Hacker News: SirHumphrey

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Show HN: I built a small app for FSI German Course"

SirHumphrey — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 10:52:39 +0000

I don’t know what exactly the op meant by delivering a press release, but at least I after a four year high school german course can read newspaper articles in german but would struggle quite a lot to order food (granted, I wasn’t very good at it). In a more grammar heavy language understanding is a lot easier than writing which is a lot easier than speaking.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Critics say EU risks ceding control of its tech laws under U.S. pressure"

SirHumphrey — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 21:26:32 +0000

I didn't even mention France, but if you insist:

I am using Fossil Fuel Support dataset from OECD. Latest available year is 2024: Specifically for petroleum there were 5228 million euros in tax exemptions and 586 million euros in direct budgetary transfer. For all fossil fuels there were 5 656 million in tax exemptions and 2579 million in direct budgetary transfers. So real, direct subsidies definitely exist.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Critics say EU risks ceding control of its tech laws under U.S. pressure"

SirHumphrey — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:08:51 +0000

You are thinking too logically. In EU fuel is expensive because it’s heavily taxed AND there are a lot of fuel subsidies.

Or to quote an old TV show: Hacker: One of your officials pays farmers to produce surplus food, while on the same floor, the next office is paying them to destroy the surpluses. Maurice: That is not true! Hacker: No? Maurice: He is not in the next office, not even on the same floor!

New comment by SirHumphrey in "LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer"

SirHumphrey — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:45:45 +0000

It’s becoming easier on iPhone (even uBlock origini is now available, if only the lite version), which is nice because internet is becoming more and more unusable without them.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "I Quit. The Clankers Won"

SirHumphrey — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 13:18:02 +0000

Amara’s law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Slovenia becomes first EU country to introduce fuel rationing"

SirHumphrey — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:53:20 +0000

There was an election recently and it’s possible there will soon be another… That’s why the fuel is so cheap.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Sodium-ion EV battery breakthrough delivers 11-min charging and 450 km range"

SirHumphrey — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:02:46 +0000

I think it’s more that when you have 300C thermal runaway in a cell in your battery storage bank the release of toxic compounds is the least of your problems.

I work quite a bit with batteries and the fear of battery fires hunts me in my sleep, especially with lipos.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Why I love NixOS"

SirHumphrey — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:41:42 +0000

It also has very slow rebuild times.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance"

SirHumphrey — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 15:07:06 +0000

In 2024[1]: - 37.2% in Sweeden - 51.6% in Denmark - 30.4% in Finland

of newly registered cars were BEV. Only Norway reaches 89% you are talking about. The total average of newly registered BEV cars in European Union was 13.6%.

The EV tech is here,but the grid in most EU countries is certainly not. The proliferation of heat pumps in the local area caused 3 blackouts caused by a failure of a local transformer - something that hasn't happened before or at least not as frequently. And in most countries you are looking at doubling the electricity consumption if all road transport was to switch to electricity.

[1]: https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/new-registr...

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Why I may ‘hire’ AI instead of a graduate student"

SirHumphrey — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:29:01 +0000

Students are not only workers, they are also disciples of your work and, once forced to read it, will likely use it in the future even when they leave your lab.

Even completely egoistically replacing students with AI is shooting yourself in the foot in the long term.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "A Survival Guide to a PhD (2016)"

SirHumphrey — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 08:27:35 +0000

The comments you write in to Zotero are not what paper is about - abstract covers this well enough - it’s about what you found interesting or useful about the paper.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future"

SirHumphrey — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:39:33 +0000

It's also that the west collectively convinced themselves that the economy could be built on high value knowledge work and services and manufacturing will be handled by someone else. Of course people would rather live near some offices, or maybe a workshop than a heavy industrial site...

The transition of my country from a socialist to a western capitalist system included a mass closure of heavy industry and what remains is dying a slow death of high energy costs. I remember when a coal mine closed there were all those marvelous ideas how the area would transition to high tech programming jobs; the thing that actually saved the area was a fuse manufacturing plant.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "You Don't Need a Vector Database"

SirHumphrey — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 13:40:57 +0000

I was asking myself the whole article “what does this mysterious semantic search api actually do?” and was a bit underwhelmed when the result came out to be - managed vector database.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]"

SirHumphrey — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 11:15:13 +0000

There is a slightly unexplored tangent in Brave New World about an experiment on Cyprus, where a society of humans bread to be intelligent descended in to civil war because nobody wanted to do menial work.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

SirHumphrey — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 20:14:25 +0000

Maybe it was, maybe he just writes that way. At some point somebody will read so much LLM text that they will start emulating AI unknowingly.

I just don’t care anymore. If the article is good I will continue reading it, if it’s bad I will stop. I don’t care if a machine or a human produced unpleasant reading material.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Europe’s next-generation weather satellite sends back first images"

SirHumphrey — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 10:04:36 +0000

Well, at least in my experience with EU projects, they tend to be much more restrictive with data sharing than equivalent US institutions: e.g. a lot of paid EUMET data has publicly available NOAA equivalents - though usually of worse quality.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities"

SirHumphrey — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 10:40:15 +0000

I can manage fine with other search indexes for English language searches; weather that is because others got better or google got worse i cannot tell, though I suspect the latter.

But for searching in more niche languages google is usually the only decent option and I have little hope that others will ever reach the scale where they could compete.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Dead Internet Theory"

SirHumphrey — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 11:57:24 +0000

Maybe, but at least in my circles it’s a structure thing- until the group actually can be organised in a single chat sanely something else will be used- but as soon as multiple chats are required the thing is moved on discord.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "After 25 years, Wikipedia has proved that news doesn't need to look like news"

SirHumphrey — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 11:48:11 +0000

Admittedly I do not know how much of a sensitive issue this is, but I find it surprising that the name given at birth is not mentioned anywhere on the Wikipedia page, even though in other cases of name change usually "Name (born Old Name)" is written.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "TimeCapsuleLLM: LLM trained only on data from 1800-1875"

SirHumphrey — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 10:01:24 +0000

I don't know if any dataset of pre 1904 writing would be large enough to train a model that would be smart enough. I suspect that current sized SOTA models would at least get to special relativity, but for general relativity and quantum mechanics I am less sure.