Hacker News: microtherion

New comment by microtherion in "Google changes its search box"

microtherion — Wed, 20 May 2026 09:17:13 +0000

Absolutely! And I also click them to get an idea how good the source is.

New comment by microtherion in "Grok 4.3"

microtherion — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:31:37 +0000

It's impressive that you've even managed to use an em-dash in spoken language. /s

New comment by microtherion in "Copy Fail"

microtherion — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 20:14:20 +0000

It also doesn't work on Raspberry Pi, though presumably it could easily be made to; it does replace the su binary, but the replacement is not executable.

New comment by microtherion in "To my students"

microtherion — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 01:04:43 +0000

When I started studying CS, the "industry" thought students should be taught COBOL, and maybe some PL/I and Fortran, because obviously that was what the market wanted.

New comment by microtherion in "Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages"

microtherion — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:39:37 +0000

I imagine Swift is also a very difficult language to compile.

New comment by microtherion in "Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages"

microtherion — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:36:23 +0000

You could do the same in reverse as well. Many of the features listed in the first paragraph existed before in other languages, though probably not all of them in a single language. In fact, I believe the design process (sensibly) favored best practices of existing languages rather than completely new and unproven mechanisms.

So there was considerable borrowing from PASCAL, CLU, MODULA(-2), CSP. It's possible that the elaborate system for specifying machine representations of numbers was truly novel, but I'm not sure how much of a success that was.

New comment by microtherion in "Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)"

microtherion — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 23:48:09 +0000

I would argue the opposite: Being describable in BNF is exactly the hallmark of sensible syntax in a language, and of a language easily amenable to recursive descent parsing. Wirth routinely published (E)BNF for the languages he designed.

New comment by microtherion in "Tesla reportedly developing new smaller, cheaper EV after killing Model 2"

microtherion — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:51:46 +0000

Quarterly earnings will be released April 22. My impression is that in recent years, such rumors tended to cluster around earnings reports (which largely haven't been great the last 2 years or so), presumably as distractions.

New comment by microtherion in "SpaceX files to go public"

microtherion — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 20:14:07 +0000

The way I remember it is that I used at least Lycos and AltaVista before Google. In both cases, a major reason for switching was that the search itself got cluttered up with ads.

So Google's current trajectory does not bode well for them, as far as I'm concerned.

New comment by microtherion in "John Bradley, author of xv, has died"

microtherion — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:13:10 +0000

He may have been a bit of a Milkshake Duck

New comment by microtherion in "Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)"

microtherion — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 22:07:49 +0000

I wonder whether that was the inspiration for the extensive use of green in the interiors of Severance.

New comment by microtherion in "John Bradley, author of xv, has died"

microtherion — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 21:54:57 +0000

I've been wondering about that as well. It appears he & Vox Day were friends/collaborators and may have shared some political views: https://postcardsfromtheageofreason.com/2026/03/01/bpr1/

New comment by microtherion in "The Resolv hack: How one compromised key printed $23M"

microtherion — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 23:44:46 +0000

stable as in "close the stable doors after the horse has bolted"

New comment by microtherion in "Apple's MacBook Neo makes repairs easier and cheaper than other MacBooks"

microtherion — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 23:12:58 +0000

It's sort of ironic that at the time, there were many complaints that Apple made its devices thin at the expense of more important features. Now that M series MacBooks are thicker again, there are complaints that they are too thick.

New comment by microtherion in "TADA: Speech generation through text-acoustic synchronization"

microtherion — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:13:57 +0000

Personally, I love synthesis that can be generated on the client machine, in real time. For some applications, like screen readers, this is a really important feature.

Of course, the big interest these days is in cloud based assistants, where synthesizing on server and piggybacking on the rest of the answer is quite reasonable.

New comment by microtherion in "TADA: Speech generation through text-acoustic synchronization"

microtherion — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:15:06 +0000

To me, the speech sounds impressively expressive, but there is something off about the audio quality that I can't quite put my finger on.

The "Anger Speech" has an obvious lisp (Maybe a homage to Elmer Fudd?). But I hear a similar, but more subtle, speech impediment in the "Adoration Speech". The "Fearful Speech" might have a slight warble to it. And the "Long Speech" is difficult to evaluate because the speaker has vocal fry to an extent that I find annoying.

New comment by microtherion in "TADA: Fast, Reliable Speech Generation Through Text-Acoustic Synchronization"

microtherion — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:08:21 +0000

This is bound to be a question that will be increasingly harder to answer. For instance, Apple processors have at least two different neural accelerators/matrix coprocessors (ANE and AMX) in addition to the integrated GPU. Do these count as "CPU"?

New comment by microtherion in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

microtherion — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 15:05:40 +0000

> Not only is the moon further, you also need to use more fuel to land on it

And take off again, if reusable spacecraft are meant to be used.

New comment by microtherion in "Self Driving Car Insurance"

microtherion — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:52:31 +0000

The skepticism and hate is based on observing decades of shameless dishonesty, which is itself a form of data provided by the company: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/

New comment by microtherion in "Self Driving Car Insurance"

microtherion — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:45:21 +0000

Supervised FSD — automating 99.9% of driving and expecting drivers to be fully alert for the other .1% — appears to go against everything we know about human attention.