nbaksalyar
Joined 15 years ago
Karma
2,570
Submissions
215
Member since
May 3
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 days ago
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was mandatory school reading in the USSR - and still is in Russia and many of the ex-USSR countries.
Comment · 22 days ago
I’m not sure people are “wishing for the death” in the literal sense.
We just need to apply the antitrust law and break these trillion-dollar corps into smaller competing corps.
There’s no reason for a single company to provide your email, browser, search, operating system, entertainment, AI, etc.
Comment · 24 days ago
> often these techniques are invented first and the applications come later
There's a great paper from Abraham Flexner on this topic:
https://worrydream.com/refs/Flexner_1939_-_The_Usefulness_of...
It argues exactly that we should be allowed to pursue the seemingly "useless" knowledge.
Previously discussed on HN:
Comment · 25 days ago
Comment · 1 month ago
What's really cool is that it has an ARM64 CPU. If it can run any Steam game, it's very possible we'll see Steam on Android phones/tablets.
Comment · 3 months ago
> the options to use socks proxies
I pair it with wireproxy [0]. This way you can assign any Wireguard-capable VPN for specific containers. It's extremely useful.
Comment · 3 months ago
> Similar to how students who spend most of their time practicing what they are studying with actual exercises achieve higher grades
This is spot on.
> build a mental model of the code with every new line of code
This idea has been explored in depth in the Peter Naur's excellent paper, "Programming as theory building" [1] (also extensively discussed on HN [2]). If you haven't read it yet, I bet you will enjoy it a lot. :)
[1] https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Programming+as+theory+building
Comment · 4 months ago
"Eliza" is a bit unusual for Zachtronics as it's not a programming/puzzle game but a visual novel. But it's excellent and I think it's one of their most under-appreciated games. It's well-written, well-acted, and very prescient. Highly recommended!
Comment · 4 months ago
What a great and timely question! :) I quit a week ago to take a year-long sabbatical.
> 1. What pushed you to do it?
The pursuit of curiosity, for the most part. That's what makes quitting a lot harder when you have a good job and nothing to complain about: you feel like you're making a huge mistake on a whim. Doubly so when you consider the state of the job market at this time.
That said, we don't live to work; we work to live. It's a lot of risk and uncertainty, but you should remember that while some unknown bad things can happen in the future, unknown good things can happen too! [1] When you own your time, you increase your luck surface considerably: you have more opportunities to travel, to wander, to play, to meet new people, to tinker, to discover.
So I've been thinking and reading about this a lot. The final push came from two books I read: "The Pathless Path" by Paul Millerd [2] and "The Inner Compass" by Lawrence Yeo [3]. I can't recommend them enough.
> 2. What will you be doing? (Even if nothing!)
I have a huge Steam backlog to beat... :) Besides that, I'll be studying computer science and maths. Programming language theory, compilers, and functional programming are particularly close to my heart.
But, most importantly, enjoying life!
Comment · 4 months ago
People keep saying things like
> it's probably an issue with your usage of if
> I've rarely seen a repo and a problem that claude can't chew through with the right prompt
> a skill/PEBKAC issue
But then I remember how Anthropic couldn't fix the flickering issue for many months. It just does not compute.
Is it that people working at Anthropic can't prompt and it's a "skill issue" too? I mean, the terminal does not flicker in a lot of other complex TUI apps that I use every day - Midnight Commander, Emacs, tmux, etc. These are open source, Claude could be prompted to "just do what Midnight Commander does". So what is it?
Comment · 4 months ago
It's not just Google AI Studio, it's also Google proper. Just one search result page consumes gigabytes of RAM. How did this happen? I've switched to DDG and never looked back.
Comment · 4 months ago
Bret Victor's list of papers and references would be one:
It's a deep, deep rabbit hole.
Comment · 6 months ago
> Is this what getting old feels like? Hating everything the rest of society is racing to embrace?
I don’t think so. Some societies are racing to embrace mass surveillance and abuse of civil rights. Pointing this out and complaining about it is not “hate” and not reserved for old people only. :)
My blog: http://nbaksalyar.github.io/