Hacker News: Normal_gaussian

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "The Beauty of Roundabouts"

Normal_gaussian — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 12:16:30 +0000

Well we have very different experiences driving to, through, and around Salisbury. There's traffic, and it can get bad, but it isn't as bad as you say.

The council and national highways are working on it, but the problem is not one of roundabouts - its one of increases in traffic and lack of capability to make the roads bigger and/or build a bypass. Unless we're willing to knock down a load of housing and cultural sites we're stuck with something around or slightly more than the road capacity we have.

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "Dyson CameraJet electric toothbrush"

Normal_gaussian — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:33:04 +0000

cheap ones are in that range; the most expensive ones around $350/$400. I paid ~£200 for one about a year ago, which is ~$270 USD including sales tax. The top end takes the piss, but if you want certain features - particularly several in combination - its what they've segmented the market to.

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "No Man's Sky Cosmos"

Normal_gaussian — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:28:44 +0000

There are a many successful games companies and marketers in the games industry that have enough respect for others to not mislead like this. Many many marketing promotions go to significant effort to show how a thing actually works. There is a great interview with the Battlefield Bad Company people pre-release showing off destructible buildings where they go into what it is and what it isn't, and explain the trade-offs they had to make and how it makes the experience immersive.

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "No Man's Sky Cosmos"

Normal_gaussian — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:26:32 +0000

Spore was similarly misleading, yes.

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "A/I shuts down"

Normal_gaussian — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:23:46 +0000

While this is often the case, it is not clear how this group specifically functioned. Theory vs practice is always very interesting in these cases.

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "A Stupid Idea for AI Alignment We Came with by Looking at Specification Gaming"

Normal_gaussian — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:16:54 +0000

Further to 1, most tasks are much harder than dying and are not actually completed by modern LLMs. It is a case of underspecification.

"Who is the fastest person in the UK?" is underspecified. We would typically answer and accept a cursory search of records, but it is possible to see the question as an instruction to measure which would justify conquering the country.

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "No Man's Sky Cosmos"

Normal_gaussian — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:10:22 +0000

Its notable that you dichotomise using the promises of another unreleased game from the same people. Depth was part of the original NMS promise.

Obviously NMS's original marketing was bonkers and capitalised on saying technically true things in ways to mislead large numbers of people.

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "AirPods 5"

Normal_gaussian — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:02:08 +0000

And many of the mics built into good webcams and laptops are superior, so long as you aren't somewhere like a café.

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "AirPods 5"

Normal_gaussian — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:59:08 +0000

> They’ll turn off the moment you take them out on iPhones atleast. This is a small example of how the user experience in the Apple Ecosystem for AirPods has been kind of nuts.

Every 'pod' type headphones I've used do this. It's odd you admit to only knowing Apple, then use it to support Apple being superior.

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "A/I shuts down"

Normal_gaussian — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 15:27:18 +0000

It should be noted that this is a very sensible thing to say even if you are not stopping; the only case where you cannot say this is if you are carrying on with the same branding, which is typically necessary if you are carrying forwards funds (which have been seized) or brand recognition (which may not be important for a group who focuses on interpersonal relationships).

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "A/I shuts down"

Normal_gaussian — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 15:24:02 +0000

I wasn't aware of this group; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistici/Inventati is their wiki article, but it is a little light on details.

Some of the claims are interesting - "Decision making in the group takes places collectively instead of through majority voting." - isn't explained by the sourced article.

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "Show HN: OwnTime – a chess clock for your day's priorities"

Normal_gaussian — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 22:40:47 +0000

This is a great (and tight) execution of a neat concept. I'm not in the garden of Apple so unfortunately I can't play with it, but the preview is thorough. I particularly like the voice integration. I sympathise with some of the time allocation issues you mention, particularly when it comes to important but not urgent things.

Relatedly - I've struggled a lot in the last year with time tracking for fixed price projects (not so important, but useful) and billable hours (very important) largely due to the amount of parallelism I now do; and I think this notion of a "chess clock" may unblock me on building my own tracker for this!

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini"

Normal_gaussian — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 09:44:39 +0000

    $0 per-token bill

You still have electricity and capital investment. Envelope math suggests cheap electricity is costing you something like $0.50/mtok and the opportunity cost on the capital tied up and lost in the unit purchase and resale is going to cost you something like $2/mtok at 100% utilization (so, frontier model prices or higher at real utilization), and you don't benefit from any elasticity.

Hosted GLM 5.3 flash is like $0.15/mtok in $0.50/mtok out

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "Dyson CameraJet electric toothbrush"

Normal_gaussian — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:18:07 +0000

Unfortunately $500 isn't much on the scale of dental care if it actually works.

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?"

Normal_gaussian — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 22:22:22 +0000

Actions aren't secondary to most paid GH users; and if they are down it usually means no deployments and no tests, which can often halt work.

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down"

Normal_gaussian — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:42:13 +0000

That's quite a take.

The EU-UK negotiations were mired in issues of EU maximalism; attempting to force each PM to agree a worse deal knowing not agreeing to it would cause short term pain for that PMs political situation. Its quite the thing that the UK managed to hold on as much as it did.

The UK was on the back foot in all negotiations having been forced into the Brexit outcome.

For all the nonsense printed in the UK and Continental presses, the UK had a surprisingly consistent position through the entire thing with clear threads of staff and policies still running to today.

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI"

Normal_gaussian — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 21:24:40 +0000

> I'm not sure this approach is a good idea, but it might be

After the last year, I feel like this sentence could replace half my outbound emails.

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?"

Normal_gaussian — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:44:38 +0000

I have an app I built for myself (because I couldn't find anything appropriate) to ask me questions via notifications like rating how I feel, how's my sleep, am I alert, eating well etc. its probablistic both in when it alerts and what it asks and I power a self monitoring dashboard off the back of it.

There were two key insights for me:

- too frequent or predictable and I'll ignore it

- always being reminded about something negative is bad for you

You didn't give a lot of information in your question; so that is my two cents.

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "Incident with Github.com"

Normal_gaussian — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:55:51 +0000

The hilarious part is more the absurdity and cognitive disconnect experienced when reading about serious evaluations that went in a completely opposite direction to those directly participated in.

New comment by Normal_gaussian in "Incident with Github.com"

Normal_gaussian — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:23:57 +0000

Those are both hilarious to me. In my last FTE role we had the exact opposite beliefs - we wanted to leave GitLabs increases in pricing and move to annual sub, but the reliability of self-hosted runners and the flexibility (and clarity) of the CI system was fantastic.