Hacker News: forinti

New comment by forinti in "I'm Tired of Talking to AI"

forinti — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:39:20 +0000

I spent many holidays in Uruguay in the 80s and early 90s.

I loved cartoons, but TV was only on at 10am, so I had to go out and play. If we went to my grandparents' beach house, there was an old vacuum tube TV that took hours to heat up so mostly I didn't bother to use it. I watched Tyson's defeat to Buster Douglas on that TV and the next morning there was still a little point of light in the centre of the screen because it also took a long time to go completely blank.

So not having access to TV was liberating. I wouldn't mind having no Internet on weekends today.

New comment by forinti in "Why Did South Africa Relinquish Its Nuclear Weapons?"

forinti — Sat, 23 May 2026 14:30:13 +0000

> It also promoted a strongly anti-communist ideology, arguing that racial equality was a communist plot to destroy the country.

This has to be the most cynical "communist threat" ever.

New comment by forinti in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

forinti — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:50:48 +0000

AI is already too old for that.

New comment by forinti in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

forinti — Tue, 19 May 2026 17:18:55 +0000

Or a search option. That would be nice.

New comment by forinti in "Iran will impose fees on subsea internet cables in Strait of Hormuz"

forinti — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:37:18 +0000

There are no rules. There's just what's convenient for some US corporations.

The US has been forcing on Latin America whatever some US corporation wants for more than a century. We've had coups over bananas!

New comment by forinti in "We don't know why Malawi is poor"

forinti — Fri, 15 May 2026 17:51:16 +0000

Look at the map in the article. It's a lot lighter in the middle than around the coastline. Niger, Chad, Burundi, South Sudan, CAR. These are all very poor. Malawi is not really an exception.

New comment by forinti in "We don't know why Malawi is poor"

forinti — Fri, 15 May 2026 17:40:38 +0000

The Central African Republic, which has a low population density, lots of water and arable land is also very poor. As is South Sudan. It must be very hard to trade your way out of poverty if you are landlocked in a poor continent. All the countries in Europe are well off by world standards because there's an enormous market next-door.

New comment by forinti in "OpenAI is connecting ChatGPT to bank accounts via Plaid"

forinti — Fri, 15 May 2026 17:01:50 +0000

People will pay for OpenAI to have access to their financial data??

New comment by forinti in "Details of the Daring Airdrop at Tristan Da Cunha"

forinti — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:47:40 +0000

They have a slow connection. That's a constraint that will keep you efficient.

New comment by forinti in "Details of the Daring Airdrop at Tristan Da Cunha"

forinti — Fri, 15 May 2026 10:13:38 +0000

The UK built a crayfish processing facility so that they could have income. They also sell stamps and a few handmade crafts such as knitted socks. There are a few government jobs and they must make some money from tourism. And they all grow potatoes for their own consumption.

New comment by forinti in "Why we lose our friends as we age (2023)"

forinti — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:55:04 +0000

Time is a precious resource and you learn to filter who you spend it with.

New comment by forinti in "The One Dollar Counterfeiter"

forinti — Sun, 10 May 2026 16:16:26 +0000

Aren't 5 pound coins worth more than the face value?

New comment by forinti in "The One Dollar Counterfeiter"

forinti — Sun, 10 May 2026 11:43:38 +0000

About 20 years ago there was a gang that made fake Brazilian R$1 coins (they must have been worth 50 US cents then, I don't recall precisely). And I have collected a couple of very shady R$0,50 coins that I'm pretty sure are fake. I collect commemorative coins so I always check my change carefully.

I don't think the materials are expensive, but the electricity required might be. So my guess is that this might make sense if someone steals the power. One guy was busted stealing electricity to mine bitcoin a few years ago.

OTOH, maybe they just do it for fun.

New comment by forinti in "PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes"

forinti — Sun, 10 May 2026 00:19:32 +0000

You could get any Raspberry Pi (even a Zero) and run RISC-OS on it.

New comment by forinti in "David Attenborough's 100th Birthday"

forinti — Fri, 08 May 2026 21:04:22 +0000

I just love those documentaries where he starts off in Europe following some bird and ends up on a rock in the middle of the ocean. And he's been at it since when the world was much bigger. What a life!

New comment by forinti in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

forinti — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:34:18 +0000

Absolutely. Look at the Portuguese Empire: even at the end most Portuguese were poor and many had to emigrate.

Most British had a low standard of living going into the XX century. Engels' report to Parliament painted a bleak picture of the standard of living in Britain at the peak of the British Empire.

New comment by forinti in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

forinti — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:43:44 +0000

The US has a long tradition of arm-twisting to forward its business interests.

This habit is starting to do more harm than good (to them) and they should try to focus on innovating the way China does.

New comment by forinti in "Show HN: TRUST – Coding Rust like it's 1989"

forinti — Thu, 07 May 2026 20:43:58 +0000

If only it would fit on a floppy.

New comment by forinti in "SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format"

forinti — Thu, 07 May 2026 14:06:28 +0000

Don't get me started on Access...

New comment by forinti in "Building my own Vi text editor in BASIC"

forinti — Thu, 07 May 2026 11:56:49 +0000

I had a little crisis at 12 when I went from BASIC to Pascal: how was that supposed to work without line numbers? The statements were just floating around without structure!