Hacker News: razeh

New comment by razeh in "The Four-Color Theorem 1852–1976"

razeh — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 18:10:04 +0000

Professor Appel was my boss when I was a system administrator for the UIUC Math department, working my way through grad school. He was one of the best bosses I’ve had over the past thirty years and had a real knack for dealing with the immature twenty something’s (like me).

He was incredibly humble about the 4 color proof, and well, just about everything. He continued to learn new things — I remember him asking me to help him debug some PostScript and I couldn’t believe it was happening.

New comment by razeh in "Bison return to Illinois' Kane County after 200 years"

razeh — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 01:12:08 +0000

I’m in River Forest and the deer are a pain to deal with. They eat your plants, they’re not afraid of people (because they get hand feed) and they get hit by cars.

They’re lacking their natural predators — and the logical solution of introducing them is ruled out because the local forest preserves aren’t large enough to support wolf packs.

Maybe the coyotes will figure out how to take them down.

New comment by razeh in "Homeschooling hits record numbers"

razeh — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 06:26:32 +0000

Every human being should have the experience of unconditional, unadulterated love from someone else. But not 24 by 7.

New comment by razeh in "Why should I care what color the bikeshed is? (1999)"

razeh — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 14:49:43 +0000

I was writing software at a bank and found a bug. I was told to save it for when we had our audit —- because no matter what, the auditors were going to insist we fixed something and it might as well be something the development team wanted fixed too. I’ve heard of contractors who leave electrical outlets out of their plans so that the building department, which will insist something be changed in the plans (proving the department’s usefulness), does not insist on something hard.

New comment by razeh in "Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, has died"

razeh — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 21:48:10 +0000

I meet Greg when I was an undergraduate at Syracuse University and he was earning his PhD. I helped out a bit with some of the graphics programming for his thesis. Greg was a class act, always patient and kind. It was super helpful to me when I went to UIUC for graduate schools and he showed up as a faculty member there; he knew how to get access to campus resources and was more willing to help me than faculty in my own department. He was a model RIP.

New comment by razeh in "Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland"

razeh — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 13:48:32 +0000

I think people tend to underestimate the risks in allowing suicide —- here’s a blurb from the linked article:

However, social acceptance may lead to more egregious abuses: the issue gained a higher profile in early 2010, when an 80-year-old man escaped after discovering his intended fate and heard his family members discussing how they were going to "share" his lands, and took refuge in a relative's home.

New comment by razeh in "The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)"

razeh — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 02:32:41 +0000

This is true for more than dev productivity.

New comment by razeh in "Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly"

razeh — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 23:55:15 +0000

In finance a bad engineer can bankrupt the firm.

New comment by razeh in "Bradford pear trees banned in few states – More are looking to eradicate them"

razeh — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 22:05:35 +0000

When the article got to the part where the trees were thought to be sterile, did anyone else hear Jeff Goldblum saying “Life finds a way”?

New comment by razeh in "Fed court rules for retired engineer told by state to not talk about math"

razeh — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 13:06:58 +0000

I was on the jury for a resisting arrest case and ended up as an alternate. The judge pulled us into chambers and we talked for about an hour. One of the things that he said that stuck with me was “Everybody thinks it is CSI in here. It’s not. People come here and they tell you [the jurors] stories and then you have to decide which are true.”

New comment by razeh in "Fed court rules for retired engineer told by state to not talk about math"

razeh — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 03:10:20 +0000

Something similar is brought up in the decision —- the licensing board could have had the licensed engineer's stamp their reports as a way of marking them as produced by licensed engineers. That the board just tried to shut Nutt up instead is one of the reasons they lost.

New comment by razeh in "Fed court rules for retired engineer told by state to not talk about math"

razeh — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 03:03:25 +0000

Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.

New comment by razeh in "Launch HN: Radical (YC W23) – Autonomous high-altitude solar aircraft"

razeh — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 01:53:15 +0000

What are the alternatives to batteries if you want to fly through the night?

New comment by razeh in "A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy"

razeh — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 02:22:22 +0000

There’s no practical way for a defense lawyer to find out what the error rate is for, say, a state lab. Occasionally organizations can do this, for example the innocence project figured out that the FBI’s hair analysis was bogus for decades (https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-testimony-on-mic...).

New comment by razeh in "A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy"

razeh — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 00:43:23 +0000

No. When it comes to evaluating forensic evidence lawyers are, by training, too process oriented to solve the problems. Ask a prosecutor what the error rate is for fingerprints or DNA evidence and you’ll get a blank stare. They don’t even try to measure it.

New comment by razeh in "How to survive a car crash"

razeh — Sun, 14 May 2023 13:35:25 +0000

I live in a walkable inner ring Chicago suburb, and commute to work by bike or the El. Snow cleanup is excellent in our suburb, and we can get to things we want to drive to in bad weather on roads where the speed limit is never over 25 mph. We just don’t need winter tires.

New comment by razeh in "Bazel 1.0"

razeh — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 17:28:43 +0000

For C++ we've had better luck, on our local cluster, with distcc than with bazel's remote execution, and we've found the the cache slowed things down. Has your experience all been in the google cloud?