Hacker News: Nzen

New comment by Nzen in "Scientists Figured Out How Eels Reproduce (2022)"

Nzen — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:43:58 +0000

tl;dr Eels have a long lifecycle with several stages. They do not develop sexual organs until late in their life, when they migrate back to the Saragossa Sea. This meant earlier autopsies of eels revealed no sexual organs, even though scientists could provoke them with hormone therapy. So, a team lead by Jose Azevedo tagged female eels in the Azores in 2018, and tracked them via satellite [0].

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-19248-8

I sometimes think about the selection pressures that lead to complex life cycles, like fig wasps. I find myself thinking about it naively, like one existed and the other grew into the niche. But, realistically, everything is changing (slowly) all the time. I just notice it for, say, influenza because their cycle time is so short.

New comment by Nzen in "Personal Encyclopedias"

Nzen — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 21:08:00 +0000

You could add an appendix with printed, scannable, binary data. You could create a page with a bunch of QR codes. Martin Monperrus vouched [0] for Twibright Optar [1].

[0] https://www.monperrus.net/martin/store-data-paper

[1] https://ronja.twibright.com/optar/

New comment by Nzen in "Boomloom: Think with your hands"

Nzen — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:47:17 +0000

tl;dr This is a project page describing a small hand woven loom. Small, means a little wider than a palm and maybe half the length of a forearm (depending on which you buy). Basically, you will run a string between two circular combs along the length of the stand and weave a separate thread or yarn horizontally many times to make a piece of fabric. These seem to cost at least 100$.

New comment by Nzen in "Show HN: What was the world listening to? Music charts, 20 countries (1940–2025)"

Nzen — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:22:30 +0000

I recommend listening to DJ Earworm's mashup of the top song across the world [0] to hear a greater variety of countries, albeit for this or last year.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDZ78RbAdxU 11 minutes

In fairness to this post, they probably posted as much as they could get easily and consistently. I feel like the same situation reigns for country history in book shops. When I go to a used book store in Queens, New York, I'm not apt to find any books about Jaipur, India. But, if I were to go to Mumbai, India, I could probably find something. So, maybe we should prevail upon or sponsor people in Africa to volunteer their lists.

New comment by Nzen in "Payphone Go"

Nzen — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:52:23 +0000

It looks like Mark Thomas maintained a phone number database up until 2007 or 2023 for many areas in the USA. I guess that could be a basis for starting 'my own' instance of payphone-go, maybe with twilio (or equivalent) to receive the calls.

[0] https://www.payphone-project.com/numbers/usa/ going through the state map feature only shows a subset compared to navigating through the links on this page.

New comment by Nzen in "[dead]"

Nzen — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 22:57:16 +0000

This sounds a lot like Jason Rohrer's project with an LLM, Sammy Jankis [0]. There, the posts are generally about the continual deaths when the LLM's context window fills up. The posts do not disclose an overt goal, as they do here, so the LLM has supposedly created a bunch of games and simulations.

[0] https://sammyjankis.com/

In this case, I think that 100$ as a starting budget (while probably appropriate for the initiating person) is not enough for a substantive business. I guess the server that runs the LLM is a subsidized asset, so this situation doesn't require renting one. I guess, as a hypothetical LLM, I could try to sell customized fan fiction to fetish communities. Most of the mainstream LLM hosts reputedly have guardrails to discourage such output. On the other hand, selling in those communities largely requires trust [1], but that might take time that this scenario doesn't permit.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emdki5B_O7Q . (60+ minute video by Matthew Colville largely directed at fledgling authors)

New comment by Nzen in "x86 prefixes and escape opcodes flowchart"

Nzen — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 17:02:07 +0000

For targeting advertising expendatures at the site level. If most of my traffic, as revealed by referrer links, comes from social-media-platform-foo and only a little from social-media-platform-bar, then I am likely to spend more on ads from foo than from bar. I'll grant that it is a noisy measure, but doesn't need to be about tracking a particular individual.

New comment by Nzen in "AI should only run as fast as we can catch up"

Nzen — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 19:04:53 +0000

Did you expect some answer that decried world peace as impossible ? It's just repeating what people say [0] when asked the same question. That's all that a large language model can do (other than putting it to rhyme or 'in the style of Charles Dickens').

[0] https://newint.org/features/2018/09/18/10-steps-world-peace

If you are looking for a vision of general AI that confirms a Hobbsian worldview, you might enjoy Lars Doucet's short story, _Four Magic Words_.

[1] https://www.fortressofdoors.com/four-magic-words/

New comment by Nzen in "Acronymy (Can we define every word as an acronym?)"

Nzen — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 17:39:41 +0000

If you want to see examples of this in practice, I recommend reading Randall Monroe's Thing Explainer [0] or some simple wikipedia articles [1].

[0] https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/

[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit (versus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit)

New comment by Nzen in "A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions"

Nzen — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 14:07:04 +0000

Could y'all point at instructions for how to imitate this limited internet situation ?

I ask because, two years ago, I was able to circumvent the Windows-11-requires-internet-and-a-microsoft-account part of the set up for a new laptop computer by doing this on a flight. Apparently, connecting to the airplane wifi (without yet logging in) was enough to satisfy the OS set-up, but limited enough that my laptop didn't require a microsoft account. With windows 10 now end of life, I will probably get a new desktop computer and would like to repeat the feat at home. Thanks

New comment by Nzen in "Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap"

Nzen — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 19:48:15 +0000

Likewise. In fact, I was under the opposite impression because of the benefit that sulfur enriched shipping exhaust had for our climate [0]. It looks like these clouds are thinner and don't have the same impact as that, though. While I felt that the featured article linked to their favorite site aggressively (four links to contrails.org), it looks like the google site is legitimate [1]. I couldn't find a recent [2] paper on NoAA about contrails, but presumably others have studied it.

[0] https://cpo.noaa.gov/the-unintended-consequences-of-reducing...

[1] https://sites.research.google/gr/contrails/

[2] https://csl.noaa.gov/news/2011/101_0714.html

New comment by Nzen in "The Beginner's Textbook for Fully Homomorphic Encryption"

Nzen — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 20:36:47 +0000

My understanding is largely ten years old and high level and only for one kind of fully homomorphic encryption. Things have changed and there is more than one kind.

I heard it described as a system that encrypts each bit and then evaluates the "encrypted bit" in a virtual gate-based circuit that implements the desired operations that one wants applied to the plaintext. The key to (de|en)crypt plaintext will be at least one gigabyte. Processing this exponentially larger data is why FHE based on the system I've described is so slow.

So, if you wanted to, say, add numbers, that would involve implementing a full adder [0] circuit in the FHE system.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adder_(electronics)#/media/Fil...

For a better overview that is shorter than the linked 250 page paper, I encourage you to consider Jeremy Kun's 2024 overview [1]

[1] https://www.jeremykun.com/2024/05/04/fhe-overview/

New comment by Nzen in "Chrome's New AI Features"

Nzen — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 18:24:23 +0000

It looks like [0] access to gemini will only be for subscribers, given that it costs them money. This is, "of course", distinct from ai mode [1] in google search that happens from the address bar in chrome. The first video implies that the difference involves throwing the current web page into the query as context so someone can ask "is this recipe gluten-free?" on a recipe webpage.

[0] https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-app-updates-io-20...

[1] https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-ai-mode-up...

New comment by Nzen in "The obstacles to scaling up humanoids"

Nzen — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 18:00:33 +0000

Ah, Agility Robotics' Jonathan Hurst has a talk that I can't find (quickly) about the various benefits of a humanoid form. I could find a 90 second snippet [0] about why their robot has legs. In that case, they use legs to traverse terrain that is difficult for wheels, like stairs or with large debris on the ground. Of the other video, I remember them suggesting that arms help with staving off a fall or reaching above the center of mass. I think they said that they put a head with 'eyes' to give the sensors a better view and so on.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHmmySGdaoM

New comment by Nzen in "ChatGPT Developer Mode: Full MCP client access"

Nzen — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 16:38:32 +0000

tl;dr OpenAI provided, a default-disabled, beta MCP interface. It will allow a person to view and enable various MCP tools. It requires human approval of the tool responses, shown as raw json. This won't protect against misuse, so they warn the reader to check the json against unintended prompts / consequences / etc.

New comment by Nzen in "Ask HN: Why is JavaScript STILL the only choice for browser-side programming"

Nzen — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 14:44:18 +0000

There are a couple of responses to your question:

* focusing on one language across the several browser vendors reduces the resources required for the different dimensions that each language supports : security, compatibility, performance, communicaton overhead for language standardization

* LSP does not define execution semantics, it defines text markup. A browser need to execute code, not just show it. So, now, a given browser needs to have a language plugin or call out to system programs to handle language X. That was a big hassle when they used to do so with the jvm and flash because of the same issues as above: is the version compatible, is the communication secure, do the different language vendors and browser vendors communicate their changes to each other in a timely and efficient fashion ?

New comment by Nzen in "Grok generates fake Taylor Swift nudes without being asked"

Nzen — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 13:28:41 +0000

tl;dr reporter used the prompt "Taylor Swift celebrating at cochella with the boys" using the 'spicy' image setting (other options: normal, fun, custom). Notes that twitter must comply with the take it down act [0].

[0] https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB11...

I should think that using a 'spicy' image setting would be tantamount to asking for a nude or titilating image. Whether twitter should offer that setting is apt to produce a more interesting conversation.

New comment by Nzen in "The Future of Programming (2013)"

Nzen — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 18:59:36 +0000

I considered the section about programs interrogating one another to accomplish some goal [0] the most evocative idea. I'll admit that my limited fantasies resembled something that resembled swagger's openapi or hateoas.

When I heard about Anthropic's model context protocol [1], it reminded me of this talk. I feel pretty skeptical that llm based systems are apt to craft a pigdin with a tool, as that seems like the kind of interaction that would use up lots of the context window. I'll grant that I've heard of people working around that by having their llm leave a summary of their session [2], to bootstrap the next, fresh session. I guess one could leave a pigdin dictionary that suited the llm traning data, as well.

[0] intro starts at 13:13, regarding arpanet, but description starts at 13:53

[1] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/learn/architecture

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44661223

Also, Bret Victor's team was able to involve the light pens mentioned in his dynamicland research group / lab.

[3] https://dynamicland.org/archive/2015/Dynamic_Library

New comment by Nzen in "Jujutsu for busy devs"

Nzen — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 15:38:27 +0000

When I've asked about using a jj stage, that's the workflow people pointed me to, as described in this tutorial [0]. I've not tried it, nor jujutsu, but I felt it worth pointing at a concrete example to allay or stoke fears of people on the fence.

[0] https://steveklabnik.github.io/jujutsu-tutorial/real-world-w...

New comment by Nzen in "Code Execution Through Email: How I Used Claude to Hack Itself"

Nzen — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 16:08:49 +0000

To be clear, I agree that this set-up is unwise and the social engineering aspect is something that human people are vulnerable to, as well.

However, it makes context in the sense of this post as an advertisement for their business. This is somewhat like the value proposition for sawstop. We might say that nobody should stick their hand into a table saw, but that's not an argument against discussing appropriate safeguards. For the table saw, that might be retracting the blade when not in use. For this weird email setup, that might involve only enabling an llm's mcp access to the shell service for a whitelist of emails, or whatever.