Hacker News: antonchekhov

New comment by antonchekhov in "CNN founder Ted Turner, a pioneer of cable TV news, dies at 87"

antonchekhov — Wed, 06 May 2026 16:09:02 +0000

Nowadays, almost any news org can have journalists reporting from across the planet in real-time. But back before internet connectivity was ubuquitous, StarLink satellites, smartphones and streaming video everywhere, CNN had a few reporters who had the then-very-rare satellite phones (I think they were almost small-backpack sized) who could report from Iraq on-site during Desert Storm, and it was revolutionary. CNN's ratings went through the roof during that war, and after the war was over, it was reported they raised their ad rates over 1000%, because they had this new giant audience. It really felt like a transformation of public news media.

New comment by antonchekhov in "Warren Buffett dumps $1.7B of Amazon stock"

antonchekhov — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:06:15 +0000

Can you enumerate which parties have been "harmed" by her donations, and the precise nature of the harm(s)?

New comment by antonchekhov in "Privilege is bad grammar"

antonchekhov — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 19:26:09 +0000

If this becomes the prevailing inclination amongst most readers, Janan Ganesh (one of my most favorite commentators anywhere) at the Financial Times will have a dim professional future.

New comment by antonchekhov in "Why don't people return their shopping carts?"

antonchekhov — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 01:06:28 +0000

Theoretically, in this case, the agonizing "It's pouring rain, blowing cold wind in your face, kids are screaming and hitting each other, you stubbed your toe into cart and generally just having bad day" scenario making any man unable to manage the extra-harrowing effort of directing a cart a few meters into a designated space.

New comment by antonchekhov in "Let AI do the hard parts of your holiday shopping"

antonchekhov — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 18:40:19 +0000

> [..] I can't imagine how useless an unthinking AI would be at this when my own family and friends who, and this is important, _know me_, can't find anything to get me that doesn't land in the above categories

This is precisely the problem - an AI does not really "know" the recipient (set aside of what it means to "know" someone). The result is you get something just a bit more varied than the usual "He's a Guy - he'll love some Whiskey Stones, a Bacon-of-the-Month subscription, or a Beard Care Kit" advice. (Adjust for whatever target demographic.)

New comment by antonchekhov in "The Green Tea Garbage Collector"

antonchekhov — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 21:18:56 +0000

Acceleration by using the x86 AVX-512 extensions is especially compelling. Since ARM64 processors are becoming pervasive in server-side systems, is-there/will-there-be any optimization using the ARM64 NEON vector instructions in current or future Go versions? (The NEON instructions are 128-bit, instead of 512 bits in the AVX-512 set, but may still be useful.)

New comment by antonchekhov in "Poison, Poison Everywhere"

antonchekhov — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 17:56:29 +0000

A former coworker who was a serious gun enthusiast experienced dangerously high levels of lead in his bloodstream - he had chronic headaches and other bodily pains. He visited shooting ranges several times per week, and also packed (assembled? made? I'm not sure the nomenclature) his own bullets. His doctors believe he aspirated atomized lead particulate doing so much shooting practice, and/or bullet manufacture. He underwent chelation therapy (a protocol involving taking certain medications that bind to heavy metals in the blood, and the patient excretes it out via urination) to reduce lead levels.

New comment by antonchekhov in "I see a future in jj"

antonchekhov — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 03:26:04 +0000

I use command-line tooling much more than IDEs (e.g. VS Code), so the `gh` command-line tool (https://cli.github.com) for doing most of the usual hub-oriented workflow (PR authoring, viewing issues, status updates, etc) really helps a lot - I don't have to constantly + to my browser, and point-click-point-click through web pages so much. It would be fantastic if ersc or any other jj-centered code-sharing hub had similar tooling early on.

New comment by antonchekhov in "LinkedIn will use member data, profiles, and public posts to train AI models"

antonchekhov — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 15:39:10 +0000

There is a difference between "giving" and "taking".

New comment by antonchekhov in "Things you can do with a debugger but not with print debugging"

antonchekhov — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 20:03:27 +0000

Back in the early '90s, I was a big fan of the C/C++ debugging library "electric fence" (written by Bruce Perens) - it was a malloc() implementation that used mmap() to set the pages of the returned buffer such that any writes in that region (and even read accesses!) caused a segfault to happen, and the program halts, so you can examine the stack. It was a godsend.

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

antonchekhov — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 16:17:44 +0000

> there are many languages in popular use that can do this, in many cases better than golang

I'd love to see a list of these, with any references you can provide.

New comment by antonchekhov in "No Hello"

antonchekhov — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 14:45:57 +0000

I don't understand why, if the recipient of the initial detached "hello" is annoyed at the communication tax of having to acknowledge it before the querier gets to the real point of the convo, why in the "preferred" example, he/she responds to their gratitude ("ta") with a "np"? That seems like just as much pointless communication noise, only at the other end of the chat. When I say thanks to anyone in real-life verbal communication, their (usually a grunt) "no problem" adds nothing.

New comment by antonchekhov in "What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)"

antonchekhov — Mon, 19 May 2025 22:18:24 +0000

The J Peterman catalog is still around around (at least, online) and approaches satire in its selection of goods (mostly clothing) that assiduously conveys "casual, interesting, old-money wealth". The Elaine Benes character on "Seinfeld" worked there, and had to deal with the kooky habits of the Mr Peterman character.

New comment by antonchekhov in "Observations from people-watching"

antonchekhov — Sun, 11 May 2025 13:35:17 +0000

Then what did your second sentence ["These are not scientific observations in any sense. What does the author do to confirm or refute her psychological theories about others?"] intend?

> She's very good at telling stories, but these stories feel like fiction, not hard fact.

There was no claim of objective fact. This is a Substack piece, not a peer-reviewed submission to "Nature" journal.

New comment by antonchekhov in "Firefox tab groups are here"

antonchekhov — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 20:02:28 +0000

Window-sharing doesn't work at all in Firefox (last several versions) on macOS 15.4; Safari works fine for Google Meet events.

New comment by antonchekhov in "Cozy video games can quell stress and anxiety"

antonchekhov — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 17:47:52 +0000

"Frasier", Season 5 Episode 12:

  Niles: [walks in] Hello, Dad.  I believe we switched videotapes on 
         accident.
 Martin: Believe me, I noticed.
  Niles: Yes, there you go. [hands over video] At first I was dismayed.  
         I popped in the tape, and there was Charles Bronson blowing 
         away street trash, but I actually got into it.  It was quite 
         suspenseful.
 Martin: Yeah, well, that's the way Duke and I felt about "My Dinner 
         With Andre."  Talk about suspense! [fake, dramatic 
         anticipation] Will they order dessert?  Will they leave a good 
         tip? [walks to chair and sits]

New comment by antonchekhov in "Jeff Bezos exerts more control of Washington Post opinion"

antonchekhov — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 03:49:51 +0000

It's very much like an echo of the old Wall Street Journal Opinion motto "Free Men and Free Markets".

New comment by antonchekhov in "It’s still worth blogging in the age of AI"

antonchekhov — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 16:16:53 +0000

JD Salinger took a lot of heat over his reticence to publish any more of his writings after Catcher In the Rye and the Glass family stories. In 1974, he responded to the NY Times, "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work."

New comment by antonchekhov in "Don't make fun of renowned author Dan Brown (2013)"

antonchekhov — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 14:55:50 +0000

I don't remember who originally stated it, but there is an old axiom that "There are three stages of Reading: 1. Infantile - to learn about the world, 2. Adolescent - to learn about oneself, and 3. Adult - to read simply for enjoyment".

I think a lot of the current market for (adult) books reflects the second stage. It would be interesting to ask the person(s) sitting next to you on the next plane ride why they are reading, e.g. Malcolm Gladwell vs Dan Brown vs Ian McEwan.

New comment by antonchekhov in "Always go to the funeral (2005)"

antonchekhov — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 05:10:17 +0000

"other people's important people" is a very astute phrase - one has to see the value in that concept in order to understand the deceased's survivors that you think you already know. I've been to a few events where some folks were flabbergasted to discover different fresh aspects of the deceased - "what the...? He/she was tight with that crowd?!"