Hacker News: Arainach

New comment by Arainach in "Why crypto's best infrastructure companies stopped looking like crypto?"

Arainach — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 01:53:39 +0000

Why did you copy two segments of the post and paste them without any thoughts of your own?

New comment by Arainach in "The Amazon tax"

Arainach — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:11:09 +0000

> Then, one day a new toaster comes out, and it might be even better than the old best-seller. How would it get sufficient traction to be recommended by the algorithm?

This is a solved problem. Recommendation algorithms aren't just "highest average rating", they take into account number of ratings, recent trends, etc.

Even if some ads improve this experience, Amazon is orders of magnitude past that threshold into hostility and toxicity. You have to scroll through pages of sponsored results to find anything worthwhile.

New comment by Arainach in "The Life and Death of Direct File [pdf]"

Arainach — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 01:28:05 +0000

Outdated energy sources, no manufacturing base, and expensive AI that's barely ahead of cheap open source Chinese models.

A massive military that's burning billions and depleting its reserves proving that it can't even protect ships from Iran.

So. Much. Winning.

New comment by Arainach in "The Life and Death of Direct File [pdf]"

Arainach — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 22:38:27 +0000

America's dominance in science and technology (and art, and other fields) was due to an atmosphere where the smartest and best people from around the world wanted to come here. We have actively worked to drive them away and broken the processes in ways that can't be fixed with the stroke of a pen.

Our economic influence was based around being a stabilizing force and soft power - both of which we have destroyed. The world was willing to forgive us for 2016-2020, but now they know we are not to be trusted - that we will abandon and publicly abuse our allies no matter how close, that our policy changes based on whichever dictator last talked to Trump, and they know that the other two wings of our government are spineless and powerless sycophants who will never put a stop to any of it. They are forming trade relationships and infrastructure without us, and we will never get back our preferred status.

We have given up generational advantages and are not set up to be a dominant power in anything. We are an empire in accelerating decline.

New comment by Arainach in "On AI regulation and messaging"

Arainach — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:05:27 +0000

What's your source for this? This isn't how patent law works.

You can't patent "repairing a road" but you can absolutely patent a new mechanism to do so.

Most patents are of this form - there are far more patents for improved ways of doing things than initial ways of doing things.

New comment by Arainach in "The Life and Death of Direct File [pdf]"

Arainach — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:27:36 +0000

America is doing awful. Income inequality, oppression of minorities, visible corruption, the wholesale destruction of the scientific and policy infrastructure that made it a world leader, abandoning important technologies such as renewable energy, destroying the social safety net....should I go on?

New comment by Arainach in "On AI regulation and messaging"

Arainach — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:34:54 +0000

"repairing DNA" isn't patentable, but "a mechanism for altering base pairs using " is absolutely patentable.

New comment by Arainach in "GIMP Development Update"

Arainach — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:02:02 +0000

> It's slow and bad.
Seems to have been working great for MS Office.

New comment by Arainach in "The Life and Death of Direct File [pdf]"

Arainach — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:56:47 +0000

The government outcompetes the private sector in almost everything it gets into. Healthcare, mail delivery, fire relief, and far more. The private sector is all about slashing quality and raising prices.

New comment by Arainach in "The Life and Death of Direct File [pdf]"

Arainach — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 05:10:16 +0000

Your "226" includes the one-time initial development costs. You're comparing $40/yr in perpetuity versus something like $220 once, $6/yr after that - and I suspect the actual costs of running the system are far lower.

New comment by Arainach in "AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them"

Arainach — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 01:21:55 +0000

No one has "invented" that it's untestable. String theory literally doesn't give predictions that would allow it to be falsified. There are an astounding number of possible geometries that mean that any set of data could technically be "consistent with string theory". There are no specific energy bounds where it kicks in - if an experiement doesn't show existence of strings, it's "try again with more energy" instead of "falsified".
String theory can't be disproved even in theory. Spending decades on that is akin to spending decades rearchitecting your software to make it more beautiful and full of design patterns and promising users/management that some day it'll all make sense.

New comment by Arainach in "Asus Bike Booster"

Arainach — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 09:18:40 +0000

Your existing bike hopefully fits you great rather than having to modify a low-mid grade ebike. Perhaps you don't have space for more bikes. Perhaps you want a bike made of good components that are easy to repair. It's a significant amount of money but there are absolutely reasons.
I have a ebike that cost ~1500 in 2018 and is probably comparable to what $2k would buy you these days. It's very heavy and while the drivetrain is repairable, there are important pieces of it that I would struggle to repair/replace if they died today.
I have a steel touring bike that's significantly lighter, has standard sized parts that can be repaired, replaced and upgraded (many of which I have already upgraded in the last 15 years) and fits me like a glove. If I didn't own an ebike and you asked me whether I'd rather spend $2k buying something like my ebike or adding a 750W motor to my Surly, I'd upgrade my touring bike.

New comment by Arainach in "AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them"

Arainach — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 08:19:16 +0000

Black holes were theorized and you could design experiments that, given the proper instruments, would allow them to be detected. Relativity was similar (famously, the curvature of spacetime was demonstrated during a solar eclipse by being able to see stars that should have been behind the sun).
String theory has nothing even theorized that would allow us to prove it.

New comment by Arainach in "AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them"

Arainach — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 19:43:13 +0000

Spending your life's work on a theory that is widely agreed to be untestable is certainly a form of ego, or at least is more philosophy than science.

New comment by Arainach in "Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant"

Arainach — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 06:04:42 +0000

> Things like auto generating walkthrough videos
I'm trying to write this with respect, but please explain your thought process here.
If your PR description is a video instead of a written explanation, I'm rejecting it without even reading the code.

New comment by Arainach in "Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant"

Arainach — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 06:01:53 +0000

This is defeatism. Reject unacceptable PRs, full stop. It's on the author to work to break them up.

New comment by Arainach in "The case for overhauling American science"

Arainach — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 01:39:28 +0000

In the Trump administration, any traditional qualifications for a job are disqualifiers. All that matters is willing to do what you're told and never question anything, publically or in private.
What does RFK Jr. know about medicine? Why do we have news anchors in cabinet positions? Same answer.

New comment by Arainach in "Every Fucking Website (2020)"

Arainach — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:06:03 +0000

You can comply with the law without banners and dark pattern defaults. These businesses are maliciously complying by making things more obnoxious and painful than they need to be.
A comparison would be a store who was angry the law says you have to be 21 to buy alcohol and starts requesting everyone, even people not buying alcohol, to show ID or be kicked out. That's not a bad law, that's a bad business maliciously complying.

New comment by Arainach in "Every Fucking Website (2020)"

Arainach — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:45:20 +0000

The EU doesn't require banners.
Companies could stop selling and storing your data. They could only use cookies when absolutely essential. They could use lots of kinds of UX.
This is the equivalent of businesses who put a big visible "20% the state says we have to give our employees healthcare" fee on their bill to throw a hissy fit and hope customers get angry at the government for protecting them instead of the business for exploiting them.

New comment by Arainach in "My Rules for Using Spreadsheets"

Arainach — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:24:14 +0000

No, I mean that you give a name to a cell of "Price" or "ExchangeRate" and then you write formulas as =Price*ExchangeRate rather than =A13*C8