Hacker News: countWSS

New comment by countWSS in "Some children are drawing on fake moustaches to bypass online age checks"

countWSS — Tue, 05 May 2026 05:32:00 +0000

That a media push to make "it more secure" i.e. closer to Chinese Internet ID.

New comment by countWSS in "Music with Lyrics Interferes with Cognitive Tasks (2023)"

countWSS — Sat, 02 May 2026 16:10:51 +0000

Try to listen to music in language you don't understand. The effects of having lyrics don't appear unless you focus on them to repeat the memory of song. Of course instrumentals are better, but lyrics lift the mood by virtue of having some "virtual social context" simulation.

New comment by countWSS in "Grief and the AI split"

countWSS — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 19:40:12 +0000

Sure, is there anyone nostalgic for debugging bash files by hand? Any sense of grief for writing C++ template headers, with all boilerplate? Hmm, does anyone like manually re-writing makefiles these days? I suspect the enthusiasts of coding craft will struggle to maintain their wonder after ~4h deep in any of these magical adventures, which surely involve inventing ad-hoc duct tape and novel, never-before-seen algorithms.

New comment by countWSS in "In Search of a Discord Replacement"

countWSS — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 08:37:59 +0000

When you make forums you compete with forum aggregators with more history and social clout, i.e. a reddit replacement. If someone made better Reddit, it could have a chance, however reddit-type aggregators crypronite is hosting their own videos/media, which makes it prohibitively expensive for small companies without ads and sponsored posts which in turn make them less of "forum aggregator" and more like facebook social feeds: mainly video/image based dopamine rides instead of actual knowledge worth keeping.

New comment by countWSS in "Gradient.horse"

countWSS — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 12:53:36 +0000

Crashed my browser, very poor code.

New comment by countWSS in "Cloudflare adds real-time Markdown rendering for AI agents"

countWSS — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 07:51:46 +0000

This seems useful beyond agents. It will save tons of traffic for scripts, text browsers, low-bandwidth connections,etc markdown is incredibly compact and easy to parse.

New comment by countWSS in "Lines of Code Are Back (and It's Worse Than Before)"

countWSS — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:44:15 +0000

The code written by AI in most cases is throwaway code to be improved/refined later. Its likely to be large, verbose and bloated. The design of some agents have "simplify/refactor" as final step to remedy this, but typically your average vibe coder will be satisfied that the code just compiles/passes the minimal tests. Lines of code are easy to grow. If you refine the AI code with iterative back-and-forth questions, the AI can be forced to write much more compact or elegant version in principle, but you can't apply this to most large systems without breaking something, as AI doesn't have context of what is actually changing: so e.g. an isolated function can be improved easily, but AI can't handle when complexity of abstraction stacks and interfacing multiple systems, typically because it confuses states where global context is altered.

New comment by countWSS in "The largest number representable in 64 bits"

countWSS — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 11:07:28 +0000

the article misses log-math and log-log-math which would use 64-bit (d)oubles are exponents in 10^d and 10^(10^d) respectively, which allows far higher range of possible values but somewhat more awkward math operations(addition/subtraction), though much more practical & faster to compute.

New comment by countWSS in "Rentahuman – The Meatspace Layer for AI"

countWSS — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 10:44:39 +0000

Isn't this basically a forum-as-s-service?

New comment by countWSS in "They lied to you. Building software is hard"

countWSS — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:08:24 +0000

There is a point in there, long-range analysis and debugging without AI is much harder, AI spots lots of non-obvious stuff very fast. If we consider "spotting non-obvious flaws" a skill, this will atrophy as beginners will learn to use AI to scan code for flaws,it is effective but doesn't teach anything, reading long blocks of code and mentally simulating it is a incredibly valuable skill and it will find stuff AI misses(something that is too complex, e.g. nested/recursive control flow,async and co-routines/threads interacting,etc), AI goes for obvious stuff first and has to be manually pointed to "identify flaws, focusing on X".

New comment by countWSS in "Does running wear out the bodies of professionals and amateurs alike?"

countWSS — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 16:10:48 +0000

Quntity of exercise cannot build quality. Its self-selecting the people who can handle running and injuries better so they adapt. The rest get injured enough to stop. II don't think trying to "push it to using 100% of potential" is worth any long-term health risk, especially with no long-term reward: so you win X race/competition once and then what?

New comment by countWSS in "LED lighting undermines visual performance unless supplemented by wider spectra"

countWSS — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 16:21:10 +0000

> (at least usually).

Nope. Lots of people see the strobing. Its causes headaches if you focus on the lights.

New comment by countWSS in "OpenAI's GPT-5.2 model cites Grokipedia"

countWSS — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 07:57:03 +0000

It seems to be adding tons of articles, then some of them get deleted. I assume it's been allocated lots of compute. The entire model is outcompeting wikipedia on quantity per topic. If wikipedia merges/integrates some article and Grokipedia has a specific page for it, the search engine/LLM will get that version front and center. Grokipedia seems to have no scope limit, so wikipedia "non-notable" entries will be SEO-optimized towards sites with the topic-names, eventually settling on AI content farms as primary destination.

New comment by countWSS in "Nvidia contacted Anna's Archive to access books"

countWSS — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 14:55:16 +0000

Short-term thinking, they don't care about where the data comes from but how easy is to get it. Its probably decided at project-manager level.

New comment by countWSS in "Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark"

countWSS — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 11:13:08 +0000

How much of internet can Cloudflare turn off in italy? They picked a fight with the cloud gorilla.

New comment by countWSS in "GitHub Is Down"

countWSS — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 17:24:41 +0000

Still, why many projects are exclusively on github? Not a single mirror, everything tied to github working, thousands of people not even considering alternatives..

New comment by countWSS in "Mozilla's open source AI strategy"

countWSS — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 09:04:52 +0000

This has the feeling of corporate feel-good PR release: its essentially content-less AI-generated rehashing "our models are freer/more open-source" which seems silly since they don't develop anything unlike DeepSeek/GLM/Qwen the real open-source giants. Mozilla is a middle-man that could use open-source agents, but it pretending to be the "gatekeeper" of "open AI". Their key motivation is exposed in the middle of text: "The Mozilla Data Collective is building a marketplace for data that is properly licensed, clearly sourced, and aligned with the values of the communities it comes from."

This is far away from Firefox roots, whatever corporate stewards are at helm of mozilla now think exclusively in terms of marketplaces and "economics of data".. Futher reading "so we’re deepening our engagement with governments and enterprises adopting sovereign, auditable AI systems. These engagements are the feedback loops that tell us where the stack breaks and where openness needs reinforcement." Hard pass.

New comment by countWSS in "LMArena is a cancer on AI"

countWSS — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 11:10:44 +0000

I have to somewhat agree on the "deceptive" answers part: Specifically, Grok4.1(#3 currently) is psychopathically manipulative and easily hallucinates things to appear more competent, even if there is nothing to form the answer it generated. Gemini3 pro(#1) casually subverts the intent of prompt and rewrites the question as if there was a literal genie on the other side mocking you with the power of thousand language lawyers. If you examine the answers, fact-check everything you will not like the "fake confidence" and the style will appear like scam artist trying to sound professional.

However, LMarena,despite its flaws(recaptcha in 2026?) is the only "testing ground" where you can examine the entire breadth of internet users. Everything else is incredibly selective, hamstrung bureaucratic benchmark on pre-approved QA sessions. It doesn't handle edge cases or out-of-distribution content. LMarena is the "out-of-distribution" questions that trigger the corner cases and expose weak parts in processing(like tokenization/parsing bugs) or inference inefficiency(infinite loops, stalling and various suboptimal paths), its "idiot-proofing" any future interactions beyond sterile test-sets.

New comment by countWSS in "Australia Enforces Age ID Checks for Search Engine Users"

countWSS — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 12:45:00 +0000

Why Australia has those weird, draconian laws invented on the spot: Australians don't seem like authoritarian "need to know" crowd, yet there is no major opposition to this absurd change. Whats next, internet passports?

New comment by countWSS in "Is There a Religious Revival Among Young US Adults?"

countWSS — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 14:29:04 +0000

Anecdotally,seems to be less of atheism online: the Dawkins/Rationalist types seem to have retreated from public debates.