Hacker News: benjijay

New comment by benjijay in "Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)"

benjijay — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:00:31 +0000

If you find yourself in West London, also check out Brunel University, all of the older buildings are pure brutalism

New comment by benjijay in "The "Crown of Nobles" Noble Gas Tube Display (2024)"

benjijay — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 15:51:13 +0000

Wearing this as an actual crown might leave one feeling light headed

I'll get my coat

New comment by benjijay in "Oxide raises $200M Series C"

benjijay — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 14:52:04 +0000

Very cryptic; what are you actually saying here?

New comment by benjijay in "Two kinds of AI users are emerging"

benjijay — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 16:07:47 +0000

I don't recall the bot he was using, it was a rushed portion of the presentation to make the point that "yes these tools exist, but be mindful of the output - they're not a magic wand"

New comment by benjijay in "Two kinds of AI users are emerging"

benjijay — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 11:11:10 +0000

> If a data science team modeled something incorrectly in their simulation, who's gonna catch it? Usually nobody. At least not until it's too late. Will you say "this doesn't look plausible" about the output?

I recently watched a demo from a data science guy about the impending proliferation of AI in just about all related fields, his position was highly sceptical but with a "let's make the most of it while we can"

The part that stood out to me which I have repeated to colleagues since, was a demo where the guy fed his tame robot a .csv of price trends for apples and bananas, and asked it to visualise this. Sure enough, out comes a nice looking graph with two jagged lines. Pack it ship it move on..

But then he reveals that, as he wrote the data himself, he knows that both lines should just be an upward trend. Expands the axis labels - the LLM has alphabetized the months but said nothing of it in any of the outputs.

New comment by benjijay in "Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes""

benjijay — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 08:42:30 +0000

While we're on an Olivia Colman thread, I can't leave 'Green Wing' unmentioned

New comment by benjijay in "Nova Launcher added Facebook and Google Ads tracking"

benjijay — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 08:34:33 +0000

How disappointing. Been using premium for a decade now (got it in a 10p sale back in 2015! Those were the days)

Time to start scoping out replacements, this thread is a great start

New comment by benjijay in "TurboTax’s 20-year fight to stop Americans from filing taxes for free (2019)"

benjijay — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 09:40:18 +0000

Land of the f(r)ee

New comment by benjijay in "How Silica Gel Took Over the World"

benjijay — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 09:00:22 +0000

I'm scrolling before coffee and initially took your acronym as India Pale Ale, which would certainly be a different cleaning experience...

New comment by benjijay in "Extend Extra Extreme: keyboard extend layer mappings"

benjijay — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 14:02:26 +0000

That's a throwback! I remember being excited about the Optimus Maximus back around '06! Never heard of any actually making it out into the wild...

New comment by benjijay in "The Floppotron 3.0 (2022)"

benjijay — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 11:06:20 +0000

Managed to see them in London a few months back, can definitely echo the recommendation! (The warm up act could have done with a sound check but I was very impressed with his playing an OG GameBoy as a MIDI controller)

New comment by benjijay in "Nobody cares"

benjijay — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 12:35:16 +0000

Volkswagen already had this idea...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

New comment by benjijay in "Making an intersection unsafe for pedestrians to save seconds for drivers"

benjijay — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 16:50:08 +0000

I am more familiar with (and more partial to) a California Roll consisting of 'crab' sticks, avocado, and cucumber, wrapped in seaweed and then rice.

New comment by benjijay in "Olympians turn to OnlyFans to fund dreams due to 'broken' finance system (2024)"

benjijay — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 12:58:15 +0000

This always gets the pearl-clutchers out of the woodwork - you're gathering a few hundred of the world's fittest people in peak performance mode in the same place for a few weeks, giving most of them a huge amount of downtime, what do you THINK is going to happen? (This is the general 'you', not YOU)

Providing free access to make sure things are happening safely is not what's 'encouraging the behaviour' here :D

New comment by benjijay in "VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles"

benjijay — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 12:33:08 +0000

Totally personally skewed perspective, but thinking about the number of systems I've installed VLC on, some multiple times through rebuilds etc, 6 billion feels like a huge underestimate!

New comment by benjijay in "A middle schooler found a new compound in a piece of goose poop"

benjijay — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 15:49:22 +0000

It's that old adage once again... throw enough goose shit at the wall and eventually you'll treat cancer.

New comment by benjijay in "Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024 winners"

benjijay — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 13:58:29 +0000

I went to this exhibit at the weekend! Some truly awesome pictures (and a handful of runners up that left me wondering how easy it is to do, really)

One of the most interesting comparisons was how some pictures were a single shot, maybe 10-15 second exposure, and others were stacks of 700 or more images with exposures ranging from 60-400 seconds, taken over the course of a month.

New comment by benjijay in "Everyone is capable of, and can benefit from, mathematical thinking"

benjijay — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 16:51:09 +0000

Most people have an above-average number of legs.

New comment by benjijay in "Show HN: I built the most over-engineered Deal With It emoji generator"

benjijay — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 12:14:47 +0000

Unless the comment above has been edited, I make that 100 days?

New comment by benjijay in "Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms"

benjijay — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 09:27:11 +0000

Well, now I have a goal!