Hacker News: defterGoose

New comment by defterGoose in "What killed the Florida orange?"

defterGoose — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 20:11:08 +0000

You got a bad/dry one. Happens all the time with home grown and less frequently with commercial products. My backyard trees have improved, but only with fairly intensive upkeep.

The flavor coming right off the tree can be truly candy-like given optimal conditions. After tasting the best ones from my own tree, I had the revelation that so many things that are "orange flavored" are mimicking navels specifically.

New comment by defterGoose in "What killed the Florida orange?"

defterGoose — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:41:36 +0000

I'll pick a bone on the flavor comment because a good Washington Navel is probably one of the best tasting oranges in existence.

New comment by defterGoose in "The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness"

defterGoose — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 22:33:38 +0000

It's the pervasive theme in the book, but never really given a conceptual grounding further than "this sort of looks like recursion or can be modelled circularly so it's a strange loop". The vagueness of it reveals itself as being "more intuitive", because a vaguer pattern will have more matches. I don't remember Hofstadter digressing on whether these loops work "in reverse" either, which is sort of what the author here is denying. Basically positing that f doesn't have a well-defined inverse.

New comment by defterGoose in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

defterGoose — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 19:46:29 +0000

It's only a little bit comforting that computers still live in meatspace when you consider something like an AI-controlled Metal Gear roaming around though.

New comment by defterGoose in "Trump says U.S. operation captured Venezuela's president Nicolas Maduro"

defterGoose — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 11:02:34 +0000

I see it's still the season of perpetual hope wherever you are...

New comment by defterGoose in "Using AI Generated Code Will Make You a Bad Programmer"

defterGoose — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:44:55 +0000

Yeah, but there's nothing like some sweet, sweet justification.

New comment by defterGoose in "My thoughts on renting versus buying"

defterGoose — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 01:13:03 +0000

The author disclaims that he's not a homeowner at the very end of the article, but these types of pieces steelmanning renting always read to me as thinly veiled pleas of "please exit the market so I can have more".

New comment by defterGoose in "Launch HN: Societies.io (YC W25) – AI simulations of your target audience"

defterGoose — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 19:53:55 +0000

Someone must have a wild-ass theorem about whether or not consciousness is representable as some distribution over possible realities. But yeah, I agree this feels like taking a huge step towards fewer and fewer people having agency in their own (real) lives.

I'm certain Big [insert industry] will gobble this kind of thing up.

New comment by defterGoose in "Dilbert creator Scott Adams says he will die soon from same cancer as Joe Biden"

defterGoose — Mon, 19 May 2025 18:33:26 +0000

Sure, but one wishes that it didn't need to arrive on the back of a face-to-face encounter with his own mortality. That understanding of a shared humanity is accessible in other ways, though cancer diagnoses do have a way of shoving it in your face.

New comment by defterGoose in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)"

defterGoose — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 17:34:47 +0000

I would love to have such a model tell me how to prune my fruit trees as they grow up. Should be a fairly straightforward supervised problem with the right front end for the graph generation.

New comment by defterGoose in "The long-awaited Friend Compound laws in California"

defterGoose — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 01:05:53 +0000

That's what a Bungalow Court is all about. They're kind of a dying breed, but have previously been very popular here in LA County.

New comment by defterGoose in "Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting"

defterGoose — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 18:06:04 +0000

Totally a mischaracterization. On one hand an imperfect crisis response, on the other hand, a brazen, unforced error.

New comment by defterGoose in "The Intelligence Age"

defterGoose — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 15:51:19 +0000

|such intelligence isn't really a bottleneck today.

Yep, pretty much agree. As soon as I see LLMs start solving millennium problems one after another I might change my tune.

The bottleneck is much more likely to be people unwilling to quit hoarding economic potential in the form of money.

New comment by defterGoose in "The Intelligence Age"

defterGoose — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 15:42:12 +0000

Everyone's life will be better than anyone's life is now? That is some impressively breathless optimism.

I dunno Sam, groceries have gotten awfully expensive.

New comment by defterGoose in "Five Most Productive Years: What Happened and What's Next"

defterGoose — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 16:02:35 +0000

> Back in 1979, for example, I’d invented the idea of transformations for symbolic expressions as a foundation for computational language.

Right, so math then. You invented math.

New comment by defterGoose in "FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancellations"

defterGoose — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 16:33:59 +0000

Don't trust changing your card either. I had a predatory LA Fitness membership. When they made me jump through one too many hoops to cancel, I called up WF and had them issue me a new card (Visa). Well, Visa, in their infinite wisdom, gave my new credit card number to LA Fitness and they kept on charging me for almost two years before I noticed. I don't remember the name of that program at Visa, but I'm sure they and other CC companies continue to do this. Should be illegal.

New comment by defterGoose in "Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?"

defterGoose — Wed, 29 May 2024 14:59:00 +0000

Care to relate some of them? My mom was a high school math teacher, my dad is a physicist and I had a STEM education, so math pedagogy is near and dear to me.

New comment by defterGoose in "Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?"

defterGoose — Wed, 29 May 2024 14:47:22 +0000

And those books you're reading. They came from where?

New comment by defterGoose in "VW to Build €20k EVs on Its Own, Forgoing Partnerships"

defterGoose — Tue, 28 May 2024 16:51:45 +0000

The i3 I've been driving around has been a complete revelation. It's an older model with a worn-out small battery. It usually claims to have 52mi range when it's topped up in the morning. Realistically, I can only use about 40-45 of that before I worry about it shutting off the contactors to protect the cells.

But it has a range extender. That transforms it from essentially a dedicated grocery-getter to a daily driver that can commute all over Socal. Barely over 2 gallons of gas will give you an extra 70mi (at about 65mph)

Granted, it's more a technology demonstrator than a blueprint for an affordable mass-market EV, but it's a huge step in the right direction if you ask me. Much more similar to what the average person in a city needs in a car than, say, the 600hp model 3 I was driving around for awhile.

New comment by defterGoose in "Mustard"

defterGoose — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 17:35:42 +0000

Probably horseradish which, incidentally, is also a member of the mustard/cabbage family. If you make mustard from scratch you will note that raw mustard seeds have a very horseradish-like flavor as well.