Hacker News: Sharlin

New comment by Sharlin in "Show HN: Rotation via Double Reflection"

Sharlin — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 17:55:16 +0000

Sure. Point is, this double-reflection construction is in no sense unique in requiring "no trigonometric functions".

New comment by Sharlin in "A Kantian Critique of "Sorry" by Justin Bieber"

Sharlin — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 16:40:28 +0000

Her money?

New comment by Sharlin in "Show HN: Rotation via Double Reflection"

Sharlin — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 14:55:35 +0000

To construct the two vectors spanning a given angle (well, as the article says, one of them can be chosen arbitrarily, the easiest is to just use (1, 0)), you'll of course need trigonometric functions. This is exactly equivalent to how constructing a rotation matrix from an angle requires trigonometric functions, but after that you can rotate how many vectors you like with just dot products, or how constructing e^ai = sin(a) + cos(a)*i requires trigonometric functions, but after that it's just complex multiplication.

Another fun way to decompose 2D rotation is into three shears, originally given by Paeth in 1986: https://silmon.github.io/arbitrary-image-rotation-using-shea...

New comment by Sharlin in "Zig’s Io.Threaded is neat"

Sharlin — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 09:36:47 +0000

The article seems to talk about how `Thread.interrupt` works with synchronous IO, rather than the async IO machinery of `java.nio`. So I'd say the article is inaccurate or at least incomplete.

New comment by Sharlin in "AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study"

Sharlin — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 17:16:43 +0000

They’re using flipped learning even in universities now.

New comment by Sharlin in "[dead]"

Sharlin — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:12:22 +0000

This is impossible to read. It's actively making the reader dumber.

New comment by Sharlin in "Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border"

Sharlin — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:46:22 +0000

Oh, they may well give you bad time if your phone looks like a burner with too little content.

New comment by Sharlin in "There's no such thing as a small software team anymore"

Sharlin — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 03:45:45 +0000

> Hundreds of bots modifying thousands of microservices may sound good on the surface

It really does not, honestly.

New comment by Sharlin in "Sol loves to cheat"

Sharlin — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:48:06 +0000

These models are so good now that they know what you want better than yourself.

New comment by Sharlin in "Sol loves to cheat"

Sharlin — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 23:14:30 +0000

Clearly a highly aligned model.

New comment by Sharlin in "Finger: the 1971 social network that never died"

Sharlin — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 12:01:39 +0000

Handier to access when something is wrong, certainly.

New comment by Sharlin in "Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco"

Sharlin — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:13:54 +0000

Sports betting is centuries if not thousands of years old.

New comment by Sharlin in "How does IKEA come up with names for its products?"

Sharlin — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 08:07:31 +0000

Not so sure. As a native Finnish speaker, I'd say most of us would understand Meänkieli just fine, especially anyone raised on the coastal areas where colloquial Swedish loans are more common in general.

New comment by Sharlin in "How does IKEA come up with names for its products?"

Sharlin — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 08:00:12 +0000

I guess you can use the tongs to serve pieces of cheese.

New comment by Sharlin in "Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco"

Sharlin — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 06:48:16 +0000

Not in the eyes of law (in many or most jurisdictions that regulate gambling).

New comment by Sharlin in "Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months"

Sharlin — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:28:56 +0000

I'm really happy that I bought 32G of RAM and a 2T M.2 SSD for my desktop two years ago. In retrospect, of course, I should've bought 64G and 4T.

New comment by Sharlin in "Expert Witness to ChatGPT: "Show how 3M is 0 percent at fault""

Sharlin — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 13:59:43 +0000

No in the case of an expert witness. And ChatGPT is not, should not and can not be party to any legal proceeding. It isn't even remotely ethically sound to help people twist facts for their own purposes.

New comment by Sharlin in "Expert Witness to ChatGPT: "Show how 3M is 0 percent at fault""

Sharlin — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:40:24 +0000

This is also another obvious example of misalignment on the part of ChatGPT. If the thing had any semblance of an actual system of ethics, or emulation thereof, it would refuse requests to try to make facts fit a predetermined conclusion. In a legal case, no less!

New comment by Sharlin in "Expert Witness to ChatGPT: "Show how 3M is 0 percent at fault""

Sharlin — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:32:12 +0000

This was an EXPERT WITNESS, not an advocate. Though unfortunately (and bizarrely) it appears that in the US, expert witnesses in civil cases can be hired to say whatever the hiring party wants them to say without it being perjury.

New comment by Sharlin in "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI"

Sharlin — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:05:56 +0000

That's beside the point. It is obvious that this discussion is about idiotic AI integrations plastered to every website and application, not about choosing to use ChatGPT or Claude on your own terms.