Hacker News: christophilus

New comment by christophilus in "Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering"

christophilus — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 12:38:44 +0000

It seems like we have enough satellites in space that are giving off enough unique signals that we could put together a device that solves the GPS problem without needing GPS itself. I wonder what it would take.

New comment by christophilus in "The discovery that changed how scientists think about memory"

christophilus — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 11:44:25 +0000

Well, it does seem that memories may be embedded in the nervous system as well as the brain, so I don’t think the OP is wrong. You sometimes hear of heart transplant patients having other people’s memories / preferences. So, it’s not good evidence, but it’s a possibility.

New comment by christophilus in "Norway greenlights first full-scale ship tunnel"

christophilus — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 18:10:16 +0000

It will be interesting to see if it’s ever completed. I imagine dealing with ship fumes in a tunnel will be a challenge. And, I’m curious what the plan is when a ship runs into the sides or breaks down halfway through.

Super cool project nonetheless. I hope it succeeds.

New comment by christophilus in "Cell-based architecture for resilient payment systems"

christophilus — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 23:16:16 +0000

“They reinvented Erlang OTP.” - Reddit

New comment by christophilus in "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"

christophilus — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:48:00 +0000

“Incredible, a mere 35 billion cycles to start up!”

The comments on that video are perfect.

New comment by christophilus in "A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones"

christophilus — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 12:04:43 +0000

Well, I really don’t like Google, but if they make this a thing, I’d switch to Android and put Graphene on it or whatever just so I could tie into this. This is an excellent idea.

New comment by christophilus in "Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses"

christophilus — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 04:19:30 +0000

Honestly, I just validate that it has an @ and then let it through. The actual sender (mailgun, or whatever) can do the dirty work for me.

New comment by christophilus in "Upcoming breaking changes for npm v12"

christophilus — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:52:35 +0000

Better than nothing. That’s the same problem every package manager has.

New comment by christophilus in "Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers"

christophilus — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:00:45 +0000

Downloading OpenBSD and going off-grid. How about you?

New comment by christophilus in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

christophilus — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:04:31 +0000

Yes. It’s just more bike shedding. Write helpful comments if you care about such things. Example: https://www.sqlite.org/src/timeline

New comment by christophilus in "Under Notre Dame, a 'dig of the century' unearths 1,700 years of history"

christophilus — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:11:35 +0000

That’s been talked about ad nauseam. It’s nice to talk about something else for a change.

New comment by christophilus in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

christophilus — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 02:48:54 +0000

Failing news headlines soar after AI takes over reporters jobs.

New comment by christophilus in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

christophilus — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 02:41:58 +0000

An exponent on $1T isn’t unlimited, but it is an uninvestible thesis in my book.

New comment by christophilus in "Sysadmining Like It's 2009"

christophilus — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 18:15:07 +0000

My videos would consist mostly of: “Chris is cursing msbuild again.” “Chris is losing a table tennis game to Mike again while he waits for the build to complete.” And so forth.

New comment by christophilus in "Anthropic surpasses OpenAI to become most valuable AI startup"

christophilus — Sat, 30 May 2026 15:10:30 +0000

The dark fiber of our time?

New comment by christophilus in "Anthropic surpasses OpenAI to become most valuable AI startup"

christophilus — Sat, 30 May 2026 15:08:53 +0000

I find codex superior in speed and equal in quality, so it’s my preference. But Claude Code made prettier UIs last time I tested. Codex produces Microsoft-grade UIs. Very enterprise and ugly unless I actively steer it.

New comment by christophilus in "Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?"

christophilus — Sat, 30 May 2026 11:57:28 +0000

Dunno. I did C++ GUI programming back in the day. It wasn’t hard. It would’ve been hard to get light/dark mode and responsive design right, probably, but in my (albeit fuzzy) memory, it wasn’t any harder than building nice web applications. The hard part was just stupid C++ nonsense that Rust and Zig and other nice things are finally here to put out of its misery.

New comment by christophilus in "Show HN: Continue? Y/N: A 60-second game about AI agent permission fatigue"

christophilus — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:50:48 +0000

Claude Code won't let you do that as root. Codex's equivalent is perfectly fine, though.

New comment by christophilus in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

christophilus — Fri, 29 May 2026 10:17:20 +0000

It reminds me of my younger self when I encountered inexplicable behavior in my own software, “I think I found a bug in Firefox!” … “Oh, nope. I forgot to add an event handler.”

New comment by christophilus in "Show HN: Continue? Y/N: A 60-second game about AI agent permission fatigue"

christophilus — Fri, 29 May 2026 10:13:22 +0000

Claude Code has gotten so bad about this that I’ve stopped using it for code reviews. I may look into wiring Claude up to Codex as an alternative LLM just to compensate.

I think the issue is that I’m running Claude Code in a container so it sees that it is root, and becomes a lot more cautious. Not sure, though.