Hacker News: antiquark

New comment by antiquark in "Words, Words, Words"

antiquark — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 12:14:25 +0000

> write fanfiction about what it thinks those best minds

I asked AI what Einstein would be working on today if he were alive, the result was a predictably rosy scenario of modern physics problems.

However the reality was that Einstein (in his later years) became isolated from physics developments.

New comment by antiquark in "I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph"

antiquark — Sun, 24 May 2026 15:00:39 +0000

> lines a consistent thickness

A "ruling pen" would help. It's like a fountain pen where you can adjust the width of the ink.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruling_pen

New comment by antiquark in "Colonization of Venus"

antiquark — Tue, 19 May 2026 15:58:32 +0000

One shudders to think of the difficulties of launching and landing space vehicles on these balloon-supported platforms.

New comment by antiquark in "An AI Hate Wave Is Here"

antiquark — Sun, 17 May 2026 23:31:24 +0000

To put it simply, nobody wants to watch AI slop. This should be obvious!

The Dome: A Simple Violation of Determinism in Newtonian Mechanics

antiquark — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:49:13 +0000

Article URL: https://sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/Dome/index.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48101775

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by antiquark in "Floats Don't Agree with Themselves"

antiquark — Fri, 08 May 2026 11:54:16 +0000

That's why they always teach: "never compare floats for equality."

Or maybe they don't teach that anymore, I dunno.

See link for the Fundamental Axiom of Floating Point Arithmetic: All floating point arithmetic operations are exact up to a relative error of epsilon_machine.

https://www.johnbcoughlin.com/posts/floating-point-axiom/

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

antiquark — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:47:21 +0000

There is still hope for a compiler book. From Knuth's website:

> And after Volumes 1--5 are done, God willing, I plan to publish Volume 6 (the theory of context-free languages) and Volume 7 (Compiler techniques), but only if the things I want to say about those topics are still relevant and still haven't been said.

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html

New comment by antiquark in "Ada 2022"

antiquark — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 01:49:18 +0000

Ada doesn't even have a "++" operator to increment a number. SAD!

Identiconn Connector Identification Utility

antiquark — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:39:19 +0000

Article URL: https://connectorbook.com/identification.html?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47180368

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by antiquark in "Hey I almost got scammed by Google"

antiquark — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 19:47:33 +0000

Coincidentally, I did a search for "honda generator." One of the sponsored results was a scam posing as a different company!

https://imgur.com/a/3ydKHZe

New comment by antiquark in "AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it"

antiquark — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:57:58 +0000

First they came for the stochastic parrots, but I said nothing, because I'm not a stochastic parrot.

( /s )

New comment by antiquark in "No one wants to admit the real reason corporations are laying off thousands"

antiquark — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 14:01:43 +0000

> AI agents will soon be processing payroll, placing orders, paying suppliers, creating policies, sending out contracts, creating marketing materials, answering customer questions, analyzing profitability, filling out compliance forms, reconciling accounts and posting on social media.

Dystopian fantasy.

New comment by antiquark in "Ask HN: What's a book that fundamentally altered your mental models"

antiquark — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:25:44 +0000

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.

New comment by antiquark in "What is “literate programming”? (2024)"

antiquark — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 14:20:39 +0000

I seriously looked into it many years ago...

One problem with "literate programming" is it assumes that good coders are also good writers, and the good writers are also good coders.

Another problem is that the source files for the production code will have to be "touched" for documentation changes. Which IMHO is an absolution no-no for production code. Once the code has been validated, no more edits! If you want to edit docs, go ahead, just don't edit the actual source.

New comment by antiquark in "AI Broke Interviews"

antiquark — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:27:16 +0000

Welp, back to nepotism, I guess.

New comment by antiquark in "Why do we remember some life moments but not others?"

antiquark — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 03:35:31 +0000

I think to remember something, you have to replay it in your mind from time to time. The more you do that, the more you remember. (Reminiscing is probably the right word).

I guess differentiator between the "style" of memories is your personality and what you dwell on.

New comment by antiquark in "You did this with an AI and you do not understand what you're doing here"

antiquark — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 20:40:07 +0000

You're a bot, aren't you.

New comment by antiquark in "You did this with an AI and you do not understand what you're doing here"

antiquark — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 10:11:57 +0000

Nice ending:

> The reporter was banned and now it looks like he has removed his account.

New comment by antiquark in "Untangling the myths and mysteries of Dvorak and QWERTY (2023)"

antiquark — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 11:35:26 +0000

In a tech support scenario, Dvorak is always troublesome. You sit down to type at someone's computer, and random characters start popping out.

New comment by antiquark in "Go is still not good"

antiquark — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 11:48:48 +0000

I'm still appalled that there's no "do while" loop in go.