Hacker News: aldousd666

New comment by aldousd666 in "I'm going back to writing code by hand"

aldousd666 — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:32:51 +0000

They aren't 10x gains. They're more like 3.5x gains. But still worth it. By a lot.

New comment by aldousd666 in "I'm going back to writing code by hand"

aldousd666 — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:31:46 +0000

you are never going to get away from reading the code every time. at least I haven't seen how you could possibly. That being said, it is considerably less work to read and check the code than it is to have to build it all, even if you know what you're doing and have done it before.

New comment by aldousd666 in "Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)"

aldousd666 — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:07:55 +0000

Parsing is the front end to a compiler. Can't get semantics without first recognizing syntax. I have a hard time thinking about programming languages without seeing them as a parsing exercise first, every time.

New comment by aldousd666 in "Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)"

aldousd666 — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:06:21 +0000

I learned from the Dragon Book, decades ago. I already knew a lot of programming at that point, but I think most people writing compilers do. I'm curious if there really is an audience of people whose first introduction to programming is writing a compiler... I would think not, actually.

New comment by aldousd666 in "Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code"

aldousd666 — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 22:55:35 +0000

And they say you can't learn anything about computers from these bots... I had to learn this lesson from giving a shell account to one of my compatriots. I worked with him on group projects so I trusted him. He installed a fork bomb in his user's cron tab that went off at 3:00 a.m. everyday and I had to wonder why my hand compiled DRI driven screensaver went to a crawl. I did learn the lesson and I did forgive him. But it didn't cost me a couple Grand in API fees.

New comment by aldousd666 in "Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit"

aldousd666 — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 13:54:30 +0000

To be clear, I mean AI is going to be the downfall of ad supported content. But let's face it. We have link farms and spam factories as a result of the ad supported content market. I think this is going to eventually do justice for users because it puts a premium on content quality that someone will want to pay a direct licensing fee to scrape for your AI bots as opposed to tricking somebody into clicking on a link and looking at an impression for something they won't buy.

New comment by aldousd666 in "Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit"

aldousd666 — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 13:48:27 +0000

This is ultimately just going to give them training material for how to avoid this crap. They'll have to up their game to get good code. The arms race just took another step, and if you're spending money creating or hosting this kind of content, it's not going to make up for the money you're losing by your other content getting scraped. The bottom has always been threatening to fall out of the ads paid for eyeballs, And nobody could anticipate the trigger for the downfall. Looks like we found it.

New comment by aldousd666 in "Goodbye to Sora"

aldousd666 — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 02:49:20 +0000

It's super expensive for them to run this hardware. And they need the compute for other things. Everyone who's cursed open AI for going down in the middle of the day whenever they're using it to write code or do some other thing, will breathe a little easier now that there's some compute available. Wise decision, in my opinion.

New comment by aldousd666 in "“Your frustration is the product”"

aldousd666 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:26:30 +0000

Some advice I follow, and give to others: Refuse notifications by default. Only enable them when you're getting paid to see them. (slack and work email, for example count as getting paid to see them)

New comment by aldousd666 in "“Your frustration is the product”"

aldousd666 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:18:25 +0000

I could do that, but then I'd have to maintain it. I used to hostfile hack my devices. but the vpn is just easier.

New comment by aldousd666 in "“Your frustration is the product”"

aldousd666 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:15:59 +0000

Transaction costs make it inefficient. Costs more to effect the transfer than they would be able to charge for the articles.

New comment by aldousd666 in "“Your frustration is the product”"

aldousd666 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:11:33 +0000

The web is the enemy. I have an ad blocking VPN and I use GroundNews to filter out sites that have paywalls. Between those two things, I lead a relatively sane life. But I tried looking at some of the same places on an unflitered device and man, I can't even imagine living like that. It now costs me $100/year in ad blocking/circumvention just so I don't want to kill the browser.

New comment by aldousd666 in "HyperCard discovery: Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive (2022)"

aldousd666 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 20:44:16 +0000

Hypercard is really kind of like the first implementation of HTML5. With applescript instead of javascript.

New comment by aldousd666 in "Billion-Parameter Theories"

aldousd666 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 20:07:06 +0000

I don't disagree, but neither does the article. It's just talking about the fact that we previously considered anything that can't be easily and tersely written down as nearly or entirely intractable. But, as we have seen, the three body problem is not really a hum-dinger as far as the universe goes, it's not even table stakes. We need to be able to do the same kind of energy arbitrage on n-body problems that we do on 2. And now we have the beginnings of a place to toy with more complicated ideas -- since these won't fit on a blackboard.

New comment by aldousd666 in "Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown"

aldousd666 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:35:01 +0000

Word and wordpad are terrible for editing code snippets tho, markdown solves this problem.

New comment by aldousd666 in "Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown"

aldousd666 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:34:31 +0000

This would be a huge bonus for me if I ever had to use windows for anything.

New comment by aldousd666 in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"

aldousd666 — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:48:26 +0000

I'm 46 but same. I'm not quite as melancholy about it, but I do feel a lot of this.

New comment by aldousd666 in "What Is a PC Compatible?"

aldousd666 — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 18:47:59 +0000

I never saw Atari software for sale in the same magazines, but I'm sure it was available somewhere.

New comment by aldousd666 in "What Is a PC Compatible?"

aldousd666 — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 18:14:21 +0000

In the 1980's, computer software was sold in catalogs and magazines. Users had either of three platforms: A Macintosh, a PC-Compatible (probably x86), or a Commodore/Amiga. So these are the three categories were there to help you order the correct version of oregon trail. They were really a name for the operating systems, not the specifics of the hardware, at least back then they were.

New comment by aldousd666 in "Perlsecret – Perl secret operators and constants"

aldousd666 — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 21:23:43 +0000

fun thing about this page: i have gemini in the browser and when I asked it 'why is the entire Wall Family naming these things?' it said it couldn't engage. Turns out 'goatse' is a forbidden word to Gemini.