Hacker News: jhide

New comment by jhide in "What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard"

jhide — Wed, 27 May 2026 04:36:40 +0000

Asking because I’ve seen the same dynamic in multiple subdivisions over several decades. I have very little love for subdivisions and the suburban built environment, but I wonder how many vocal urbanists’ opinions are colored because they experienced the aging of a neighborhood’s inaugural population. If you look at the neighborhood again in 50 years maybe it will have a healthier age variance.

New comment by jhide in "What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard"

jhide — Tue, 26 May 2026 11:37:54 +0000

How old were the homes when you were a kid?

New comment by jhide in "What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard"

jhide — Tue, 26 May 2026 11:30:10 +0000

> What? What kind of city would limit the age of who can use the bathroom? Sounds bananas.

I think this was another comment about homelessness, not an implication about the law.

New comment by jhide in "Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore"

jhide — Mon, 25 May 2026 23:58:25 +0000

Do you maintain a system in which punch cards play a critical role?

New comment by jhide in "Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects"

jhide — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 17:33:12 +0000

My point is the existing private DCs can be reconfigured for a different use. Building new gpus is not required to on-shore compute. We already have it. Obviously if the military started contracting out compute onto the hyperscalar clusters it would involve a host of changes. I wasn’t aware that they were letting India and China manage their infrastructure… That seems exceedingly unlikely? That relationship would obviously be severed if the compute was reconfigured for the military.

New comment by jhide in "Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects"

jhide — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 02:55:53 +0000

On the topic of warfare, wars are fought differently now. Compute will be mentioned in the same breath as total manufacturing output if a global war between superpowers erupts. In highly competitive industries this is already the case. Compute will be part of industrial mobilization in the same way that physical manufacturing or transportation capacity were mobilized in WWII. I’m not an expert on military computing but my intuition is that FLOPS are probably even more easily fungible into wartime compute than widget makers, and the US was able to go widgets->weapons on an unbelievable scale last time.

New comment by jhide in "Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects"

jhide — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 02:42:21 +0000

They’re unclassified public cloud GPUs today, much the same as the massive industrial base of the United States was churning out harmless consumer widgets in 1939. Those widget makers happened to be reconfigurable into weapon makers, and so wartime production exploded from 2% to 40% of GDP in 5 years [1]. But the total industrial output of course didn’t expand by nearly that much.

I think it’s maybe plausible that private compute feels similar in the next do-or-die global war.

[1] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-worl...

New comment by jhide in "Claude Opus 4.7"

jhide — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:40:17 +0000

A gated, premium-tier product differentiation strategy only works when you sell the differentiated product. They went to market with 4.7 nerfed at security work and aren’t letting even large, vetted corporations pay more for the Mythos model… sentiment is quite negative where I work right now. There’s a real possibility that open source will give them a hair cut in the interim. And if the SWEs start modifying their CLI flows to avoid lock in to `claude`, it’s probable that the hair just never grows back. Losing strategy.

New comment by jhide in "The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode"

jhide — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 22:28:25 +0000

Have you ever reviewed an AI-generated commit from someone with insufficient competence that was more compelling than their work would be if it was done unassisted? In my experience it’s exactly the opposite. AI-generation aggravates existing blindspots. This is because, excluding malicious incompetence, devs will generally try to understand what they’re doing if they’re doing it without AI

New comment by jhide in "FPGAs Need a New Future"

jhide — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 01:45:38 +0000

This article could’ve been written 20 years ago with only minor revisions, and it would’ve been true then. But it’s not now. It is trivial, literally a day of work, to set up a build system and CICD environment using Verilator if you are already proficient with your build system of choice. Learning TCL to script a bitfile generation target using your FPGA vendor’s tools is a few extra days of work. And regarding IDE support, the authors complain about the experience of writing code in the vendor GUI. They should look at one of the numerous fully featured systemverilog LSPs available in e.g. VS Code.

The real argument for open source toolchains is much narrower in scope and implying its requirement for fixing a nonexistent tool problem is absurd

New comment by jhide in "Influential study on glyphosate safety retracted 25 years after publication"

jhide — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 17:06:02 +0000

I agree about with your claim, but the answer to your question is that “weeds” is a set of species that contains both invasive, ecologically harmful species, and crucial native annual and perennial forbs+grasses.

From the universalizability principle, if everyone merely let “weeds” propagate, because of the ecology of invasives that are in that set, we would be MUCH worse off for the next few millennia than we are now. Until the ecosystems healed and the “invasives” become “keystone species”. Not sure how long that would take but we won’t see it :)

New comment by jhide in "Influential study on glyphosate safety retracted 25 years after publication"

jhide — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:59:40 +0000

It depends on the target and the surrounding soil. It’s often easier to pull especially for the random weed that sprouts up around your landscaping. However if you are trying to manage an infestation of invasive species, where the surrounding soil will have a seed bank heavily contaminated with seeds from the years of invasive reproduction, it’s usually a bad idea to merely pull. You can expose soil to sunlight and cause an explosion of dormant seeds. And some nasty invasives are nearly impossible to remove by hand because of their root structure — some species even leave little rhizomes broken off in the soil along the root structure when you pull off the foliage causing a hydra effect.

tl;dr targeted herbicide is a much less evolutionarily selected-for offense, as opposed to hand cultivation which mimics attacks plants have evolved to survive for eons

Defensive fungal symbiosis on insect hindlegs

jhide — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 15:19:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp6699

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45628056

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by jhide in "We're making GPT-5 warmer and friendlier based on feedback that it felt formal"

jhide — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 22:06:52 +0000

What does zeroth law mean in this context?

Samsung smart TV outage prevents access to third party apps

jhide — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 01:21:36 +0000

Article URL: https://downdetector.com/status/smart-hub/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44752074

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

New comment by jhide in "In a milestone for Manhattan, a pair of coyotes has made Central Park their home"

jhide — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 02:37:50 +0000

You’re just stating a trait of animal predation. Predation often eliminates the weakest animals in a population. The point is that invasive species by definition of invasive predate in a way that their prey has not had adequate evolutionary space to adapt to because they are introduced. All the words in that sentence have precise definitions in ecology and I don’t think we share the same framework or definitions

New comment by jhide in "In a milestone for Manhattan, a pair of coyotes has made Central Park their home"

jhide — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 02:27:15 +0000

The word natural is doing a lot of lifting here. I think we are talking past each other because we don’t have the same framework for understanding how ecosystems work. Predation by an invasive species is not natural in the sense that the species did not coevolve. It seems we don’t agree that cats are an invasive species or even on the definition of an invasive species

New comment by jhide in "In a milestone for Manhattan, a pair of coyotes has made Central Park their home"

jhide — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 20:26:31 +0000

Coyotes attacked a small dog in the park near my house last fall (when the juveniles leave the den and try to stake out territory) so I understand the concern. But comparing them to lions in Zimbabwe doesn’t resonate with me and I live in Chicago (we have tons, one was under my porch last year).

Think of all the samples of the interaction function between humans and the >1mm coyotes (often unbeknownst to the humans) in American cities each day. The list of all attacks recorded in modern times has a Wikipedia page. In human-created spaces we make very little separation from the habitats coyotes live in. They choose not to predate the defenseless babies they encounter in backyards because it is not the ecological niche they have carved out.

I will let my older children play unsupervised in my backyard despite knowing there are dozens of coyotes in my city because no creature has made a niche out of killing them. The same is not true for my very young children but that’s because toddlers have made an evolutionary niche out of killing themselves :)

New comment by jhide in "In a milestone for Manhattan, a pair of coyotes has made Central Park their home"

jhide — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 19:15:22 +0000

Coyotes do not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as a lion. And people should celebrate anytime a native predator is able to carve out a niche in an urban environment as long as it doesn’t involve murdering children. Which coyotes don’t do. They eat small mammals and also sometimes invasive feral cats.

New comment by jhide in "In a milestone for Manhattan, a pair of coyotes has made Central Park their home"

jhide — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 19:05:33 +0000

There have been less than 10 (Wikipedia says 2) fatal coyote attacks in recorded history. A conservative estimate of the number of native birds and small mammals killed by feral cats since unix time began counting on 1/1/1970 is 1 trillion. Literally 20 billion a year. That’s a grotesque ecological sin against the ecosystems which keep us alive. Artificially supporting an invasive species which eats your petsmart kibble and then ravages (often as play) whatever vestige of the native wonder that existed in North America before we turned it into lawns is an ecological sin. Not caring for it and trying to leave it a better place than we found it for the next generation is an ecological sin.