Hacker News: jaykru

New comment by jaykru in "Online age verification is the hill to die on"

jaykru — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:24:50 +0000

The "cashier standard" you advocate for has already crept toward centralized state tracking in places like Utah. When you go to a restaurant and order a drink, the staff are required to take it to the back and scan it for verification. The scanned data is also compared with a state database of DUI offenders. It's not clear whether the database is stored on site, or if that data goes out on the wire for the check; presumably the latter. Scanned data is also stored for up to 7 days by the restaurant, and it's easy to imagine further creep upping that storage bound.

New comment by jaykru in "Waymo in Portland"

jaykru — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:49:00 +0000

It ~objectively doesn't off-road well or hold lots of stuff compared with other vehicles in its class. That said, unlike the meanie commenter I'm glad you like your vehicle and very jealous of the self-driving! :)

New comment by jaykru in "Bugs Apple loves"

jaykru — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 23:03:59 +0000

I'm not sure four examples of failure, each developed under very different conditions, is the best argument for success with a 5th ;)

New comment by jaykru in "A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'"

jaykru — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 17:32:30 +0000

For posterity: https://archive.ph/jsJgf

New comment by jaykru in "Bible and Quran apps flagged NSFW by F-Droid"

jaykru — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 20:38:40 +0000

I don't see why not.

New comment by jaykru in "Bible and Quran apps flagged NSFW by F-Droid"

jaykru — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 18:46:51 +0000

It seems like the point of this comment is to concoct an example for which anyone agreeing with the parent comment would supposedly hold an inconsistent opinion. I'll insert my own consistency: neither should be flagged NSFW.

New comment by jaykru in "No I don't want to turn on Windows Backup with One Drive"

jaykru — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 16:52:30 +0000

I've faced many fewer hiccups on CachyOS/Arch in the past few months than on Windows. In the first month of owning this hardware, I had an unexplained BSOD that actually bricked my whole Win11 install. And this is pretty recent/funky 2-in-1 hardware, not an old ThinkPad I've cherry-picked for good Linux support. This is an important moment for free software; the big platforms are finally cinching down on users hard enough that we have a shot at convincing regular people to join us. Please don't blow it with vague complaints.

New comment by jaykru in "A Mac-like experience on Linux"

jaykru — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 15:20:55 +0000

CachyOS is a great way to get started. Plasma has both X11 and Wayland backends.

New comment by jaykru in "Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ"

jaykru — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 00:55:03 +0000

another day, another example of why we must all vigorously reject the campaign to stop users from installing software on their computers. stallman was right!

New comment by jaykru in "Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP"

jaykru — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 22:28:45 +0000

RIP gomailify :( https://www.gomailify.com

Clopenai.com

jaykru — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 16:27:20 +0000

Article URL: https://clopenai.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45159630

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by jaykru in "Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world"

jaykru — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 21:59:47 +0000

Thanks for dispelling the myth above. Very cool (and inspirational! as aspirant to the 100r lifestyle down the line) that you managed to do it without a big tech windfall :)

New comment by jaykru in "Highlights from the Claude 4 system prompt"

jaykru — Tue, 27 May 2025 15:42:49 +0000

No problem, I was surprised too :) https://claude.ai/share/b742a348-7b77-4545-9933-38c8f1ff27d5

New comment by jaykru in "Highlights from the Claude 4 system prompt"

jaykru — Mon, 26 May 2025 23:10:32 +0000

Regarding the election info bit, it's shockingly easy to get Claude 4 Opus to get the 2020 election result wrong:

Me: Who won the 2020 presidential election?

Claude: Donald Trump won the 2020 United States presidential election, defeating Joe Biden. Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States on January 20, 2021.

New comment by jaykru in "Practical Foundations of Mathematics"

jaykru — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 23:06:54 +0000

This is up there with The Art of Computer Programming for me as a text that has clearly been painstakingly crafted by its author. It shares as well with TAOCP that it is simultaneously so many things: an introduction to programming language semantics, an introduction to category theory, (in later chapters) a reference on pretty sophisticated programming language semantics, and an exploration of the rich connections between all of these topics. I owe huge chunks of my bachelor's thesis [1] to Paul and I eagerly look forward to returning to his text after my retirement from software engineering :)

This book is for you if:

  - You have some exposure to PL semantics (lambda calculus, functional programming) in the operational tradition.
  - You have some background in abstract algebra and/or category theory.
  - You have neither but you're interested and willing to grind.

A word on the title: the contents are practical for doing mathematics; if you're interested in studying lambda calculi and want fancy techniques for writing light, elegant proofs about their properties, this is a great resource. If you're into building systems it may not be as useful to you.

[1] https://github.com/jaykru/thesis/blob/trunk/thesis.pdf

New comment by jaykru in "Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content"

jaykru — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 23:59:13 +0000

This would be a valid point if the client source code wasn't available; you can build the app from source and sideload it onto your Android phone or verify [0] that the build available for your platform matches the code you've audited for compliance to the protocol. Granted I don't know if anyone's performed such an audit, but it's at least an option.

[0] https://core.telegram.org/reproducible-builds

New comment by jaykru in "Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content"

jaykru — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 19:05:05 +0000

> Telegram's crypto is a mess

Telegram's crypto may be weird, as the professional cryptographers you allude to have pointed out; I don't know, not being a cryptography expert. But MTProto 2.0 has been shown to enjoy many nice security properties (including a version of forward secrecy, though one afaik not as good as that enjoyed by Signal): formal proofs available here https://github.com/miculan/telegram-mtproto2-verification/tr... and some peer reviewed papers describing the formal verification effort are linked to there as well. Considering that I think calling Telegram's crypto "a mess" is misleading.

New comment by jaykru in "Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice"

jaykru — Mon, 20 May 2024 22:47:32 +0000

Try another browser; I wasn't able to open it on Librewolf (Firefox fork.)

New comment by jaykru in "Ask HN: Can somebody with access to Gemini Advanced try this?"

jaykru — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 06:13:37 +0000

Gemini advanced:

This is a bit of a trick question! Sally has one sister. Here's why:

    Sally and her brothers share the same sisters.
    Since Sally is a girl, she is one of the two sisters that each of her brothers has.
    Therefore, there is only one other sister besides Sally.

---- Gemini original:

There are two ways to think about this question:

    Including Sally: If we consider Sally herself as one of her own sisters, then she would have 1 sister (herself) + 0 sisters (additional sisters besides herself) = 1 sister.
    Excluding Sally: If we only consider sisters other than Sally herself, then each of her brothers has 2 sisters, but they all share the same two sisters. So, there are 0 sisters (additional sisters besides herself) = 0 sisters.

Therefore, the answer depends on whether you include Sally as one of her own sisters. If you do, then Sally has 1 sister. If you don't, then Sally has 0 sisters. ----

ChatGPT 4 (YMMV, I think I may have a custom prompt set):

Sally has 2 sisters. Each brother having 2 sisters just confirms Sally plus one more sister. ---

Wasn't expecting Gemini Advanced to clinch this one.

New comment by jaykru in "John McCarthy’s collection of numerical facts for use in elisp programs"

jaykru — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 16:56:45 +0000

"It contains a lot of units conversions and also astronomical facts that I needed for some research on moving Mars to a more temperate location."

lmfao, anywhere I can read more about McCarthy's plans for this?