Hacker News: peonicles

New comment by peonicles in "Self-taught engineers often outperform (2024)"

peonicles — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 15:01:14 +0000

Margaret Hamilton (checks wikipedia) studied mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1955.

Back in 1955, "computer science" wasn't a thing yet. Computers were the domain of electrical engineering and math, the latter of which was what Margaret studied..

New comment by peonicles in "Microsoft is creating a new Rust-based programming language for secure coding"

peonicles — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 18:23:22 +0000

Sylvan Clebsch and Sophia Drossopoulou (credited on Project Verona in a slide) work on the Pony, which has been described as a cross between Rust and Erlang.

New comment by peonicles in "Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B"

peonicles — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 16:24:32 +0000

I had to google for what "^H" meant.

Found an interesting answer and backstory: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/386870.html

New comment by peonicles in "A new credit bubble gets ready to burst"

peonicles — Sun, 02 Jun 2019 21:03:21 +0000

Isn't this bundling what caused the subprime crisis ? How is this time "guaranteed to work well" ?

New comment by peonicles in "Smoke and Mirrors: How Snap and Pinterest Hide User Attrition"

peonicles — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 15:52:19 +0000

Maybe it's social media that is broken.

New comment by peonicles in "Crypto 101 – Introductory course on cryptography"

peonicles — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 19:08:41 +0000

It seems that the downloadable pdf doesn't have a couple of tweaks that have landed in master (https://github.com/crypto101/book). Any plans to generate a slightly updated version ?

PS: Thanks for your work ! Watched your talk and it was a nice quick primer. Glad you turned it into a book with more detail.

New comment by peonicles in "Overview and Introduction to Lisp (1986) [video]"

peonicles — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 16:13:27 +0000

The entire series of 20 lectures (uploaded by MIT) is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY&list=PLE18841CAB...

New comment by peonicles in "An Experimental Course on Operating Systems"

peonicles — Sat, 13 Jan 2018 04:04:11 +0000

Rust + Rpi interests me and I might wanna follow along. Are they using an available kit from an online retailer ? Getting/shipping individual parts is a pain where I'm from.

New comment by peonicles in "An Experimental Course on Operating Systems"

peonicles — Sat, 13 Jan 2018 02:22:13 +0000

> Here is another thought. One has to realize that nobody wants an operating system. People only use them because it is the only way to run the applications the users actually wants to use.

That reduces things to almost an absurd level, and literally tries to ignore reality.

---

I want X!

Ok, we need this and that to get there...

I don't want this and that, I want X!

But you need this and that to get to X...

I don't want this and that, I want X!

---

While it's true in essence, and people should always keep the end user and lofty end goals in mind, we should never lose sight of the ground, because that's where we exist.

Besides, different users want their operating system to do different things.

> At best an operating system is absolutely invisible ... but a new non-OS would probably be a better idea than a new OS.

This train of thought can be applied to just about anything. The best product for X would just get out of the way, and assist you seamlessly to do X.

New comment by peonicles in "New Zealand to ban foreigners from buying existing houses"

peonicles — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 01:12:34 +0000

Because they actually live there ? As opposed to transient visitors ?

It's like going to your friend's house and rearranging the furniture there because "we were all born on planet Earth".

New comment by peonicles in "JSLinux – Run Linux or other Operating Systems in your browser"

peonicles — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 18:35:52 +0000

I was a little disappointed to see there wasn't any internet connection on Windows 2000.

All I wanted to do was to open Firefox, goto https://bellard.org/jslinux/ , and fire up the Linux emulator ...

New comment by peonicles in "The Despair of Learning That Experience No Longer Matters"

peonicles — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 03:29:08 +0000

Its not as simple as that. Humans are social, and want to feel that they are "useful", that their presence / skills are needed. Not having a job takes that away from them, which can snowball into psychological issues, and possibly turn them "bad".

When a chunk of society becomes jobless, we've got problems ...

New comment by peonicles in "Why the MacBook Pro Is Limited to 16GB of RAM"

peonicles — Sun, 20 Nov 2016 05:30:15 +0000

Competing laptop manufacturers have options for more ram.

New comment by peonicles in "Tabby's star is dimming at an incredible rate"

peonicles — Sat, 06 Aug 2016 20:56:49 +0000

There's a comment [1] in the other reddit thread that somewhat rules this out.

> That doesn't even make sense when you're flying within the Solar System. Stuff moves, so you have to fly towards where it's going to be, not where it is.

> The star is far enough away to be treated as a point source, with its light forming an apparent cone with the Earth's diameter. It doesn't intuitively make sense, at least to me, that the ship would stay within that cone as it corrects for the motion of our Solar System (and its own) within our galaxy. Remember that this dimming effect has been observable for several decades.

Then again, aliens don't have any obligation to make sense to us.

[1] : https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comments/4waozn/new_paper...

New comment by peonicles in "Marketers and ad buyers are moving away from Vine"

peonicles — Fri, 13 May 2016 17:44:57 +0000

> Some Vine stars charge as much as six figures for a branded Vine, a pricey bet for buyers.

6 figures, for 6 seconds of video. Sounds about right.

New comment by peonicles in "Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source"

peonicles — Tue, 10 May 2016 18:32:29 +0000

It's probably fair to say the DVCS accelerated the growth of the entire software industry.

Was BitKeeper the first version control system to "think distributed" ?

New comment by peonicles in "Hedge Funds Faced Choppy Waters in 2015, but Chiefs Cashed In"

peonicles — Tue, 10 May 2016 11:34:07 +0000

The waiter provides a service in exchange for money. Hedge fund managers literally move money around. Their value add is debatable.

New comment by peonicles in "Hedge Funds Faced Choppy Waters in 2015, but Chiefs Cashed In"

peonicles — Tue, 10 May 2016 11:28:10 +0000

Granted they are skilled at what they do, but I think the point is that they don't create much, if anything of actual value.

New comment by peonicles in "Linux at 25: Q&A with Linus Torvalds"

peonicles — Wed, 30 Mar 2016 12:03:19 +0000

> This is so quintessentially Linus. He's criticizing this idealized tech startup CEO character with a big passionate vision, (...)

I don't think he's criticizing anyone in particular. He probably doesn't care enough about most startups to even begin criticizing them.

Well, unless said tech startup CEO submits a dumb patch to the Linux kernel ...

New comment by peonicles in "That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people"

peonicles — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 16:37:55 +0000

If you have serious money problems, you can't spend the "extra" $600 you have on an iPhone, even if it supposedly pays for itself after 24 months.

You spend $600 on food and necessities. Because you need to survive.