Hacker News: dandelany

New comment by dandelany in "Claude is a Contrarian"

dandelany — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 18:42:00 +0000

Claude: “lots of people enjoy lemon in their tea, but there’s a subtlety: putting it in coffee is likely to be an unpleasant experience”.

If I asked “should I try lemon in my tea and coffee?” this would be effective communication. But Claude gives answers like this for “should I try lemon in my tea?” which is just annoying.

New comment by dandelany in "Mechanical light bulb from 1675 [video]"

dandelany — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:49:48 +0000

People used to do a lot of stupid stuff. If you live alone and are conscious of the risk, sure, this is not a terribly dangerous item if you're safe about it. If you live with pets or children, it's entirely sensible to be concerned about the risk. A mercury spill can seep between the floorboards and contaminate your house with volatile mercury vapors for years to come if not properly managed.

New comment by dandelany in "Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming (2018)"

dandelany — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 06:27:27 +0000

If you break the game in such a way that no one wants to play with you anymore, then you have in fact lost the metagame

New comment by dandelany in "Cuba's national electric grid collapses, leaving millions without power"

dandelany — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 23:49:43 +0000

Maybe in a pinch, doesn't seem very sustainable. A single decent 400 watt solar panel produces about the same continuous power as a horse, and doesn't consume 20 lbs of hay per day, or pee on your generator.

New comment by dandelany in "AirPods Max 2"

dandelany — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 22:42:38 +0000

Sure, plenty of people also wear a 14 oz hard hat strapped to their head all day with no negative health impacts. Doesn't mean it's enjoyable or comfortable for everyone.

New comment by dandelany in "221 Cannon is Not For Sale"

dandelany — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:39:39 +0000

This was once common but is exceedingly rare these days. I'm sure exceptions exist, but nearly all Americans now treat this as a Very Secret Number.

New comment by dandelany in "Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections"

dandelany — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 01:50:24 +0000

The property you are talking about is generally called "deniability" in the literature, whereas the GP is talking "verifiability" ie. being able to verify your own vote is cast correctly. They are both valuable, sometimes mutually exclusive, but not necessarily, see eg. https://petsymposium.org/popets/2024/popets-2024-0021.pdf

New comment by dandelany in "Boeing knew of flaw in part linked to UPS plane crash, NTSB report says"

dandelany — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 23:49:40 +0000

Like most things, guessing and proving require vastly different efforts. In aviation, a few more orders of magnitude than most.

New comment by dandelany in "F5 says hackers stole undisclosed BIG-IP flaws, source code"

dandelany — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 19:34:13 +0000

You’re overthinking it. “Country” is simply more ambiguous when used as an adjective. “F5 announces attack from country hackers” sounds silly and confusing.

New comment by dandelany in "Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups"

dandelany — Thu, 29 May 2025 19:31:40 +0000

I suspect they also empirically have less price-sensitivity on average, for a variety of reasons

New comment by dandelany in "A thought on JavaScript "proof of work" anti-scraper systems"

dandelany — Thu, 29 May 2025 03:34:44 +0000

As opposed to what we have now?

New comment by dandelany in "Building an agentic image generator that improves itself"

dandelany — Thu, 22 May 2025 00:35:56 +0000

"Simple stochastic blob detection" is an abstraction. You write (or import) a function where the the gnarly logic lives and call `detectBlobs()`. "Use an abstraction" doesn't mean you should use the same abstraction for every task, you should use the right tool for the job.

New comment by dandelany in "Possible new dwarf planet found in our solar system"

dandelany — Thu, 22 May 2025 00:31:01 +0000

He didn't "do it", he was one voice among many astronomers who have been calling for a reclassification for years, the IAU voted and made the decision. It's a little silly calling him out for "doing it" for ego reasons when you are the one implicitly giving him credit for it... He didn't write the definition, he didn't chair the committee, he wasn't even on the committee. All he did was leave it off the list of planets at the Hayden Planetarium, where he was director.

New comment by dandelany in "SpaceX pushed "sniper" theory with the feds"

dandelany — Tue, 06 May 2025 05:11:04 +0000

…you realize this happened nine years ago, right?

New comment by dandelany in "The April Fools joke that might have got me fired"

dandelany — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 23:49:09 +0000

Is it still trespassing if the door was unlocked? Yes. Not sure why so many people have trouble applying the same principles of unauthorized access to computers.

New comment by dandelany in "Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died"

dandelany — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 02:17:05 +0000

Perhaps they are optimizing for having plausible deniability/a fully fleshed out backstory in case they are questioned by eg. local cops or a security guard, moreso than inconspicuousness to a random passerby who is unlikely to pose any danger with their idle theorizing

New comment by dandelany in "Two Grand Canyon-size valleys on far side of the moon formed within 10 minutes"

dandelany — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 20:35:55 +0000

Please be complete if you’re gonna translate to American units. That’s 117,000 football fields per football game, or 325 per commercial.

New comment by dandelany in "ChatGPT Is Down"

dandelany — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 02:05:55 +0000

Guessing these are the folks that can’t get work done because GPT is down…

New comment by dandelany in "Tcl under fire: report suggests its QLED TVs might not have any quantum dots"

dandelany — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 22:43:05 +0000

Could definitely be a Monty Python sketch.

"I looked inside the TV, there were NO quantum dots."

"Well there's your problem right there - you've gone and collapsed the wave function by looking!"

New comment by dandelany in "Nano DIP: the smallest complete Arduino board 33 x 10mm"

dandelany — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 19:01:24 +0000

There is at least one area where ATtiny still outcompetes RP2040: low power consumption. Even in its lowest-power dormant state, 2040 still burns around 200uA, whereas the ATTiny can sleep on only a handful of uA or less. Even during active use, an ATtiny with low voltage supply and low frequency clock can often do what you need with an order of magnitude or two less power than a 2040. So for a hobbyist project to build a battery-powered device with long lifetime, it’s hard to beat the ATtiny. Otherwise I completely agree!