Hacker News: hatthew

New comment by hatthew in "Chess puzzle I found in my dad's old book"

hatthew — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:07:48 +0000

I solved it with this, a pleasingly symmetric solution. I was surprised that a solution exists with all the queens in a row.

    . . . . . . . .
    . . . . . . . Q
    . . B . . . . .
    . . . . . Q . .
    . . . . . . . .
    . . . Q . . . .
    . . . . . . . .
    . Q . . . . . .

New comment by hatthew in "Chess puzzle I found in my dad's old book"

hatthew — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:03:33 +0000

I put `setInterval(checkBoard, 100)` in the console to do it automatically.

New comment by hatthew in "Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)"

hatthew — Wed, 13 May 2026 23:47:06 +0000

I wonder how reliable this is. Will AWS lightsail continue to work indefinitely for free? What if AWS changes the system in some way? What if the person hosting my locality becomes unavailable?

New comment by hatthew in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

hatthew — Tue, 12 May 2026 00:46:37 +0000

It's definitely theoretically possible, but not there yet. I use cursor, claude (opus 4.7), and several proprietary LLMs/LLM frameworks at my job. The institutional knowledge I have wouldn't fit in the context window, and AIs lack my mental index/intuition of where to look for answers. When my AI makes a PR, I generally have to make some important changes, without which it's solution would be fundamentally broken. AI also cannot be trusted to make the right business tradeoff decisions.

New comment by hatthew in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

hatthew — Mon, 11 May 2026 18:44:21 +0000

In no particular order

    - Meetings
    - Reading papers
    - Understanding legacy code
    - Reading internal news
    - Ad hoc chats with coworkers
    - Writing docs
    - Editing configs
    - Thinking about solutions
    - Slacking off
    - Analyzing results
    - Testing code
    - Reviewing PRs
    - Understanding others' ongoing projects

New comment by hatthew in "Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect"

hatthew — Fri, 08 May 2026 00:35:39 +0000

Can't access the paper, but I'm curious how they measured statistical significance. I wonder how much to interpret the result as "we didn't measure any effect" (which is a largely meaningless conclusion) versus "no effect exists." The latter wouldn't be a rigorous statement, but it seems to be the conclusion we are being led towards.

New comment by hatthew in "Easy Random Trees"

hatthew — Fri, 08 May 2026 00:22:46 +0000

As someone who has never heard of most of these concepts before (plane trees, catalan numbers, ballot sequences, depth vectors), I found the question "Can you think of a way to efficiently generate a random plane tree?" confusing, and I only understood the problem being solved by first trying to understand the solution. After reading through, it seems like it's asking about generating a random plane tree drawn from a uniform distribution of all possible plane trees with a given number of nodes? Cool idea once I understood it though!

New comment by hatthew in "Colombia hosts talks on exiting fossil fuels as global energy crisis deepens"

hatthew — Thu, 07 May 2026 01:29:56 +0000

Yeah looks like Venezuela is definitely an outlier in south america. French Guiana is also a big outlier in the other direction.

New comment by hatthew in "Colombia hosts talks on exiting fossil fuels as global energy crisis deepens"

hatthew — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:10:28 +0000

Do you have a source for GDP/kWh? Last time I was curious I dumped some raw stats (copied from wikipedia) into excel and venezuela was among the bottom three. I recall being surprised that there wasn't any strong correlation between GDP/kWh and any other obvious metric like technological development, population, land size, climate, etc.

New comment by hatthew in "Why most product tours get skipped"

hatthew — Wed, 06 May 2026 07:54:31 +0000

That requires deciding which element to zap, which takes more brainpower than I'm willing to invest into a webpage that doesn't want to show me its content. Ctrl+W works every time.

New comment by hatthew in "Why most product tours get skipped"

hatthew — Wed, 06 May 2026 01:08:12 +0000

cookies, newsletter popups, sign-in popups, product tours, soft paywalls, etc.

New comment by hatthew in "Why most product tours get skipped"

hatthew — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:26:01 +0000

This is a bit of a tangent, but cookie consent dialogs have exhausted my will to navigate anything blocking the content I care about. If I go to a new website and encounter any sort of popup, modal, or large banner, I will reflexively feel an urge to close the page unless there is an obvious dismiss button. I often need to see the content on the page and resign myself to navigating the dialog, but just as often I decide the content wasn't important anyways and close the page in <1 second.

New comment by hatthew in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

hatthew — Tue, 05 May 2026 21:10:02 +0000

Chrome installs additional software that 99% of users don't use. It can intercept and modify code running on your computer, and spies on all network requests. Hackers use it to analyze potential vulnerabilities. 90% of users aren't even aware that it exists!

New comment by hatthew in "New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming"

hatthew — Sat, 02 May 2026 00:36:15 +0000

I experience similar, but I'm pretty sure it's just rest and a fresh mind, not overnight learning/thinking. When I'm bashing my head against a wall, I'm stuck in a local optimum, and sleeping lets me reset and try something new that often works better (and I execute it better since I'm not as tired).

New comment by hatthew in "Brent Crude hits $119.56/barrel peak today"

hatthew — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:18:58 +0000

My guess is the stark difference in type of cars, number of cars, typical miles driven, and public transport. A standard american's road trip vacation would be unusual in europe. For example, my relative visits family several times a year, doing 4 hour drive in a large pickup truck for a short weekend trip. In europe, my understanding is that destinations are likely to be closer, cars are smaller, and trains are common (maybe the default?).

New comment by hatthew in "Brent Crude hits $119.56/barrel peak today"

hatthew — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:10:45 +0000

I don't think that was a specific prediction, but rather an illustration of the type of impact oil shortages could have.

I'm curious if people have more specific predictions about what products/services will be affected more than a layperson would expect.

New comment by hatthew in "Generalised plusequals"

hatthew — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 05:38:12 +0000

I think I am misunderstanding the behavior of the alt keyword

New comment by hatthew in "Generalised plusequals"

hatthew — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 01:38:53 +0000

It seems like this is proposing syntactic sugar to make mutating and non-mutating operations be on equal footing.

> The more interesting example is reassigning the deeply nested l to make the cat inside older, without mutating the original cat

Isn't that mutating l, though? If you're concerned about mutating cat, shouldn't you be concerned about mutating l?

New comment by hatthew in "Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players"

hatthew — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 05:13:24 +0000

haha agreed

New comment by hatthew in "Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players"

hatthew — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:50:23 +0000

> If war is mostly played out from a disrance, will years of playing RTS give South Korea an edge ?

Not sure if this is serious, but RTS skills are different from real-world battlefield skills. Macro is completely different, and while micro skills might be slightly transferrable, computers are so much better that no human will ever be microing real units on a real battlefield.