jonjacky · HackerTrans

Previously:

Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48908271

9 days ago, 182 points, 104 comments

jonjacky

il y a 4 joursdiscuss

From the article:

"... Working a corporate job had enough drudgery to begin with, but the last year it has become more necessary than ever to have a place of accomplishment which is simple and fun. ... Having a project where I can directly use my skill on distinctly human tools is a breath of fresh air that has kept me sane and happy.

If you feel like me, I highly recommend thinking about how your tools and craft can be distilled so that other people can pick them up, use them and eventually modify them. Keep them distinctly human. Even before AI, us software developers loved to add complexity to solve problem like scale, "performance", and things the "user" would need. Build like you are the only user and most complexity will melt away. Write your tools to be fast for O(H), where H is human use only. The editor I write in is pure-lua and yet has zero latency despite asynchronously syntax highlighting the file. I've designed it to be able to load and edit million line files using only KiB of added memory. Sometimes problems seem harder than they really are. ..."

jonjacky

il y a 4 joursdiscuss

John Von Neumann and Norbert Weiner: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death by Steve Heims (1982) Out of print but libraries have it.

Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Weiner, the Father of Cybernetics by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman (2005)

Weiner himself wrote some autobiographies, including Child Prodigy and I Am A Mathematician.

jonjacky

il y a 23 joursdiscuss

Here's a simulation in Lisp:

https://josephoswald.nfshost.com/circuit-sim/woz-machine-hw-...

jonjacky

le mois dernierdiscuss

I wonder what a hobby OS would have looked like it if it assumed nothing, that is, as a thought experiment ...

There are some hobby OS projects that do this. The best known example is Terry Davis' TempleOS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS

If you only want to please yourself, you can dispense with all that legacy stuff. You can stay busy and enjoy yourself in your own world. Some of the hobby OS listed here look like they might be standalone worlds:

https://github.com/jubalh/awesome-os

jonjacky

le mois dernierdiscuss

"Did you take that test yourself?"

jonjacky

le mois dernierdiscuss

Curlie is the successor to DMOZ: https://curlie.org/docs/en/about.html

But Curlie doesn't appear in the website linked in the parent post.

jonjacky

le mois dernierdiscuss

Grugs are a different species: https://grugbrain.dev/

jonjacky

le mois dernierdiscuss

In Elif Batuman's 2017 novel The Idiot, about a naive Harvard student, her not-really-a-boyfriend Ivan, a math student, enthuses to her about Emacs. The book is set in 1995.

I enjoyed the book. It got good reviews and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

jonjacky

le mois dernierdiscuss

https://sites.gatech.edu/alexburgin/on-self-respect-by-joan-...

Dramatic sepia photograph contrasts with understated gray text on light gray background with lots of empty space.

jonjacky

le mois dernierdiscuss

https://dfns.dyalog.com/n_sudoku.htm

Explanation of Sudoku in APL. Lots of information, absolutely no clutter. Entire page is nothing but text in a single precise sans-serif typewriter font, the same size and strength for everything: headings, explanation, code, and tables. Typewriter font includes mathematical symbols.

jonjacky

le mois dernierdiscuss

https://www.datagubbe.se/short/

Header, body, trailer panels with three complementary background shades that soften the large black sans-serif typography.

jonjacky

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

What project was that?

via this discussion in HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22729461 (2020) I found:

Writing an OS in Rust: Async/Await (2020) https://os.phil-opp.com/async-await/

Blogging about Midori: Asynchronous Everything (2015) https://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/19/asynchronous-everything/

jonjacky

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

Particles accelerating in a cyclotron at sufficiently high energy reach relativistic speeds. You have to account for their relativistic mass increase to get the cyclotron to work. Figuring this out was a big issue in cyclotron design in the 1930s. The remedy is to strengthen the magnetic field near the outer edge of the cyclotron where particles move fastest, by adding coils there to carry more current. I don't recall what the energy is where this becomes necessary - it is certainly needed at tens of MeV.

Plutonium was first synthesized in a cyclotron by Lawrence's group at Berkeley. I don't know what energy they used so I don't know if they needed the extra coils, but they did know of the effect and must have considered it.

Also, U235 was separated at Oak Ridge using machines called Calutrons invented by Lawrence that might have encountered the same problem -- at least they must have considered it.

jonjacky

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

I haven't seen it mentioned here or in the obituaries, but Peter started the RISKS Digest in 1985 partly in response to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, "Star Wars") which proposed a space-based anti-ballistic missile system run autonomously by computers [1]. Another response was the formation of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibilty (CPSR) [2]. Peter was an early member, and many early RISKS submissions were by CPSR members.

Peter's letter to readers about the creation of RISKS in Issue #1.01 [3] mentions SDI and CPSR (it's long, scroll down)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative

2.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Professionals_for_Soc...

3. https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/1.01.html

jonjacky

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

Previously, 2023, 19 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35982037

There are updates in the last several months, so it looks like the project is still active.

jonjacky

il y a 3 moisdiscuss

Nice page design, so I will try to read the content.

jonjacky

il y a 3 moisdiscuss

Also pertinent and well-written, from the Vatican itself, including some quotes from Pope Francis:

https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...

ANTIQUA ET NOVA: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence. "Francis ... on 14 January 2025 ... approved this Note and ordered its publication."

via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750835, comment by jimmcslim on Pope Francis has died.

jonjacky

il y a 3 moisdiscuss

"Keep cool, but care" - McClintic Sphere, ca 1959 (fictional jazz musician in V, the 1963 novel by Thomas Pynchon)

jonjacky

il y a 3 moisdiscuss

This is a remarkable, very unusual project. It looks well thought out and is surprisingly complete -- it even includes an end-to-end ML training and sampling program as an example!

Is there a writeup somewhere that explains more about the motivation and history for this project?