Hacker News: dtj1123

New comment by dtj1123 in "Abu Fanous"

dtj1123 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 06:16:39 +0000

Will o' the wisps

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will-o%27-the-wisp

New comment by dtj1123 in "How to Earn a Billion Dollars"

dtj1123 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:07:18 +0000

The arguments for or against it being possible to earn a billion units of currency seem to hinge on differences in understanding of the term "earn".

The pg view seems to assume that if there is a causal relationship between your actions and a billion dollars appearing in your bank account, then it counts as having earned that money.

The countering viewpoint seems to consider the words "earn" and "build" as having a similar relationships to money and buildings respectively. If I tell you I built the shed in my garden, then you'll probably take my word for it. If I tell you I built a skyscraper, you'll either call me a liar or understand me to mean that a large number of individuals built it at my request.

I think the second version is more useful and more accurate.

New comment by dtj1123 in "Eric S. Raymond: How to Become a Hacker (2001)"

dtj1123 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:38:56 +0000

I've just done a little reading on the author, and am sad to say he seems like a piece of shit. @dang, is there any way/chance I can have this removed from my submission history?

Eric S. Raymond: How to Become a Hacker (2001)

dtj1123 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 20:52:30 +0000

Article URL: https://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48509319

Points: 33

# Comments: 1

New comment by dtj1123 in "Report on an Unidentified Space Station"

dtj1123 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 11:18:03 +0000

Then where is the 15k lightyears figure supposed to come from?

New comment by dtj1123 in "The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0"

dtj1123 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:27:53 +0000

My point is that it isn't well suited for it. Hence WASM.

New comment by dtj1123 in "The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0"

dtj1123 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:45:07 +0000

From the same link, opening sentence:

"The Java® programming language is a general-purpose, concurrent, object-oriented language."

Edit: Having thought a little, I appreciate that it's possible to compile for the JVM from source code which is not Java, which makes the JVM a compilation target. As far as I'm aware the JVM doesn't have first class support for this though, It's been tacked on as an afterthought. Compiling C to JVM bytecode for example doesn't appear to be an enjoyable process. WASM on the other hand was designed explicity to function as a compilation target for arbitrary languages.

Maybe I'm missing something, happy to be proven wrong.

New comment by dtj1123 in "The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0"

dtj1123 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:02:11 +0000

Because Java is a language, not a compilation target?

New comment by dtj1123 in "Anthropic's model naming, extrapolated"

dtj1123 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 06:55:55 +0000

Thankyou for sharing this. I've been reading the culture series over the last few months and this beautifully articulates ideas that I've not been able to.

New comment by dtj1123 in "Anthropic walks back policy that could have 'sabotaged' researchers using Claude"

dtj1123 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 06:12:37 +0000

Great, now just let me use it for bioinformatics and we're good.

New comment by dtj1123 in "Claude Fable 5"

dtj1123 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:08:37 +0000

I'm trying to test this out, but literally any mention of creating a program that does genome alignment (something I have a legitimate need for) is resulting in a switch to opus. I don't get it...

New comment by dtj1123 in "Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism"

dtj1123 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:09:15 +0000

I'm not entirely sure that I believe this, although I do believe a strong argument can be made here.

I think the idea that various mechanisms in modern society are subtly corroding free speech en masse with various nasty knock-on effects is an interesting one though.

New comment by dtj1123 in "Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism"

dtj1123 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:47:21 +0000

Cash incentivised speech is arguably not free.

New comment by dtj1123 in "Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it"

dtj1123 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:33:33 +0000

What's changed is the minimum amount of knowledge required to release a website.

New comment by dtj1123 in "Giant Floating Victorian Drydock"

dtj1123 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:02:36 +0000

Agreed

New comment by dtj1123 in "Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it"

dtj1123 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:40:28 +0000

The issue is that there are now different expectations surrounding velocity and apparent productivity. Previously an individual new to web development might have genuinely needed to develop an understanding of web protocols, HTML and other stuff in that domain in addition to actually wanting to wrap their head around it. Nowadays spending the time required to understand how a website works carries a heavy opportunity cost, at least in the short term.

New comment by dtj1123 in "Giant Floating Victorian Drydock"

dtj1123 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:50:57 +0000

It hadn't occurred to me that the wreck would still be visible. This is amazing.

New comment by dtj1123 in "Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo"

dtj1123 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 07:34:38 +0000

However unlikely it may be, when I see a wealthy celebrity with a doppleganger child the thought crosses my mind that they may have had themselves cloned.

The resemblance between young Donald Trump and his son Barron is uncanny, for example.

New comment by dtj1123 in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

dtj1123 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 19:10:04 +0000

I was actually surprised by how low the per-second rate is.

New comment by dtj1123 in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

dtj1123 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:04:21 +0000

I think those are exactly the right questions.

I'd say that AI is too poorly understood at this point to conclude whether it does or does not possess some form of consciousness. It has a few features that privilege it over other systems like the ones you've described (though I think it's entirely possible that those too are conscious): the networks underpinning modern AI are largely inspired by those we've observed in brains, and the apparently intelligent behaviours exhibited by AI have historically only been exhibited by entities which we accept to be conscious.