Hacker News: pvitz

New comment by pvitz in "Show HN: GhostBox – disposable little machines from the Global Free Tier."

pvitz — Fri, 01 May 2026 15:17:27 +0000

Segfault provides something similar with a direct ssh connection: https://www.thc.org/segfault/

New comment by pvitz in "Ask HN: How to get started with robotics as a hobbyist?"

pvitz — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 17:57:21 +0000

The book "Robot Builder's Bonanza" is a nice introduction and gets you started on the hardware side.

New comment by pvitz in "Lua 5.5"

pvitz — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 22:31:02 +0000

From the manual:

   The control variable in for loops is read only. If you need to change it, declare a local variable with the same name in the loop body.

Also [0]: Roberto Ierusalimschy > So what's the rationale to make them constant now? Does it have performance > reasons?

Yes. The old code does an implicit "local x = x" for all loops, in case you modify 'x'. With the new semantics, the code only does it when you ask for it.

[0] https://groups.google.com/g/lua-l/c/SlAG5QfpTac

New comment by pvitz in "Lie groups are crucial to some of the most fundamental theories in physics"

pvitz — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 20:46:15 +0000

That symmetries imply conservation laws is pretty fascinating (see the Noether theorem). I guess it seems only strange it you assume already that the conservation law holds.

New comment by pvitz in "Learning Feynman's Trick for Integrals"

pvitz — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 08:35:07 +0000

When I was a student of physics and came across this paragraph in Feynman's book, I was curious if he really meant the simple technique explained in the article, a more general one (also described in the article with the integral bounds as functions of a parameter) or something else. I don't know, but this led me to read the text "Advanced Calculus" by Edwin Bidwell Wilson (1912), which includes a lot of examples and gems. If there is some young student out there who wants to go well beyond the basic techniques of calculus taught in analysis or mathematical physics courses, have a look at [0].

[0] https://archive.org/details/advancedcalculus031579mbp/mode/1...

New comment by pvitz in "Kaitai Struct: declarative binary format parsing language"

pvitz — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 17:03:45 +0000

I understood "binaries" in "compressed binaries" as "executables", e.g. like a packed executable, but I see that you mean indeed a binary file (and not e.g. a text file).

New comment by pvitz in "Kaitai Struct: declarative binary format parsing language"

pvitz — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 15:56:24 +0000

Thanks for your reply and advice! I guess what you describe as "impossible" is the case I am mostly interested in, though more for non-executable binary data. If I am not mistaken, this goes under the term "file fragment classification", but I have been wondering if practitioners might have figured out some better ways than what one can find in scholarly articles.

And yes, searching for the reimplementation beforehand would have saved me some hours :D

New comment by pvitz in "Kaitai Struct: declarative binary format parsing language"

pvitz — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 14:53:19 +0000

A shot in the dark, but maybe you could give me a hint. Recently, I was interested in extracting sprites from an old game. I was able to reverse the file format of the data archive, which contained the game assets as files. However, I got stuck because the image files were obviously compressed. By chance, I found an open source reimplementation of the game and realised it was LZ77+Huffman compressed, but how would one detect the type of compression and parameters with only the file? That seems a pretty hard problem or are there good heuristics to detect that?

New comment by pvitz in "LabPlot: Free, open source and cross-platform Data Visualization and Analysis"

pvitz — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 17:54:30 +0000

Same experience here! We used Origin and/or QtiPlot in a physics lab for the graphs and quick regressions.

New comment by pvitz in "“Dynamic programming” is not referring to “computer programming”"

pvitz — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 14:49:55 +0000

More like "precomputed table" and "table lookup"...

New comment by pvitz in "[dead]"

pvitz — Fri, 23 May 2025 11:30:02 +0000

We have been in the process of upgrading to the latest version and can't continue. The lack of communication by Mathworks is very strange.

New comment by pvitz in "Migrating to Codeberg"

pvitz — Mon, 12 May 2025 09:46:43 +0000

The reasons for this change seem to be described in [0] with the following summary:

  > The contribution workflow in Guix has been facing several challenges:
  > difficult onboarding, lack of legibility, complex, unreliable, and
  > labor-intensive infrastructure, and lack of automation.  All these lead
  > to an experience that contributors often find frustrating and hinders
  > quality assurance efforts.  We propose to address these limitations by
  > migrating repositories, issue tracking, and patch tracking to Codeberg,
  > an integrated forge with a Web interface that is hosted by a non-profit.

[0] https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/content/sha1_git...

New comment by pvitz in "Obituary for Cyc"

pvitz — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 10:03:58 +0000

> But the longer I worked there the more I felt like the plan was basically:

> 1. Manually add more and more common-sense knowledge and extend the inference engine

> 2. ???

> 3. AGI!

In retrospect, this reasoning doesn't seem to be so wrong.

New comment by pvitz in "The History of S.u.S.E"

pvitz — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 15:28:52 +0000

That the distribution was a fully translated system together with a thick manual (of course also in German) was the whole point and idea. Your comment is too dismissive in my opinion.

Episode 1: Digital Jesus a.k.a. Matt Harrigan – Wwsul

pvitz — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 20:40:36 +0000

Article URL: https://wherewarlocksstayuplate.com/interview/episode-1-digital-jesus-aka-matt-harrigan/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911577

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by pvitz in "Living with Nausea: My Story in Six Charts"

pvitz — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 18:52:17 +0000

My migraines turned out to be related to my wisdom teeth. Once they were removed (for a different reason), the migraines stopped.

New comment by pvitz in "Zusie – My Relay Computer"

pvitz — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 07:00:48 +0000

Do you buy the sockets or do you have a custom solution for that?

New comment by pvitz in "Magnus Carlsen to return to World Blitz Championship after dress code dispute"

pvitz — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 07:21:14 +0000

From all we know, this was most likely an oversight by Carlsen and then an overreaction by FIDE. After he left on his own, I guess the main sponsor got pretty upset with FIDE and forced this dispensation to let all of them somehow save face and keep the star in the tournament.

New comment by pvitz in "OK, I can partly explain the LLM chess weirdness now"

pvitz — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 19:40:38 +0000

A system that would just output the most probable tokens based on the text it was fed and trained on the games played by players with ratings greater than 1800 would certainly fail to output the right moves to totally unlikely board positions.

New comment by pvitz in "Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code"

pvitz — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 19:05:48 +0000

Yes, it looks like they should have written "NM" instead of "nm".