Hacker News: hatthew

New comment by hatthew in "StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month"

hatthew — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 01:48:01 +0000

What do you mean? You could always answer questions without any barriers, and partial answers were acceptable. Unless you're talking about protected questions (very rare), or you had such a fundamental misunderstanding of the site that you got answer-banned.

New comment by hatthew in "StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month"

hatthew — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 01:43:12 +0000

The discussion around who gets a green checkmark and +15 rep was bad enough. I can't imagine how it would be if there was real money involved.

New comment by hatthew in "StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month"

hatthew — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 01:37:24 +0000

I feel like the "repository of knowledge" identity was pretty clear for around a decade (at least for main Q&A, not Chat or Discussions). It was inconsistently enforced because the volume of low-quality questions exceeded the ability of the "moderators" to enforce it. At its peak, the backlog of questions in the process of being closed was about a full month's worth of question volume (this doesn't include questions that did get closed or questions that didn't yet start the process of being closed).

New comment by hatthew in "StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month"

hatthew — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:47:17 +0000

The golden age of SO was when all the important questions that have accumulated over decades were getting asked and answered. SO stabilized once that backlog got finished, and then started dying once people moved to github issues for project-specific questions. Chatgpt just replaced the last remaining type of questions ("plz do my work for me"), which arguably shouldn't have been getting asked in the first place.

New comment by hatthew in "StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month"

hatthew — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:43:55 +0000

SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming. It was already dying long before the question rate dropped off, since most new questions were "plz write/debug my code for me" which tend to be the sort of question that SO was not designed for. Chatgpt replaced that, and github issues replaced project-specific debugging. Now there's nobody left to write/read/answer the small amount of questions that are still a good fit.

New comment by hatthew in "A Stackless Floodfill Automaton"

hatthew — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:30:30 +0000

But that's only assuming that your original data structure already has space for the algorithm to store metadata. If there's space that can be manipulated freely to store metadata, can't you just remove that space to save memory, and then use the extra space for a stack?

New comment by hatthew in "A Stackless Floodfill Automaton"

hatthew — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 21:01:07 +0000

What's the utility of this? It's arguably still using a stack, just encoded in the original data structure itself. If your original data structure somehow uses colors but is also fine with the algorithm overwriting with its own colors, I guess it works? But those are very unusual preconditions. For any real world scenario I can imagine, I feel like there's a better solution.

If the colors in your original data are important, then you can't really just overwrite them and/or assume that the algorithm can use its own colors. You're going to have to add a stack.

If your original data doesn't have colors, adding a stack is better than integrating metadata into the original data structure.

If for some reason your original data has colors but they aren't considered important, then just remove the colors and add a stack.

If your concern is about dynamic memory, preallocate static memory equal to the size of the original data structure.

New comment by hatthew in "Somebody please stop the spam texts"

hatthew — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 21:12:22 +0000

> text is my highest-signal communication channel

I'm a little surprised by this. Due to the prevalence of spam, I favor private third-party messaging applications (slack, discord). Text messaging is about 50% garbage for me, and the majority I leave unread. Though contrary to the experience of a lot of others, I almost never get spam phone calls (probably <10 in the last two years), so that remains my highest signal channel.

New comment by hatthew in "Diamond Transistor"

hatthew — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 21:00:14 +0000

I'm on a non-touchscreen mac, on firefox with smooth scrolling turned off, and have LinearMouse installed. I tried both trackpad scrolling and mousewheel scrolling. The weird "smooth" scrolling of this website is very jarring to me, and makes it take significantly longer to scroll to where I want to, since the responsiveness went from ~instant to ~.5s and I keep on overshooting.

New comment by hatthew in "Evolving Threat: http2shell is an RCE in Node, Python, and more"

hatthew — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 02:14:18 +0000

I feel like normal security issues don't get much publicity. The PHP and eMudhra issues seemed severe, and worth publicity. But then with things like this, I'm not sure. Is this a severe issue? Or is it just a run of the mill issue that's only newsworthy because web security is on people's minds right now?

New comment by hatthew in "How is music possible"

hatthew — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 18:36:22 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson

New comment by hatthew in "eMudhra to exit global SSL/TLS certificate business"

hatthew — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 19:29:37 +0000

technical accuracy aside, this made me giggle like a madman

New comment by hatthew in "Credit where credit is due"

hatthew — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:27:56 +0000

This article is chock full of interesting links. The link about Kenyan English/LLMs [0] describes something that feels like it should have been obvious to me.

[0]: https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...

New comment by hatthew in "How gyroscopes got so small [video]"

hatthew — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 20:19:59 +0000

I see several comments critical of this video. As someone whose only exposure to gyroscopes was the classic string-driven all-metal toy[0] when I was a kid, is this video helpful for getting a better understanding of how modern ones work, or should I just stick to the wikipedia page on gyrometers?

[0]: https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/toy-gyroscope-gm172188163-...

New comment by hatthew in "Tesla Roadster"

hatthew — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 02:10:22 +0000

It's very economically feasible if it pumps up the stock price

New comment by hatthew in "Muse Spark Open"

hatthew — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 01:04:49 +0000

> only provides comparison at the highest reasoning level, which is mostly unusable for high-volume production use cases

Similarly, AFAIK evals tend to be performed at native precision, while anyone who cares about speed is probably running quantized.

New comment by hatthew in "Why are we even doing all this?"

hatthew — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 22:53:10 +0000

I don't think this article communicates any new ideas; to me the style is the unique aspect of it that makes it worth reading. If you personally don't like the style, there are many other articles portraying the same sentiment in a more agreeable style.

New comment by hatthew in "Why are we even doing all this?"

hatthew — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 21:37:16 +0000

Yeah, BERT was cool, but IMO things like StyleGAN were equally cool. I think DALL-E was the first time that there was practical, nonphilosophical, discussion about AI replacing human industries. Maybe there was discussion within the data labeling industry about text classification models replacing humans prior to that? But also, data labeling is one of the industries that probably got a lot bigger due to AI, so...

New comment by hatthew in "Why are we even doing all this?"

hatthew — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 21:19:43 +0000

Diffusion models were the first gen AI tech to plausibly be able to replace humans, no? I feel like image generation was ahead of text generation 2015-2022, and prior to 2015 the best "gen AI" was markov chains which I don't think is within the scope of what we're talking about.

New comment by hatthew in "Why are we even doing all this?"

hatthew — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 21:12:44 +0000

> (that’s philosophy, which I would never be a doctor of)

I'm in the office and was trying to contain my laughter next to my colleagues, but this tipped me over the edge