Hacker News: WantonQuantum

New comment by WantonQuantum in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

WantonQuantum — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 06:26:41 +0000

I find quite a lot of it very satisfying. For example, the deep mathematical symmetries of gauge theory and how they relate to the observed forces of the universe is truly amazing.

The excellent Arvin Ash has a very accessible video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paQLJKtiAEE

New comment by WantonQuantum in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

WantonQuantum — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 06:19:51 +0000

The device you used to make this comment relies heavily on quantum effects to make efficient transistors. The necessary theoretical understanding of semiconductors did not exist 120 years ago.

New comment by WantonQuantum in "Infinite Collaborative Word Search Game"

WantonQuantum — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 23:03:40 +0000

Don't miss the drawings people have made to the north of the starting place! Zoom all the way out with the mouse wheel and then click and drag.

New comment by WantonQuantum in "Infinite Collaborative Word Search Game"

WantonQuantum — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:47:21 +0000

This is fun! Took me a little while to realise that if I don't click the green tick, it doesn't save my word.

New comment by WantonQuantum in "Lego announces Smart Brick, the 'most significant evolution' in 50 years, no AI"

WantonQuantum — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 23:56:32 +0000

See also discussion here and non-paywalled link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46503733

New comment by WantonQuantum in "When AI recreates the female voice, it also rewrites who gets heard"

WantonQuantum — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:12:18 +0000

tldr: AI voice synthesis isn’t just a technical novelty. When male-dominated platforms and creators simulate female voices, it can obscure real female voices and reinforce existing power imbalances in who gets heard, especially in music and media. Genuine representation matters.

New comment by WantonQuantum in "Linus Torvalds Lashes Out at RISC-V Big Endian Plans"

WantonQuantum — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 03:51:00 +0000

I wouldn't characterize what Linus has written as "lashing out". He's just making a sensible engineering decision about what the linux kernel is and is not. For Linus, the tone is way below the threshold of "lashing out".

New comment by WantonQuantum in "Unions?"

WantonQuantum — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 03:39:25 +0000

It's difficult to even have a conversation about unions due to people having very different perceptions and/or feelings about unionism.

New comment by WantonQuantum in "[dead]"

WantonQuantum — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 03:37:09 +0000

If you haven't encountered Gene Ray's "Time Cube" before, you should be aware that it's likely that he had a mental health problem.

New comment by WantonQuantum in "The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog"

WantonQuantum — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 00:13:38 +0000

This is amazing! I remember playing some of these in the 90s. Fond memories.

BTW, this site is likely not set up to handle a HN hug of death of downloads so consider throttling your downloads if you can.

New comment by WantonQuantum in "Real-time sentiment analysis of selected topics on Bluesky"

WantonQuantum — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 23:57:32 +0000

I don't use bluesky, can you give me an example of conspiracy theories on the platform?

New comment by WantonQuantum in "Trump announces 100% tariff on branded or patented pharmaceuticals from Oct. 1"

WantonQuantum — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 23:53:03 +0000

Don't worry, Trump always chickens out.

New comment by WantonQuantum in "Phishing: Slash-like Unicode characters in URL [video]"

WantonQuantum — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 23:35:21 +0000

The attack boils down to sending phishing emails that contain a url that looks like a legitimate booking.com url but is actually this url. Note the unicode characters that can make it seem like a booking.com url:

https://account.booking.xn--comdetailrestric-access-ge5vga.w...

More info here (the video refers to this page describing the attack): https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/bookingcom-ph...

Edit: HN presents the unicode characters in the domain in a way that makes it clear they're not slashes (well done HN!) so you'll need to look at the url when you hover over it.

New comment by WantonQuantum in "Extracting text from a pdf broke ChatGPT"

WantonQuantum — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 00:10:04 +0000

That link doesn't work for me - it just redirects to www.surgehq.ai

New comment by WantonQuantum in "Coffee poll: what do you usually order? I order a latte"

WantonQuantum — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 09:13:51 +0000

My order is a "long black" with 3 shots. I'm in Australia so that means three espresso shots with some hot water to make it normal coffee sized. It looks like a cup of filter coffee but I prefer the taste of the espresso coffee.

New comment by WantonQuantum in "Marathon Fusion claims it can turn mercury into gold while creating clean energy"

WantonQuantum — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 02:42:36 +0000

The actual paper on arxiv.org (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13461) says that they _predict_ the ability to create gold from mercury using _simulations_.

New comment by WantonQuantum in "Why Rewriting Emacs Is Hard"

WantonQuantum — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 02:26:29 +0000

That's quite a read! Looks like emacs has done an amazing job of handling text correctly in the face of quite a few challenges. Including cases where there perhaps is no "correct" choice.

Now, I'm certainly not in the "all C code must be rewritten in Rust because security" camp but it does raise the question: With all this complexity how do I know that pasting text from a web page into emacs (or any editor really) isn't going to trigger an undiscovered vulnerability?

Edit: I guess that's rhetorical question because of course the answer is "you don't".

New comment by WantonQuantum in "Ask HN: If you were to start a business outside of tech, what would it be?"

WantonQuantum — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 01:02:36 +0000

Last year I decided to plan ahead for a career change to become a counselor. I started volunteering with a crisis support help line (lifeline.org.au) and did their training course (quite substantial!). I'm now doing volunteer shifts and getting some experience. In the future I will do some more formal courses while continuing to volunteer and likely cut back my hours working as a dev (over 30 years experience). My ultimate goal, when my financial position allows it, is to work full time or perhaps part time as a counselor whether that is my own business or through some other organisation or a combination.

New comment by WantonQuantum in "Project Limitless: Letting a Frontier AI Think to Itself for 100k Hours"

WantonQuantum — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 00:12:45 +0000

What does "think to itself" mean? If, for example, your plan is start with some initial prompt like "Start thinking" and then simply feed the response from that back in as the next prompt, I guarantee you'll be disappointed by the result after about 5 minutes. 100k hours won't make it any better.

New comment by WantonQuantum in "Ask HN: Do you read your own PR?"

WantonQuantum — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 04:57:21 +0000

I definitely read through the changes in my PRs to make sure I haven't done anything obviously wrong.