Hacker News: privong

New comment by privong in "How close can pure functional programming get to C?"

privong — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 14:59:23 +0000

Maybe I am misunderstanding what you wrote, but "state" in the context of functional programming refers to the state internal to the program, not the state external to the program. So whether the input data comes from the real world is orthogonal to the question of whether a program preserve state.

OpenBSD 8.0

privong — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 02:06:40 +0000

Article URL: https://www.openbsd.org/80.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50160494

Points: 493

# Comments: 159

Janus (reversible computing programming language)

privong — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 05:22:31 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_(reversible_computing_programming_language)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50099510

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by privong in "Recreational Programming"

privong — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 11:12:27 +0000

I'm not sure I follow...were there ever (many) jobs in the ham radio community? There have been people making/selling kits and radios, but it is _amateur_ radio, so was inherently non-commercial.

New comment by privong in "Diesel prices in U.S. top $6 a gallon for first time"

privong — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:35:27 +0000

I agree with you. But to be fair, gasoline powered cars are also converging on being crappy tablets with wheels attached.

New comment by privong in "LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby"

privong — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 17:40:32 +0000

Analogously, there's evidence that companies will make extensive use of available techniques (browser fingerprinting, cookies, etc.) to track and surveil users without their knowledge and often against their will. The exposure of that arguably also hasn't triggered an effective backlash against those companies. So, as with the pre-Snowden evidence for domestic communication interception by the NSA, I think there's ample evidence of the willingness of companies to exploit whatever technologies they can in order to surveil users.

New comment by privong in "LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby"

privong — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 17:16:01 +0000

> This seems paranoid. There are many things which are technically possible, but [...]

Isn't this what people said pre-Snowden? Not that NSA spying is the same as corporate "surveillance capitalism", but if companies can make more money off it and the technology exists, it seems prudent to assume companies are trying it.

Juno to Establish Virtual Supercomputer Network (2001)

privong — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:19:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.internetnews.com/it-management/juno-to-establish-virtual-supercomputer-network/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49524957

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Agentic Research Is Oxymoronic

privong — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 16:12:17 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.31161

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49524016

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by privong in "There's no reason for software to be slow anymore"

privong — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 02:18:05 +0000

The downvotes may be related to community enforcing what's in the HN guidelines:

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Racket v9.3

privong — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:14:48 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.racket-lang.org/2026/08/racket-v9-3.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49302562

Points: 143

# Comments: 20

NSF, National Radio Astro Obs, and U.S. Naval Obs Partner on NgVLA Pathfinder

privong — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:40:12 +0000

Article URL: https://public.nrao.edu/news/ngvla-pathfinder/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49023376

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by privong in "“Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky"

privong — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 19:08:17 +0000

We're saying the same thing -- one radioastron satellite isn't enough, you'd need a constellation of them.

New comment by privong in "“Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky"

privong — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 08:24:59 +0000

> How about putting our astronomy experiments into space as well? There'd be no light / em pollution there, as well as no atmospheric interference etc.

One would need to put the telescopes into fairly high orbits in order to avoid the interference. I think that even images made with the Hubble space telescope have sometimes seen the impact of satellite constellations.

New comment by privong in "“Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky"

privong — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 08:23:16 +0000

> In space there are no limits, see Radioastron for example, and that was decades ago.

Radioastron required cross-correlating the signal with ground-based radio teleacopes in order to do science. The collecting area, dish distributons, etc. would need to be fully replicated in space if one wanted to avoid using ground-based facilities entirely.

New comment by privong in "“Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky"

privong — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 07:01:28 +0000

There's at least two issues with this line of thinking:

1. many astronomical observations are long integrations (many minutes of open shutter) and you often cannot read out the pixels during the exposure. So you can't selectively ignore pixels on a "by moment" basis. And with enough satellites, enough pixels could be affected to render an entire image effectively unusable

2. It seems you're thinking only about optical astronomy. There's also a ton of radio/millimeter wave astronomy that's done from the ground. Satellites have radio-wave downlinks that can be powerful enough to destroy the electronics used in radio astronomy receivers. The US's National Radio Astronomy Observatory has been working on data sharing with Starlink to mitigate this, but it's basically up to companies to agree to work together. Other satellites / companies don't engage in this coordination and so some radio telescopes need to go to a "safe"/stow position to protect the electronics. This costs valuable observing time.

Simplify: Move Code into Database Functions

privong — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 03:42:59 +0000

Article URL: https://sive.rs/pg

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48499676

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Email triage with an embedding-based classifier

privong — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:41:10 +0000

Article URL: https://adamwiggins.com/posts/triage-embedding-classifier/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315161

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by privong in "Why I still reach for Lisp and Scheme instead of Haskell"

privong — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 12:38:23 +0000

Can you elaborate on how this is doable (in, say, Racket) and what tooling is needed? I'm afraid your reply doesn't add much information beyond the same assertion that I quoted that was in the article posted to HN. And I haven't been able to find information on this with Racket.

New comment by privong in "Why I still reach for Lisp and Scheme instead of Haskell"

privong — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:46:06 +0000

That could very well be it. I guess I had gotten my hopes up, seeing the statement in a piece that purported to be specifically about Scheme .