<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: lambdaone</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lambdaone</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 24 Jul 2026 03:27:20 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=lambdaone" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "98.css"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Windows XP and MacOS System 7 had pretty good looking GUIs. Since then, modern keyboard-and-mouse UIs have not really improved that much; it's mostly been just evolving and polishing styling. All the real innovation has been on touchscreen devices.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:36:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49029955</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49029955</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49029955</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "Speculative Growth and the AI "Bubble" [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Algorthmic improvements in inference could make all that kit redundant very quickly - there are already moderately capable models that can be run on phones or laptops with specifications that are currently high-end but will be mainstream in another year or so.<p>This will lead to a superabundance of power-hungry compute power in the hyperscalers, and it's not entirely clear what can be done to consume it all and still run at a profit unless they manage to make ever greater gains for ever more compute-hungry models that cannot be run on consumer devices, unless they refresh their hardware at ever faster and more expensive rates.<p>The joke about data centers used to be that their core business was selling power at a loss; this may end up being true of the hyperscalers next.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:54:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48928250</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48928250</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48928250</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "Count Binface"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think Farage will probably win, but it will be a lot closer than he would like. While they will make no difference at all for his hard-core supporters, the financial allegations will be discouraging for at least some of his voters and will reduce his turnout, all serious anti-Farage tactical voters will vote for Binface as the most likely protest candidate, and a nontrivial number of voters will vote for Binface just because it would be funny to do so - Britain is the country of Boaty McBoatface, after all.[0]<p>According to the bookies, Binface is currently 8/1 to win (about 11% probability), and Farage 1/8 (about 89%), with the rest of the candidates nowhere. There's probably something Bayesian you could do to estimate the probability of various margins from that, but it's going to be uncomfortable for Farage no matter what - winning over Binface by an embarassingly small margin will not enhance his image, particularly if there is going to be another byelection called soon after with the financial issue continuing to be in the spotlight. The only way this works out favourably for Farage is if he scores a crushing victory over Binface with an increased voter share relative to his previous election result, and I think the odds of that are slim.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRS_Sir_David_Attenborough#Naming_poll" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRS_Sir_David_Attenborough#Nam...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:28:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48893296</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48893296</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48893296</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "Some Monsters Are Real"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is a vastly superior, earlier, and more detailed article compared to the one being discussed here [0], and should replace it.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888331">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888331</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:36:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890600</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890600</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890600</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "The Graph That Should Be Front-Page News"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That article is vastly superior and is the one that should be being discussed, not this.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:24:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890487</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890487</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890487</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm working on improving my PCB synthesis system; given a KiCad schematic and some extra metadata it can currently lay out and route an entire double-sided PCB with about 50 components in 4 minutes without any human intervention.<p>I wrote it because I was too lazy to learn how to use KiCad's layout features properly, and thought 'how hard can it be?'. Several months later, I had this.<p>It's not intended to compete with Altium etc. but it certainly produces compact, valid and fully design-rule-compliant boards with much less work that doing it myself or using one of the low-cost remote labour platforms.<p>It uses constraint logic programming to solve the hard parts of the problem. Hierarchical decomposition of the circuit design helps reduce combinatorial explosion, which was a show-stopper for early versions of the system. Current indications are that I may be able to scale it further in the longer term to deal with more complex design scenarios and larger boards, without hitting the exponential cliff.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:15:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890403</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890403</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890403</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "Count Binface"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's the 10% chance they are worried about. Reform is very much the Farage party, and him losing to a bin in their heartland would be catastrophic; he would go from being the presumptive next Prime Minister to a national joke.<p>Binface, ridiculous though it may seem, is going to be the unity candidate for tactical voting, and that's deadly serious from the point of view of those who wish to get Farage out.<p>Even if Farage wins, but with a reduced majority, in an election where the alternatives are fringe or novelty candidates, it will be hard for his dignity to recover.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 08:05:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48889361</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48889361</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48889361</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "Count Binface"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>To be fair, we really don't know what counts as smart business attire on Sigma IX.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 07:57:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48889310</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48889310</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48889310</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "Count Binface"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>His birth name, and I believe still his legal name, is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. But he is "commonly known as" Boris Johnson, so that's what can go on the ballot paper, although his full name must still go on the registration documents. Count Binface is in the same situation.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 07:55:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48889298</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48889298</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48889298</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "YC CEO says he ships 37K LoC AI code per day. A developer looked under the hood"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Absolutely. For him the bloat is not a problem; it's a negative externality.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Jul 2026 10:32:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48815895</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48815895</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48815895</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "“Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If only there was some way that countries could make international agreements on things...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 05 Jul 2026 14:22:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794497</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794497</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794497</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>IP-only != fibre. Try reading my comment above in its entirety. You can also read this for further enlightenment about SOGEA:<p><a href="https://www.btwholesale.com/products-and-services/data/sogea.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.btwholesale.com/products-and-services/data/sogea...</a><p>I wish I had a link for the other thing, but it was deep inside some Openreach site that Google don't seem to have access to.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Jul 2026 18:54:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787843</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787843</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787843</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No, it's still sitting on my machine. It was just a quick-and-dirty shim on top of an LLM service, and not worth maintaining. And it ate tokens at an amazing rate updating every character's point of view.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Jul 2026 18:29:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787603</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787603</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787603</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Right now, Openreach are maintaining two entirely different local loop networks, one baseband and other IP. My experience of their PON network is that it's rock solid, and that's clearly where all the effort is going - it's much easier to keep connectivity if you can link your PON headend to the exchange via multiple fibre paths so when street works sever one cable the other keeps working, unlike with legacy copper-to-the-exchange.<p>They very much want to cut that back to one; big cost savings. And there are eventually going to be (hundreds of?) millions to be made from tearing the copper out from underneath the pavements and selling it, unless copper thieves get there first.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Jul 2026 18:20:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787539</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787539</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787539</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's half right (the worst sort of right) digital data is carried over ADSL/VDSL as OFDM analog waveforms, albeit with frequencies well above the audio range.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Jul 2026 18:16:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787514</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787514</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787514</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Soon to be repeated in the UK, by the end of January 2027. We've now passed the tipping point where doing telephony end-to-end entirely over IP is cheaper that keeping the baseband analog PSTN going. The main network backbone, of course, has been all-VoIP for years.<p>It's taken British telcos years to plan for this, and it's been put off a couple of times to deal with practical problems such as situations where you absolutely can't put fiber-to-the-premises in in any reasonable timescale.<p>This time they really seem to be determined to make it happen, even if it involves bizarro products like SOGEA, and  if I recall correctly a sort of exchange-hosted baseband-only single-line DSLAM for the most intractable cases such as elderly people with no access to mains power - but even then it will implement the standard Digital Voice protocols, not the legacy DSLAM stuff.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Jul 2026 18:05:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787434</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787434</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787434</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Even the bus route articles seem to have drawn sufficient reliable-sources attention to merit them being kept. The policy is clear and definitive.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Jul 2026 16:53:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48786860</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48786860</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48786860</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "How working memory could give rise to consciousness"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For me the most plausible argument for "quantum consciousness" was made by Roger Penrose. I still don't believe it; we can  demonstrate wavefunction collapse using experiments like the delayed-choice quantum eraser without anything  conscious being involved (unless you believe in retrocausality or the cosmic conspiracy theory, or in panpsychism, which is really no weirder than the quantum consciousness ideas and also quite fun to contemplate).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Jul 2026 16:50:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48786832</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48786832</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48786832</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "How working memory could give rise to consciousness"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think you'd have great difficulty in doing either, as you are imagining what <i>you</i> think it might be like to be one of these animals are are almost certainly unable to encompass what <i>they</i> might feel it to be like; the case of bats is literally the subject of Thomas Nagel's <i>What Is It Like to Be a Bat?</i></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:34:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48785725</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48785725</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48785725</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lambdaone in "How working memory could give rise to consciousness"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Consciousness is the echo chamber of the quantum domain<p>[citation needed]</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:31:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48785705</link><dc:creator>lambdaone</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48785705</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48785705</guid></item></channel></rss>