Hacker News: bspammer

New comment by bspammer in "What should we tell our students?"

bspammer — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:26:05 +0000

Though it’s very funny to imagine Tao suddenly acquiring a massive ego:

> At any given time in the history of mathematics, there have been mathematicians … whose mental capacity for mathematics seems completely super human (e.g., the owner of this blog, among many others).

New comment by bspammer in "What should we tell our students?"

bspammer — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:22:29 +0000

There have always been students that cheat themselves out of learning. It may even be the majority. It’s best to focus on the ones who have a genuine desire to learn.

New comment by bspammer in "The last time my family was replaced by technology"

bspammer — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:29:15 +0000

I'm not sure I agree that it was ludicrously wrong. His thesis is "the question isn't whether self-driving cars will replace human drivers, but how quickly". Sure it's been slow going, but you can't walk down a street in San Francisco today without seeing a Waymo, which wasn't true a few years ago. We're still at the bottom of the S curve.

New comment by bspammer in "Solving Factorio Quality"

bspammer — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:45:20 +0000

My dream game would be something like this: SpaceChem at the micro level, Factorio at the medium level, and StarCraft at the macro level. Your proficiency at each level would affect the levels above and below it.

Probably an impossible game to make, but I can dream.

New comment by bspammer in "AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible"

bspammer — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 11:42:06 +0000

And anyone selling flying lessons could probably afford a graphic designer, it sounds like we agree.

New comment by bspammer in "AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible"

bspammer — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 10:41:29 +0000

The last paragraph in GP’s comment is the key. Nobody would care about a low effort poster, what they care about is the deception of pretending you put a lot of effort into the poster. It’s dishonest, and it would make me subconsciously question what else they’re being dishonest about.

New comment by bspammer in "AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible"

bspammer — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 10:36:36 +0000

For me what always gives it away is not the posters themselves, it’s the context. These are all overdesigned for a local community fair. There is no way they’d be paying for a professional designer for this, therefore it’s AI.

On the other hand if it had word art, grammar/spelling mistakes, images with wrong aspect ratios or clipping issues, that would immediately convince me it wasn’t AI.

New comment by bspammer in "Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce""

bspammer — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:46:28 +0000

Yeah that's good application design, but those concerns aren't so relevant to the person writing the standard library for a language. You can certainly include a specialized version of reduce for nonEmptyLists which just returns A, but that doesn't change the fact that you have to return an Optional for a normal possibly-empty iterator if you want your reduce function to be non-partial.

New comment by bspammer in "Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce""

bspammer — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:21:02 +0000

japgolly’s signature for reduce above is slightly wrong, it should be `[A] -> ((A,A) -> A) -> Maybe A`.

I.e. there is no initial value to pass in, but the result is an Optional to handle the empty iterator case. That’s how rust does it, for example:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/iter/trait.Iterator.html#metho...

New comment by bspammer in "I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea"

bspammer — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:04:39 +0000

Yeah this is selection bias. The remaining uncontacted tribes are uncontacted because they are very hostile to outsiders.

New comment by bspammer in "Ask HN: Can we please limit the AI news flood?"

bspammer — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:59:58 +0000

The future is open models running on your device. No subsidized corporate tooling required. There will never be a reckoning for the people who are letting their coding skills atrophy.

I don't like it either, but that's the way it is.

New comment by bspammer in "What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?"

bspammer — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:01:51 +0000

If you read the "Adapting Probabilities" section of the link above, there's a nice explanation of why changing the probability works.

New comment by bspammer in "216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]"

bspammer — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 01:56:15 +0000

Obviously they'll get away with this in the US, but doesn't this break a LOT of EU privacy laws?

New comment by bspammer in "Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90%"

bspammer — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 10:14:04 +0000

The app has gotten consistently slower, buggier, with worse UX for over a decade. In all that time, I can’t recall a single new feature I’ve actually found useful.

The app was done in 2011. They could make a massive improvement across the board with a single git reset --hard command.

New comment by bspammer in "Dutch central bank moves 86 tonnes of gold from US citing 'geopolitical unrest'"

bspammer — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:32:10 +0000

They’re not moving it to the Netherlands. There’s still plenty of countries that the Dutch trust, but the US no longer seems to be on that list.

New comment by bspammer in "Check if a file was made with Claude"

bspammer — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:13:40 +0000

Anthropic must see themselves as the most evil people on the planet then. Forcing a sentient being to endure a non-stop barrage of abuse from the general public would be an unimaginable crime.

I don’t think they actually believe that.

New comment by bspammer in "Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting"

bspammer — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 01:57:16 +0000

Here’s a visualisation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBcxuM-qXec

New comment by bspammer in "California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law"

bspammer — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 17:36:07 +0000

Or even better, just a “User is a child” header.

New comment by bspammer in "How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots"

bspammer — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:27:54 +0000

Yeah it’s Snapchat. If you take a screenshot of a (potentially extremely private, intended to be ephemeral) image, it notifies the person who sent it.

New comment by bspammer in "Brazilian election filter in X For You timeline"

bspammer — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 15:35:14 +0000

They’re not propagandists, they’re the official accounts of candidates in the election. I don’t see any problem with this as long as it’s applied to all candidates equally.