Hacker News: Sophistifunk

New comment by Sophistifunk in "Honda is killing its EVs"

Sophistifunk — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 01:37:19 +0000

This isn't reporting, it's propaganda.

New comment by Sophistifunk in "Apple loses UK App Store monopoly case, penalty might near $2B"

Sophistifunk — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 01:05:58 +0000

Thing is that's a question for the market to decide. Which is why we have anti-trust / anti-monopoly laws in the first place. We don't want the state setting "fair" prices for anything, it always backfires. We want them ensuring the market is free to set prices. Monopolies granted by the state (trademarks, copyright, patents) are specific and limited, and ideally we want monopolies that arise naturally to be similarly limited, or broken up if they are being weaponised against the public.

New comment by Sophistifunk in "Claude Memory"

Sophistifunk — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 01:00:52 +0000

Claude is (in my limited experience so far) more useful after a bit of back and forth where you can explain to it what's going on in your codebase. Although I suspect if you have a lot of accurate comments in your code then it will be able to extract more of that information for itself.

New comment by Sophistifunk in "YouTube is a mysterious monopoly"

Sophistifunk — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 03:56:32 +0000

The idea that what's needed is for these alternative platforms to switch to "free with ads" is amazingly short sighted and disheartening. Everything bad YouTube does is driven by this business model. Switching to it might make a few people rich at the top of these alternative platforms, but it won't make anything better for any user or creator.

New comment by Sophistifunk in "The History of Windows XP"

Sophistifunk — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 04:27:28 +0000

Race cars have heaps of safety systems not present in road cars. They don't have ABS and traction control because they don't actually increase safety on track with a professional driver. SRS airbags also offer no additional safety when in a 6 point harness and wearing a helmet and neck brace.

New comment by Sophistifunk in "A Rust shaped hole"

Sophistifunk — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 06:14:58 +0000

True, but I think the "low-level" complaint against Go in the article was just referring to all the stupid repetitive ceremony required for error handling, which Zig mostly skips over.

New comment by Sophistifunk in "Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction"

Sophistifunk — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 03:12:47 +0000

The wasted time and money in construction comes entirely from two places: a small percentage of crooked builders (and their local council mates), and the bureaucracy that is trying to protect the citizens from same. Big brother puts in a lot of hoop-jumps standards and supposed checks and balances that end up creating massive delays and costs for the consumer, but the actual standards (while usually quite sensible) are easily sidestepped by the crooked builders, so the war continues, and the overhead constantly increases with the usual expansion-only government regulation ratchet.

None of these things are susceptible to "AI" and other such automation. We have had prefab construction for decades.

New comment by Sophistifunk in "A Rust shaped hole"

Sophistifunk — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 03:05:32 +0000

I very much enjoy reading and writing TS code. What I don't enjoy is the npm ecosystem (and accompanying mindset), and what I can't stand is trying to configure the damn thing. I've been doing this since TSC was first released, and just the other day I wasted hours trying to make a simple ts-node command line program work with file-extension-free imports and no weird disagreements between the ts-node runner and the language server used by the editor.

And then gave up in disgust.

Look, I'm no genius, not by a long shot. But I am both competent and experienced. If I can't make these things work just by messing with it and googling around, it's too damned hard.

New comment by Sophistifunk in "A Rust shaped hole"

Sophistifunk — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 03:01:20 +0000

Sounds like a Zig-shaped hole to me ;-)

New comment by Sophistifunk in "The time is right for a DOM templating API"

Sophistifunk — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 00:35:49 +0000

When are we done adding everything into the browser API?

New comment by Sophistifunk in "Using an 8K TV as a Monitor"

Sophistifunk — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 22:52:46 +0000

I'm much more interested in going the other direction, in order to get a TV without all the crapware.

New comment by Sophistifunk in "B-Trees and Database Indexes"

Sophistifunk — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:21:13 +0000

It's very interesting to me that we have to keep telling people this, but it hasn't become part of the "hive folk knowledge" we all seem to develop. I think DB vendors have been sleeping on an opportunity to encourage better practices.

New comment by Sophistifunk in "NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon"

Sophistifunk — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 06:34:56 +0000

Boeing haven't exactly been covering themselves with glory with their non-NASA work over the last decade or two, either. But I'd still go with "both" :)

New comment by Sophistifunk in "Strategy for EU Bootstrapping Hardware Startups: Don't Sell to Anyone in EU"

Sophistifunk — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 06:18:39 +0000

An ARM computer running a BSD and x stack. What's interesting about it, that makes it a "flying car" as opposed to everybody else's 140 characters?

New comment by Sophistifunk in "How to Know When It's Time to Go"

Sophistifunk — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 06:27:59 +0000

There's plenty of people who want to build that thing, and most of us have a good idea how it probably should be, at least at first. The problem isn't building it, it's funding it without selling out the user.

New comment by Sophistifunk in "ExectOS – brand new operating system which derives from NT architecture"

Sophistifunk — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 03:54:40 +0000

That's pretty damned impressive.

New comment by Sophistifunk in "Why isn't anyone signing up?"

Sophistifunk — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 03:22:37 +0000

Most image sharing is ephemeral. Nobody cares if the image is gone 3 weeks from now, or if some private equity firm destroys the host company entirely in a year. Nobody's going to go through the hoop jumps required to pay for such a service, even just constantly having to re-log-in if you don't use it too often.

New comment by Sophistifunk in "Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage"

Sophistifunk — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 02:19:08 +0000

I didn't mean you need the house to work on it, FWIW, but there are a lot of hobbies that will scratch that itch, and are impossible or make you a real dick if you live in an apartment complex. Sorry for not making that clear.

New comment by Sophistifunk in "Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage"

Sophistifunk — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 02:16:24 +0000

I am not an American.

New comment by Sophistifunk in "Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage"

Sophistifunk — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 01:07:22 +0000

This idea that the problem with western society is that we allow people to live in detached houses with yards instead of inner-city apartment buildings is bollocks. People need privacy, something to work on, freedom to move about, and agency over their environment to thrive psychologically. That's why prison is the opposite of this. "Something to work on" is partially being met by video games, and it's not going well for us. The rest are much harder to fake out. It's possible to have those things in the city, but only if you are extremely wealthy. For everybody else, it's a life of being tolerated by the people who own and control your world, so long as you keep paying out most of what you earn, don't make any noise or waves, and aren't interested in doing anything that doesn't already have the required space or vendor already within your designated, walkable, or public transport-safe area.