Hacker News Reader

JRandomHacker42on Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)

Wish I could have heard back about my job application there. It looks like a really exciting place to work.

JRandomHacker42on Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations

Oh but they _told_ the AI they were in a box. That should do it, right?

JRandomHacker42on Incident CVE-2026-LGTM

HN has a big blind spot, in my opinion, around writing that isn't "purely technical". I've seen several cases of commenter complaining about "clickbait" for a blog post that I'd describe as "having a narrative hook and structure"

JRandomHacker42on You Can Run

I've seen this attitude on HN all the time - the concept of "a narrative hook" is apparently a foreign concept here

JRandomHacker42on I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis

> Being a programmer does not make one knowledgeable about other specialized fields

If I could make every HN user read this before commenting on literally any article...

JRandomHacker42on Someone used my open source project to phish people

> There was no exploit. No vulnerability disclosure. No CVE for me to write.

was a dead giveaway in my mind when I read it.

JRandomHacker42on United Wizards of the Coast

I'm specifically talking about the use case of "can we use natural-language tools to parse oracle text and produce functioning game objects in Arena". For that use case, it's completely sensible to look at the actual rules text and not reminder text.

Looking back further, there was confusion during preview season when people were looking at "fake/leaked" mockups that had incorrect text on them, but this also isn't a problem for the issue of "WotC themselves writing systems that can parse card text".

JRandomHacker42on United Wizards of the Coast

I'm a judge and have seen barely any discussion around Prepared (mostly just clarification around the interaction with.

Rule 722 is the rule for "Preparation Cards", so I fail to see how it could not be relevant.

The text "its spell" only occur in reminder text, which is not rules text and would not be included in template language.

JRandomHacker42on United Wizards of the Coast

I don't think Prepared is ambiguous at all. It has its meaning defined in the CR (722) and every card that uses it has either a clear trigger condition or the "enters prepared" replacement effect. It's just a new designation and there are plenty of those already, including ones that are 10+ years old (Renowned, Monstrous, Level Up).

JRandomHacker42on United Wizards of the Coast

The Arena card engine is based on CLIPS [1] and not modern LLM-based tools. Magic cards are written in a very constrained language (usually called "card templating") that lends itself very well to machine-parseability.

[1]: https://www.clipsrules.net/

JRandomHacker42on Rethinking School Design

Jacob Geller did a really interesting video essay [1] about the parallels that can be drawn between modern school architecture and maps from shooter games - on top of whatever other context or functionality they provide, they are fundamentally spaces that are designed around the question "what happens if violence occurs here?"

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usSfgHGEGxQ

JRandomHacker42on Tour of CLIPS (2022)

The source for them using CLIPS is a conversation I had with Arena team lead Ian Adams in a Magic-community Discord.

The source for the bug is a video WotC did that I can't find right now that featured the Arena team talking about developing Kaldheim - the bug came from the card Alrund, God of the Cosmos.

JRandomHacker42on Tour of CLIPS (2022)

MTG Arena, the new digital client for the Magic the Gathering trading-card game, uses CLIPS to implement the actual game-rules based on the English text of the cards. Magic cards are written using a very standardized language (look at custom-card communities and discussions around "templating"), but the fact that they've had such success with this approach is incredibly impressive to me.

It also leads to some really funny bugs that arise from grammar ambiguities - things like a card that says "[...] then put them into your hand" and the game losing track of what "them" refers to and putting _all_ the cards into your hand.

JRandomHacker42on Universal Paperclips

https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

JRandomHacker42on The apps that Americans search to “delete” the most

> They say it's the 'me' generation. It's not. The arrogance is taught, or it was cultivated. It's self-conscious. That's what it is. It's conscious of self. Social media - it's just the market's answer to a generation that demanded to perform, so the market said, here - perform. Perform everything to each other, all the time, for no reason. It's prison - it's horrific. It's performer and audience melded together. What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member. I know very little about anything. But what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.

Bo Burnham, from Make Happy

JRandomHacker42on 80/20 Aluminum T-slot Building Systems – Build your Idea

I've used 8020 to custom-fab my Perfect Monitor Stand: it holds either three widescreen or two ultra-wide displays, has two attachment points to the desk, and has the minimum possible depth to keep the monitors as far as possible towards the back of the desk. It wasn't cheap, but it's solved basically all of my monitor layout issues.

JRandomHacker42on Restoring a Vintage Rolex GMT

I'm always amused at how little cross-promotion Marshall does - he has decently large followings in two completely different contexts and most of them are completely unaware of each other.

JRandomHacker42on Ask HN: Experienced devs, what language would you learn today?

Seeing "Java/C#" makes me think that you might not have taken a look at C# in a while

JRandomHacker42on OpenAI API pricing update FAQ

One of my former colleagues who was always in charge of publishing our team's performance testing results was a complete hardass on the rest of us for using proper language around multipliers and superlatives. It's well worth the clarity to avoid precisely this situation.

JRandomHacker42on Hikaru Nakamura's Forbidden Platform

A lot of athletic contracts would forbid athletes from playing other sports or doing certain other strenuous activities - they were designed partially to try to avoid players injuring themselves doing something other than their contracted sport, and partially to prevent players earning money off their image outside of their team.

Jordan had a clause specifically exempting him from any restrictions around playing basketball - by his contract, he could play basketball in any league, or even any scrimmage, exhibition, or pickup game.