Hacker News: axblount

New comment by axblount in "Peta releases video showing experiments on infant monkeys at Univ of Washington"

axblount — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 15:33:27 +0000

You've created a false choice between children dying or torturing monkeys. This isn't the trolley problem.

They poisoned pregnant macaque mothers to see what would happen to their babies. Really sick stuff.

New comment by axblount in "Gemini 4 Argon"

axblount — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 16:15:28 +0000

Gemini isn't perfect but I find it a lot less annoying than other model families (personal preference or stockholm syndrome). Interested to read the reviews.

Is it actually available?

New comment by axblount in "Show HN: A CC0 museum of retro 3D tricks you can paste into a page"

axblount — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 15:24:02 +0000

Do you have "prefers reduced motion" on?

New comment by axblount in "The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization"

axblount — Wed, 13 May 2026 14:16:18 +0000

"Methinks the lady doth protest too much"

New comment by axblount in "The “small web” is bigger than you might think"

axblount — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:55:54 +0000

Signatures do have similar problems to certificates. But Gemini doesn't avoid them either and often recommends TOFU certificates. I think the comment's point was that digital signatures ensure identity but are unsuitable for e-commerce, a leading source of enshittification.

New comment by axblount in "Four Column ASCII (2017)"

axblount — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 16:49:52 +0000

Bit-level skeuomorphism! And since NUL is zero, does that mean the program ends wherever you stop punching? I've never used punch cards so I don't know how things were organized.

New comment by axblount in "X blames users for Grok-generated CSAM; no fixes announced"

axblount — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 20:17:01 +0000

Can you not see a difference between someone's imagination and a publicly posted image?

Posting a photo of yourself online is not an invitation for AI generated nudes.

New comment by axblount in "Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)"

axblount — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 01:44:23 +0000

Town, outside, and dungeon represent decreasing levels of safety. In most games, players want a clear indication of how much danger they are in just walking around. Some games, like Dark Souls, do blur these lines. I think it would be easy to go overboard.

This strikes me as one of those things that sounds better on paper than in practice.

New comment by axblount in "Writerdeck.org"

axblount — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 15:28:37 +0000

It's hard for me to see the advantage of using one of these over pen and paper:

- distraction free (except doodling)

- lower power consumption

- expressive in a way that typing can never be

- tends to discourage editing as you write

edit: and less eye strain

New comment by axblount in "RISC-V takes first step toward international ISO/IEC standardization"

axblount — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 01:53:55 +0000

What's the advantage of standardizing through ISO/IEC? Better adoption in industry?

Seems like this would take away a lot of power from RISC-V International. But I don't know much about this process.

New comment by axblount in "Meta’s live demo fails; “AI” recording plays before the actor takes the steps"

axblount — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 22:43:00 +0000

Live demos are especially hard when you're selling snake oil.

New comment by axblount in "Eternal Struggle"

axblount — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 20:55:49 +0000

Does some interesting things if you up the ball speed to 20. The boundary breaks down.

  data.blackBall.v = data.whiteBall.v = createVector(0, 20);

New comment by axblount in "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work"

axblount — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 21:28:48 +0000

"When in doubt, use brute force." --Ken Thompson

New comment by axblount in "A candidate giant planet imaged in the habitable zone of α Cen A"

axblount — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 06:04:26 +0000

I was curious about the acceleration due to gravity at the surface:

    G * (120 Earth masses) / (radius of Jupiter ^ 2)

Comes out to 9.7 m/s. Not bad!

New comment by axblount in "Build Your Own Lisp"

axblount — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 17:11:20 +0000

Lisp In Small Pieces by Christian Queinnec

It takes a very thoughtful approach to introducing an increasingly complex Scheme implementation. I doesn't shy away from the complexity that many LISP implementation tutorials try to push under the rug.

New comment by axblount in "2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results"

axblount — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 15:12:11 +0000

They're in the write-ins for their respective categories. Emacs with 0.1%. Clojure with an impressive 0%!

New comment by axblount in "‘I witnessed war crimes’ in Gaza – former worker at GHF aid site [video]"

axblount — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:54:40 +0000

I'm sorry but committing genocide is wrong without scare quotes. There is no justification.

New comment by axblount in "‘I witnessed war crimes’ in Gaza – former worker at GHF aid site [video]"

axblount — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:53:01 +0000

Arizona has a similar law regarding the Uyghurs. Every contact needs a clause that says no Uyghur "forced labor" was used.

New comment by axblount in "Jank Programming Language"

axblount — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 18:58:45 +0000

Aside from the lack of JVM, what's holding back Jank from being a drop in Clojure replacement?

New comment by axblount in "Stuffed-Na(a)N: stuff your NaNs"

axblount — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 14:33:18 +0000

This is usually called NaN-boxing and is often used to implement dynamic languages.

https://piotrduperas.com/posts/nan-boxing