Hacker News: ketralnis

New comment by ketralnis in "xAI joins SpaceX"

ketralnis — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 01:02:14 +0000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM

New comment by ketralnis in "Homomorphically Encrypting CRDTs"

ketralnis — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 18:49:01 +0000

Sure but it will just select the word in your browser

New comment by ketralnis in "I've largely replaced Google with ChatGPT for looking things up"

ketralnis — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 02:24:56 +0000

If the only thing it did was give me references that's already a leg up

New comment by ketralnis in "Evidence suggesting Quasar Alpha is OpenAI's new model"

ketralnis — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 04:01:29 +0000

Shrug, programmers always have weird names for things https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

New comment by ketralnis in "Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news"

ketralnis — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 19:43:42 +0000

I also don't read all of the terms and conditions, and I feel free to get mad at unreasonable items that I discovered while using the product. Fight me.

New comment by ketralnis in "I tried making artificial sunlight at home"

ketralnis — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 21:54:51 +0000

Have you considered taking neutrino supplements?

The nice thing about them is that they're flavour changing

New comment by ketralnis in "Peano's Axioms"

ketralnis — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 23:39:03 +0000

It's up to you if you think it's "better" but it's answering the question of whether Peano axioms are the only fundamental structure

New comment by ketralnis in "Google change is breaking some digital photo frames"

ketralnis — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 18:22:17 +0000

This is exactly why even as a programmer I don't own pretty much any tech crap at all. No cloud connected home automation, photo frames, voice assistant, smart lock, wifi washing machine, nothing. The whole industry is just too brittle and unreliable and your money will evaporate the moment some product manager doesn't want to schedule a bug fix and kills the product instead because it's easier than meeting the promises that you already made. I minimise the number of computers and phones and whatever else to what I'm willing to spend a bunch of time updating and maintaining.

New comment by ketralnis in "America desperately needs more air traffic controllers"

ketralnis — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 22:55:58 +0000

In that case the pilot would still be able to override controls

New comment by ketralnis in "America desperately needs more air traffic controllers"

ketralnis — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 21:47:02 +0000

That there is a computer at ATC that a human looks at, reads what it says with their eyes, speaks those instructions over the radio in a specific protocol, another human listens to it (and confirms within that protocol), and inputs those control signals into the airplane.

Computer -> human -> radio(spoken protocol) -> human -> plane.

There aren't a lot of practical reasons it can't just be

Computer -> radio(digital protocol) -> plane

(There are nonzero reasons, such as the presence of weird situations, VFR aircraft, etc., but it's not a lot.)

New comment by ketralnis in "Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15"

ketralnis — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 00:32:52 +0000

No? You can have a photos app that doesn't phone home while not having to move to a cabin in the woods. See: every photos app that doesn't phone home, and I currently don't live in a cabin in the woods.

New comment by ketralnis in "Mathics 7.0 – Open-source alternative to Mathematica"

ketralnis — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 02:08:59 +0000

> I love how I get downvoted for every negative comment about this rather than an actual rebuttal of the issues.

It's because you haven't mentioned any issues. Just said it's terrible and buggy. Nobody can debug that for you based on that description. If they haven't experienced the same "issues", the best they can say is "nuh uh".

New comment by ketralnis in "A made-up name is better than no name"

ketralnis — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 01:13:18 +0000

I don't know why it's named that way but you need some number of cross-country flights and hours because there are skills that you pick up doing that (several kinds of navigation, fuel management, weather management, flight planning, map reading, etc) that you wouldn't by flying in circles or by spending time in the pattern (looped takeoffs and landings, which you do also need to do a fair amount of but builds a separate set of skills)

New comment by ketralnis in "A made-up name is better than no name"

ketralnis — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 00:26:18 +0000

No, it's not just the computer world.

Affordable housing where I live is a specific thing. Below-market-rate housing purchaseable/rentable with specific income requirements. Some number of units in new builds are usually required to meet this requirement. Your example sounds similar, it is also specifically defined and not just housing that is affordable but rather it meets specific requirements.

A cross-country flight to a pilot licence is a flight that goes greater than 50 nautical miles one-way. During flight training you need some number of these so you talk about them a lot during that training and it's mentioned a lot in the regulations.

And as I guess you're aware secure computation is also a term of art in CS for a specific thing.

I'm sure every field has terms of art that overlap with things whose words don't precisely describe. A chef's knife is a specific shape/class of knife, not any knife used by a chef. Law is full of them. There is a wealth of examples.

New comment by ketralnis in "A made-up name is better than no name"

ketralnis — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 23:37:21 +0000

I have a lot of conversations like "There's a technique called 'secure computation', which confusingly is not just computation that is secure", "They're building affordable housing, which confusingly is not housing that is affordable", "I was on a cross-country flight, which confusingly is not a flight that crosses the country". Using a different word entirely can avoid that problem

New comment by ketralnis in "Owl Lisp – A functional Scheme for world domination"

ketralnis — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 20:04:09 +0000

Python also detects this situation (at runtime using refcounts) and does in-place mutations where possible https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/a2ee89968299fc4f0da4b...

New comment by ketralnis in "Using Erlang hot code updates"

ketralnis — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 22:32:30 +0000

This is my experience. About 25% of the time I'd encounter a bug that's impossible to reproduce without both versions of the code in memory, and end up restarting the node anyway dropping requests in the process. Whereas if I'd have architected around not having hot code updates I could built it in a way that never has to drop requests

New comment by ketralnis in "Jury awards American Airline $9.4M from website behind 'skiplagging' hack"

ketralnis — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 02:20:30 +0000

Also... they DID sell that seat. To the person that bought it, and paid for it, and then didn't use it. They didn't cost the airline any money. They paid for the seat. They don't get the money back for the seat they don't use. The airline keeps the money for it, while not incurring the costs of filling it.

New comment by ketralnis in "Web Platform Status"

ketralnis — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 20:09:06 +0000

Sure yes. Just like caniuse https://caniuse.com/flexbox

New comment by ketralnis in "New Warp Drive Model Requires No 'Exotic Matter,' Scientists Say We Can Build (2021)"

ketralnis — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 01:10:43 +0000

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/abdf6e

> provide optimizations for the Alcubierre metric that decrease the negative energy requirements by two orders of magnitude

It still requires negative energy