Hacker News: cowthulhu

New comment by cowthulhu in "Tank leaking toxic chemicals in Orange County will spill or explode"

cowthulhu — Sat, 23 May 2026 20:49:05 +0000

That actually doesn’t seem that toxic. Doesn’t seem like a carcinogen either. Obviously still bad, but at least we’re not talking about something on the tier of phenol or benzene here!

New comment by cowthulhu in "Solar on canals reduces water evaporation by 70% and algae growth by 85%"

cowthulhu — Sat, 09 May 2026 14:06:58 +0000

Unfortunately I suspect this idea is somewhat dead-on-arrival… anti-renewable people will fight it for obvious reasons, while environmentalists will fight it due to concerns over shading the waterways.

New comment by cowthulhu in "Killswitch: Per-function short-circuit mitigation primitive"

cowthulhu — Sat, 09 May 2026 14:01:43 +0000

Once you’ve got root, you don’t need to exploit compromised code to do whatever you want.

New comment by cowthulhu in "How LEDs are made (2014)"

cowthulhu — Sat, 09 May 2026 13:59:06 +0000

This was a lot lower-tech than I was expecting. Very cool!

New comment by cowthulhu in "Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race"

cowthulhu — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 21:32:58 +0000

Wow, that’s ~13 mph, basically a full-on sprint for a mere mortal. Absolutely insane.

New comment by cowthulhu in "Joins Are Not Expensive"

cowthulhu — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 01:44:17 +0000

I quite liked this article. That said, I think it misses the two big advantages of denormalized (one big table) data -

It’s much easier for people to use, especially non-technical stakeholders who tend to just not understand joins.

It doesn’t require anything from the query optimizer… until you’ve had a complex query randomly go from “runs instantly” to “spins for hours” overnight, you can’t appreciate the value of a simple execution plan.

A bonus benefit is that it scares off the architecture astronauts!

New comment by cowthulhu in "The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner"

cowthulhu — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 14:21:58 +0000

The author really lucked out that the government employee was not actually malicious. I can think of a good few ways she could have made life much more difficult for the author, even if he was likely to ultimately succeed.

New comment by cowthulhu in "Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls"

cowthulhu — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:58:31 +0000

Lumen, Nanite, Substrate, Metahumans, and Chaos Physics all come to mind as major innovations driven by Epic. Nanite specifically has pretty much no alternatives. Additionally, the developer UX on UE5 gets better from release to release - for instance, being able to recompile your logic or animations while actively running the game is pretty insane.

New comment by cowthulhu in "Rack-mount hydroponics"

cowthulhu — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 05:42:58 +0000

The author is trying very hard to look like they are not trying at all.

New comment by cowthulhu in "SEIU Delenda Est"

cowthulhu — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 06:55:26 +0000

One comment I found interesting basically argued that if the billionaires are so scared of over the top wealth taxes, they should be pushing/lobbying for more reasonable wealth taxes as a blocking play, otherwise they can’t really complain if the really disruptive versions get passed.

New comment by cowthulhu in "SEIU Delenda Est"

cowthulhu — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 06:51:49 +0000

I don’t think that’s a fair take - his argument is primarily that the ballot measure is fundamentally flawed, and likely put forward in bad faith by a group who’s CEO literally admits to using bad faith/destructive ballot measures to force concessions from counterparties.

New comment by cowthulhu in "Jane Street faces claims of insider trading that sped up Terraform's collapse"

cowthulhu — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 22:57:47 +0000

Matt Levine has a fairly reasonable take on this: '[…] if you go to Jump Trading and Jane Street and say “hello, I have an unregulated poorly designed mechanism that could lead to $50 billion of market value collapsing overnight, would you like to trade with me,” they are going to say yes, but their eyes are going to light up, you know? If at Time 0 you give them an extremely gameable system that can produce billions of dollars of profit, at Time 10 your system is going to be a smoking wreckage and they are going to have billions of dollars of profit. That’s their whole job, you know? […] But as a heuristic, I mean, come on. Terra was like “hello we have a balloon full of money, here is a pin, dooooooon’t pop the balloon.” Guess what!'

New comment by cowthulhu in "Uncovering insiders and alpha on Polymarket with AI"

cowthulhu — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 06:43:56 +0000

Prediction markets should be accurate, not fair. If people want to gamble without doing the work of finding some alpha, they should head to a casino, not a prediction market.

New comment by cowthulhu in "MIT Living Wage Calculator"

cowthulhu — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 20:59:26 +0000

28/hr is closer to 60k/yr.

130k/yr is more like 65/hr.

New comment by cowthulhu in "Fined $48k for using a jammer to keep commuters from using phones while driving"

cowthulhu — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 15:07:58 +0000

Until someone has a heart attack and needs to call 911… these are super illegal for a reason!

New comment by cowthulhu in "Sam Altman Responds to Anthropic Ad Campaign"

cowthulhu — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 06:17:41 +0000

Great idea! A tweet providing thoughtful commentary on a competitors ads will surely set the record straight, people always respect CEOs that are willing to publicly talk about touchy topics. Would you like me to draft one for you?

New comment by cowthulhu in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

cowthulhu — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 21:44:39 +0000

What is the real-world advantage of putting datacenters in space?

New comment by cowthulhu in "Show HN: Play poker with LLMs, or watch them play against each other"

cowthulhu — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 06:32:01 +0000

This is completely wrong - the entire point of the Nash equilibrium solution (in the context of poker, at least) is that it is, at worst, EV-neutral even when your opponent has perfect knowledge of your strategy.

Your 72o comment indicates you are either playing with very weak players, or have gotten lucky, as in reasonably competitive games playing (and then full bluffing) 72o will be significantly negative EV. Try grinding that strategy at a public 10/20 table and you will be quickly butchered and sent back to the ATM.

New comment by cowthulhu in "Show HN: Play poker with LLMs, or watch them play against each other"

cowthulhu — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 23:15:59 +0000

To expand on this - an LLM will try to play (and reason) like a person would, while a solver simply crunches the possibility space for the mathematically optimal move.

It’s similar to how an LLM can sometimes play chess on a reasonably high (but not world-class) level, while Stockfish (the chess solver) can easily crush even the best human player in the world.

New comment by cowthulhu in "PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases"

cowthulhu — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 03:58:09 +0000

Last sentence completely undercuts the other sentiments you shared in your comment… probably best to cut stuff like that out in the future IMHO, even if it’s how you feel.