Viewing profile — spenrose

Got caught in a day-long traffic jam leaving a rural area in North America after the 2017 total eclipse.

As usual, this paean to deductive reasoning (“formal methods”) leaves out its fundamental limit: how closely do the postulates and definitions fit the domain they purport to map? (…

Many HNers will enjoy this book about the company’s maturation from a hardware startup founded by one difficult genius to an institution that had to be rebuilt as it scaled: https:…

Indeed. The problem arises from a two step: 1. Free Software / Open Source are Good and True by assertion. There is no God but source code, and Stallman is its prophet. 2. Question…

Fantastic piece: shows how fundamental dynamics (queuing) generate practical problems AND what to do about them. This essay is better than 95% of tech blog posts I read via HN. Kud…

“... when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed” Welcome to the human condition, my friend. The good news is that a plurality of novels, TV shows, country songs, et…

“Finally, Bucciarelli is right that systems like telephony are so inherently complex, have been built on top of so many different layers in so many different places, that no one pe…

This perspective dates to at least 1940, when the population was a fraction of the current size. The fantastic Charles C. Mann wrote an excellent book, The Wizard and the Prophet, …

Thank you for the correction. I should have said “trained”.

Thank you for the correction

I can't stop thinking about this. WRT Perl specifically, it’s fascinating how the two competitors adopted Unix shell patterns. Python is handicapped to this day by not automagicall…

I forgot two, er, three: 9. Python got lucky that its inevitable screwups (Python3) didn’t quite kill it. 10. Swift and Kotlin both define programming as serving the compiler (spec…

1. Python was designed by testing syntax with novice users to see what they could adopt easily.[1] > 90% of current Python users weren’t born when it was created. They all had to l…

I am disappointed to see this article flagged. I thought it was excellent.

Claude Sonnet 4.5 summary of the original paper [ https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adw1280 ] for middle school students: How Earth Got Its Water: A Cosmic Detective Story…

Look at your examples. Translation is a closed domain; the LLM is loaded with all the data and can traverse it. Book and music album covers _don't matter_ and have always been arbi…

So many articles should prepend “My experience with ...” to their title. Here is OP's first sentence: “I spent the past ~4 weeks trying out all the new and fancy AI tools for softw…

"Since 1995 nearly all of my professional work has been enabled by, and published on, the web." https://jonudell.net

Some headlines, such as this one, are catnip to up-voters* despite the article's contributing nothing to the established discussion c. 2015, let alone 2025. I don't know how you di…

Direct link: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33697/w336...