Hacker News: quchen

New comment by quchen in "Phone-free bars and restaurants on the rise across the U.S."

quchen — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:10:53 +0000

There are a couple of communities that have almost no phone presence. Certain kinds of music festivals are an example, and it's really quite nice not having to worry about being filmed.

New comment by quchen in "Why I love NixOS"

quchen — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 17:52:13 +0000

The idea is so good it’s as close to platonic as it gets. The user experience of writing your own nix expressions is so bad that it makes me angry every time I try. Not only that, but at some point the beginner help (!) meta became »use flakes, don’t do what the existing tutorials tell you, yes flakes are unstable beta and there are no tutorials but use it I beg you«. No, please, let me choose my own way to learn!

I haven’t given it a shot in the LLM age yet though, and trying out NixOS in a VM is not only easy, it is practical – in the sense that when you’re happy, you can simply boot that same config/OS anywhere else by just installing that config. And I’ll never forget that one time where I completely borked my everything in the VM, did a kernel rollback with like 3 command line args and a reboot, and the OS was, well, rolled back. As I said, almost platonic.

What I can recommend is using nix-the-package-manager. Whenever I need the newest version of something, `nix-env -i ` and it’s there and works. If it doesn’t, roll back. If I need a different version, that’s on nixpkgs as well, with the same negligible amount of friction.

New comment by quchen in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

quchen — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:40:46 +0000

Do you have a link? There are plenty of snippets that are easy to find, is there one canonical full video?

New comment by quchen in "Death to Scroll Fade"

quchen — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:40:03 +0000

I used to use WikiTok [1] on my phone at times, but now they’ve introduced »words appear word by word« on the mobile version. Baffles me, why one would hide and gradually reveal any sort of content. It’s nauseating!

[1]: https://www.wikitok.io/

New comment by quchen in "Slicing Bezier Surfaces"

quchen — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 11:13:47 +0000

Bezier curve are just nested lerps! A bezier curve of degree 1 is lerp, what we usually call "bezier curve" is of degree 3.

It's a mathematical property that bezier curves (degree n) can be split exactly into two bezier curves (degree n), which is known as deCasteljau's algorithm:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Casteljau%27s_algorithm

That page also features some pretty animations on the "lerpy" part - Bezier curves are really simple, it's just that for some reason they are often presented with lots of math jargon that's completely over the top.

This is also used to efficiently draw bezier curves: subdivide them until they're visually straight lines, then plot those.

New comment by quchen in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

quchen — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 08:18:24 +0000

(Note the post you’ve replied to mentioned electrons and _protons_, not positrons.)

New comment by quchen in "PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch"

quchen — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 11:39:40 +0000

In my recent experience, a new culture of "I switched to Linux and it's fine" is establishing itself. It's on HN, sometimes on YouTube, sometimes my friends are unhappy with ads in their OS. It takes a very good reason to switch OS (most workflows break, after all), and I think the reasons are piling up into mainstream unhappiness.

New comment by quchen in "Xfce is great"

quchen — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 08:25:07 +0000

You can configure a window resize hotkey. I use Win+(drag the window with right mouse) and it resizes it i the way you expect, moving the corner closest to the cursor. Left click would move the window instead of resizing.

This is by far my favorite way to resize and I don't know why it's not an industry standard.

New comment by quchen in "Never Use Pixelation to Hide Sensitive Text (2014)"

quchen — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 20:28:06 +0000

Flameshot (a screenshot tool) in its newer versions (!!) uses random noise for pixelation, and colors it based on the un-noised surroundings so it blends in reasonably.

It's a nice mix if optically unobtrusive, algorithmically secure, and pleasant to look at.

New comment by quchen in "A Century of Noether's Theorem"

quchen — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 16:43:24 +0000

Noether is one of my heroes. Rising through the ranks to one of the greatest minds we've known, recognized in spite of being a woman in a time where that was unthinkable in science, all odds against her. And yet here she is, the name of one of the most basic, and most beautiful, concepts in physics. The inventor of abstract algebra too (which I hear is as significant, it's just not my domain).

So many great minds have had to fight an uphill battle, but few had it as steep and even fewer were as successful as her doing so.

It really is a shame that she's not as recognized as the Bohrs and Feynmans and Paulis and so on, but at least everyone with a passing interest in theoretical physics ought to know about her.

New comment by quchen in "Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo"

quchen — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 14:33:39 +0000

To expand on Firefox mobile: if you haven’t tried it, give it a shot. uBlock Origin works just like on desktop. I have seen maybe five ads on my phone browser (including Youtube!) since buying it in 2019.

New comment by quchen in "Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products"

quchen — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 18:35:25 +0000

Which is what?

New comment by quchen in "What's the deal with Euler's identity?"

quchen — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 11:00:55 +0000

Any hints towards the answers? I've spent a lot of time with complex numbers, and my answers would be

Quaternions: not profound, C is complete, quirky but useful representation of SO(3)

Inverses: fun fact coincidence

1+i/1-i: not sure what to experiment with here

i^i: gateway to riemann surfaces.

Adding angles: comes out like this, that's the point of exp(i phi)

Unit circle: roots of unity?

Riemann sphere: cool stuff!

Quantum stuff: mathematical physicist here, no need to sell this one!

New comment by quchen in "Löb and Möb: Loops in Haskell (2013)"

quchen — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 10:18:13 +0000

I did not expect this to surface after all these years, but here we are! o:-)

New comment by quchen in "Affinity Studio now free"

quchen — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 17:09:20 +0000

One of the reasons I stopped doing photography was that I realized I’m locked to using Lightroom where all my previous pictures are, and without a subscription it’s such a hassle to gain access to them again. I miss the days when I just bought Lightroom and that was it. :-(

New comment by quchen in "MAML – A new configuration language"

quchen — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 23:34:34 +0000

I love that in the end, everything still comes down to using bash (and env vars), because for all its footguns and strings, it's still the most reasonable choice when giving up on the zoo of newer formats. I expect it to outlive us all, like our unergonomic keyboards, and having to deal with null values.

New comment by quchen in "Type Theory and Functional Programming (1999) [pdf]"

quchen — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 17:00:23 +0000

TAPL, I meant TAPL (Types and Programming languages by Pierce)! This would not have happened with a well-typed comment section. I mixed up OP's book (which is nice as well!) and the abbreviation. Sorry!

New comment by quchen in "Type Theory and Functional Programming (1999) [pdf]"

quchen — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 08:10:20 +0000

TTOP is the standard work on the topic. Some parts I would say fell out of fashion (using Miranda for example), but many parts are either timeless or still just as relevant.

That said, the book is very dense; for me it was just too much the first time I tried to read it. After circling back to it after a while it gets much easier, because you know what parts you really need (which is a common pattern for me at least with everything academic).

New comment by quchen in "Windows 10 resists its end: usage share climbs while Windows 11's falls"

quchen — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 13:38:22 +0000

My gaming PC is a very unloved Windows machine, if not for that I'd be long gone (everything else is Linux). Come to think of it, gaming is why I used windows in the first place, starting with 95. With the Steam Deck and its push for Linux compat I don't see the next generation being so windows focused either.

New comment by quchen in "The elegance of movement in Silksong"

quchen — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 13:24:08 +0000

I’m curious about those traps. I used to hate Soulslikes, Elden Ring made it click, and I binged them all on PC. Traps became part of some twisted humor, I started waiting for the (literal) punchline. I missed traps, or as I started calling them, »FromSoft bullshit«, when there weren’t any for a while. I’m super careful and alert in all games now.

I wonder whether Silksong’s traps scratch that itch, or whether they’re just annoying.