Hacker News: nivertech

New comment by nivertech in "Deir El-Medina Strikes"

nivertech — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 06:21:33 +0000

To protect their homes from floods and fires, the ancient Egyptians made sacrifices and offerings to deities like Hapi (god of the Nile)[1] and Bastet[2]

But this naive actuarial model with a 100% deductible is obviously far less sophisticated than modern insurance ;)

—-

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapi_(Nile_god)

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastet

New comment by nivertech in "Deir El-Medina Strikes"

nivertech — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 20:17:45 +0000

In ancient Egypt, there were various trade unions, usually organized by profession

One of the most interesting was the thieves' union

Suppose someone stole yr carpet at night, and in the morning you'd go to the office of the head of the thieves' union, pay 25% of the carpet's value, and get it back. Much better than modern insurance!

New comment by nivertech in "Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter"

nivertech — Fri, 29 May 2026 14:10:28 +0000

The Soviet computer industry had only two secrets:

1. how far behind the West it was, and

2. that there were no other secrets

New comment by nivertech in "Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter"

nivertech — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:05:00 +0000

This Soviet project developed two Russian-language PLs: Robic[1] and Rapira[2]. Robic was similar to Logo, but unlike Logo, which had only one actor - a turtle, Robik had several: a Train, an Ant, a Painter, and so on

Rapira was more like SETL + Python. It was a dynamic interpreted PL with a rich set of compound data types, such as sets, records (associative arrays), and so on. Compared to the contemporary BASIC, it was ADVANCED

Like Logo, Robik was used to teach programming to kindergarthen-age children, while Rapira was aimed at high school students

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robic / https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%B8%D0%BA

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapira / https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%80...

New comment by nivertech in "Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence"

nivertech — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:32:15 +0000

Even if you have an insurable interest, moral hazard may arise - acting recklessly or other abuse, while knowing you are insured/covered. Somewhat similar to friendly fraud in retail/ecommerce.

New comment by nivertech in "Ask HN: Does Claude use 'prior' in a Bayesian sense more than English?"

nivertech — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:40:51 +0000

AI talk is turning into Silicon Valley pseudo-math slang. Priors, exponentials, latent space

You get lines like “no priors” or “embracing exponentials” that sound smart but mostly signal status

Same move as N Taleb and “convexity.” A real idea turned into a generic intellectual flex

New comment by nivertech in "Slow Down to Speed Up"

nivertech — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 18:02:58 +0000

> slow is smooth, smooth is fast

New comment by nivertech in "I Stumbled Upon Paul Graham's Essays – and Can't Stop Reading"

nivertech — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 01:47:00 +0000

https://paulgraham.com/articles.html

New comment by nivertech in "4-bit floating point FP4"

nivertech — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 21:55:34 +0000

It's better to first show truth tables, then K-maps, and only then logical formulas.

But the main question is: does this FP2 have any real applications? Maybe it could be useful when only one operand is FP2? Especially for vectorized math.

New comment by nivertech in "4-bit floating point FP4"

nivertech — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 22:19:24 +0000

What about comparison operators?

New comment by nivertech in "Ask HN: Anyone know of that "levels of AI programming" blog post?"

nivertech — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 10:39:24 +0000

The Five Levels: From spicy autocomplete to the dark factory

https://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2026/01/the-five-levels-from...

January 23, 2026

72 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46739117

There are several other similar posts/videos. Steve Yegge also talks about it.

New comment by nivertech in "4-bit floating point FP4"

nivertech — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 10:35:43 +0000

FP2 spec:

  00 -> 0.0
  01 -> 1.0
  10 -> Inf
  11 -> NaN

  00 -> 0.0
  01 -> 1.0
  10 -> Inf
  11 -> -Inf

New comment by nivertech in "In the last 30 years, the number of public companies has been cut in half"

nivertech — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:53:17 +0000

The number of traditional public companies has been cut in half.

The number of alternative public and semi-public companies went up exponentially (Reg CF/Reg A, crypto ICOs).

After reaching some thresholds a Reg A company can become public and even trade on OTC markets.

New comment by nivertech in "Redesigned Claude Code Desktop app is now available"

nivertech — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:19:36 +0000

Windows (arm 64), but no official Linux (x86) support?

There is only unofficial build:

Claude Desktop for Debian-based Linux distributions

https://github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian

New comment by nivertech in "We spoke to the man making viral Lego-style AI videos for Iran"

nivertech — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 03:53:55 +0000

statistics == lies

New comment by nivertech in "Ask HN: Why Databases Instead of Filesystem?"

nivertech — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:05:24 +0000

BTW: some early filesystems were more database-like:

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

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

They were more like BerkeleyDB and lacked Query Planner.

I think Oracle internally using something similar, i.e. a native filesystem optimized for an RDBMS.

New comment by nivertech in "NY Times publishes headline claiming the "A" in "NATO" stands for "American""

nivertech — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:17:14 +0000

“The North Atlantic Treaty Organization Without Atlantis?”

New comment by nivertech in "Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw"

nivertech — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:22:29 +0000

The slogan of the Russian Revolution of 1917 was: "Factories to the workers, land to the peasants."

If the factory is yours, then everything inside is yours ;)

But it's funny how low wages under the broken Soviet economic system turned such things into a semi-official, informal work perks, allowing people to make ends meet.

New comment by nivertech in "Default GraphQL response is now HTTP 500"

nivertech — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:11:36 +0000

1. The problem is with using HTTP for APIs, not with GraphQL. HTTP was designed for rich (hypertext) documents, not for APIs. So layering GraphQL or any other APIs over HTTP is a hack.

2. GraphQL is useful for small remote teams b/c of mandatory staticly-typed schema and built-in schema documentation. Otherwise it's lots of back-and-forth between backen, frontend, QA, etc. You forced to use external tools like Postman collections, and still having communication problems.

New comment by nivertech in "Default GraphQL response is now HTTP 500"

nivertech — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 02:14:14 +0000

> After years of debate and confusion, the GraphQL Working Group has reached a historic decision: starting with the October 2027 spec release, all GraphQL responses will return random HTTP status codes between 100 and 599.

> Additionally in order to make GraphQL AI Agents friendly, the GraphQL response body will be switching from JSON to Markdown.