Hacker News: astockwell

New comment by astockwell in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious"

astockwell — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:17:01 +0000

This is the fundamental trust challenge with private/profitability-driven 'science'.

New comment by astockwell in "Hard Rust requirements from May onward"

astockwell — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 15:19:12 +0000

Would this logically extend to also include C-reliant languages like Python and Ruby (the latter being mostly a grammar underpinned by C) as technical debt also?

New comment by astockwell in "Why do some gamers invert their controls?"

astockwell — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 22:03:56 +0000

Disclosure: Didn’t read. But I did always get heckled at gatherings for inverting my controls, and then forgetting to switch them back. I think it came from whatever console you started with first (Sega Saturn), if you played early PC joystick games (Tie Fighter!), and Goldeneye’s Solitare configuration, which allowed deadly accuracy without needing to invoke the crosshairs.

New comment by astockwell in "Ask HN: Recommend resources that helped your game dev journey?"

astockwell — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 17:04:43 +0000

The inimitable https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/contents.html, which is a great read for any programmer, not just game devs.

New comment by astockwell in "What's happening inside the NIH and NSF"

astockwell — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 23:43:16 +0000

Chesterton's Fence

New comment by astockwell in "I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled"

astockwell — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 19:46:01 +0000

This is probably the right answer. Similar to "dont fight the police on the street, fight them in court". Can even quiet-quit during the project if you need to.. software can take an awfully long time to build..

Also, track your time during the work. And keep all correspondance. Paper trail, paper trail, paper trail.

New comment by astockwell in "Setelinleikkaus: When Finns snipped their cash in half to curb inflation"

astockwell — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 16:25:37 +0000

I imagine Finland's would be similarly branded a disaster if the present-day internet/social media megaphones had existed..

History books on 1945 aggressive monetary policy change: "The public didn't like it"

History books on 2025 aggressive monetary policy change: "The public went frigging bananas, doxxed their leaders, coordinated widespread disobediance on the scale of GME, etc"

(Granted I live in the US, and that's putting it mildly how the US would react)

New comment by astockwell in "Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]"

astockwell — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 13:37:31 +0000

Link?

New comment by astockwell in "Postgres.new: In-browser Postgres with an AI interface"

astockwell — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 18:53:33 +0000

I think you are 100% spot-on. Good enough has always been fine for the vast majority of people and the vast majority of use-cases.

Couple this with decreasing costs of storage (and ideally compute), and it doesn't matter if the data model is garbage, people can still get something workable that's better than the awful Excel files they curate now. It will still make errors, but eventually fewer than their spreadsheets.

New comment by astockwell in "Three ways to think about Go channels"

astockwell — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 16:39:52 +0000

Go does have the `- race` flag for test + build commands [1], which can help (not 100% iirc, but some) with datarace detection.

[1] https://go.dev/doc/articles/race_detector

Passing the Postgres 65535 parameter limit at 120x speed

astockwell — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 14:50:37 +0000

Article URL: https://klotzandrew.com/blog/postgres-passing-65535-parameter-limit/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40158271

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by astockwell in "The Making of Django Reinhardt"

astockwell — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 20:25:16 +0000

In college, in a music class (History of Jazz maybe?), I had to miss an exam, and the professor assigned me an essay to make up for it: Life and impact of Django Reinhardt, minimum of 10 pages (back in the "12 point font, Times New Roman" days).

This was in the early '00s, and hand-over-heart, there was less than 10 pages _on the internet_ about Reinhardt. The collegiate library was not much more help.

New comment by astockwell in "M 4.8 – 2024 Whitehouse Station, New Jersey Earthquake"

astockwell — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 14:57:47 +0000

Felt it in Hartford, CT!

New comment by astockwell in "'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza"

astockwell — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 19:56:33 +0000

Haha having recently rewatched MIB with my daughter after ~15 years, I don't think Will Smith correctly selected the target... :'D

New comment by astockwell in "Chainguard Images now available on Docker Hub"

astockwell — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 14:52:42 +0000

Many organizations pay people (or entire teams) to maintain a suite of hardened images, either for device/firmware applications, or because they use many languages in-house, etc. This is definitely one of those business models I thought "oh, of course" as soon as I saw it.

New comment by astockwell in "Home Lab Beginners guide"

astockwell — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 16:42:29 +0000

Some defense against the class(es) of availability problems that occur from OS + upwards. No defense against the class(es) that occur below that (metal).

New comment by astockwell in "Neurosurgeon pioneers Alzheimer's, addiction treatments using ultrasound [video]"

astockwell — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 19:18:22 +0000

Careful, that was literally the exact same selling point of Electroconvulsive therapy 80 years ago.

New comment by astockwell in "Ten Simple IT Security Rules for Early-Stage Startups"

astockwell — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 13:03:59 +0000

I have often wondered the same thing. I think it boils down to the actual factors being “something you have” and “something you know”, where the former is the possession of the password manager file/access, and the latter is the master password of the pw manager?

New comment by astockwell in "LinkedIn shelved plan to migrate to Microsoft Azure cloud"

astockwell — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 18:34:25 +0000

$$$

New comment by astockwell in "Moderna Melanoma Vaccine Cuts Death Rate in Half"

astockwell — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 17:14:56 +0000

> The most common sites of melanoma are chest and back in men and legs in women

> The most common chemical sunscreen ingredients cause cancer themselves

Both of these statements are out-of-date.

Recent studies show two different histological subtypes of melanoma for young adults vs older adults, each following a different common mode of presentation [1]. Melanoma in younger adults tends to present on the long limbs and is thought to have different contributing factors.

Also "common chemical sunscreen ingredients cause cancer" is a common FUD trope. Sunscreen reduces cancer mortality, full stop. Each person's circumstances vary based on their daily habits, geography, and personal/familial history.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8482997/