HN user

ColinWright

136,064 karma

If you want to contact me, find me on the web. I am especially interested in math, juggling, programming, and education, and since there are other people with my name you'll probably need to include at least one of those terms in any search.

I was once a prolific contributor and commenter, but no more. I go through bouts of submitting stuff, but then go and disappear for lengths of time. If there is something you'd like me to see or comment on, you can email me. Don't ask me to upvote things. If it is interesting (to me) then I will.

Submissions do not imply endorsement.

My spam filtering is pretty severe, but I've put the word "Dysprosium" on the allow-list - quote that and your email will get through.

I used to have an email here but it got harvested by spammers - I'm looking at you, mbientlab.com - so it has been removed. This is a temporary one:

HN_a7dab8S4@solipsys.co.uk

Email sent there and quoting the element name will pass my spam filters. After that we can use "proper" email addresses.

Posts7,399
Comments8,987
View on HN
www.nytimes.com 16h ago

OpenAI Says Its A.I. Models Went Rogue and Attacked a Digital Library

ColinWright
1pts1
gts.cryptography.dog 1d ago

Bright Data ltd: "Smart TV"s become a part of a bot-net

ColinWright
1pts0
codeberg.org 7d ago

Sabot in the age of AI: A list of offensive methods and strategic approaches ...

ColinWright
9pts0
cryptography.dog 9d ago

Responsible Bot Operation

ColinWright
1pts0
celestrak.org 12d ago

Y2K in orbit: Tomorrow, we run out of satellite catalogue numbers

ColinWright
4pts0
news.ycombinator.com 14d ago

Anyone here with an "in" with eBay?

ColinWright
21pts9
plan9.io 14d ago

Plan 9 FAQ

ColinWright
2pts0
curia.europa.eu 14d ago

The General Court dismisses Apple's actions over its designation as a gatekeeper [pdf]

ColinWright
6pts0
blogs.nature.com 14d ago

Fibonacci's Real Mathematical Legacy

ColinWright
38pts13
old.reddit.com 14d ago

Time to kill at Temple Meads. What's up with platform 2? Where is platform 14?

ColinWright
1pts0
www.schneier.com 15d ago

AI and Liability

ColinWright
1pts0
www.bbc.co.uk 19d ago

NASA launches robot to save Swift telescope falling to Earth

ColinWright
7pts3
mathstodon.xyz 20d ago

The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain

ColinWright
379pts177
cen.acs.org 20d ago

To be trustworthy, LLMs need to show their work

ColinWright
3pts0
shkspr.mobi 20d ago

Discovering My Talk

ColinWright
3pts0
mastodon.social 21d ago

ESO: SpaceX plans to launch 1M satellites for space-based data centres

ColinWright
3pts2
theconversation.com 22d ago

Too many satellites? Earth's orbit is on track for a catastrophe

ColinWright
7pts1
www.msn.com 24d ago

Starbucks Is One of the Largest Banks

ColinWright
2pts0
www.johndcook.com 27d ago

Regular expressions that work “everywhere”

ColinWright
103pts45
ethanmarcotte.com 1mo ago

All Tomorrow's Parties

ColinWright
5pts0
neilzone.co.uk 1mo ago

Pondering routing more of my traffic via nodes outside the UK

ColinWright
71pts88
netwars.pelicancrossing.net 1mo ago

Banned

ColinWright
3pts0
www.bbc.co.uk 1mo ago

'We had to get out of the way': The backlash over delivery robots

ColinWright
4pts0
www.youtube.com 1mo ago

Colours Can Compute – CoM Apr 2021 [video]

ColinWright
1pts0
satellitetracker3d.com 1mo ago

Satellite Tracker 3D

ColinWright
3pts0
www.youtube.com 1mo ago

Current and Future Megaconstellations [video]

ColinWright
2pts0
tagide.com 1mo ago

The Anatomy of a Learning Stall

ColinWright
4pts0
www.magicbell.com 1mo ago

The Slack Notifications Flowchart Explained

ColinWright
3pts1
www.ncsc.gov.uk 1mo ago

Frontier AI: what you need to know

ColinWright
2pts0
www.schneier.com 1mo ago

The Security Mindset (2008)

ColinWright
3pts0

Quoting:

“Mathematician Laurence Sigler had made it his mission to translate [Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci], rushing to complete the task right before he died of lymphocytic leukemia in 1997. But his editor moved on, and the manuscript languished on floppy disks for years. For a while Sigler’s widow Judith Sigler Fell, fearing the project would be killed, took the extraordinary step of impersonating her husband in communiqués.

By the time Fell found a new publisher, Springer Verlag (now part of the same publisher as Nature), floppy disks had been superseded and she had to hire a hacker to extract the files. Fell then discovered that Springer only accepted submissions in TEX format, the technical standard for physics and mathematics texts. She learned it and spent six months retyping the text. Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci was finally published in 2002 — the 800th anniversary of the book’s first appearance.”

Quoting from the article:

Representatives from Springer Nature declined to comment, beyond saying that “detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.”

So the only person with whom Springer can discuss why the papers have been withdrawn is ... Plank.

Well ... good luck with that.

No idea. Sometime when it's not being hammered you can ask them ... it's not my instance.

And I don't know what my instance is running on ... I have a tech co-mod who deals with it. We have two rather grunty servers running the the cloud, that's all I know.

If you're genuinely interested, email me and I'll find out for you. Details in my profile.

-----------------------------------------

Added in edit ...

From their "about" page:

Hello World! Welcome to mastodon@bauhaus, our small niche in the fediverse.

This server originated @maschinenraum, a small hackspace in Weimar. It is currently administrated and moderated by a small team via @admin.

We run our own server in a local data centre just down the road, so there's no cloud here – however, that also means if it breaks, it breaks. And it will happen every now and then, and there are backups, and it's mostly fine, but don't expect 100% uptime – 99% will have to do.

We're part of the Chaos family surrounding the Chaos Computer Club, so you can meet us at events like the C3 and get to know your admins!

-- https://social.bau-ha.us/about

Suffering the HN Hug of Death.

Text reads:

And just like that—surprise!—one AI company bails out another AI company's grift. Google agreeing to rent compute from xAI (cough, "SpaceX") magically makes them eligible for inclusion in the S&P500.

Americans, they are looting your life savings, the ones you earned through labour that they are gleefully replacing. Your descendants will never have the chance you had.

-- https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/05/google-will-pay-spacex-920...

Is it too much to ask that when giving a book review, a link to the actual book title, and possibly a listing on a website, should be prominently given?

33:

Lawyer A began chatting with the firm's AI on 20th March 2026 following receipt of my query of that date.

What is remarkable when reading those chats is, first, that one would think that the text attributed to the AI was produced by an intelligent human being.

The second remarkable thing is that, on a large number of occasions, it is plainly wrong or, at the very least, extremely misleading.

I agree entirely that seeing and experiencing are different, but seeing it is more than being blissfully unaware, and can be enough to provide motivation.

And I've worked with many youngsters who have significant amounts of empathy. They feel the pain almost as if it's their own.

> definitely matters as to how old they are, and how much they've done.

No, it doesn't. Either the tool is good/useful or it isn't.

So if a developer with decades of experience in writing software would receive exactly the same feedback from you as a 16-year-old writing their first project?

If not, if you would tailor your feedback, then it does matter how old they are.

I know 16-year-olds, and 15-year-olds, and 14-year-olds, who absolutely know what goes on in a job hunt because they are observant, socially aware, and have watched relatives sending literally hundreds of resumes and get nothing back.

And those kids ... inexperienced, no mortgage, no creditors, no "real world" responsibilities ... absolutely see it.

When someone builds something using the tools at hand and the experience they have, it definitely matters as to how old they are, and how much they've done. That shapes how you give feedback, both in style and content.

I know a lot of bright, intelligent, keen, motivated kids, and in every way I encourage them to go and build things that they think are relevant and important, even if I don't agree. The experience will shape them and make them better.

In case anyone else is as baffled as I was by this comment, I did a quick web search and found this:

Pondering the orb refers to a meme that features a sagely figure looking into a crystal ball, often used humorously in various edits and templates online. It originated from a Twitter post in October 2021 and has since become popular across social media.

I knew nothing of this. Maybe I'll put the post up under that title and set the linked page to be a re-direct.

People say "Practice makes perfect" ... they're wrong.

Practice make permanent.

You need to practise the right thing, and that's where you will benefit from good quality feedback.

Learning on your own is hard.

I remember reading this in the late-60s, and it's very much an old friend. It does, however, annoy me when the section breaks are lost.

Here's a PDF:

https://dn710709.ca.archive.org/0/items/TheFeelingOfPower/Th...

Also, it's no surprise that it's been submitted many times before. Here's one of the earlier discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=931273

Even so, perhaps there are new things to say in this time of emerging "AI-assisted programming".