Hacker News: kilna

New comment by kilna in "What archaeology reveals about the rise of autocracy"

kilna — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 19:12:05 +0000

So, societies where increasingly-centralized private control (which always results in monopolization) of trade, resources, expansion profits, plantations, and enslaved labor, are the ones that become autocratic. So, basically, all the things libertarians want (commodification of everything with no collectively-demanded limits) while pretending they don't result in this.

New comment by kilna in "Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI"

kilna — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:45:28 +0000

I think this IS good for a focus when forming an organization. I don't think it'll reform bad companies per se, but reading something like this might help better companies to form.

New comment by kilna in "My life was changed by four sentences in four books"

kilna — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 17:11:32 +0000

Withdrawal rate. They were talking about per year.

New comment by kilna in "Sticky wage norms and the real wage cost of unexpected inflation"

kilna — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 16:57:22 +0000

Inflation is not just an increase in prices, it's basically a money pump. Under weakened labor it is redistribution from workers to the parasite class.

New comment by kilna in "Googlebook"

kilna — Tue, 12 May 2026 22:02:47 +0000

It's called Gemini because there's two of them responding to you. One that tells the lie, and the other to apologize for telling the lie (which, of course, is just a different lie).

New comment by kilna in "They Live (1988) inspired Adblocker"

kilna — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:12:40 +0000

The heavier weights of League Spartan would be a good match.

New comment by kilna in "The woes of sanitizing SVGs"

kilna — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:55:47 +0000

> SVG was seen as a potential flash replacement?

Yes, that was a large part of the thrust back in the day. Even if it wasn't officially a goal of the SVG working group, there was a lack of an open standards-based alternative to what Flash was able to do, and the developers of the SVG standard saw that adding animation/tweening wouldn't take much given what browsers were already becoming capable of.

New comment by kilna in "The woes of sanitizing SVGs"

kilna — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:46:31 +0000

The rust resvg [1] project uses micro SVG (usvg) [2] as an interim normalization format that simplifies SVG into solely:

* Simplified paths (no shapes, only one kind of object)

* DTDs, Attributes, CSS and references are pre-resolved

* Invisible elements and comments are removed

Resolving shared items may cause sizes to increase drastically however. This is the sort of explosion that compression is perfect at compressing.

1: https://docs.rs/resvg/latest/resvg/ 2: https://docs.rs/usvg/latest/usvg/

New comment by kilna in "No Terms. No Conditions"

kilna — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 05:04:34 +0000

#5 "Access is not conditioned on approval" would seem to be permission to DDOS.

New comment by kilna in "Unsealed court documents show teen addiction was big tech's "top priority""

kilna — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 23:03:07 +0000

All capitalism is crony capitalism.

New comment by kilna in "Show HN: I've been using AI to analyze every supplement on the market"

kilna — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:08:11 +0000

Monetize it with Amazon or other affiliate links, and provide dollar per effective dose for a given set of desired supplements.

New comment by kilna in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

kilna — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 23:56:52 +0000

https://kilna.net - I knocked up a linktree type site for myself and all of my projects a while back, but the offerings out there were so obnoxiously branded even when paid... and none of them felt polished in the way I like. I did the HTML + CSS myself, and was pleased I could make it work so well on both mobile and desktop.

New comment by kilna in "Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%"

kilna — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 18:35:20 +0000

Framing it as unwarranted to not think "Tesla is uniquely unable to achieve it"...? Seriously?

The real question is if Tesla is uniquely ABLE to achieve it, above others in the market... including new startups or tech/auto-maker partnerships which may yet form.

Tesla has some supply chain innovation, but none of what they do can't be replicated... and Musk's slavish commitment to video as opposed to LIDAR is hobbling them.

New comment by kilna in "Go Gray, Not Cray: Why You Should Grayscale Your Phone"

kilna — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 07:09:31 +0000

Black and white is 1-bit, where one value (say, 1) means white and the other (say, 0) means black.

New comment by kilna in "Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm"

kilna — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 17:45:22 +0000

Sure, but very modestly due to scale, not core institutional morals. Go to your average small business with 10 or so people and ask the staff how they are treated and paid, and you'll get an answer not much different than the level of employee satisfaction for Fortune 500 companies. Look a their customer reviews... are small restaurants for instance an order of magnitude different that megacorp chains? In an economy with regulatory capture and highly unequal distribution of wealth, the wealthy set the tone across the board.

New comment by kilna in "A Fast 64-Bit Date Algorithm (30–40% faster by counting dates backwards)"

kilna — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 17:25:00 +0000

Leap seconds are not deterministic.

New comment by kilna in "Things I've learned in my 7 years implementing AI"

kilna — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 02:41:22 +0000

It takes good self control to not go down rabbit holes writing the wrong prompts, or prompts that produce interesting or pleasing results without necessarily solving the problem you intended to solve. Sycophantic LLMs are an addiction engine, in addition to being a guess-based autocomplete for thoughts.

New comment by kilna in "Disk Prices"

kilna — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 03:23:25 +0000

This makes me miss pricewatch.com

New comment by kilna in "The history of the Schwartzian Transform (2016)"

kilna — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 20:21:16 +0000

If the production code has to be maximally performant, you'd want the transform. It doesn't copy data around with a bunch of needless assignments. Pipelining the extract/sort/reconstitute in this manner is absolutely the right thing to do in production if production requirements are to keep it fast and with a small footprint. There's no excuse for not commenting it, but strictly-code-speaking there's no reason not to use this for production if the requisite needs are there.

New comment by kilna in "The history of the Schwartzian Transform (2016)"

kilna — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 20:08:17 +0000

Perl was ahead of its time, and likely because of it's Borg-like capacity to absorb a little bit of everything... it was unfortunately nigh on impossible to refactor. This is why Perl6 (nee Raku) took nearly 2 decades to be "done". It's a crying shame that it lost momentum, because many of the techniques that the features of Raku enable are as clever/succinct/revolutionary as the Schwartzian Transform was back in its day... but because the developer community is so very small now, Raku will have a very hard time catching up to the performance of competing languages.