Hacker News: newmana

New comment by newmana in "How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer"

newmana — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 03:17:46 +0000

A great version of this and how ex-DEC engineers saved Google and their choice of ECC RAM - inventing MapReduce and BigTable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK0I4f8Rbis

New comment by newmana in "AI just proved Erdos Problem #124"

newmana — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 03:59:50 +0000

"Recently, yet another category of low-hanging fruit has been identified as within reach of automated tools: problems which, due to a technical flaw in their description, are unexpectedly easy to resolve. Specifically, problem #124 https://www.erdosproblems.com/124 was a problem that was stated in three separate papers of Erdos, but in two of them he omitted a key hypothesis which made the problem a consequence of a known result (Brown's criterion). However, this fact was not noticed until Boris Alexeev applied the Aristotle tool to this problem, which autonomously located (and formalized in Lean) a solution to this weaker version of the problem within hours."

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115639984077620023

New comment by newmana in "The Efficiency of Vim"

newmana — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 03:51:49 +0000

Smalltalk Environment - the dawn of IDEs - "Don't mode me in"

"Novices are not the only victims of modes. Experts often type commands used in one mode when they are in another, leading to undesired and distressing consequences. In many systems, typing the letter "D" can have meanings as diverse as "replace the selected character by D," "insert a D before the selected character," or "delete the selected character." How many times have you heard or said, "Oops, I was in the wrong mode"?"

https://archive.org/details/TheSmalltalkEnvironment

New comment by newmana in "Do artifacts have politics? [pdf]"

newmana — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 05:09:47 +0000

It's worth noting that the debunking has been debunked (it's much more nuanced but essentially you can take the quotes, experience of others and the height of the bridges at face value):

"I recorded clearances for a total of 20 bridges, viaducts and overpasses: 7 on the Bronx River Parkway (completed in 1925); 6 on the initial portion of the Saw Mill River Parkway (1926) and 7 on the Hutchinson River Parkway (begun in 1924 and opened in 1927). I then took measure of the 20 original bridges and overpasses on the Southern State Parkway, from its start at the city line in Queens to the Wantagh Parkway, the first section to open (on November 7, 1927) and the portion used to reach Jones Beach. The verdict? It appears that Sid Shapiro was right."

"Overall, clearances are substantially lower on the Moses parkway, averaging just 107.6 inches (eastbound), against 121.6 inches on the Hutchinson and 123.2 inches on the Saw Mill."

If buses have always about 118" that would be effective.

"Robert Moses and the saga of the racist parkway bridges" https://archive.md/zMrZ4 (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-mo...)

"Robert Moses and His Racist Parkway, Explained." https://archive.md/v98HO (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/10/robert-mo...)

New comment by newmana in "A woman named "Steve" – IT pioneer, entrepreneur, philanthropist (2019)"

newmana — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 01:22:54 +0000

Video from 1979 about F International (Dame Shirley's company) - working from home, as a computer a programmer, is the greatest revolution for working women since the pill. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6URa-PTqfA&t=295s

New comment by newmana in "Scientists discover why dozens of endangered elephants died"

newmana — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 03:38:38 +0000

It's also worth noting, one of the author's of the paper: "Transmission of the bacteria is possible, especially given the highly sociable nature of elephants and the link between this infection and the stress associated with extreme weather events such as drought, which may make outbreaks more likely."

https://www.surrey.ac.uk/news/scientists-uncover-cause-myste...

Paper link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41987-z

New comment by newmana in "I have written a JVM in Rust"

newmana — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 11:30:08 +0000

They might be talking about the checkcast operation: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se8/html/jvms-6.ht...

This is generated when you do something like: final Main value = list.get(0);

http://henrikeichenhardt.blogspot.com/2013/05/how-are-java-g...

New comment by newmana in "Covid-19: The T Cell Story"

newmana — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 10:05:41 +0000

Sweden has achieved about 15% infection rate and has showed no signs of slowing.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/new-beijing-outbreak-raise... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

New comment by newmana in "Covid-19: The T Cell Story"

newmana — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 09:51:58 +0000

"It took nine days for the number of infections to grow from 6 million to 7 million, and less than eight days to get to the latest million, so the pandemic is not slowing down." https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/coronacast/the-global-...

New comment by newmana in "Zork source code, 1977"

newmana — Fri, 08 May 2020 04:43:38 +0000

Or better yet, from the MDL documentation https://mdl-language.readthedocs.io/en/latest/08-truth/#824-...

New comment by newmana in "Zork source code, 1977"

newmana — Fri, 08 May 2020 04:25:17 +0000

"indivisible and hence ultimately simple entity, such as an atom or a person."

New comment by newmana in "Was History Fair to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Owners?"

newmana — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 02:05:59 +0000

Yes.

New comment by newmana in "Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?"

newmana — Thu, 20 Sep 2018 21:01:40 +0000

The Semantic Web was not XML but RDF. XML was the serialisation format.

New comment by newmana in "Haskell in the Datacentre"

newmana — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 11:36:43 +0000

This was covered in a previous post: "Haskell is sandwiched between two layers of C++ in Sigma. At the top, we use the C++ thrift server. In principle, Haskell can act as a thrift server, but the C++ thrift server is more mature and performant. It also supports more features. Furthermore, it can work seamlessly with the Haskell layers below because we can call into Haskell from C++. For these reasons, it made sense to use C++ for the server layer." https://code.facebook.com/posts/745068642270222/fighting-spa...

New comment by newmana in "Ask HN: Refactoring a BASIC Blackjack Game from the 70s"

newmana — Sat, 28 May 2016 00:48:41 +0000

Sounds like fun https://github.com/newmana/haunted-house

New comment by newmana in "A reply to Russell Okung"

newmana — Mon, 18 Jan 2016 04:44:44 +0000

"So you could for example have no poverty and perfect social mobility, and still have great economic inequality."

I think this is where the evidence is to the contrary - economic inequality predicts poverty and poor social mobility.

"These results suggest that the takeoff in income inequality may account in part for the decline in mobility."

http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/working_papers/mi...

New comment by newmana in "Rediscovering MVC"

newmana — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 04:35:54 +0000

I love this quote from Christopher Alexander, author of Pattern Language on its failure:

"So there is the slightly strange paradox that, after all those years of work, the first three books are essentially complete and, from a theoretical point of view, do quite a good job of identifying the difference but actually do not accomplish anything. The conceptual structures that are presented are just not deep enough to actually break down the barrier. They actually do not do anything."

https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf

New comment by newmana in "#FFFFFF Diversity"

newmana — Fri, 16 Oct 2015 12:23:30 +0000

That study has many flaws especially in self selection:

http://othersociologist.com/2015/04/16/myth-about-women-in-s...

New comment by newmana in "My Weird Ruby"

newmana — Sat, 07 Mar 2015 09:17:37 +0000

I wish Ruby had better support for functions, passing it to a method incurs a 400% performance penalty: https://www.omniref.com/ruby/2.2.0/symbols/Proc/yield#annota...

New comment by newmana in "Q&A With Pax Dickinson on Tweets, Regrets"

newmana — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 20:06:38 +0000

Constructing a sexist joke is generally seen as a misogynistic thing to do.

There are FAQs perhaps the most relevant is: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Misogyny

But you can find examples everywhere. In Australia, the first female Prime Minister had terms like "ditch the witch" used against her, which is obviously beyond sexism and is hatred see: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/17/differe...