HN user

jmspring

4,959 karma

Interests - building interesting things, gardening, mountain biking, surfing

Posts77
Comments2,012
View on HN
news.ycombinator.com 5mo ago

Ask HN: Why is the Lua web / related ecosystem so stagnant?

jmspring
2pts1
news.ycombinator.com 6mo ago

Why does Apple Ecosystem suck so much at search?

jmspring
1pts0
hackaday.com 8mo ago

Lord Nikon's Laptop

jmspring
4pts0
news.ycombinator.com 9mo ago

RSS – Is It Needed

jmspring
2pts0
github.com 9mo ago

An LLM IF doodle project – personal, but trying to be compatible with others

jmspring
1pts1
www.uscis.gov 1y ago

H-1B Specialty Occupations

jmspring
1pts1
news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Ask HN: Cooking classes (mainly Asian) in SF?

jmspring
2pts1
www.dailymail.co.uk 1y ago

Possible cause of the collapse of Roman Empire?

jmspring
1pts1
news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Ask HN: With iOS 18 did messaging become way stupider?

jmspring
5pts0
cr.yp.to 2y ago

Salsa20 ciphers in assembly for different architectures

jmspring
2pts1
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 2y ago

Reversible cerebrovascular vasoconstriction syndrome from a Carolina Reaper

jmspring
3pts1
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: Tracking activity on GitHub – where commits come from

jmspring
1pts2
news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: Version Control for Non-Engineers?

jmspring
1pts1
www.smithsonianmag.com 4y ago

The Quest to Protect California’s Transcontinental Railroad Tunnels

jmspring
7pts5
news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: Open-source Embeddable node based scripting

jmspring
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: Mapping Service Fuckups as a Service

jmspring
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: Discovering HN type sites for other interests

jmspring
8pts5
news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: Toys for pets that are too smart

jmspring
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

WTF is with FB web client lately?

jmspring
4pts5
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: What High School Math Calculator

jmspring
2pts10
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: X11 on macOS

jmspring
1pts0
www.swissmicros.com 5y ago

DM41x: a modern take on the HP-41CX

jmspring
101pts74
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Options for a “computer programming” topic for homeschooling

jmspring
2pts3
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Something like Khan Academy but full curriculum for grade schoolers?

jmspring
283pts104
www.theverge.com 6y ago

EU Plans Ban on US Travel to Europe

jmspring
50pts4
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Economical solution for static IP address?

jmspring
1pts1
cloud.google.com 6y ago

Google joins Hedera governing council

jmspring
4pts1
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: What does “prepare for cyber attacks” mean in context of Middle East?

jmspring
2pts2
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: Job requirements to skillset, including contracting

jmspring
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: Could Kubernetes be written to use alternatives?

jmspring
2pts2

I think Moore's Law and related have made programming sloppy. AI is building on that. There was a time where accounting for memory, footprint, stability, and speed mattered. Your point shows we are well passed that aside from certain areas.

Heck, a buddy and I once chatted about the likelihood of k8s running as the control plane in a prototype autonomous vehicle.

top/btop/htop on the mac are always fun to run and see what's up.

There is a market for it. Cheap. Good range on a tank. 4WD. I've got a 2016 Tacoma TRD Offroad. It's only got about 115k miles (bought it new). I'm not planning on replacing it - toyota hybrid numbers for their trucks suck and an in kind replacement would cost me almost 2x what I originally paid (yes new tech, blahblah). $35k in 2015, $70+k now. Gas isn't going away and rural areas (I've lived in a few) often don't have charging options.

I nearly triple majored (or a minor) because I took Lit classes for fun when doing my Bachelors. Due to the impacted nature of that school now, I don't think it would be possible to duplicate what I did. Sometimes, for me, having a bit of structure helps focus on an interest - undergrad it was literature (beyond other courses, work, and being social - not sleeping much was I guess helpful at the time).

When I spent about 8 years living in a remote area with a lot of old mines, etc. exploring rocks, having a mining claim, etc was interesting and it was not directly related to work. So, trying Geology made some sense because I had an interest.

Yes the near Lit minor and my second Bachelors (chemistry) were literally for fun - but there was a roundedness to not just staring at computers all the time.

Different people have different interests and approaches.

Also costs when I was doing the initial schooling wasn't as bad as it is now (a TAing job, working in a lab, and maybe some part time tech support) covered most bills. Rent, tuition, and other expenses were under 10k for the year - even at a UC - yes this was awhile ago. My step-daughter is looking at closer to $30k a year (give or take) for a CSU.

We will be hopping over to Italy/France/or Croatia in the next year or so. Work will not be the motivator, but we both have options.

In the states during late covid, I thought the downtime would be good to do a second masters in something unrelated to working in software. I chose a remote program with a univeristy here in the states, I did the first year, but it reminded me that studying - especially a program unrelated to anything you have currently done - is actually not easy.

I chose Geology. I have BS/BA in Comp Eng and Chemistry and an MS in Comp Eng. So this was personal interest.

Revisiting math I hadn't used in awhile was the easy part. Making the time, while working, reminded my why I also ended up ABD (all but dissertation - toward PHD) post masters. Sometimes your brain needs to relax.

Glad it worked for you. And the European Universities are significantly cheaper than Universities in the states (this was a state univerisity which is - per state - considered a step above a state school. For instance a UC vs a CSU in california).

The model is the important part, a huffman code or adaptive huffman or other sorts of encoders would be much better on a dataset based on the model. You need the model to also decode. And on a dataset of sufficient size, embedding the model and the benefit of it's memorization of the file can be offset.

A non-general compression algorithm (model - I don't mean a distinct llm, but "modeling data") targeted at a specific dataset will always do better than a general algorithm.

The reason I mentioned the "encoder" doesn't matter - arithmetic coding, for the data it is presented, will beat huffman/adaptive huffman every day, but it's the model that is where the real "compression" comes into play.

I've implemented enough "coders" over the years, including arithmetic for both commercial and research purposes (was a student of Glen Langdon).

Om Malik has died 27 days ago

I liked the mid-2000s, gigaom and techcrunch actually had articles worth reading (not all, TC got sorta gossipy rag at one point). Om's were generally well thought out.

I've played with crypto enough to be amused, like you I like some of the tech - especially the Hedera eco-system. Dabbling in crypto helped me help the wife start a plant store we had for a couple of years. It's always been a hobby. I think things like decentralized IDs (DID) - while not directly crypto related, often land in tech discussions of such - and the like could likely be useful for some of the AI related identity work going on at the identity level.

Some nice loss harvesting in the past will help with some other financial moves down the road. I'm definitely checking in now and then, but mostly see it as background noise.

Google AI responses are generally crap and annoying. I've gone back to DDG or if I need some context - very specific guidance for claude/chatgpt. Goodle's AI is generally inadequate or wrong without significant clarification.

My step daughter graduated this last week (high school). Watching the curriculum over the last 4 years, they had 5-8 validictorian (all a's) and 6-8 salutarians (sp?) (all a's one b). They would have been at the 3.x level in my high school 25 years ago. The rigor in high school is no longer there, community college is adopting to the lesser expectation as well.

The keyboards look janky. Why buy this over something like Das Keyboard which has mechanical keys as well and is cheaper?

I think it is a matter of focus and aptitude. It also depends on instruction and approach. I took more math than I care to remember in college. Physics made calculus click. Upper division physics classes made some transform math confusing. David Huffman (yes, that one) taught a class in the CS department covering the same thing - from first principles - it made sense.

When the kiddo was dealing with common core stuff, I threw up my hands ... the approach made no sense, but sold text books.

As an American, no. Well aside from - yes a significant part thrives on seeing others than them suffer. Years ago, I spent multiple times a year at a B&B on the Hilo side of the big island. The host was one of the last "Grand Dame's" of Hilo. She was a cattle rancher that knew Roosevelt; her husband had been a friend of Linus Pauling. She did hikes in her 70s and 80s few in those ages can do now.

She was grandfathered under a form of medical insurance - I think older Blue Cross/Blue Shield - none can access now. At one point, the US did have better health care than we do at the moment. The fcking idiot boomers (including my parents) bought into the BS from Nixon, Reagan, etc. Hey - (good or bad) - let's stop allowing one to write off debt, but allow companies to do so, etc.

This country does have it's head up it's ass and a significant number blame everyone but themselves and how they vote.

We pay more (as a country) by a lot* and get significantly less for our medical coverage. Want to go self employed with a family of 3? Want a PPO? $4-6k/mo in California right now. Deductibles will be high.

Having just shipped the kiddo into the real world, she's leaning liberal arts (her and her mom suck at math), but she has a benefit neither her mom or I had - EU deal citizenship. She's going to do a year here to figure things out - she's also been thinking about Europe. University in Europe, for undergrad, is different than the US.

I think the large class model and a barrier of exams to advance makes sense in Europe. I've not been in the University of California system for years, but the school I went to - some classes didn't always hold up a level of academic rigor.