identity act of 2023" that never get out of committee. The latest incarnation seems to be "H.R.7270 - Stop Identity Fraud and Identity Theft Act of 2026". There almost always have one republican and one democratic sponsor. But they don't seem to rise to the level of urgency to get past the current dysfunction in congress.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7270...

New comment by mcshicks in "Doomsday scoreboard"

mcshicks — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 21:36:38 +0000

They seemed to have missed peter turchin

"In 2010, Turchin published research using 40 combined social indicators to predict that there would be worldwide social unrest in the 2020s"

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

New comment by mcshicks in "IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)"

mcshicks — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 16:25:01 +0000

Surprised there was no mention of brief. That was my favorite editor for programming for a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_(text_editor)

New comment by mcshicks in "Airpass – easily overcome WiFi time limits"

mcshicks — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 20:51:03 +0000

Pretty sure it will work on JAL at least right now. They just asked for an email. But it was also a new service so maybe to wanted people to try it. It occurred to me at the time that two devices with two emails should work for twice as long. For what I wanted to do on that flight, i.e. check and send a few messages the one free hour was fine. But yeah of course they could change it so that would not work.

New comment by mcshicks in "Airpass – easily overcome WiFi time limits"

mcshicks — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 20:14:50 +0000

I think the name refers to the limits some airlines have. JAL for instance offers one hour free on some flights.

New comment by mcshicks in "Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball"

mcshicks — Sat, 10 May 2025 18:31:49 +0000

In the US there is a bill that's been floating around Congress for a while called the improving digital identity act.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/884...

New comment by mcshicks in "DeepSeek-Prover-V2"

mcshicks — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 21:12:09 +0000

You can run the model for free on openrouter.ai. I have played around with lean, slowly working my way through mathmatics in lean. I was stuck on this problem in section 3.6

theorem convergesTo_unique {s : ℕ → ℝ} {a b : ℝ} (sa : ConvergesTo s a) (sb : ConvergesTo s b) :

For fun I tried it on the free model on openrouter.ai. Got the answer the first time.

https://leanprover-community.github.io/mathematics_in_lean/m...

Here's the answer just to give you a feel.

  by_contra h
  have h₁ : a ≠ b := h
  have h₂ : |a - b| > 0 := by
    apply abs_pos.mpr
    exact sub_ne_zero.mpr h₁
  -- Use the definition of convergence to find N₁ and N₂
  have h₃ := sa (|a - b| / 2) (by linarith)
  have h₄ := sb (|a - b| / 2) (by linarith)
  cases' h₃ with N₁ h₃
  cases' h₄ with N₂ h₄
  -- Choose N to be the maximum of N₁ and N₂
  let N := max N₁ N₂
  have h₅ := h₃ N (by simp [N, le_max_left])
  have h₆ := h₄ N (by simp [N, le_max_right])
  -- Derive a contradiction using the triangle inequality
  have h₇ : |s N - a| < |a - b| / 2 := by simpa using h₅
  have h₈ : |s N - b| < |a - b| / 2 := by simpa using h₆
  have h₉ : |a - b| < |a - b| := by
    calc
      |a - b| = |a - s N + (s N - b)| := by ring_nf
      _ ≤ |a - s N| + |s N - b| := by
        apply abs_add
      _ = |s N - a| + |s N - b| := by
        rw [abs_sub_comm]
      _ < |a - b| / 2 + |a - b| / 2 := by
        linarith
      _ = |a - b| := by ring
  linarith

New comment by mcshicks in "Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model"

mcshicks — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 17:27:10 +0000

That's so funny I had to check something was working with an llm API last night and that's what I asked it, but just in jest.

New comment by mcshicks in "Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries"

mcshicks — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 21:36:57 +0000

I find the most consistent explanation for Donald Trump is he does whatever is going to keep himself the top news story in the media. I don't think there's any deeply held belief other than if he doesn't think people are talking about him that's bad

New comment by mcshicks in "Silicon Valley 'nepo baby' publishes scathing first novel about growing up rich"

mcshicks — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 01:15:01 +0000

Silicon Valley meets Bret Easton Ellis and Less than Zero.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Less_than_Zero_(novel)

New comment by mcshicks in "Show HN: Clawtype v2.1 – a one-hand chorded USB keyboard and mouse [video]"

mcshicks — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 06:11:22 +0000

I was going to say I have a old twiddler 2 (wired usb). There was this program I used to learn called "twidor" that was like a type tutor but had graphic that showed you the chords. Really helpful. I didn't see anything like that in the github repository linked in the video. I guess they are up to twiddler 4 now. I read the linked chordite page and I agree that a problem with the twiddler is you are kind of trying to hold the thing steady so you can chord with the same fingers you chording with.

https://wearables.cc.gatech.edu/projects/twidor/screens.html

New comment by mcshicks in "Learn electricity and electronics fundamentals without taking a formal course"

mcshicks — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 05:39:36 +0000

I don't know, it's hard for me to know what the author means by "fundamentals". I looked at the table of contents from the amazon website, and somethings that I consider pretty fundamental like Thevenin's Theorem didn't seem to be listed there. By comparison it's in Chapter 1, page 9 on my copy of "The Art of Electronics". I'm not trying to knock the book, it could be very handy, but I would use the term "basics" as opposed to "fundamentals" to describe the content as I understand it.

New comment by mcshicks in "A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset"

mcshicks — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 15:04:45 +0000

I have a twiddler and tried doing this a long time ago i.e. emacs with a twiddler. For me I really needed to use a sticky cntl and alt key because I just couldn't press the cntl button on the top and chord at the same time. And I couldn't figure out how to make the sticky cntl work on the phone. But that was a very long time ago. Now I just use a mini bt keyboard and termux to run emacsclient over ssh and that's good enough for what I want.

New comment by mcshicks in "Notetime: Minimalistic notes where everything is timestamped"

mcshicks — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 14:38:55 +0000

My org capture template from bernt Hanson's website clocks in and out giving you a timestamp. There is a "note" capture type.

https://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html

New comment by mcshicks in "Why and How I use "Org Mode" for my writing and more"

mcshicks — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 11:38:34 +0000

Tailscale, ssh and emacsclient in terminal mode makes it pretty easy to access and update notes from different machines without syncing by just say leaving your main laptop on and connected to the Internet and using emacs daemon. If you have sshd running on all the machines you can use tramp to move files around or use git or many other tools. The trickier part is using emacs key bindings on say android. Read only sharing with PDFs works fine. Co editing is impossible :).

New comment by mcshicks in "Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI"

mcshicks — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 23:06:16 +0000

Honest question. What's happens to Microsoft's investment then?

New comment by mcshicks in "Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI"

mcshicks — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 22:33:33 +0000

Exactly what I want know! A non profit is a corporation for public benefit. They bylaws state how the board gets elected, but there is no such thing as voting shares. So there is no owner. When you close a non profit you have to disperse the assets to another entity that supports the non profits mission statement.

New comment by mcshicks in "Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)"

mcshicks — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 15:35:06 +0000

I guess it matters how long it is and if you need to know it exactly, and how long you need to retain it. I had to memorize 50 to 100 word phrases and I chained them together with index cards. The first sentence is the cue for the second, the second for the third, etc. Carried them around in my pocket in order and started from first a few times a day until I could do the whole thing. But I only needed to know it exactly for a few weeks usually.

New comment by mcshicks in "Meta in talks to reincorporate in Texas or another state, WSJ reports"

mcshicks — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 20:43:03 +0000

Maybe if you are a non profit based in CA. There's probably some other corner cases I'm not aware of, like it might be simpler in some cases like an LLC for holding family property, etc.

New comment by mcshicks in "Intel slashes prices of Xeon 6 CPUs by up to $5,340"

mcshicks — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 14:19:32 +0000

It means the child of a first cousin. I'm a native speaker of English and I find the phrase confusing also.