Hacker News: AndrewOMartin

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "Tim Curry has died"

AndrewOMartin — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 10:15:34 +0000

Yeah, I've never understood this observation. The entire shtick of The Muppets was that every celebrity they ever had on the show treated them like real actors and celebrities. Not even "famous Muppets", just straight up celebs.

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude"

AndrewOMartin — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 08:52:51 +0000

1970s personal computers were "controlled" by the likes of Richard Stallman. 2020s AI systems are controlled by the likes of Sam Altman.

See the difference?

This is intentionally a wild and crude oversimplification, but I hope to raise at least one point against the notion that AI will be similarly democratized.

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "Alien World Chemistry Found Inside Meteorite That Struck New Jersey Home"

AndrewOMartin — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 15:56:57 +0000

https://ohyeahihadntthoughtofthat.com/

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "Running Doom on Our Custom CPU and Going Viral"

AndrewOMartin — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 15:40:57 +0000

Doom 2. And only John "Benevolent hyper-intelligent architect of the post singularity simulation we all live in" Carmack would know why he named it that.

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "I also filed the corners off my MacBook"

AndrewOMartin — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 10:16:17 +0000

What a tragedy Robert Bosch Stiftung isn't receiving the dividends into his personal accounts, as this means he's not incentivized to keep innovating or to reduce prices.

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k"

AndrewOMartin — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 08:08:44 +0000

The Agents are more like Double Agents. Purporting to work for you, but with the primary goal of siphoning your wallet to its handler.

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "Bonnie Tyler has died"

AndrewOMartin — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:18:47 +0000

Is it too much to ask for a Streetwise Hercules?

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk"

AndrewOMartin — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 17:04:44 +0000

I think the "state of the art" of measuring the quality of outputs was to send the same task to multiple "agents" and only accept answers if over a certain amount agree. With some human review and reputation scoring sprinkled on top. It was a while since I was in this field though

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed"

AndrewOMartin — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 10:26:34 +0000

This is like when store-bought locks are able to be picked by a novice, or broken with a hammer, or bypassed with a magnet. The phrase used is "it keeps good people honest", rather than "it keeps absolutely all bad guys out".

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "Being an old school web-based sports sim dev in the era of vibe coded games"

AndrewOMartin — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:39:34 +0000

We might get a powerful enough model to run "Claude, build me GTA6" before GTA6.

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "New Beam Spring Keyboards"

AndrewOMartin — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:10:41 +0000

That's $55 to ship to the UK. Tbh, I have an original Model-M and if ~£175 gets something of similar quality on your desk I'd say that's a fair value deal.

It's not cheap for a keyboard, but no one on this forum should be cheaping out on a keyboard. I always say, if you can find a vendor of Model-M keyboard buy a lifetime's supply (i.e. one).

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert"

AndrewOMartin — Sun, 31 May 2026 19:20:35 +0000

Even worse, what's to prevent the terrorists from temporarily renaming their Bluetooth bombs to something innocuous just before going through security and only renaming it back when they need to conveniently find them again while pairing?

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'"

AndrewOMartin — Fri, 29 May 2026 11:52:21 +0000

I think we can assume any hacker worth his salt has a dead man trigger. I imagine that if he doesn't reset it before a given period elapses then a script imports that will and testament text file into LaTeX and emails a lovingly rendered PDF off to the local lawyer.

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "What Do Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems Mean?"

AndrewOMartin — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:54:04 +0000

Only in the sense that Economists speak entirely in statements that are unprovable.

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "What Do Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems Mean?"

AndrewOMartin — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:52:28 +0000

Some people, when confronted with a Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, think "I know, I’ll use a theoretically infinite set of axioms." Now they have aleph-nought problems.

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "Porting 3D Movie Maker to Linux"

AndrewOMartin — Fri, 15 May 2026 08:58:14 +0000

Your point stands, it's very impressive. But Dragon in America was a cut above even that. Just look at the "chase scene" starting at 10:00 (even just 15 seconds should be enough to make my point)

https://youtu.be/i5IJCAhiBhw?si=qsTJgv6MsfjXmEXU&t=600

For anyone not familiar with 3DMM, there was no facility to move "the camera" to any apparent camera movement was just moving each primitive object, as far as I know, one piece at a time.

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

AndrewOMartin — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:05:25 +0000

The second, fourth, and sixth form is options aren't used AFAIK.

Otherwise, a leading underscore indicates a private method but isn't enforced. A double leading underscore is also a private method but is "enforced" by giving it an unpredictable name. Double underscore (on both sides) means the function is digging in to python's API, like if you want to give a class some behaviour with + or = or [].

It's not trivial, and not particularly intuitive, but it's not necessarily terribly confusing.

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games"

AndrewOMartin — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 07:50:28 +0000

I always felt Deadly Rooms of Death (my preferred version being the free "Architect's Edition", but all are good, and many have better QoL features) was one of the puzzle games which was essentially "discovered" rather than invented.

Simple turn-based eight-direction grid movement, where one of your adjacent squares contains your "sword" and you can rotate your sword around yourself one square per-turn. Kill (deterministic and 1hp) monsters by moving your sword on to all the monsters move after your move, and "complete" a room by killing all monsters.

There's quite an active community (at least there was when I was in to it) but I've rarely heard it mentioned outside of the community.

Edit: I'm happy to see some other references to DroD in this thread.

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git"

AndrewOMartin — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:48:00 +0000

I'm one of the git users who would sweat. Can you explain a bit (out link relevant docs) how I might split a commit up, and move it?

New comment by AndrewOMartin in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

AndrewOMartin — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 21:11:21 +0000

> Foreman was sued by the Adams County Sheriff’s Office over a drug search at his home in August 2022 that resulted in no criminal charges.

This is a mad sentence.