Hacker News: Asraelite

New comment by Asraelite in "Steam Machine launches today"

Asraelite — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 22:23:20 +0000

Discounted doesn't necessarily mean at a loss. It could just mean a smaller profit margin than normal.

New comment by Asraelite in "Bias Compounds, Variance Washes Out"

Asraelite — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:12:57 +0000

It's active voice. Intransitive verbs cannot be put in the passive.

New comment by Asraelite in "Bias Compounds, Variance Washes Out"

Asraelite — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:06:02 +0000

> "$1m in stocks" is a thing that is having appreciation done to it.

How? "appreciate" in this sense is not a transitive verb. There cannot be an agent.

In any case, I don't think you need to defend this. It's not about humans never using that pattern, it's about how frequent it is relative to LLMs. Individual counterexamples do not disprove a trend.

New comment by Asraelite in "You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)"

Asraelite — Sun, 31 May 2026 17:22:35 +0000

It's not "we should live in the same environment we evolved in to be happy", it's "the things that make us happy are a product of the environment we evolved in, and we should take that into consideration".

New comment by Asraelite in "Anthropic surpasses OpenAI to become most valuable AI startup"

Asraelite — Sat, 30 May 2026 17:26:52 +0000

I hate that this discussion is about OpenAI vs. Anthropic and not OpenAI+Anthropic vs. Google.

Google put up so little of a fight against the DoW for their use of Gemini that we didn't even hear about it. They are clearly the worst of the evils here, but OpenAI is the one getting all of the negative press.

New comment by Asraelite in "Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)"

Asraelite — Thu, 28 May 2026 09:51:52 +0000

You are conflating obnoxiousness with directness.

New comment by Asraelite in "Performance of Rust Language [pdf]"

Asraelite — Wed, 27 May 2026 12:03:13 +0000

> GPU-friendly? Scalable? Energy-efficient? Reliable? User-friendly? Maintainable?

Nobody uses "performant" to refer to any of those. It usually means either high throughput, or some aggregate of high throughput + low latency + low memory usage.

New comment by Asraelite in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

Asraelite — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:47:25 +0000

> Widespread vulnerabilities discovered

This is a good thing

New comment by Asraelite in "Nordstjernen Web Browser"

Asraelite — Tue, 19 May 2026 08:33:18 +0000

Did this project exist in some form since 1997? The Wayback Machine shows that the website was previously completely different - a fan site for someone connected to the Norwegian royal family.

New comment by Asraelite in "Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors"

Asraelite — Wed, 13 May 2026 17:24:58 +0000

> You can use your imagination to come up with many reasons these result in more chargebacks than normal purchases.

No I can't. Can you elaborate?

New comment by Asraelite in "Deterministic Fully-Static Whole-Binary Translation Without Heuristics"

Asraelite — Wed, 13 May 2026 10:51:23 +0000

Where is the source code?

New comment by Asraelite in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

Asraelite — Sun, 10 May 2026 22:38:44 +0000

Corruption does not necessarily mean a politician receiving a kickback. It can be a lot more indirect and subversive.

New comment by Asraelite in "Show HN: Countries where you can leave your MacBook at a random coffee shop"

Asraelite — Sun, 10 May 2026 11:03:04 +0000

Something similar is the lost wallet test:

https://reddit.com/r/europe/comments/ijboze/study_of_civic_h... source: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aau8712

https://web.archive.org/web/20190327101602/https://www.rd.co...

New comment by Asraelite in "Dirty Frag: Universal Linux LPE"

Asraelite — Fri, 08 May 2026 07:47:24 +0000

Secure boot doesn't provide security, just control for device manufacturers.

Physical access always means the device is pwned. You can install a keylogger or something similar.

New comment by Asraelite in "Eurosky.social Account"

Asraelite — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 07:56:10 +0000

> for productive national conversation (and some digital services) at scale to happen online identities need to be verified

That is the exact opposite of what you need. Loss of anonymity creates chilling effects that stifle conversation.

AI bots/spam are a problem, but don't solve it by creating an even worse problem.

New comment by Asraelite in "What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)"

Asraelite — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:59:42 +0000

The wording was just an attempt to illustrate the point. There are cases where you can rephrase a sentence with "zero" to get basically the same meaning, but the important thing is that "zero" falls into the same semantic class as other numerals, which other ways of negatively qualifying existence don't.

Put another way, the invention was not literally the word "zero", or anything to do with language per se. It was the idea that you can think about lack of existence in the same was that you think about counting, i.e. treating the idea of there being two apples and the idea of there being zero apples as two examples of the same thing in your mind, instead of treating one as being in some way fundamentally different.

Being raised with a maths education from a young age now, it's easy to see this as obvious, but there was a time in human history when it wasn't.

Also, I wasn't disagreeing with the Cartesian coordinate system being more significant.

New comment by Asraelite in "What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)"

Asraelite — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:05:28 +0000

Also not the same. You can't say "the number of apples is no", but you can with "zero".

New comment by Asraelite in "What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)"

Asraelite — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:23:03 +0000

"nothing" is not the same the same as "zero". "zero apples" means something different to "nothing", but that difference is subtle and difficult to explain, which is what makes the invention of zero such an achievement.

New comment by Asraelite in "The passive in English (2011)"

Asraelite — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 08:57:23 +0000

That doesn't follow. Linguistics is not literature.

New comment by Asraelite in "What is the most beautiful / highest quality code you've seen (or written)?"

Asraelite — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 08:21:15 +0000

The Rust standard library.