HN user

cristoperb

1,761 karma

https://catswhisker.xyz

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/cristoper; my proof: https://keybase.io/cristoper/sigs/SWsOrCvLu4JArQD8gFi9_2-m6nS4FqY9uRwvZheVQr4 ]

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yuanchuan.dev 5mo ago

Experimenting a New Syntax to Write SVG (2022)

cristoperb
3pts0
catswhisker.xyz 5mo ago

Lichess Puzzle Timer: A browser extension to help you do chess puzzles slower

cristoperb
1pts1
catswhisker.xyz 5mo ago

I ran 40km and knit a hat for my 40th birthday

cristoperb
1pts0
blog.emeraldonion.org 6mo ago

Evolving Our Tor Relay Security Architecture – Emerald Onion

cristoperb
6pts0
robertheaton.com 6mo ago

Diceomatic: A DSL for making children's dice games

cristoperb
1pts0
motiongen.io 7mo ago

MotionGen

cristoperb
3pts0
adam.zeloof.xyz 7mo ago

Oscar Live Coding Environment

cristoperb
1pts0
datatables.net 10mo ago

DataTables CDN Outage – post incident review

cristoperb
42pts27
jriddell.org 10mo ago

Adios Chicos, 25 Years of KDE

cristoperb
9pts1
www.youtube.com 11mo ago

I Turned Frustration into Creative Success [video]

cristoperb
3pts0
blog.goedel-prover.com 11mo ago

Goedel-Prover-v2: The strongest open-source theorem prover to date

cristoperb
1pts0
giflib.sourceforge.net 11mo ago

What's in a GIF – Bits and Bytes

cristoperb
1pts0
blog.thelifeofkenneth.com 1y ago

Creating an autonomous system for fun and profit (2017)

cristoperb
20pts1
labs.ripe.net 1y ago

Build your own Anycast Network in Nine Steps (2016)

cristoperb
3pts0
phys.org 1y ago

Curious humpback whales approach humans and blow bubble 'smoke' rings

cristoperb
4pts2
kristoff.it 1y ago

Advent of Code in Zig

cristoperb
2pts0
geoffg.net 1y ago

WebMite: Pico W with BASIC and WiFi support

cristoperb
3pts0
shazow.net 2y ago

Why aren't we using SSH for everything? (2015)

cristoperb
40pts15
lichess.org 2y ago

Optimizing the Lichess Tablebase Server

cristoperb
246pts55
pldb.io 2y ago

The Ages of Programming Language Creators

cristoperb
1pts0
groups.csail.mit.edu 2y ago

A Brief History of ClarisWorks

cristoperb
1pts0
www.sqlite.org 2y ago

The SQLite Query Optimizer Overview

cristoperb
2pts0
goodsnooze.gumroad.com 2y ago

MacWhisper: Transcribe audio files on your Mac

cristoperb
240pts93
waterheatertimer.org 2y ago

Names of Parts on Electric Pole

cristoperb
43pts14
noxim.xyz 3y ago

Rust on the CH32V003

cristoperb
3pts0
github.com 3y ago

Wings3D is an advanced sub-division 3D modeller

cristoperb
2pts1
ludocode.com 3y ago

Flatpak Is Not the Future

cristoperb
3pts1
lamport.azurewebsites.net 3y ago

Specifying Systems by Leslie Lamport

cristoperb
3pts0
www.ctrl.blog 3y ago

Don’t record your social life on an append-only social network (2022)

cristoperb
159pts136
blog.kagi.com 3y ago

Summarize Anything with the Universal Summarizer – Kagi Blog

cristoperb
3pts0
Ti-84 Evo 3 months ago

I still use my TI-89 from high school, but I'm interested to find if there are any open hardware/firmware calculator projects with basic engineering tools and a CAS.

I can't speak for the person you're replying too, but I use -- for emdash for two reasons: I never remember how to type an actual emdash in linux/X11, and more importantly, I do most of my writing in Asciidoc which converts -- to an emdash automatically. It's nothing to do with bot detection or whatever.

But it does get me confused sometimes because in LaTeX (and other markup languages) -- gets converted to an endash whereas it takes three hyphens --- to make an emdash.

I haven't tried it for anything myself yet. The paper provides several benchmarks. The emphasis during training was on multi-language support (over 1800 languages are represented in its pre-training data, which is 40% non-English) and non-copyrighted training data... and the benchmarks seem to suffer for it.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14233

Though see the Plain Text Accounting[0] movement for something maybe more unixy than Gnucash. I download .csv files from my bank and credit card issuers and import to hledger[1]. hledger has its own rules engine for filtering/transforming imported entries, but you could also preprocess the files using any unix tool before importing if you needed to.

0: https://plaintextaccounting.org/

1: https://hledger.org/

I just came back to check if anyone else was discussing their entry, so thanks for posting your write up!

I wrote mine by hand just testing it using the in-browser simulator. I initially used subroutines to try to keep things structured but then resorted to inlining most things (and flattening as much state as I could to bare registers) to try to speed things up, though i never quite got my ants to always move within the 64 op step.

My best score on the official test set was 654 (43rd place). I put my code and a little write up here: https://github.com/cristoper/brain.ant

Thunderbird delivers RSS feed items the same way as email, so you can apply filters to mark them as "read"

This is a good idea. I use Thunderbird only for a small number of feeds I want to read every post from. I used to also use a separate feed reader for my "river of news", but eventually I stopped looking at that and just loadded hackernews or reddit when I wanted a distraction. But I might try Thunderbird for more feeds and just auto-mark most of them as read so I can browse at my leisure.

I guess it's not prefatory remarks or disclaimers that I find so grating, but the explicit "I'll explain" (or worse, faux conversational "May I explain?" "Let me explain") followed immediately by the explanation.

This is a nitpick, but since this essay is over 15 years old now I don't think the author will mind. This phrase always rankles me:

Let me explain what I mean.

It turns out that if you're writing an essay or a youtube script you don't have to tell me that you're going to explain something to me before you explain it to me. I guess it acts as a "hack" to try to impart some gravity to what follows without actually having to write a convincing introduction, but unlike "it turns out" it can almost always just be deleted to improve the flow.

No worries, I don't think "company" is even technically wrong. But I do think given the nonprofit structure (and Moxie Marlinspike's track record), that there are fewer incentives for Signal to lie about its privacy guarantees than a messaging app backed by a commercially-driven big company.

Ollama Web Search 10 months ago

Ollama is a ycombinator startup, so I guess they have to find some roi at some point.[1]

I personally found Ollama to be an easy way to try out local LLMs and appreciate them for that (and I still use it to download small models on my laptop and phone (via termux)), but I've long switched to llama.cpp + llama-swap[2] on my dev desktop. I download whatever ggufs I want from hugging face and just do `git pull` and `cmake --build build --config Release` from my llama.cpp directory whenever I want to update.

1: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ollama 2: https://github.com/mostlygeek/llama-swap

Haha, the fact that an LLM tries to offload NLP jobs to Python libraries is funny. But I just tried this prompt (with "Don't use python") and uploaded a text file and it worked well (it immediately started outputting entities without running Python):

"NER task: extract all named entities from this text. Don't use python. JSON format"

I tried Gemini too, and it works without needing to tell it to not use Python.

The API is still better, of course, because you can constrain output to a JSON schema of your choosing... but all models now seem quite good at outputting valid JSON when asked and can follow 1-shot schema examples