Hacker News: armitron

New comment by armitron in "I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now"

armitron — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:58:16 +0000

Dwarkesh is your run-of-the-mill vapid influencer idiot. Fridman on the other hand, when in the presence of greatness, knows to STFU and listen.

New comment by armitron in "Every book recommended on the Odd Lots Discord"

armitron — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 11:21:55 +0000

Very smart people on discord sounds like an oxymoron: why would anyone very smart contribute to the siloization of knowledge and support grow a corporate entity possessing highly questionable incentives? Discord is not a great place to discuss anything of substance.

If that's not clear to some now, it will be once monetization kicks in and the inevitable blowup and loss of accumulated knowledge follows.

New comment by armitron in "It's Always TCP_NODELAY"

armitron — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 23:17:30 +0000

Assuming he shows up, he'll still probably be trying to defend the indefensible..

Disabling Nagle's algorithm should be done as a matter of principle, there's simply no modern network configuration where it's beneficial.

New comment by armitron in "Git 3.0 will use main as the default branch"

armitron — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 09:11:09 +0000

This is why I left California and utterly done with you people.

New comment by armitron in "Git 3.0 will use main as the default branch"

armitron — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 22:50:13 +0000

You're implying that those who are throwing hissy fits about "master" are aware of bitkeeper documentation and their (wildly unchecked) emotional response to this matter is nuanced enough to take "provenance" of technical terms into account.

Do you even realize how ridiculous these nonsensical "arguments" sound?

New comment by armitron in "Git 3.0 will use main as the default branch"

armitron — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 18:47:37 +0000

This argument isn't just absurd but push it to its logical extreme, and you're inviting brutal thought policing and full-blown totalitarianism.

I stick with "master" in my Git repos partly because it's an excellent filter: it lets me steer well away from anyone who pitches a fit over the word.

New comment by armitron in "Git 3.0 will use main as the default branch"

armitron — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 17:23:49 +0000

Making "some people" happier isn't zero cost if the people in question are intolerant lunatics with ideas corrosive to the social fabric. It's one reason why the pendulum is swinging fiercely in the other direction.

New comment by armitron in "Unix Hater's Handbook Stinks"

armitron — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 08:49:16 +0000

> Computer science would have progressed much further and faster if all of the time and effort that has been spent maintaining and nurturing Unix had been spent on a sounder operating system. We hope that one day Unix will be relingquished to the history books and museums of computer science as an interesting, albeit costly, footnote.

UHH is obviously sound but doesn't go far enough in criticizing the unix disaster.

New comment by armitron in "Winamp clone in Swift for macOS"

armitron — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 15:19:19 +0000

No source "freeware", would you trust a binary from a random Russian developer to not contain/deliver a trojan?

New comment by armitron in "Lisp: Notes on its Past and Future (1980)"

armitron — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 19:52:07 +0000

Clojure is a niche language that (for realistic purposes) is still tied to a single platform, the JVM, which (Clojure, not the JVM) looks more dead with every passing year. It never became popular and it's been steadily losing users. It's also not as general purpose as Common Lisp (ie. not suited for system or lowlevel programming).

If you're going to learn a niche Lisp, you might as well learn Common Lisp or Scheme which have well-specified standards, have stood the test of time and will still be around for decades to come.

New comment by armitron in "A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI"

armitron — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 07:24:23 +0000

It is a gross exaggeration. There are far better modern text adventures out there written by one person (ie see the games of Andrew Plotkin).

There’s minimal if any interactivity in this “game” and I deleted it after 10 minutes of one screen with one line of text after another.

New comment by armitron in "A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI"

armitron — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 07:21:53 +0000

It is boring, there’s minimal interactivity. Quite a long way from the better text adventures out there.

New comment by armitron in "Wireshark 4.6.0 Supports macOS Pktap Metadata (PID, Process Name, etc.)"

armitron — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 15:35:06 +0000

Wild exaggeration. Wireshark is very limited in what it can do and has gained few if any new power-user features (especially when it comes to extensibility and programmability) in more than a decade of development. The macOS-specific functionality in this very post has been available for years.

Anyone who relies on non-trivial packet capture or processing workflows, ditches Wireshark (optionally reusing dissectors) and writes custom tooling (which is very easy to do).

New comment by armitron in "Ofcom fines 4chan £20K and counting for violating UK's Online Safety Act"

armitron — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 14:37:07 +0000

I moved to Germany where my wife is from, and I currently split my time between a conservative US state where my kids are studying (I left California where I grew up when the liberal politics became too much to handle as I didn't want my kids to grow up in this sort of environment).

New comment by armitron in "Ofcom fines 4chan £20K and counting for violating UK's Online Safety Act"

armitron — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 07:47:54 +0000

As someone who's lived in the UK for years but no longer there (I'm American and currently live in another EU country) it's sad but also quite funny watching the rapid deterioration across multiple domains that has taken place in the last 20 years. At times it seems that the people at the upper strata of politics have completely broken with contemporary reality and went off into a fantasy make-believe space, but don't realize it and keep acting as if that's not the case.

New comment by armitron in "Compiling a Forth"

armitron — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 07:31:09 +0000

Read jonesforth if you want to learn how a Forth can be implemented and bootstrapped simply. Like other comments in this thread point out, this implementation isn’t really Forth and completely misses the point of Forth.

New comment by armitron in "The history of cataract surgery"

armitron — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 15:31:26 +0000

Flud vision IOL has been in trials for years and looks very promising. Unless you really need an IOL NOW, I'd wait a few years for accommodating IOLs to hit the market. They make monofocals/trifocals seem like medieval technology as they work at all distances, in the same manner as a natural lens (ie. continuous focus). For someone with myopia/presbyopia, they're an occular enhancement that can give better than 20/20 vision.

New comment by armitron in "The gaslit asset class"

armitron — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 09:15:20 +0000

Did you bother to read the OP text where it’s made crystal clear that Bitcoin is neither secure nor decentralized?

New comment by armitron in "Companies are lying about AI layoffs?"

armitron — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 20:00:43 +0000

Trump is trying hard to get voter id passed (common sense in Europe) and he’s obviously not doing that because he wants to cheat in elections. Your characterization is therefore misguided in the extreme.

We only need to look at states like California and their complete absence of voter id to realize where and for whom rampant election fraud takes place.

New comment by armitron in "How did we all miss the bacteria taking over her body?"

armitron — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 16:31:18 +0000

This is good example of how disastrous NHS can be (and it's not even that serious compared to horror stories that involve cancer) and makes me look at the flawed but also clearly superior US health system with renewed appreciation.