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npongratz

2,519 karma · joined April 14, 2010

Please direct personal correspondence to my HN username at Big G's surveillance-powered electronic mail service.
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npongratz··on AI firm HUMXN offers free plumbing and HVAC service in Minnesota to train robots
As much as I am a skeptic of household maintenance robots, I'll admit that the robots will probably 1) actually show up, 2) show up around the time they say they would, 3) won't be drunk, 4) won't ask me to join their MLM.

Though I'm less sure about (4), considering the Worldcoin eyeball-harvesting scammers and the AI-bailout scammers are one and the same.

npongratz··on Returning from vacation? The government can search your phone without a warrant
But you see, they just have to vote harder!
npongratz··on Best LLM for every budget, updated daily
Opus 5.5 is indeed on the Intelligence tab, but I don't see it on the Coding or Math tabs.
npongratz··on Global bond yields hit 2008 highs, raising stakes for big borrowers
> vote for people who are financially literate, can think long term, and can "conserve" rather than politicians who promise endlessly

I wish you luck. Endless promises and short term thinking are the main things the system incentivizes. Each politician is temporarily renting their seat, paid for by other people. Each bureaucrat is studiously, steadfastly avoiding learning anything that threatens their continued employment, which is paid for by other people.

npongratz··on Anna's Archive Owes $340 Million, Lost Several Domains, but It's Still Online
Many of us did, and I certainly still do, but there obviously weren't enough of us rebelling to convince them of how reprehensible it is to sue your own fans and sic the guns of the state on them.
npongratz··on ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2
"Abysmal", but that's beside the point.

Suppose a US citizen, residing and working in the US and never traveling to China, crosses The Powers That Be. Which Power is more likely to do worse things to said citizen? Pretty unlikely they'll be rendered to one of the illegal Chinese jails in Brooklyn, more likely they'll be sent to Gitmo or a black site.

npongratz··on Pystd, similar-ish functionality with a fraction of the compile time
Not only that, but given how I would phonetically pronounce it... ew.
npongratz··on Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
I suspect it's more accurate to say the private equity that bought out dental practices everywhere have the cash to burn. At least for now.
npongratz··on Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
They don't use their own product, and they don't want their engineers to use their product either. They want velocity, and you can't have velocity if you're bogged down by doing end-to-end testing and finding friction and whatnot.
npongratz··on Scorched Earth 2000 – Web
Just remember: "NO KIBITZING"!

Sadly, it appears ChatGPT 5.5 did not implement this crucial feature for this javascript port.

npongratz··on New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming
That's awesome! I had a somewhat similar experience (shared previously [0]):

> I proved a topology theorem in a dream once.

> Before I went to sleep, my inability to prove it had been bugging me all day long, and I suspected it'd be featured on the next morning's (way too early) final exam for my university course. I solved it in my dream, woke up, wrote on my whiteboard what I remembered and sure enough, it was correct. I worked it a few more times to cram it into my memory before running to my exam.

> To my great delight, the ability to prove that theorem was featured heavily in one of the exam's questions, and helped me do quite well on the exam overall.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40651913

npongratz··on Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
That's just a straight-shooter with "upper management" written all over him.
npongratz··on Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price
> The PTO shaft is a spindle on the back of the tractor which drives things like your flail mower, wood chipper, etc.

... and kills/maims anyone with lose clothing trying to step over it!

npongratz··on Dr. Dobb's Developer Library DVD 6
I believe you mean r/datahoarder: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/

r/datahorde is different, and a ghost town.

npongratz··on Systemd BirthDate Merge: Conflicts of Interest
Mirror here: https://isoc-sig.freifunk.net/systemd/systemd%20birthDate%20...

(confirmed still up at the time of writing this post.)

npongratz··on Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz
It might be mere semantics, but the 1814 burning of Washington has been depicted as an invasion.

https://archive.org/details/burningofwashing00pitc

npongratz··on No right to relicense this project
> And that error is that they look for technical compliance when so much of the law is subjective and holistic.

I know it sounds like an oversimplification, but "got off on a technicality" is a common thing among the well-connected and well-heeled. Sure, us nerds probably focus too much on the "technicality" part, since we are by definition technical, but the rest is wishy-washy, unfair BS as far as many of our brains work much of the time.

npongratz··on Dyson settles forced labour suit in landmark UK case
Poor performers get put on PIPs, right? Did that person's poor performance "ruin it for everyone" and put the rest of the working plebs (the entire company or department or whatever) on PIPs? No, of course not. The poor performer gets singled out, which is just fine.

So instead of punishing everyone for some lying asshole's poor judgment, I propose management puts that lazy jerk on their own SDIP (sick day improvement plan).

EDIT: As an alternative, sure, update the handbook's sick policy while that liar is working for you. Since there's now precedent for handbook updating, should be an easy thing to revert it back to the normal, "no sick day policy" after they leave (by whatever means).

npongratz··on Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy
Regulation is theater, effectively, thanks to regulatory capture.
npongratz··on Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy
The progression of the cable TV industry shows many people are more than happy, or apathetic enough, to allow the industry to double-dip.
npongratz··on Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest
pingfs has similar inspiration, where storage capacity scales with latency.

https://code.kryo.se/pingfs/

Discussed in 2015:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844725

npongratz··on Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel (2020)
Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39884821 195 points | 2 years ago | 66 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23902124 196 points | 5 years ago | 100 comments

npongratz··on Electromechanical reshaping, an alternative to laser eye surgery
Same results for me. Absolutely awful, vision consistently began failing by becoming noticeably blurry about 8 to 9 hours after taking night lenses out, and I couldn't drive at night because of headlight and streetlight halos even after "topping off" with those uncomfortable lenses during the day. As an enthusiastic night sky observer, trying to use those lenses was depressing.

I gave up after extended tries with three different lenses (I think it was six to nine months total), with my highly experienced doctor consulting with different manufacturers and researchers from around the country. Turns out my pupils naturally open up too wide, made worse by corneas that apparently are not thick enough to retain the reshaping all day. These issues, incidentally, make me ineligible for the popular cut-n-burn style of eye surgery.

On the bright side, it was indeed completely reversible and I've suffered no effects of any kind after about two days of non-use. That was a bit over a decade ago.

npongratz··on 29 years later, Settlers II gets Amiga release
Not completely unheard of but I get your point :). Babylon 5's pilot's animations (and I believe opening credits) was rendered in 1993 on sixteen souped-up A2000s, each with 32 MB of RAM.

https://www.generationamiga.com/2020/08/30/how-24-commodore-...

npongratz··on Open AI announces $1.5M bonus for every employee
> The AI race seems more defined by spending more money than the other guy, regardless of results.

Reminds me of the much-vaunted, then widely maligned and derided, burn rate metric of the dot-com bubble.

npongratz··on Google suffers data breach in ongoing Salesforce data theft attacks
> You can always get a plugin if something is missing.

To my great consternation, I have not found this to be true in the cloud version:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-72631

Special thanks to Matt Lachman for keeping up the good fight every (business) day.

npongratz··on Claude Code weekly rate limits
Words mean things. Please don't call it "unlimited" if you limit it.
npongratz··on Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer
> (After 8 months they told me to pick up all my gear, they found nothing, but thanks for traumatising my kids)
npongratz··on Archaeological evidence of intensive indigenous farming in MI's Upper Peninsula
From TFA, they're using LIDAR results to determine features suggesting indigenous farming practices. Researchers are doing the same in tropical rainforests around the world, where there's far more vegetation, finding similar evidence of intensive agriculture.

I highly doubt weeds, extensive though they might be, would wipe clean the evidence they've found in the landscape.

> I find it very hard to believe that we can find evidence of intensive cultivation after 3,600 years in such a wet area.

Perhaps I'm missing something. I'm no expert, and have merely skimmed through, but the earliest date I could find in the PDF linked from the fine article was 400 BCE [0], so around 2400 years. That's still a lot, but definitely not 3600 years.

[0] "While there is evidence of maize in the Upper Peninsula as early as 400 BCE (7), intensive cultivation, like we clearly see at Sixty Islands is typically not undertaken until roughly 1000 CE."

https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.ads1643/su...

npongratz··on War and Wilderness: British Soldiers in Revolutionary America
There are no native water buffalo in Alaska. Are you perhaps thinking of American bison?
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