Hacker News: setopt

New comment by setopt in "Klaxon a livr earthquake map with no back end"

setopt — Sun, 17 May 2026 12:02:55 +0000

Seems the author is active on HN (see the parallel thread)

New comment by setopt in "Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux"

setopt — Sat, 16 May 2026 17:58:18 +0000

It’s more like a low-background label: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

New comment by setopt in "Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux"

setopt — Sat, 16 May 2026 17:53:50 +0000

Are there even still sufficiently large populations of win9x-compatible viruses online to make it a security issue anymore?

New comment by setopt in "Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux"

setopt — Sat, 16 May 2026 17:51:34 +0000

I’m curious, are you running i386 devices or more philosophically opposed to deprecation?

New comment by setopt in "Δ-Mem: Efficient Online Memory for Large Language Models"

setopt — Sat, 16 May 2026 13:38:58 +0000

Even for ASCII chars, nomenclature in math and physics is usually case-sensitive.

New comment by setopt in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

setopt — Thu, 14 May 2026 18:26:21 +0000

All of the things you mention can also be done as a PostDoc. Which might be even better for social networking, broadening your research portfolio, etc. than staying in a single PhD position for the duration of a PhD + PostDoc.

New comment by setopt in "What happens when you post a real Monet and say it's AI?"

setopt — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:57:15 +0000

Define «original».

Under many definitions, where novel composition of existing knowledge or techniques is counted, it certainly can.

New comment by setopt in "Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution"

setopt — Mon, 11 May 2026 18:50:36 +0000

It was good on a long time scale, but I think the parent poster refers to the short term. If I recall correctly, during the early Industrial Revolution the average life span decreased, child mortality went through the roof, and malnutrition meant adults lost their teeth in their early 20s at best. That was… worse. It took time for the revolution to become a net-positive for the average person (which I certainly wouldn’t dispute).

New comment by setopt in "Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data"

setopt — Fri, 08 May 2026 18:42:35 +0000

As an associate professor, I do explain things the first day, but I am certainly not permitted to fail students as a consequence of not checking their email daily.

Even if they didn’t hand in an assignment at all, without any reason provided, I’m required by regulation to offer them a second chance to pass that assignment.

The students’ rights are quite strong here (Northern Europe), which I generally support, but it has some downsides.

New comment by setopt in "Canvas is down as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data"

setopt — Fri, 08 May 2026 08:24:15 +0000

In my experience, it’s hard enough to make students check their school email in the first place. Let alone filter it.

New comment by setopt in "Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data"

setopt — Fri, 08 May 2026 08:12:58 +0000

Just to add one more data point, we also use Canvas at my university. The deadline for submitting who are eligible (i.e. passed compulsory assignments and labs) to take the exam was yesterday, and I couldn’t meet that deadline because Canvas went down. I usually do corrections offline so I have backups of my own evaluations, but these are courses with many teachers and many TAs, so Canvas is the way we sync our assessments.

New comment by setopt in "A desktop made for one"

setopt — Sun, 03 May 2026 22:27:21 +0000

I had to check it up too. Appears to be a synonym for "inverting" used in some fields like biology and medicine.

New comment by setopt in "Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants"

setopt — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 19:09:29 +0000

It makes economic sense because they require a large initial investment (CAPEX), but low cost per year to keep functioning for many decades (OPEX). In contrast to say wind or solar, which are smaller CAPEX but higher OPEX.

So when you compare average cost per year over the complete expected lifetime of the plants, nuclear is good, but when you compare the up-front cost to build it, yeah it looks bad.

Another thing is that nuclear in the US is far more costly than in e.g. France. The key is that France standardized a few reactor designs that they kept building again and again, which made both construction and maintenance cheaper over time. While in the US, each nuclear plant is a unicorn, which can perhaps result in better individual designs but ends up more expensive.

New comment by setopt in "HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing"

setopt — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:49:41 +0000

How long until we have to solve a captcha per message to counter that?

New comment by setopt in "Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers"

setopt — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:17:20 +0000

Since it’s an upgrade of markdown, you should have called it "markup".

New comment by setopt in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

setopt — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 22:45:42 +0000

I don’t disagree, I just moved back to Linux from macOS myself (Tahoe was the last drop for me).

But did you try Homebrew and its extensions? It works pretty well for managing both terminal and GUI apps, and has some useful extensions like Brewfile, MAS, etc. Its not perfect, but for single-user Macs with an up-to-date OS version, it works quite well.

New comment by setopt in "Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)"

setopt — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:41:16 +0000

> I would welcome a version of it that stripped out everything but that, and just replayed the last few pages of scrollback on reattach.

Like `dtach`?

New comment by setopt in "Android now stops you sharing your location in photos"

setopt — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:03:15 +0000

I had a similar moment a few years ago. That Google Maps pop-up was what caused me to first switch to de-googled Android, and once that turned out to be a hassle after a couple of years, switch to an iPhone without Google stuff. (On Android, Google is a location provider, so blocking their access is much harder.)

New comment by setopt in "Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user"

setopt — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:05:08 +0000

Indeed. For example, most desktop operating systems have a keybinding for «search for any Unicode symbol by name and input it». That would make sense to have as a fallback button on a virtual keyboard too.

The iOS emoji selector is close in UI/UX already, but the search is restricted to the emoji range of Unicode.

New comment by setopt in "Women were never meant to give birth on their backs"

setopt — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 06:42:33 +0000

If the water actually broke, inducing labor can be important to reduce the risk of infection though, since bacteria can easily get into the amniotic fluid. If the water didn’t break yet, then at least where I live they don’t induce unless you go so much over the expected birth date that there is a high risk you’ll need C-section if you wait more (in Northern Europe they generally don’t offer C-sections unless medically required).