Hacker News: beached_whale

New comment by beached_whale in "Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)"

beached_whale — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:52:54 +0000

Microsoft has a terrible habit of doing that. KB's used to have a predicable URL, they may again, but they keep changing them. Or any of their docs really. It's terrible as those URL's end up in other documents to be killed. This is not really an enterprise friendly way of supporting customers.

New comment by beached_whale in "Switching to electric stoves can dramatically cut indoor air pollution (2025)"

beached_whale — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:13:33 +0000

I've seen induction with dials for the stove. Ovens have had electronic buttons for decades though.

New comment by beached_whale in "Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)"

beached_whale — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:16:14 +0000

When it comes to empowering, I am not sure much beats Excel. It lets non techy people codify amazing things and get real work done.

New comment by beached_whale in "Countries are competing to see which can carry out mass surveillance the best"

beached_whale — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 13:32:36 +0000

This parent wants a form of that that doesn't require identity disclosure. Like zero trust assertions. Without that, the risks are too high.

New comment by beached_whale in "Countries are competing to see which can carry out mass surveillance the best"

beached_whale — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 13:31:07 +0000

mullvad has been one of the good ones.

New comment by beached_whale in "I hate compilers"

beached_whale — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:50:40 +0000

There are a lot of people writing really bad scrapers and running them on far from high compute power systems. This is the prevent DoS because of those. The big companies are often far more clever and know they are traversing the whole internet and can come back later.

New comment by beached_whale in "CrankGPT"

beached_whale — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:03:31 +0000

Other way around, a horse does more like 5-15hp

New comment by beached_whale in "CrankGPT"

beached_whale — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:48:29 +0000

1hp/750W or so sustained is insane power for all but a few and that is still for relatively short time periods.

New comment by beached_whale in "I am retiring from tech to live offline"

beached_whale — Fri, 29 May 2026 21:28:58 +0000

Some code definitely does, but it isn't the product. People, outside the devs making it, don't value how good the code is, but how well it solves the problem.

New comment by beached_whale in "I am retiring from tech to live offline"

beached_whale — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:08:54 +0000

More and more I have realized it was not the coding that I enjoyed, but solving problems/puzzles. This fits into the beautiful code not really mattering to more than myself but the solution for people, but that is hard to let go of.

New comment by beached_whale in "He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice"

beached_whale — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:11:19 +0000

From personal experience, one can get practically close guessing such that the error isn't going to be more significant compared to the errors in insulin to carb ratios/sensitivity factors/...

I am pretty good at this and the cheese sandwich example threw me, I would have estimated around 10-15g of carb for each slice. So the 28g is fairly consistent with that, not 40g. The only real way would be to weigh it and use the labeling. Another thing that often gets people is the labeling often has a serving size of say 2 slices and a weight that does not reflect the actual weight of 2 slices.

Luckily with good tools the significance is reduced, people using closed loop insulin pumps will automatically correct for that. Lots more room to wiggle.

New comment by beached_whale in "Tailslayer: Library for reducing tail latency in RAM reads"

beached_whale — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:46:59 +0000

Out of my area, but yeah, I have never heard of an optimized read using that. On the surface, it seems like a task much better suited for HW and there are companies that would probably pay for the ram per core penalty to get that low jitter in latency.

New comment by beached_whale in "Tailslayer: Library for reducing tail latency in RAM reads"

beached_whale — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 03:04:16 +0000

I wonder if there will be a hardware solution in the future that duplicates memory over multiple channels and gives the first result back transparently without threads and racing.

New comment by beached_whale in "AI may be making us think and write more alike"

beached_whale — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:35:51 +0000

This is one of my fears with this, losing ones voice. Everyone's expression distilled to the mean. This has ramifications in things like recognizing if a person is who they say they are too. At least currently, it is punished/shunned to sound like an LLM, but it's well within reason to see that shift to individuality being penalized.

New comment by beached_whale in "US deploying nearly all stealthy long-range JASSM-ER cruise missiles to Iran war"

beached_whale — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 18:52:05 +0000

There is a lesson in Ukraine and Iran being that invading a prepared country isn't easy and takes full commitment. Taiwan is most likely very prepared to defend itself.

New comment by beached_whale in "Big-Endian Testing with QEMU"

beached_whale — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:42:13 +0000

I've used docker buildx to do this in the past. Easier to work with than qemu directly(it does so under the hood).

New comment by beached_whale in "Why Don't You Use String Views Instead of Passing Std:Wstring by Const&"

beached_whale — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 04:07:15 +0000

std::string since C++ 11 guarantees the buffer is zero terminated. The reasoning being thread safety of const members. https://eel.is/c++draft/basic.string#general-3

New comment by beached_whale in "Honda is killing its EVs"

beached_whale — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 03:22:42 +0000

I don't want my vehicle connected at all. It's an open invitation to privacy reducing tech and exploits.

New comment by beached_whale in "Using Thunderbird for RSS"

beached_whale — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:57:19 +0000

The issue I have with Thunderbird and RSS is that there's no good way to do a show me the unread only and keep the feed folders. You can do a search folder or show unread folders but that affects mail too.

Or I don't know how

New comment by beached_whale in "The death of social media is the renaissance of RSS (2025)"

beached_whale — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 04:56:44 +0000

I'm reading this on my RSS reader right now :)