Hacker News: QuercusMax

New comment by QuercusMax in "Taking a walk may lead to more creativity than sitting, study finds (2014)"

QuercusMax — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:53:46 +0000

Would be fun to see if they could learn to think with Portals

New comment by QuercusMax in "Blood Pumping Mechanism of the Hoof (2020)"

QuercusMax — Sat, 23 May 2026 05:30:54 +0000

Kinda like we have sensors all over the place, but the info a lot of them deliver (pain) is pretty vague. And because of how it gets aggregated and delivered to the brain, sometimes you have funny glitches like how I can scratch the inside of my left ear and it makes me cough.

New comment by QuercusMax in "AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills"

QuercusMax — Fri, 22 May 2026 22:34:14 +0000

It can spit out a utility bash or python script lightning fast, which is a real game changer.

I wanted to run a stupid little webserver on one of my raspis, so I just asked Gemini to write my the code, along with a bash script to set up the proper configs to run as a systemd service. Nothing I couldn't basically do in my sleep, but it takes some amount of time and focus to do.

In the time it took me to write this comment, it wrote exactly what I needed. Not that impressive in isolation, but now I've been doing all the little home automation things I never had the energy for with other responsibilities.

New comment by QuercusMax in "AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills"

QuercusMax — Fri, 22 May 2026 22:15:21 +0000

You still have to do the engineering parts of software engineering, you can't just turn off your brain and vibe. Just like you can't with hand-written code. I've seen what an intern with access to prod DB can do.

For example, the testing tool I built explicitly doesn't work in production environment. That was part of my design spec and I manually verified the code and behavior.

New comment by QuercusMax in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

QuercusMax — Fri, 22 May 2026 21:11:40 +0000

So let's not even think about how to build a better world because the administration we have right now is garbage?

We need a wealth tax, ONLY public financing of elections (no PAC money, no "I'm a billionaire so I can spend as much as I want on myself"), and many other reforms. Nationalizing critical industries and sectors is also something we should be pursuing.

New comment by QuercusMax in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

QuercusMax — Fri, 22 May 2026 20:55:54 +0000

Your argument must not be very convincing if need to refer to your opponents using slurs.

Using a wealth tax to nationalize corporations sounds like exactly what we should be doing.

New comment by QuercusMax in "AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills"

QuercusMax — Fri, 22 May 2026 18:30:53 +0000

I work in the health software space and there are tons of internal tools which aren't production code that can benefit massively from throwaway "write-only code". Putting a web UI on top of a management CLI tool so support ops can run things without needing an oncall engineer can be a huge win. I recently built a testing UI that doubles a demo-scenario-setup tool. Is it well-engineered? Who cares - it pokes the right things into the database and runs the right backend tasks, and has helped me catch and fix dozens of real bugs in the UIs that customers see.

There is an enormous untapped market for crappy low-effort apps which previously weren't worth the time - but with the effort so low put together a simple dashboard or one-off tool it becomes much more attractive.

New comment by QuercusMax in "Why Japanese companies do so many different things"

QuercusMax — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:51:59 +0000

Are you saying that in Japan they sell Acura as Honda, and Lexus as Toyota?

New comment by QuercusMax in "Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods"

QuercusMax — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:39:36 +0000

We had a story in the news this week about a Cybertruck driver who thought his Elonmobile was a boat because it has "wade mode" and deliberately drove into a lake! Humans are very stupid when it comes to driving through standing water!

New comment by QuercusMax in "Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart"

QuercusMax — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:36:52 +0000

I recently read The Mote in God's Eye and its (much later) sequel The Gripping Hand, which had very interesting long-distance space combat scenes with high powered lasers - which only move at the speed of light. There's a very real "fog of war" element where you might be VERY out of date with what's happening just due to radio transmission speeds / direct observation.

New comment by QuercusMax in "Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart"

QuercusMax — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:34:29 +0000

Babylon 5 was the only show in the 90s that actually had any sort of physics based space combat (as opposed to Star Wars-style "they're really just airplanes but we're pretending it's space").

New comment by QuercusMax in "Seattle Shield, an intelligence-sharing network operated by the Seattle police"

QuercusMax — Thu, 21 May 2026 18:59:46 +0000

Now I want to play Steve Jackson's Illuminati...

https://www.sjgames.com/illuminati/

New comment by QuercusMax in "Seattle Shield, an intelligence-sharing network operated by the Seattle police"

QuercusMax — Thu, 21 May 2026 18:09:07 +0000

Scientologists being involved with intelligence agencies doesn't surprise me even a bit, it makes a lot of sense as a CIA cutout.

New comment by QuercusMax in "College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos"

QuercusMax — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:26:55 +0000

Do you argue with a film director when they talk about having made a movie? Do you argue with a founder when they talk about having built a product?

New comment by QuercusMax in "Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension"

QuercusMax — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:42:24 +0000

Each critical dependency you stack multiplies your risk. Now you have to worry about Railway AND Google causing business-damaging outages.

New comment by QuercusMax in "Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension"

QuercusMax — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:47:16 +0000

Building on someone else's platform is always gonna be a risky move, and building a platform on top of someone else's platform is even riskier.

My company used to use a hosting provider that was basically AWS plus some extra guarantees. We just finished migrating onto regular AWS because they now offer what we need directly.

New comment by QuercusMax in "College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos"

QuercusMax — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:44:31 +0000

Maybe more like collaborated with a robo chef to make a plate of food based on a recipe you've adapted.

At some point you have to be OK with accepting "I made this" as meaning "my vision was executed under my supervision".

New comment by QuercusMax in "Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit"

QuercusMax — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:52:05 +0000

The judge in the case in fact put out a statement that there WAS no settlement.

> Kathleen Williams, the judge handling the lawsuit, dismissed the case on Monday and, in her filing, admonished the government agencies, notably the Justice Department, for failing to be transparent about the settlement.

> She said no agency "submitted any settlement documents nor filed any documents ensuring that settlement was appropriate where there was an outstanding question as to whether an actual case or controversy existed."

https://www.npr.org/2026/05/19/g-s1-122938/irs-trump-settlem...

New comment by QuercusMax in "No way to parse integers in C (2022)"

QuercusMax — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:05:59 +0000

One reasonably common pattern is to have the return value indicate success / error, and you pass in a pointer to the value which will be mutated if successful.

New comment by QuercusMax in "College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos"

QuercusMax — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:25:03 +0000

Lots of people eat McDonald's but that doesn't mean it's good for you and will support your nutritional goals, or even that it's good food which tastes good.

If you want to listen to nothing but slop I can't stop you.