Hacker News: hgomersall

New comment by hgomersall in "Is The Economist Always Wrong?"

hgomersall — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 08:53:08 +0000

Given that many economic predictions are really about pushing an agenda, they are not at all useless, or at least, would be better measured against that criteria. I suspect the reason we still have neoliberal economics is precisely because despite its manifest failures of prediction, it still pushes the right agenda to be supported.

New comment by hgomersall in "Sony erases digital content from libraries"

hgomersall — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:24:05 +0000

The trivial fix to this is to allow breaking of DRM.

New comment by hgomersall in "GLM-5.2 is a step change for open agents"

hgomersall — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:23:37 +0000

I can't even keep up with the chain of thought needed to manage a single session, let alone review. I typically never exceed 30% of a 5x plan. Fable took me almost to the limits, but not Opus. Claude design hits things harder, but still not to saturation.

New comment by hgomersall in "Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities"

hgomersall — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:07:13 +0000

Called, fittingly, Chinese Whispers in the UK. As an aside, I've always wondered if it was so called because, Chinese being a tonal language, it's much harder to whisper in.

New comment by hgomersall in "Canyon HUD helmet for road riding"

hgomersall — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 09:12:13 +0000

Of course, wearing a helmet is a choice and many get on just fine without it. I've come off my bike enough times where my helmet prevented a nasty bump to the head to wear one, but I suspect I'd have survived just fine without it. I view my helmet as insurance against my own incompetence - slipping on a wet manhole cover for example. For context I ride thousands of km a year for transport, but have done much riding as a conspicuous leisure activity too. I just wear a helmet and I'm not really bothered by it.

New comment by hgomersall in "Canyon HUD helmet for road riding"

hgomersall — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 09:03:11 +0000

I think they will already act like that, MIPS or not. Stick a helmet on your head, now wiggle it. It moves really quite a bit, unless you like to wear it so tight you get a headache.

New comment by hgomersall in "Canyon HUD helmet for road riding"

hgomersall — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 09:01:31 +0000

It does feel like a thing that has never been properly validated. It's a good market to push this in because, well, why wouldn't you spend 10% more to be a little bit safer?

New comment by hgomersall in "Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school"

hgomersall — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 06:46:58 +0000

Yeah, I we considered a Steiner school because I think that extensive play is a super critical part of a good education. The problem is you also need to be able to be part of the mainstream system at some point, and it felt like it didn't necessarily quite meet that goal.

New comment by hgomersall in "Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows"

hgomersall — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:31:05 +0000

Among US kids. FTFY.

Apparently in the UK it's up: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cze93wggw74o

New comment by hgomersall in "I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it"

hgomersall — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 06:32:23 +0000

It's the same debate that was had and won around open source software. There are far more good actors than bad actors so you allow anyone to use the tools and fix the vulnerabilities.

New comment by hgomersall in "Codex just found a "workaround" of not having sudo on my PC"

hgomersall — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 06:32:25 +0000

No, using AI tools not in an effective sandbox is inherently unsafe.

New comment by hgomersall in "Guitar tuner that uses phone accelerometer"

hgomersall — Mon, 11 May 2026 09:31:37 +0000

If you know you have a single frequency close to an actual frequency of interest, you can use the fact you know you're in an aliased band to get a precise frequency estimate.

New comment by hgomersall in "Two millionth electric car registered as market rebounds from tax changes"

hgomersall — Tue, 05 May 2026 19:45:59 +0000

Total UK electricity consumption is around 300 TWh annually. That would put the grid losses at less than 10% based on your link. The charging is never as bad as 25% (internal house losses are negligible for any sensible charging rate) and the car is typically ~12% charging loss. Moreover, EVs recover quite a bit too. Even in purely dissipative driving (highway driving), I get around 4 miles/kWh, which is about 4 times better than an ICE vehicle.

Furthermore, if you're going to include distributional losses, then let's also drop the available petrol by 10-15% to account for refining etc.

Finally, on anything resembling a sunny day, my car charges entirely of rooftop solar, so what efficiency do we assign to that?

New comment by hgomersall in "UK: Two millionth electric car registered as market rebounds strongly"

hgomersall — Tue, 05 May 2026 19:04:59 +0000

Small batteries mean heavy cycling of those batteries. When on pure EV, the oversized battery means most days you sit in the middle third of the battery which is great for battery longevity.

New comment by hgomersall in "Men who stare at walls"

hgomersall — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:44:37 +0000

Yes, but you tend to carry around a smartphone all the time and the temptation to whip it out whenever there's more than a 5s window can be very strong.

New comment by hgomersall in "Men who stare at walls"

hgomersall — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:19:56 +0000

I've recently realised that the biggest problem with smartphones is not that they steal your attention (which is bad enough), but that they steal your disattention

I don't know of a better word for it than disattention. Perhaps downtime? But it's not so structured. It's just those moments where you'd previously let your mind wander. Gone forever.

New comment by hgomersall in "I’m spending months coding the old way"

hgomersall — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 06:31:57 +0000

Well yes, if a team doesn't bother to understand the code, that's certainly quicker.

New comment by hgomersall in "Rust Threads on the GPU"

hgomersall — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:15:09 +0000

It makes sense when the inner operations are vectorisable, as in the example.

New comment by hgomersall in "John Deere to pay $99M in right-to-repair settlement"

hgomersall — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 07:06:49 +0000

I had an interesting situation where we had failure of a Thule bike trailer wheel and could see where the connection-to-the-trailer design had changed from an earlier version (from the company that Thule bought). The wheel functioned the same, but you could see a clear difference which fully explained the failure. I expect it was a cost optimisation, and we only encountered the failure because we used it very heavily.

Edit: they also failed to honour their warranty commitments, but that was secondary.

New comment by hgomersall in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

hgomersall — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 07:35:14 +0000

Well the real insight here is that most "investing" is gambling.