Hacker News: zweifuss

New comment by zweifuss in "Why were Victorian elites so effective?"

zweifuss — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 06:55:24 +0000

The Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833; the government got deep into debt to reimburse the owners for their former slaves. That is not the whole story, of course, but the abolition of slavery before Victoria's reign was one of the brighter spots of British history.

New comment by zweifuss in "We found a division by zero bug in FFmpeg with a vibecoded fuzzer"

zweifuss — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 11:59:44 +0000

Some WTFs are to be expected: https://www.osnews.com/story/19266/wtfsm/

New comment by zweifuss in "Coconut oil jet fuel matches kerosene's efficiency in engine tests"

zweifuss — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 16:49:44 +0000

Middle of the road, comparable to Sunflower oil. But they want to utilize waste products and a low energy conversion process.

New comment by zweifuss in "LFM2.5 2.6B model competitive with 4x larger models"

zweifuss — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:06:16 +0000

It should. With good speed even on a 12th gen Intel. But more importantly, what's your use case?

New comment by zweifuss in "Covid.gov – Lab Leak: The True Origins of Covid-19"

zweifuss — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 10:04:41 +0000

These claims by WH site are at least debatable/unsubstanciated:

- "The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature." Furin cleavage sites are common in other types of coronaviruses (like MERS).

- "Data shows all cases stem from a single introduction into humans." The collected samples suggest there were at least two separate spillover events (Lineage A and Lineage B) at the Huanan Market.

- "If there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced." For many viruses we have never found the exact animal/human jump variant or the in-between carriers.

New comment by zweifuss in "UnifiedIR for Julia"

zweifuss — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:22:53 +0000

So, does this mean faster rendering in notebooks, better debugging, fewer NVIDIA troubles?

New comment by zweifuss in "Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows"

zweifuss — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 17:37:19 +0000

As said before, the physics for chemistry is 100 years old (Schrödinger/Dirac), but the N-body Hamiltonian is an exponential beast. Scaling to just 1mg (~10¹⁹ particles) hits the "Exponential Wall."

New comment by zweifuss in "I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle"

zweifuss — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 11:22:14 +0000

The app on your Mac today isn't a rewrite of the legendary Mac OS 7.2.1 Graphing Calculator, but an acquired app based on Curvus Pro introduced in OSX Tiger.

The first one has a legendary backstory. 2 devs snuck into Apple after their project was canceled: https://www.pacifict.com/Story/

Curvus Pro: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/curvus-pro

New comment by zweifuss in "CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs"

zweifuss — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:37:33 +0000

The disagreement in timelines usually comes from differences in the used definition of AGI. Many who predict a 2026–2028 arrival define it as: 'the ability to perform any purely cognitive task a human can do.' If we stick strictly to that 'cognitive-only' metric, we are arguably very close.

New comment by zweifuss in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

zweifuss — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:53:06 +0000

When you explore a problem, use Python and lists/sets/dictionaries/JSON. Wait with types and specific data structures till you have understanding. Speed of development over speed of execution.

When you know what and how to build commit to good data structures. Do the types, structs, classes, Trie, CRDTs, XML, Protobuf, Parquet and whatnot where apropriate. Instrument your program. The efficiency of the final product counts.

New comment by zweifuss in "Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)"

zweifuss — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 12:11:35 +0000

If you can do a successful switch to cloud only Entra (aka. AzureAD) first, you are 90% ready for a migration to Open Source. You need Entra for Licensing anyway. Yes, I'm aware that this is hard.

Univention Nubus (Keycloak + OpenLDAP) or FreeIPA as alternatives for Entra come to mind. You can even leverage your Powershell expertise.

New comment by zweifuss in "Apple I Advertisement (1976)"

zweifuss — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 19:53:34 +0000

The text was mangeled by some OCR-software. This ad can be found as image on Wikimedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_1_Advertisemen...

New comment by zweifuss in "East Germany balloon escape"

zweifuss — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 13:58:40 +0000

Yes and no.

They all have a very solid industrial base, like 30% to 50% of the economy, with ~50% of workers living abroad (not fully part of the welfare state). Comparatively high R&D. Low taxes.

And plain tax evasion is now illegal, but those countries are still an important stop to hide money elsewhere.

But the main secret sauce is a flexible fast legal system. Stability, low crime, and less gridlock in the legislature when the need for change is realized.

New comment by zweifuss in "Himalayas bare and rocky after reduced winter snowfall, scientists warn"

zweifuss — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 08:11:39 +0000

https://homerdixon.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Environmen...

New comment by zweifuss in "AI is forcing us to write good code"

zweifuss — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:18:24 +0000

I made a mistake:

  Test #  A      B      C      Result
  1       True   True   False  True
  2       False  True   False  False
  3       True   False  False  False
  4       False  True   True   True

New comment by zweifuss in "AI is forcing us to write good code"

zweifuss — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 11:03:28 +0000

Modified Condition/Decision Coverage

It's mandated by DO-178C for the highest-level (Level A) avionics software.

Example: if (A && B || C) { ... } else { ... } needs individual tests for A, B, and C.

Test #,A,B,A && B,Outcome taken,Shows independence for

1,True,True,True,if branch,(baseline true)

2,False,True,False,else branch,A (A flips outcome while B fixed at True)

3,True,False,False,else branch,B (B flips outcome while A fixed at True)

New comment by zweifuss in "Show HN: AlgoDrill – Interactive drills to stop forgetting LeetCode patterns"

zweifuss — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 20:15:35 +0000

AlgoDrill is so futuristic, that Gemini 3 included it in the HN front page 10 years from now (#5): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632

New comment by zweifuss in "Perl's decline was cultural"

zweifuss — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 14:06:50 +0000

I can remember perl vs python flame wars ca. 2002.

Also, the early 2010s are not that recent: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Pythonista%2Cp...

New comment by zweifuss in "How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack"

zweifuss — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 12:31:04 +0000

The history of the Windows TCP/IP stack went most likely like this:

IBM (NetBEUI, no TCP/IP) -> Spider TCP/IP Stack + SysV STREAMS environment -> MS rewrite 1 (early NT, Winsock instead of STREAMS) -> MS rewrite 2 (make win2000 faster):

https://web.archive.org/web/20151229084950/http://www.kuro5h...

New comment by zweifuss in "Germany to ban Huawei from future 6G network"

zweifuss — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 18:42:00 +0000

ZTE is also under scrutiny. The reason it's only Huawei and ZTE is that other Chinese providers are so insignificant that the telecoms will likely be able to replace the infrastructure themselves with spares or consolidation. However, in an emergency, the government would have to foot the bill for replacing Huawei/ZTE systems quickly, as the telecoms couldn't finance this and lack of capacity would mean very high prices.