Hacker News: akhosravian

New comment by akhosravian in "Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)"

akhosravian — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 16:09:22 +0000

Actually some say “modern C++” dates to 19th century Europe. Ada Lovelace provided some of the earliest examples of undefined behavior that C++ programmers still love talking about to this day.

New comment by akhosravian in "Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)"

akhosravian — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:09:47 +0000

Steam predates all those platforms by years. The only platforms that I can think of predating it are long dead and didn’t have the same concept of ownership (gamespy, gamestorm, AOL, heat.net, etc). Indeed, part of why those platforms struggle or failed is exactly steams early mover advantage.

Eight years before Origin. Six years for Ubisoft’s. Fifteen for Epic Games Store. Ten years for itch.io. Five years for GOG. Seven years for humble bundle (though their early offerings were literally steam keys).

New comment by akhosravian in "McDonald's is losing its low-income customers"

akhosravian — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:47:09 +0000

Why would you allow notifications from most apps? What could the McDonald’s app possibly offer to warrant allowing it to dictate your attention for even a fraction of a second?

New comment by akhosravian in "U.S. Added 911,000 Fewer Jobs in the Year Ended in March"

akhosravian — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 05:14:01 +0000

That’s a cool historical fact but the modern colloquial usage is synonymous with poor (financially) countries.

New comment by akhosravian in "Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context"

akhosravian — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 04:39:04 +0000

And when you work on a really big codebase you start having multiple files and have to learn tools more advanced than ctrl-f!!

New comment by akhosravian in "Rules by which a great empire may be reduced to a small one (1773)"

akhosravian — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 15:34:04 +0000

The comment you are replying to was replying to a comment that was more akin to “the ceramic bits on the floor were caused by your parents meeting” though

New comment by akhosravian in "Psilocybin treatment extends cellular lifespan, improves survival of aged mice"

akhosravian — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 08:37:35 +0000

These dosages are off the charts for what most people ever do.

A typical estimate is 15 mg psilocybin per gram of dried mushroom so for a 200 pound person that’s 90 grams of mushrooms. 5 grams is the classic heroic dose.

New comment by akhosravian in "Kagi Assistant is now available to all users"

akhosravian — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 16:03:26 +0000

People like free and the “greedy corporations” found a way to give them what they want.

Google search is trash now (for reasons that aren’t entirely in Google’s control), but for the first decade it was magical how well it could one shot finding relevant data on the web.

New comment by akhosravian in "China completes green belt around Taklamakan Desert"

akhosravian — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 02:51:40 +0000

Funny you mention Seattle’s light rail. The first part of New York’s subway system was built in 4 years and had more stops than Seattle’s light rail does after 15 years.

We (Americans) absolutely built big public projects in reasonable timeframes a century ago, and we don’t now. Attributing it to the form of government seems to miss the mark.

New comment by akhosravian in "I got dysentery so you don’t have to"

akhosravian — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 15:26:17 +0000

The idea that it costs nothing somehow is bizarre.

If you divide the NHS budget for 2024 (192 billion) by the UK population (67 million) you’ll find it works out to just under 3000 pounds per person just for 2024.

Assuming your wife’s visit was this year your family paid about 3x what the poster you are responding to did.

I’m also working from the assumption most posters here are in high tax brackets; I understand tech jobs in Europe pay much worse than the US so that may not be true.

New comment by akhosravian in "Supreme Court rules ex-presidents have immunity for official acts"

akhosravian — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 02:11:25 +0000

Plea bargains account for over 90% of convictions in the US. Part of the cause is prosecutors can and do offer deals that rational actors would have a hard time refusing.

As a trivial example: imagine you are charged with a misdemeanor you absolutely didn’t do. Assuming you have no previous criminal record the state offers you a civil penalty (ie an expensive speeding ticket).

Are you going to go to trial knowing you could be sentenced to a year in prison? Keep in mind just paying an attorney to represent you through the trial will cost several times the civil penalty.

New comment by akhosravian in "You are never taught how to build quality software"

akhosravian — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 21:30:19 +0000

I’m not a CS academic or a mathematician, but don’t Godel’s incompleteness theorems preclude a formal proof of correctness?

New comment by akhosravian in "Ego, Fear and Money: How the A.I. Fuse Was Lit"

akhosravian — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 16:58:19 +0000

Surely you can’t believe the outer space treaty will be followed once interplanetary travel is actually possible.

If someone like Elon Musk were to liquidate all their earth assets to lead a mission to mars to start a permanent colony there what actions do you think would happen to stop him? What consequences would he face once he staked out “muskland” with some other settlers?

New comment by akhosravian in "U.S. GDP Grew at a 5.2% Rate in the Third Quarter, Even Stronger Than Indicated"

akhosravian — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 06:06:15 +0000

While the world’s resources are finite I think it is excessively pessimistic to suggest we’re consuming anywhere near all that is available to us.

It’s possible to call out externalized costs (eg greenhouse emissions, many plastics) and be optimistic about our ability, as a species, to produce more.

New comment by akhosravian in "FDA Proposes to Ban Food Additive, brominated vegetable oil"

akhosravian — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 21:24:58 +0000

My recollection is in Europe (or at least Spain circa 2016) Mountain Dew was much less intensely colored than in the US, and the neon tint was mainly from the bottle.

New comment by akhosravian in "Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake"

akhosravian — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 08:38:23 +0000

Teams has the advantage of being able to juice their numbers by counting everyone with an office license as a customer.

New comment by akhosravian in "Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake"

akhosravian — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 08:37:27 +0000

The Kinect was released in November 2010. Are you suggesting they’re still running it?

My understanding is it died ~six months after the Xbox one released (early 2014) when they stopped bundling it with that console. They kept selling it for several years after, but it was inconceivable it would do anything but die at that point.

New comment by akhosravian in "Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green"

akhosravian — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 20:55:50 +0000

Thanks for writing this. I cringe every time I see someone drop the phrase “there’s no direct English translation” as if it means there is some unique insight only able to be expressed in that language. Words aren’t isomorphic between languages, but that doesn’t tell us anything about the range of ideas that are available.

Surely no one believes a native English speaker only experienced schadenfreude after that word was imported from German?

New comment by akhosravian in "Ferrari Sued a Used Car Dealer for $2.2M over a Replica. It Didn't Go Well"

akhosravian — Sun, 22 Oct 2023 00:36:45 +0000

El Pais is a well knownand reasonably reputable Spanish newspaper; at a tier equivalent to the New York Times or Wall Street journal in the US. It is unlikely they are producing AI fabrications of this sort.

New comment by akhosravian in "Goldman Sachs Wants Out of the Apple Card Business, Report Claims"

akhosravian — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 20:45:40 +0000

For context apple offers 0% apr financing on many of their products with the Apple Card. If one has the means to buy a new iPhone with cash, why not take the free ~40 bucks you can get by using Apple Card financing and keeping the cash in some other extremely low risk place (eg an FDIC insured high interest savings account like the one Apple Card offers)