Hacker News: edschofield

New comment by edschofield in "The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok"

edschofield — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:13:47 +0000

Any company worth more could (in principle) acquire it with a share swap [1]. Even a smaller company could buy it with an LBO [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_swap

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveraged_buyout

New comment by edschofield in "Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew"

edschofield — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 22:07:30 +0000

This is not an edge case. Most HN commenters describe the latest two versions of macOS as being objectively worse than earlier versions: slower, less stable, more broken. There are significant numbers of “power users” who deliberately avoid upgrading or have actively downgraded macOS to Sonoma because they care about their computing experience.

New comment by edschofield in "Show HN: Clawe – open-source Trello for agent teams"

edschofield — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 21:00:54 +0000

I like “Clawboard”.

New comment by edschofield in "Pandas 3.0"

edschofield — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 11:51:40 +0000

The design of Pandas is inferior in every way to Polars: API, memory use, speed, expressiveness. Pandas has been strictly worse since late 2023 and will never close the gap. Polars is multithreaded by default, written in a low-level language, has a powerful query engine, supports lazy, out-of memory execution, and isn’t constrained by any compatibility concerns with a warty, eager-only API and pre-Arrow data types that aren’t nullable.

It’s probably not worth incurring the pain of a compatibility-breaking Pandas upgrade. Switch to Polars instead for new projects and you won’t look back.

New comment by edschofield in "Pandas 3.0"

edschofield — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 11:29:46 +0000

Yes, ChatGPT 5.2 Pro absolutely still does this. Just ask it for a pivot table using Polars and it will probably spit out code with Pandas arguments that doesn’t work.

New comment by edschofield in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

edschofield — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 18:48:07 +0000

Thanks for the link! I didn’t know Monday existed. I laughed so hard at its output. But I fear that using it regularly would poison my soul…

New comment by edschofield in "Feynman vs. Computer"

edschofield — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 18:45:38 +0000

Numerical integration methods suffer from the “curse of dimensionality”: they require exponentially more points in higher dimensions. Monte Carlo integration methods have an error that is independent of dimension, so they scale much better.

See, for example, https://ww3.math.ucla.edu/camreport/cam98-19.pdf

New comment by edschofield in "Gold hits all time high"

edschofield — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 20:20:23 +0000

Here's an interesting way to understand it:

https://pricedingold.com

The true value of gold is quite stable over time (since new gold is mined at a slow rate). Fiat currencies are constantly being debased. Hard assets fluctuate up and down relative to gold.

New comment by edschofield in "CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)"

edschofield — Sun, 25 May 2025 23:39:46 +0000

That's a Dutch auction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction.

I agree that reverse auctions would be a simple solution the current scalper problem. If demand outweighs supply, scalpers drive up the prices toward their economic equilibrium anyway, making ticket prices just as "unfair" to the poor, but with additional problems of trust...

New comment by edschofield in "Ask HN: What are you reading these days?"

edschofield — Sun, 12 Nov 2023 07:04:37 +0000

“The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes”, by Zachary D. Carter.

New comment by edschofield in "The MacBook Air M2 is so good it's given Apple a problem"

edschofield — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 09:37:35 +0000

> the unpopular touch bar which initially removed a physical ESC key.

I still have the scars: I no longer use a Caps Lock key, even on my newer computers — it’s permanently mapped to ESC…