Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | iberator's commentslogin

try writing your own 512 bytes MBR sector.

It is so easy to learn x86 assembly that way, and actually understand WHY BIOS was so important.

Os development is so easy nowdays with internet forums...


caffeine is not the same as coffee.

coffee is caffeine plus THOUSANDS of compounds interacting with each other and your body: some of them are protective for the heart for example.

That's why synthetic caffeine is bad, while coffee is overall good in moderation.

That's why more people die from energy drinks than from coffe in coffeeshop hehe


Let me phrase out one "American" word that should explain it all for you: INDEPEDNECE.

:)


Quantum computing is 3 decades old scam. Not even Google was able to prove that their quantum computer works LOL.

weakened algorithms to the extreme (17 bits in 2026 LOL).


Didn't Google recently report a verifiable quantum advantage?

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/research/qu...


You know you're blowing your reputation when such claims are met by scientific articles with the headline, "Google claims 'quantum advantage' again." [1]

[1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03300-4


Dont they report an advantage based on simulating quantum effects every other year? I was promissed a quick way to decrypt my old harddrives decades ago, can we have that at some point before the sun burns out?

Are your old hard drives encrypted using asymmetric cryptography? If not, I'm not sure who made you that promise.

The funny thing is we already have PQC so even if quantum computing works, it will be immediately irrelevant.

At least for breaking crypto, which seems to be its headline feature. Maybe there are other useful things it can do?


I expect they're just banking on getting their investment back with some fat returns by licensing it to the NSA to decrypt their hoovered up encrypted coms, with their data storage now reaching up to the yottabyte level. That's a lotta byte.

On what? They can't run it against anything real

I think there is potential in it but it is absolutely going to become the next stock market slop after AI goes bust. You'll see everyone and their mom significantly overpaying for $10 billion random noise generators.

Prime example showing lack of more of any kind of soldiers and us army. They illegally kidnapped the president of the sovereign country - they should be all in jail!

USA is a rogue state at this point. NATO is at risk because of that.


Sagan is good for high schoolers maybe.

Not really scientific books at all. He is popular because he was hyped in the media for being accessible.

Those people dumb down science for the masses - it harms society on the long run imo


This really struck a chord for me. The majority of the people I know - including me - want to be drawn into a topic somehow and that somehow is story telling. People like Sagan and Tyson are amazing story tellers, they will draw you in with their use of language, their voice and pace and will open the doors for everything else. This is how great teachers do it and this is what is missing for most of the people to be interested into a topic, no matter how basic it is.

It’s ironic what you wrote because it was Carl Sagan who first developed the theory to explain the Venusian climate.

I met Carl Sagan and he was not a person who dumbed down anything. He had a profound impact on planetary science on top of inspiring many including myself to pursue physics.

I think the fact that we are all still talking about Carl 30 years after his death is strong evidence of his impact.


If a science book is too heavy, you'll get less people interested in science than would normally be.

Carl Sagan significantly influenced Neil deGrasse Tyson (another popular science writer), for example. But I'm not sure if Tyson would have pursued science regardless of Sagan's influence.


And me. I have a PhD in computational fluid dynamics

> Sagan is good for high schoolers maybe.

Even though I think you are wrong on this, you seem to be saying it like it's a bad thing ? Why ?

What, exactly, is wrong about inspiring high-schoolers ?


As an ex-physicist, I cannot disagree more.

When explaining something to people outside of science, I was ok with 60% accuracy. Even 50% and some technical lies was fine if this would encourage them to learn more. Some came back to say "you lied!!" and these were one of my most cherished victories.

In lectures for 1st year students, I would have here and there an asterisk with "almost true", to which we would come back a semesters or two later.

Dumbing down science to dumb up people is wonderful.


I took classes in high school in subjects that weren’t even discovered yet when Oxford was founded.

It’s only “scientific” because it’s new, not because it’s too difficult to understand.


This is a terrible take, and I say this having a PhD in Physics.

Many physicists have written popular articles and books for the general population. Eg Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox. Improving accessibility of advanced concepts is nothing to scoff at.


https://xkcd.com/397/ (the zombie feynman one)

do you want to gatekeep science even more than it is?

Making information more accessible and approachable never harms society in the long run.

Your view is just a snobbish and rigid one, Sagan made science topics interesting for more people, from those people very likely many got inspired enough to pursue deeper science training.

Dumbing down is necessary to make it interesting for people who feel it's unapproachable, it breaks a barrier, I have no idea how you look at this and think "this is harming society"...


I’ve read a lot of hot takes on HN, but Carl Sagan harming society is on a whole new level.

It's a shame to know that there are some amazing architectures back from 70" that handled IPC better. Nowadays is still a hard problem to tackle despite decades of x86

I remember that back in around 2007 i was able to somehow mount a graphical card (ati similar to geforce2?) memory directly in Linux, and put my swap file there :); Great times. Slackware 8.1 i think.

as for zram: somehow i dislike it. Nowdays ram is plenty and if not: better to have fast OOM than chug of death with swap.

I also remember running NetBSD 1.3.1 and Slackware 3 on 386SZ 26MHZ with 2 mb of ram (nowadays hard limit is 4mb to boot due the large memory pages on x86 afik)


Much agreed. Early OOM is so much better for me than swap. I have 128G on my work laptop, 96 on my personal desktop. If it doesn't fit in that, it probably means I'd need a terabyte or infinite amount of swap and that's just nonsense.

This reminds me of a question I answered on StackOverflow a long time ago. I pointed out the original question was asking the computer to allocate no less than 128 gigabytes of RAM. The poster refused to accept the answer because I "didn't solve the problem, only explained why the code did not work"

I mean I would indeed consider that a comment on the question rather than an answer. Unless the question was "why doesn't the work with less than 128GB of RAM?"

Maybe start actually working and PROGRAMMING instead of simply cheating and ruining the job market at the same time?

Usage of such tools should be forbidden in companies - its cheating and using code you didn't even wrote. thsts literally a crime


"Should be forbidden in companies"? I think you need to see some fresh headlines and read a few articles.

I presume that if you're such a vocal opponent of CC, you're also fighting using IDEs and other tools useful in software engineering, like CI pipelines?

Emacs/vim and make should be the maximum a person is permitted!


Nice, but slip and plip is more tun


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: