Hacker News: nbaksalyar

New comment by nbaksalyar in "The Great American Rascal: Tom Sawyer at 150"

nbaksalyar — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 10:15:52 +0000

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was mandatory school reading in the USSR - and still is in Russia and many of the ex-USSR countries.

New comment by nbaksalyar in "REA Reverse – Engineer Anything"

nbaksalyar — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 10:17:58 +0000

I’m not sure people are “wishing for the death” in the literal sense.

We just need to apply the antitrust law and break these trillion-dollar corps into smaller competing corps.

There’s no reason for a single company to provide your email, browser, search, operating system, entertainment, AI, etc.

New comment by nbaksalyar in "“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically"

nbaksalyar — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 11:59:52 +0000

> often these techniques are invented first and the applications come later

There's a great paper from Abraham Flexner on this topic:

https://worrydream.com/refs/Flexner_1939_-_The_Usefulness_of...

It argues exactly that we should be allowed to pursue the seemingly "useless" knowledge.

Previously discussed on HN:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=usefulness+of+useless+knowledge

New comment by nbaksalyar in "The Mathocalypse"

nbaksalyar — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 21:22:21 +0000

Also his "Division by Zero":

https://web.archive.org/web/20111121100139/http://www.fantas...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_by_Zero_(short_story)

New comment by nbaksalyar in "Steam Frame: Valve's standalone SteamOS VR headset ($1,059)"

nbaksalyar — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 17:25:55 +0000

What's really cool is that it has an ARM64 CPU. If it can run any Steam game, it's very possible we'll see Steam on Android phones/tablets.

Parallel Fun with Monoids

nbaksalyar — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 20:52:01 +0000

Article URL: https://okmij.org/ftp/Algorithms/map-monoid-reduce.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49616841

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by nbaksalyar in "Firefox Containers Preview"

nbaksalyar — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 10:15:42 +0000

> the options to use socks proxies

I pair it with wireproxy [0]. This way you can assign any Wireguard-capable VPN for specific containers. It's extremely useful.

[0] https://github.com/windtf/wireproxy

New comment by nbaksalyar in "Ask HN: I hate coding agents. Is this skill issue?"

nbaksalyar — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:24:39 +0000

> Similar to how students who spend most of their time practicing what they are studying with actual exercises achieve higher grades

This is spot on.

> build a mental model of the code with every new line of code

This idea has been explored in depth in the Peter Naur's excellent paper, "Programming as theory building" [1] (also extensively discussed on HN [2]). If you haven't read it yet, I bet you will enjoy it a lot. :)

[1] https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Programming+as+theory+building

New comment by nbaksalyar in "Exapunks (2018)"

nbaksalyar — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 19:35:29 +0000

"Eliza" is a bit unusual for Zachtronics as it's not a programming/puzzle game but a visual novel. But it's excellent and I think it's one of their most under-appreciated games. It's well-written, well-acted, and very prescient. Highly recommended!

New comment by nbaksalyar in "Ask HN: Who is quitting? (July 2026)"

nbaksalyar — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 13:27:23 +0000

What a great and timely question! :) I quit a week ago to take a year-long sabbatical.

> 1. What pushed you to do it?

The pursuit of curiosity, for the most part. That's what makes quitting a lot harder when you have a good job and nothing to complain about: you feel like you're making a huge mistake on a whim. Doubly so when you consider the state of the job market at this time.

That said, we don't live to work; we work to live. It's a lot of risk and uncertainty, but you should remember that while some unknown bad things can happen in the future, unknown good things can happen too! [1] When you own your time, you increase your luck surface considerably: you have more opportunities to travel, to wander, to play, to meet new people, to tinker, to discover.

So I've been thinking and reading about this a lot. The final push came from two books I read: "The Pathless Path" by Paul Millerd [2] and "The Inner Compass" by Lawrence Yeo [3]. I can't recommend them enough.

> 2. What will you be doing? (Even if nothing!)

I have a huge Steam backlog to beat... :) Besides that, I'll be studying computer science and maths. Programming language theory, compilers, and functional programming are particularly close to my heart.

But, most importantly, enjoying life!

[1] https://moretothat.com/take-the-leap/

[2] https://pathlesspath.com/

[3] https://compass.moretothat.com/

New comment by nbaksalyar in "Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?"

nbaksalyar — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 14:35:14 +0000

People keep saying things like

> it's probably an issue with your usage of if

> I've rarely seen a repo and a problem that claude can't chew through with the right prompt

> a skill/PEBKAC issue

But then I remember how Anthropic couldn't fix the flickering issue for many months. It just does not compute.

Is it that people working at Anthropic can't prompt and it's a "skill issue" too? I mean, the terminal does not flicker in a lot of other complex TUI apps that I use every day - Midnight Commander, Emacs, tmux, etc. These are open source, Claude could be prompted to "just do what Midnight Commander does". So what is it?

New comment by nbaksalyar in "Codex logging bug may write TBs to local SSDs"

nbaksalyar — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:13:56 +0000

It's not just Google AI Studio, it's also Google proper. Just one search result page consumes gigabytes of RAM. How did this happen? I've switched to DDG and never looked back.

New comment by nbaksalyar in "Doing something that’s never been done before (2025)"

nbaksalyar — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:47:48 +0000

Bret Victor's list of papers and references would be one:

https://worrydream.com/refs/

It's a deep, deep rabbit hole.

New comment by nbaksalyar in "Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything"

nbaksalyar — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 05:06:36 +0000

> Is this what getting old feels like? Hating everything the rest of society is racing to embrace?

I don’t think so. Some societies are racing to embrace mass surveillance and abuse of civil rights. Pointing this out and complaining about it is not “hate” and not reserved for old people only. :)

Volatco – Powerful Multicompute

nbaksalyar — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:44:53 +0000

Article URL: https://volatco.github.io/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47696674

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Matrix-matrix multiplication, from less conventional points of view

nbaksalyar — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 05:11:53 +0000

Article URL: https://okmij.org/ftp/Algorithms/matmul.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47670977

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by nbaksalyar in "Seeing like a spreadsheet"

nbaksalyar — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 22:27:48 +0000

I think spreadsheets have been severely undervalued by software engineers and they're generally under-researched. It's definitely possible to use them in more non-obvious and interesting ways. E.g., see AmbSheets [1]

[1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/ambsheets/notebook/

New comment by nbaksalyar in "Do your own writing"

nbaksalyar — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 22:09:33 +0000

I have a feeling that the same idea absolutely does apply to code. Writing code is much closer to writing prose than it may seem. And the act of writing code also makes you think as you write. Even if you're writing boilerplate. Because how else would you uncover subtle opportunities to reduce the boilerplate and introduce new, better abstractions?

Ask HN: What are your favorite podcast episodes?

nbaksalyar — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 03:13:43 +0000

What episodes were particularly insightful and memorable? Something affected you on a personal level? Please share!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47318719

Points: 1

# Comments: 3

New comment by nbaksalyar in "OpenClaw is changing my life"

nbaksalyar — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 23:06:34 +0000

Why is it wrong? Please elaborate. For more substance, here’s a discussion from 2015:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10381015