Hacker News Reader

kd0amgon Do we need billionaires?

> SpaceX is what it is because the vision is much less tyranny of the masses, and much more damn the torpedoes no one can stop me.

Apple did not need to be controlled by a majority shareholder in order to follow an ambitious, cohesive vision.

kd0amgon What I've learned about the trombone

> I've been trying to square the physics and my experience.

> Pedal B flat is the fundamental, low B flat is the 2x, F 3x, mid B flat the 4x, D the 5X, high F is 6X, G half sharp is 7X and high B flat is 8X.

I've always been amused at how many sources state the "tube with one end open" model, derive the "odd harmonics only" behavior from the model, and then never engage with the observable behavior of the instrument or reconcile it with the model.

I did find this when trying to understand that disparity, but I don't know enough to confirm/refute/amend the explanation:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/292724

kd0amgon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2026)

> We also have a Research Engineering role for which we're actively interviewing: https://careers.ibm.com/en_US/careers/JobDetail?jobId=113488...

This page says the job is closed.

Also, not sure if my email response to your last post made it through or not.

kd0amgon Live: Artemis II Launch Day Updates

Think of it more as "speed is the indefinite integral of acceleration" with the extra constant denoting a choice of inertial reference frame.

kd0amgon Grace Hopper's Revenge

I took that to mean ≈ "Amount of training data isn't the big factor dwarfing all else." Depends who "we" refers to, I guess. Back when LLM-generated code was new, I definitely saw predictions that LLMs would struggle with niche or rarely used languages. These days, consensus among colleagues within earshot is that LLMs handle Rust much better than Python or C++ (corpus size and AutoCodeBench scores notwithstanding).

kd0amgon How to Give a Good Talk

And yet a lot of speakers still seem to need that self-evidently true statement pointed out to them. Tautological advice isn't necessarily bad or useless, especially for beginners.

kd0amgon Reddit mods and scaling problems in social control

What percent of own-content submissions are good original content though?

kd0amgon Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

Does that button... do anything?

kd0amgon Why Won’t Anyone Teach Her Math?

> Ever try or even see a "Leet-Code" style question that stated the problem without providing example results?

This style of question asks the examinee to devise a procedure for producing those results, not to come up with the individual results themselves. If a student is given a bunch of systems of linear equations to solve, an answer key isn't especially useful since checking a candidate solution is pretty straightforward.

kd0amgon Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

Teaching isn't likely to get you away from unreasonable people with unreasonable expectations.

kd0amgon Nerdle = Like Wordle but with Equations

We could be extremely, reductively classical about it and say that all of Nerdle's answers point to the same place (⊤, since any answer equivalent to ⊥ is disallowed by the rules), but the real answer is that Nerdle—like Wordle—is simply about finding the right piece of syntax, not finding the right semantics.

kd0amgon On being a PhD student of Robert Harper

> Python's OOP is awkward with object.f() meaning something different from f(object), when really they ought to mean the same thing.

Why should they? Coming from other OO languages, I would expect `object.f()` to involve a vtable lookup, or something similar that effectively has `object` carrying around its own particular implementation of `f` (which might have been closed over some hidden internal state as well), and I'd expect `f(object)` to not do anything of the sort.

> In Pandas, you sometimes have a function with the same name as a method, which behave subtly different from each other.

This sounds more like a poorly designed library than any language-level awkwardness.

kd0amgon They Still Haven't Told You

> Figure 2 shows plots of overnight and intraday returns for twenty-one major stock market indices around the world. Turn the page and compare Figure 1 with Figure 2. See if you can tell a difference.

These images... do not render well on my machine, to put it lightly. So they look remarkably similar to me. Perhaps the author could spell out what this difference is? There is eventually mention of "striking similarity in the overnight and in- traday return patterns in the indices around the globe," but I don't think I'm ready to conclude that strong correlation of phenomena across markets in a global economy must be caused by a collection of manipulators acting on all of those markets.

I'm curious to see what others have to say, since I lack the hardware and background to properly read this document.

kd0amgon Explaining Huffman’s Impossible Pyramid

The issue is about which edges are in the same plane as which other edges. If this is a polyhedron, AD and BE must be coplanar, and BE and CF must be coplanar. Extending the edges into lines, they don't form a 3-way intersection. G gets projected to the same screen point as some point on line AD, but the only way G can be on line AD is if AD and FC are coplanar. If all three of AD, BE, and FC are coplanar, the entire figure is a flat pentagon (and DE, BE, and FE are not edges).

If G isn't on line AD, then BE and CF can't be a side of the same truncated pyramid.

kd0amgon Interview with Charlie Munger on Controversial UCSB Dorm

The language of someone who's rational would respond to the issues raised by the interlocutor instead of just insulting him.

kd0amgon Why do dogs tilt their heads? New study offers clues

> A quick internet search turned up plenty of speculative results positing that dogs tilt their heads to hear better, to listen for specific words or tones, or to see past their snouts. Sommese found one poster hypothesizing that shelter dogs do it more often because they know on some level that humans find it irresistible.

Amusing to see this play out again in the comments here

kd0amgon Algebraic data types: things I wish someone had explained about FP (2019)

Recursive sum-of-products types also let you do things that sums and products alone cannot.

kd0amgon Algebraic data types: things I wish someone had explained about FP (2019)

OR alone is insufficient because you still need NOT (or AND and ⊥). You can also encode sum-like behavior using negation and products (a continuation consuming a pair of continuations).

kd0amgon Things Go needs more than generics

> Option types require generics

Why would a built-in option type require more genericity than the built-in array and map types?

kd0amgon Workers are 'rage quitting' their jobs as a tightening labor market

> Interesting that this is pointed out, since I noticed they linked to this article, describing these sorts of jobs being a "teenage rite of passage" to be a myth.

The hyperlink's text claims it is a myth, but the linked article does not refute the idea that working this kind of job is considered by our culture to be a significant growth step for teenagers.

kd0amgon Are dynamic languages going to replace static languages? (2003)

> I've written plenty of invariants that would have been covered by a static type system but no tests.

Do these invariants have some language-level support?

kd0amgon Build Your Own Metal Working Shop from Scrap (2011)

In order to make woodworking tools, you will probably want a functioning smithy.

kd0amgon Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone?

Raising prices doesn't only move toward equilibrium by increasing the quantity supplied -- it also decreases the quantity demanded.

kd0amgon How Dwarf Fortress is built

Catplosions (Tarn loves cats, cats reproduce, too many cats kills DF performance)

This was a particularly insidious one because the usual strategy of culling excess livestock doesn't work out when applied to dwarfs' pets (pets can't be designated for slaughter, and other means of making pets die will make their owners upset). With most animals, you can avoid the pet adoption issue by just not marking them as available for adoption, so you wouldn't have to worry about a dogsplosion, sheepsplosion, etc. Cats do not become pets through that system. Instead, a cat adopts a dwarf.

kd0amgon How many real numbers exist? New proof moves closer to an answer

> why is 2^68 0% of the "numbers that need to be checked"?

The vast majority of natural numbers are larger than 2^68. Only 2^68 of them are less than 2^68, but infinitely many of them are greater.

kd0amgon Alcohol-free beer is fizzing

> Just drink juice?

Far too sweet to be a suitable wine replacement

kd0amgon GraalVM at Facebook

When you make a better compiler/runtime, that work on one program benefits many programs. So it is often more cost-effective to improve the compiler/runtime than to improve all the user programs. Developing higher-level languages creates a similar situation: many programmers can be more productive.

kd0amgon We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments

> This is disproved very easily by reality - most places have increasing rent YoY. Same goes for house prices.

All this proves is that evolving market conditions lead to changes in price. Try charging 2030's market-rate rent in 2021, and see how many offers you get.

kd0amgon As the Pandemic Recedes, Millions of Workers Are Saying 'I Quit'

It's not counting all spending as costs of living.

kd0amgon Facebook will start putting ads in Oculus Quest apps

> this announcement, which essentially amounts to "leading VR platform tests new way for developers to monetize applications with personalized ad service". People seem to think this is Facebook injecting ads into games all willy nilly, when in fact it's just a platform for developers to add ads to their VR apps/games.

This piece (along with others I've read) attributes the action only to Facebook and not to game developers, so readers are likely to miss that part.