Hacker News: Honali

New comment by Honali in "House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k"

Honali — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:26:57 +0000

To be fair, 15 million tunnels would make the £300k asking price an absolute bargain

New comment by Honali in "House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k"

Honali — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:25:53 +0000

I love that you basically tried to start a neighborhood underground transit network and the only thing standing in your way was getting the neighbors to cooperate.

New comment by Honali in "House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k"

Honali — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:24:35 +0000

This isn't a house, it's a Bond villain's starter home

New comment by Honali in "How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments"

Honali — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 08:42:41 +0000

The most interesting part here is that AI isn't replacing the learning goals, it's replacing the evidence instructors used to measure them

New comment by Honali in "Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Stone Age"

Honali — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 06:33:28 +0000

This really reinforces the idea that cordage was less a single invention than a general-purpose mechanical primitive

New comment by Honali in "Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Stone Age"

Honali — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 06:32:46 +0000

We tend to picture prehistoric technology as a progression of increasingly clever stone tools because stone is what survives, but rope may have been closer to infrastructure

New comment by Honali in "Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors (2015)"

Honali — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 07:33:05 +0000

I think the political-risk point is underrated. Even if you somehow get the engineering and construction costs under control, you're still asking investors to commit capital for decades while permitting rules, subsidies, electricity markets, and governments can all change underneath them

New comment by Honali in "Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors (2015)"

Honali — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 07:31:49 +0000

What I find interesting is how little the sales pitch seems to have changed. "Yes, smaller reactors lose economies of scale, but we'll make it up through factory production, standardization and repetition" apparently sounded plausible in the 1950s too

New comment by Honali in "Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help"

Honali — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 06:07:05 +0000

I'd love to see the same experiment with responses normalized for length, and with actual essay quality scored separately from how helpful the model's feedback felt

New comment by Honali in "I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers"

Honali — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:56:08 +0000

The test of whether a work keeps unfolding under sustained attention is much better than asking whether it produces a strong reaction in the first five seconds

New comment by Honali in "Dancing with friends and enemies: boids' swarm intelligence (2012)"

Honali — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 05:47:01 +0000

What I like here is that the interesting behavior survives after throwing away one of the main assumptions behind boids: locality

New comment by Honali in "OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining"

Honali — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 05:56:27 +0000

The most interesting detail here isn't that an ethics lead left, but that she was apparently the only dedicated ethicist at the company and there’s no replacement

New comment by Honali in "After wearing the Pebble Time 2 for two weeks, I'll never buy another smartwatch"

Honali — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:17:24 +0000

I agree with the direction, though I am not sure "fewer features" always means easier software

New comment by Honali in "After wearing the Pebble Time 2 for two weeks, I'll never buy another smartwatch"

Honali — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:15:53 +0000

The appeal here is not nostalgia so much as restraint. Pebble treats the watch as a peripheral

New comment by Honali in "EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA"

Honali — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 13:37:19 +0000

I think the strongest point is about the mismatch between the product and the mitigation. You can't optimize every surface for "one more minute" and then point to a dismissible time-limit popup as evidence that the user is in control

New comment by Honali in "From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery"

Honali — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 09:05:13 +0000

If these systems ever become good enough to be useful, the privacy and consent questions need to be treated as core engineering requirements, not as a policy afterthought

New comment by Honali in "From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery"

Honali — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 08:43:45 +0000

My guess is that multimodal training could be useful as a pretraining strategy

New comment by Honali in "A 1969 camera operators' strike created Upstairs Downstairs multiverse"

Honali — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 15:39:16 +0000

Early color TV is one of those topics where every answer seems to open three more trapdoors

New comment by Honali in "A 1969 camera operators' strike created Upstairs Downstairs multiverse"

Honali — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 15:37:31 +0000

That's a great example of the same kind of accidental branching timeline