There’s literally nothing stopping them from fixing the bug in either this case or the hypothetical. The maintainer just doesn’t respond to email from .ru domains. He could still choose to take the patch. He may just have decided not to accept this patch because changing something quite obscure to fix a weird printer used by one guy is likely to cause more problems than it solves. We don’t know because he didn’t respond.

That certainly doesn’t mean he wouldn’t fix a serious bug just because he heard about it from a .ru address.

Greg K-H is a fully autonomous human being and he doesn’t work for the author of tfa. It sucks that we live in a world where nation states try to put exploits into the linux kernel and other foss projects but we very much do live in that world. It sucks that that means the author doesn’t get to contribute to the Linux kernel because their government (who they presumably have little control over) are very active in doing that, but that too is a fact of life.

Either way Greg K-H doesn’t owe you or me or the author anything and people need to stop being so entitled about free software.

Similarly, narrowing test cases to the smallest case that reproduces a particular behaviour so you're only actually testing a very targeted thing will make the test suite faster and also make it easier to fix tests which break because they exercise a very narrow path.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48432479

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

   Recruiter: Hey there!  Do you know what this is?
   Colleague: Err, … It *looks* like some sort of network protocol
   Recruiter:  No, it’s *COMPUTER CODE*

One of the most boring and yet egregious examples imo is "Random Variable". So named because

- they aren't random and

- they aren't variables.[1]

A "random variable" is actually a measurable deterministic function from the set of possible outcomes of some experiment to the real numbers. But you can see why the name "random variable" is confusing to people.

[1] https://cyril9227.github.io/random-variables/ and elsewhere.

When I was younger, I used to own a zoo, and a pirate ship....

Though not at the same time. We couldn't afford that much lego.

Yes. In fact we would not be the first to call Turkey “Europe”. In ancient Greece they used the name “Europe” to refer to part of Thrace that is now in Turkey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(consort_of_Zeus)#Conti...

   > Can't all proofs be eventually broken down into their fundamental pieces and then it's clear as day if it's right or wrong?

The proof that there are 26 of these sporadic simple groups is part of the theorem known as the classification of finite simple groups, sometimes known as the “Enormous Theorem”.[1] It took over 100 mathematicians nearly 50 years and resulted in hundreds of papers. Even with that many mathematicians involved, there were still errors and revisions needed to the original proof. Some of the original authors are gradually publishing a somewhat simplified version of the proof but it’s still a massive effort.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_finite_simpl...

Even when the proof is produced by the llm in a formal system like Lean4 it may not be “honest”[2] and it can be hard to tell if the proof is very long and complex and especially if it includes highly specialized results from lots of different areas of maths. Llms can (and do) do this just fine, but for a human proof that would require a team each of which was specialized in a particular area. Those people are more likely to be able to cross-check each other.

[1] https://pubs.ams.org/ebooks/conm/098/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem

[2] An “honest” proof may contain bugs or errors but it does not constitute a deliberate attack on the proof system or the math libraries it uses. Systems like Lean aim to not incorrectly validate an honest proof with mistakes but don’t guarantee anything in the case of a proof being dishonest. This is the sense used here https://lean-lang.org/doc/reference/latest/ValidatingProofs/ .

“To my loving wife, who read this entire book, apart from the maths parts.”

I used to hate writing on the ipad but the thing that was transformational for me was a “paperlike”[1] screen protector, which makes the surface feel a lot nicer to write on.

[1] https://paperlike.com/

Whenever you say "nobody would be that stupid" you have to pause and take a deep breath and realise that however dumb something is, there are for sure people who are stupid enough to do it.

Example 1 from personal experience: I was at my aunt's house and she had to rush a friend's husband to get medical help because he had drilled a hole in his own stomach with a hand drill while trying to put up a bookshelf.

The friend had been reading a book on medieval medicine so (rather than rushing her husband immediately to hospital) decided to try a medieval remedy on him so fed him some soup to see whether (in line with the medieval diagnostic routine) she could smell it after he had eaten it. She could indeed, because it dribbled out of the hole he had drilled in his stomach.

Now. You might reasonably say: "Noone would be so dumb as to drill a hole in their own stomach" or indeed "noone would be so dumb as to see a loved one who had drilled a hole in themselves and decide to feed them soup" but I can tell you from direct personal experience there are people dumb enough to do this.

Example 2 from personal experience[1]: A friend of my dad who was a highly capable chemical engineer and generally very practical guy (eg he made a motorcycle for his kids to play on using salvaged parts including a lawnmower engine and a frame he welded together himself) was a hobby parachutist. He broke his spine because he decided to modify his parachute himself on his wife's sewing machine in spite of having no previous sewing experience.

However dumb something is, there are people dumb enough to do it and even otherwise smart people have blind spots that make them incredibly dumb under the right circumstances.

[1] Just in case you think smart people can't do incredibly dumb things.

And a couple of docs I converted from latex went from about 10s to compile in latex to 10ms to compile in typst. I didn't think this would be a big deal since my docs aren't that big and I didn't feel like I was waiting long for compile but I'm already much more productive as a result.

Having said all of that, I have no idea why you would want pandoc or markdown involved. Typst (unlike latex) is really no harder than markdown to type, so you should just be using typst rather than markdown if that's what you want. Then you don't need pandoc in the mix at all.

It's also (ironically given TFA) what I used to sync all my files off dropbox when I cancelled my subscription because of their misuse of root to re-add their thing to special permissions on macOs after I had removed it.[2]

[1] https://rclone.org/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338 not trying to reopen a flame war, but for me personally, that was one of those things a company doesn't get to do to me twice. As soon as it happened, I copied my files off and cancelled. In fact I'm there somewhere in the comments on that article saying I was going to be cancelling and I immediately did.