Hacker News: noufalibrahim

New comment by noufalibrahim in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

noufalibrahim — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:39:11 +0000

The slight groove that was there on the middle of the base which allowed you to stick your finger to open the top had sharp corners that poked my wrists and i filed them both off on the first, and only, macbook I used in 2014 or so m

New comment by noufalibrahim in "Ask HN: How do systems (or people) detect when a text is written by an LLM"

noufalibrahim — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:46:39 +0000

It's a lot easier to detect when you mostly interact with non English speakers.

I asked an LLM to rewrite this to make it nicer and got the following. I'd flag the first because I don't usually hear "majority of your interactions" in conversation but I might miss it. The second will probably get by me. As for the third, I never say "considerably easier" unless I'm trying to sound artificially posh.

1. It becomes much more noticeable when the majority of your interactions are with non-native English speakers.

2.It tends to stand out more when most of the people you interact with speak English as a second language.

3. It's considerably easier to identify when most of your interactions involve people whose primary language isn't English.

New comment by noufalibrahim in "Electronics for Kids, 2nd Edition"

noufalibrahim — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 10:54:46 +0000

I wasn't around in the 60s but I had a chemistry set from Salter Science in the 80s and loved it. They had details on how to make simple glassware and so many other things. I didn't have carbon rods for the electrochemistry section but I managed to supplement the manual with another "science experiments book" and pulled out a few from spent batteries. Even synthesised a few simple salts based on my understanding of how things worked so that I could try out the "advanced" experiments from the book.

Modern chemistry sets are extremely lightweight and boring in comparison.

New comment by noufalibrahim in "Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming"

noufalibrahim — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:19:19 +0000

I had a situation where we need to implement a protocol. The spec was fairly decent but the public implementations of the other end were slightly non compliant which necessitated special casing. Plus multiple versions etc.

An expensive consultant suggested creating pristine implementation and then writing a rule layer that would modify things as needed and deploying the whole thing as a pile of lamdba functions.

I copy pasted the protocol consumer file per producer and made all the necessary changes with proper documentation and mocks. Got it working quickly and we could add new ones without affecting.

If I'd try to keep it DRY, i think it would be a leaky mess.

New comment by noufalibrahim in "Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line"

noufalibrahim — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 08:59:27 +0000

No problem. I didn't take the original comment too seriously either. Just a passing chuckle at some wordplay.

TBH, I haven't heard the complaints about the use of "oil" in that context.

New comment by noufalibrahim in "Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line"

noufalibrahim — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 06:58:06 +0000

Reminds me of a joke I read online. "Plant Based Meat" is not Plant. It's not Based and it's not Meat.

New comment by noufalibrahim in "Fontcrafter: Turn Your Handwriting into a Real Font"

noufalibrahim — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:29:16 +0000

I agree. I make adjustments depending on which parts of the page I'm on and what I'm writing. This is a nice project but I'm not sure id want to use it for anything.

New comment by noufalibrahim in "A tool that removes censorship from open-weight LLMs"

noufalibrahim — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:53:36 +0000

I believe that this is already done to several models. One that I've come across are the JOSIEfied models from Gökdeniz Gülmez. I downloaded one or two and tried them on a local ollama setup. It does generate potentially dangerous output. Turning on thinking for the QWEN series shows how it arrives at it's conclusions and it's quite disturbing.

However, after a few rounds of conversation, it gets into loops and just repeats things over and over again. The main JOSIE models worked the best of all and was still useful even after abliteration.

New comment by noufalibrahim in "Show HN: Elecxzy – A lightweight, Lisp-free Emacs-like editor in Electron"

noufalibrahim — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 10:52:41 +0000

- Lisp Free x Emacs like

- Lightweight x Electron

Contradictions. Writing ones own editor is a bit of a rite of passage though. So, on that front, Congratulations!

New comment by noufalibrahim in "15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram"

noufalibrahim — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 07:37:12 +0000

Indeed. I don't remember all the details of the flow but the aesthetics of the diagram are still stuck in my head.

New comment by noufalibrahim in "Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse"

noufalibrahim — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 04:46:18 +0000

Completely agree. It shouldn't be treated as an excuse but it's silly to ignore this as a HUGE risk factor. Probably should be considered when making policies etc.

New comment by noufalibrahim in "Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse"

noufalibrahim — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 04:52:23 +0000

True. Damaged parents are often the kinds of people who are taken advantage of by sex offenders. I think it requires a social fix of some kind.

New comment by noufalibrahim in "I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers"

noufalibrahim — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 05:18:21 +0000

I've never used Arch but I can really get the vibe here. Wikis (especially toopical ones) are social media of sorts. There was a strong community around the #emacs IRC channel and emacswiki.org back in the day. About a 100 people who knew each other quite well. And an Emacs bot that could read from the wiki (pre-modern RAG I suppose) and answer questions.

New comment by noufalibrahim in "Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media"

noufalibrahim — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 05:45:04 +0000

I can relate to this. Early social media were forum sites, boards, irc, mailing lists and things like that.

New comment by noufalibrahim in "Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry"

noufalibrahim — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 03:10:59 +0000

Tangentially related. The idea that scientific research operates in a vacuum uninfluenced by real world considerations in its relentless search for truth is a notion that a lot of scientism advocates put out.

I've always found the idea laughable and this is a good example of that.

New comment by noufalibrahim in "ThinkNext Design"

noufalibrahim — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 07:13:29 +0000

I think it was mostly familiarity. I'd been using Linux on thinkpads for so long that I had a few config files which for the tools I used. Mine was a very text heavy command line workflow. Mostly driven by the keyboard. Almost no mouse usage (except the occasional GUI program to draw). Tiling window managers. I was also very used to package repositories which worked smoothly (Debian/Ubuntu). Brew etc. wasn't that smooth.

I suppose I could have learnt how to use it and become efficient but even the possible gains seemed very poor and I didn't think it was worth the investment. I used the smallest subset of features I needed to get my work done and that was enough.

New comment by noufalibrahim in "Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)"

noufalibrahim — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 13:06:01 +0000

I remember a panel once at a PyCon where we were discussing, I think, the anaconda distribution in the context of packaging and a respected data scientist (whose talks have always been hugely popular) made the point that he doesn't like Pandas because it's not excel. The latter was his go to tool for most of his exploratory work. If the data were too big, he'd sample it and things like that but his work finally was in Excel.

Quick Python/bash to cleanup data is fine too I suppose and with LLMs, it's easier than ever to write the quick throwaway script.

New comment by noufalibrahim in "ThinkNext Design"

noufalibrahim — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 11:08:50 +0000

I've been using Thinkpads exclusively from 2005 or so. My first was a T40 I got from work. Then I got a T42 of my own. I used it heavily till the fan gave out. After that, I got an X200 which I used for a long time. The keyboard got damaged because of a spill. I replaced it but somehow, the motherboard got shorted out and it died. I then bought a second hand X240 (roughly 2013) and used it as my primary machines. Replaced the battery (twice), fan, hand rest. And it's still running. My kids use it to play some simple games. My main machine right now is an X1 carbon (which I'm not really happy with compared to the others but it's okay for now).

I used a Macbook for about 2.5 years in between. Didn't like it (hardware was decent. Software was terrible). I also bought a Dell latitude (which was okay and is being used now as headless machine at my workplace for tinkering).

But my primary machine is a Thinkpad and I don't expect to see that changing in the near future.

New comment by noufalibrahim in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

noufalibrahim — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 07:50:15 +0000

http://nibrahim.net.in.

Not updated frequently. Mostly personal with a drop of technology. I've been on this hosting provider (hcoop.net) since 2002ish.

New comment by noufalibrahim in "The next two years of software engineering"

noufalibrahim — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 11:39:27 +0000

I don't really know if I agree with you but the analogy is really good. :)