Hacker News: julienchastang

New comment by julienchastang in "Étienne Ghys: The Shape of Letters: From Leonardo da Vinci to Donald Knuth"

julienchastang — Wed, 20 May 2026 22:48:16 +0000

He was also interviewed on RFI recently [0] (in French).

[0] https://www.rfi.fr/fr/podcasts/de-vive-s-voix/20260401-etien...

New comment by julienchastang in "The bird eye was pushed to an evolutionary extreme"

julienchastang — Sat, 16 May 2026 04:18:49 +0000

The photography of the bird eyes in the article is stunning especially the 3x3 grid.

New comment by julienchastang in "Ted Turner, cable TV visionary who created CNN, dies at 87"

julienchastang — Wed, 06 May 2026 15:35:59 +0000

For those of us who came of age at the start of the web, CNN had a pioneering presence on cnn.com. I still check it pretty regularly due to old habits. (Also https://lite.cnn.com/).

New comment by julienchastang in "How Monero’s proof of work works"

julienchastang — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:39:47 +0000

Having dealt with hackers (not the HN variety unfort) who go to extraordinary lengths to cryptojack pennies, I completely agree. They always use Monero for some reason. In sum, what is this technology good for?

1. Illegality 2. Speculation (i.e., gambling)

So yes, +1. :-(

New comment by julienchastang in "Credit cards are vulnerable to brute force kind attacks"

julienchastang — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:13:31 +0000

Related story and wondering if the OP may have been chasing red herrings. I recently noticed an unauthorized charge for a small amount on my credit card (something about FB/Meta). Likely someone probing the card to see if anyone would notice. I called the CC company, had them removed the charge, canceled the card and had them send me a new card (5-7 business days). With the brand new unused card (new CC number, new expiration date, new CVV), the fraudulent payments resumed (again FB/Meta). How is this possible? The reason: digital wallets. Your credit card number, etc. transfers via digital wallets even when you cancel the card. I again called the credit card company and this time, told them to cancel all the digital wallets (there were 99 of them!). There is no way to do this online. You have to speak to a human in a call center. You then have to sit through a lecture about how all your renewing payments are going to reset and you will have to re-establish them will all merchants. "Yes, I understand that. Please cancel the card and all digital wallets!" Then you have to hold for twenty minutes (why? what are they doing? manually canceling all the digital wallets?). The lesson I learned here is that canceling your credit card may not be what you think. Also recurring payments must be incredibly lucrative and canceling them must amount to a big loss in revenue. (Edited for grammar.)

America's New Surveillance Dragnet

julienchastang — Fri, 01 May 2026 03:07:22 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/immigration-ice-arrests-surveillance-6f1cef64

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47970925

Points: 25

# Comments: 5

New comment by julienchastang in "AI Is Cannibalizing Human Intelligence"

julienchastang — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 21:06:27 +0000

TLDR: when humans work with AI as intellectual sparring partners, they perform better than when working without AI or just copy/pasting the results of AI. Interesting article. Here's a gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/is-ai-smarter-than-humans-cyborg...

Freak Heat Spikes Pay Big on Polymarket, Rousing Weather Nerds' Suspicion

julienchastang — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:36:35 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/business/unusual-weather-bets-on-polymarket-spur-french-investigation-b799bec8

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877035

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Security releases of JupyterHub, Auth0, LTI authenticators

julienchastang — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:00:28 +0000

Article URL: https://discourse.jupyter.org/t/ann-security-releases-of-jupyterhub-auth0-lti-authenticators/38480

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47593413

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by julienchastang in "White House plan to break up iconic U.S. climate lab moves forward"

julienchastang — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 21:16:14 +0000

> I deeply wish the democrats had run a better campaign in 2024.

The problem is that there was no primary. That really (really) hurt Democrats not only for that election cycle, but for future ones too, where candidates could have made their names known even if they did not end up getting the nomination.

New comment by julienchastang in "After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes"

julienchastang — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 17:30:43 +0000

> best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established

The way I am working with AI agents (codex) these days is have the AI generate a spec in a series of MD documents where the AI implementation of each document is a bite sized chunk that can be tested and evaluated by the human before moving to the next step and roughly matches a commit in version control. The version control history reflects the logical progression of the code. In this manner, I have a decent knowledge of the code, and one that I am more comfortable with than one-shotting.

New comment by julienchastang in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me"

julienchastang — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:26:00 +0000

I have not studied this situation in depth, but this is my thinking as well.

New comment by julienchastang in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me"

julienchastang — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:46:04 +0000

That, or I also wonder if this may be a prank or a hoax.

New comment by julienchastang in "My five stages of AI grief"

julienchastang — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 17:16:38 +0000

> Writing code isn't where I bring the most value. Understanding business problems, analyzing trade-offs, and making sure we're building the right things is where I can put all those years to good use. It might sound like an obvious thing, but it took me a while to get to this point.

Reaching this epiphany is a major milestone in the career of an SE even before the days of LLMs. That's basically the crux of it.

New comment by julienchastang in "Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025"

julienchastang — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 17:55:03 +0000

"Never copy and paste the output from generative AI chatbots" is mentioned in the article three times. This has been my experience as well. Initial AI output can be stunning until you quickly realize that it is mostly BS, filler and pap. However, I do find LLMs to be really useful for brainstorming, ideation, sounding boards etc.

New comment by julienchastang in "Interesting facts I've learned about wildfires over the years"

julienchastang — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 05:27:00 +0000

I appreciate that each section of the article has supporting references. About zombie fires, coal seam fires can burn for 100+ years even sparking fires above ground [0]. This is a scientific discipline that appears to have a promising future due to a warming climate and more people living in the wildland/urban frontier. Probably not a bad career area to get into and may even be somewhat AI-disruption resistant career longevity-wise.

[0] https://www.cpr.org/2024/11/22/fighting-a-decades-old-underg...