Hacker News: Bratmon

New comment by Bratmon in "I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI"

Bratmon — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 20:06:42 +0000

To provide a competing point of anecdata: A Gemini diagnosis saved me $3,000 in unnecessary repairs on my Civic.

New comment by Bratmon in "Solving Wordle using information theory"

Bratmon — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 20:36:14 +0000

Didn't like 20 different YouTube channels do this exact thing back when Wordle was relevant?

New comment by Bratmon in "Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)"

Bratmon — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 02:29:52 +0000

Even in cloistered private communities, "not playing the online meta" is an unstable equilibrium.

As soon as someone loses a bunch of games in a row and decides to Google "$GameName strategy", the community's unique meta disappears.

New comment by Bratmon in "The history of butterfly swimming"

Bratmon — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:00:57 +0000

I noticed the article pointedly didn't compare the stroke to the forward crawl, which is clearly both faster and more efficient.

There's no real way to compare the butterfly and the forward crawl that doesn't make the butterfly look like a ridiculous farce.

New comment by Bratmon in "The history of butterfly swimming"

Bratmon — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:51:59 +0000

I never quite understood why there are Olympic medals for Butterfly swimming, but not things like "100m hop-on-one-foot sprint"

Like, why is being good at a deliberately-inefficent form of movement worth a medal in only this one case?

New comment by Bratmon in "Air Force bomber crashed on takoff at California base"

Bratmon — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 23:13:24 +0000

Another Boeing disaster.

Although we can't really blame this one on McDonnell Douglas.

New comment by Bratmon in "How to earn a billion dollars"

Bratmon — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 08:27:34 +0000

I apologize for derailing this conversation about whether or not Uber is better than taxi companies by bringing up irrelevant topics like whether or not Uber is better than taxi companies.

New comment by Bratmon in "How to earn a billion dollars"

Bratmon — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:48:48 +0000

As opposed to taxi companies, who are famously efficient, honest, and not creeps.

New comment by Bratmon in "GameBoy Workboy"

Bratmon — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:53:47 +0000

People who can see the article can see that it's incredibly mid and not worth commenting on.

But for people who can't see the article, it could be anything! For all they know, they're being kept out of the greatest content of all time!

New comment by Bratmon in "Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau"

Bratmon — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:42:19 +0000

This is a rare occasion of the Trump administration getting something right.

Why even do a census if you're just going to synthesize random data as the last step?

New comment by Bratmon in "Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau"

Bratmon — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:39:55 +0000

I think the TFA was very light on evidence that people's desire to respond to the census is increased if the government fabricates the results later

New comment by Bratmon in "Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau"

Bratmon — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 16:29:07 +0000

Surely any such foreign occupier would just demand the unredacted data?

New comment by Bratmon in "Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau"

Bratmon — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 16:28:37 +0000

But this article is about a decision to damage the census less. If you value an accurate census, you should be celebrating!

New comment by Bratmon in "Several injured in Boeing 787 nose-gear collapse in Frankfurt"

Bratmon — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 01:41:16 +0000

The official cause of the Lionair 610 crash was literally "The pilot pushed the nose down for no reason in the middle of the flight"

New comment by Bratmon in "Too many people become too capable without asking permission"

Bratmon — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:42:23 +0000

If this article was written by an AI, then the "author" needs to upgrade to premium.

If it was written by a human, then the "author" definitely needs to upgrade to premium.

New comment by Bratmon in "Several injured in Boeing 787 nose-gear collapse in Frankfurt"

Bratmon — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:38:58 +0000

Fun fact: Neither of the 737 Max 8 MCAS crashes were determined to be an engineering defect either.

New comment by Bratmon in "I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it"

Bratmon — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:24:56 +0000

> It’s not because of capability, it’s because Anthropic’s guardrails prevented it from solving the problem.

I'm not familiar with this case, but in general people should be very suspicious about this claim- it is extremely common for an LLM to claim they're not allowed to do something when in fact they're incapable of it.

After all "My code of conduct forbids me from..." is a completion just like any other, and if the LLM can't perform a task, it's usually the best completion.

New comment by Bratmon in "Retro-Tech Parenting"

Bratmon — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:04:23 +0000

I don't think enough parents have internalized that if they're the "I don't let my teenager have a phone" parent in 2026, that also means they're the "I don't let my teenager have friends" parent.

New comment by Bratmon in "DNS is for people, not for IT infrastructure"

Bratmon — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:19:02 +0000

If you're worried about bad DNS changes causing problems, then you should be terrified about bad Ansible changes.

New comment by Bratmon in "DNS is for people, not for IT infrastructure"

Bratmon — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 02:41:54 +0000

> Instead of configuring domain names that may not resolve, we can just directly inject the appropriate IP address(ess) into configuration files

Because now you've replaced one single point of failure configuration system with caching and TTLs (DNS) with a higher maintenance and much less widely supported one.