Hacker News: lambdaone

New comment by lambdaone in "That Methyl Methacrylate Tank"

lambdaone — Wed, 27 May 2026 11:36:11 +0000

The answer to grandfathering things in is not to give them an indefinite examption from the rules; instead, give them, say, a 10 year period of exemption, giving the owner enough time to fix the defect and to spread the expense of doing so over time. It's not perfect, but eventually everything ends up being fixed.

New comment by lambdaone in "Does anybody like React?"

lambdaone — Tue, 26 May 2026 08:58:00 +0000

"Probably the wrong framework for most use-cases" is not that much of a recommendation.

New comment by lambdaone in "Does anybody like React?"

lambdaone — Tue, 26 May 2026 03:00:46 +0000

SPAs are a monster that grew and grew; an idea that at first seemed like a clever optimization has generated huge and complex systems that are a nightmare to work with, and are bloated, slow and insecure.

Web components are the next big idea. I hope they have a chance to work.

New comment by lambdaone in "A desire for a loud car correlates with higher scores on psychopathy and sadism"

lambdaone — Wed, 13 May 2026 23:07:11 +0000

There is a medical treatise, "On Assholes", just waiting to be written here, in much the same way that Harry G. Frankfurt introduced us to the technical academic concept of 'bullshit' in his book "On Bullshit".

New comment by lambdaone in "The first microcomputer: The transfluxor-powered Arma Micro Computer from 1962"

lambdaone — Mon, 11 May 2026 10:54:28 +0000

There's not much information about transfluxors available, although a patent for them goes into quite a lot of technical detail, and is referenced in the Wikipedia article.[0] If anyone knows more about this, the Wikipedia article is definitely in need of expansion:

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfluxor

New comment by lambdaone in "Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged"

lambdaone — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:57:54 +0000

This is truly disturbing, and trying to sneak it in like this without public discussion is disingenous. Hopefully it will be shot down like last time - at the very least, there are surely antitrust issues here.

New comment by lambdaone in "America's Geothermal Breakthrough"

lambdaone — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 10:07:27 +0000

There are so many ways around this - for a start, you can use some other working fluid that boils at a lower temperature. Or you can choose a different thermodynamic cycle that doesn't involve phase change.

New comment by lambdaone in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

lambdaone — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:39:54 +0000

I once aspired to American citizenship, and was dazzled by its wealth, opportunity, can-do attitude and freedom. Now I can't imagine wanting to go there - everything I see or hear, from both American and other sources, right or left, suggests a deeply unhappy country at war with itself.

New comment by lambdaone in "Someone bought 30 WordPress plugins and planted a backdoor in all of them"

lambdaone — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 11:45:13 +0000

It seems obvious to me that there should now be a concerted and open effort to detect malware in supply chains based on AI-based scanning. Sure, there will be an arms race in malware obfuscation, but that was coming anyway. Manual review is useless at this scale - it is just not happening.

New comment by lambdaone in "Is Germany's gold safe in New York ?"

lambdaone — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:07:25 +0000

At today's prices, that's around 1400 tons of gold. It's made out of lots of individual gold bars, and they can certainly move it in increments, by road then air or sea, unless the American government stops them doing it.

People ship million-dollar assets all the time. It would be a huge task to make 160,000 such trips, though.

New comment by lambdaone in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

lambdaone — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:08:53 +0000

Very insightful. One key sentence sums it up: "He shipped a product, but he didn't learn a trade."

This is going to get worse, and eventually cause disastrous damage unless we do something about it, as we risk losing human institutional memory across just about every domain, and end up as child-like supplicants to the machines.

But as the article says, this is a people problem, not a machine problem.

New comment by lambdaone in "Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years"

lambdaone — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:51:45 +0000

False positives can be eliminated mechanistically by testing if they actually work, in a sufficiently isolated automated test apparatus.

The hard thing is reducing detected crashes to well-formulated test cases that help rather than hinder maintainers.

New comment by lambdaone in "HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)"

lambdaone — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:58:39 +0000

What a fantastic company HP used to be, back in the day. They led the way in scientific equipment and calculators, and even desktop computers for a brief moment.

They even made PostScript laser printers that were built like tanks and were a by-word for reliability.

Now they are just famous for being the printer brand everyone hates, and this is just scraping the bottom out of an already empty barrel.

New comment by lambdaone in "The 49MB web page"

lambdaone — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 22:46:41 +0000

The article says "I don't know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from."

The answer is really simple and follows on from this article; the purpose of the app is even more privacy violation and tracking.

New comment by lambdaone in "Show HN: Context Gateway – Compress agent context before it hits the LLM"

lambdaone — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 19:44:44 +0000

This company sounds like it has months to live, or until the VC money runs out at most. If this idea is good, Anthropic et. al. will roll it into their own product, eliminating any purpose for it to exist as an independent product. And if it isn't any good, the company won't get traction.

New comment by lambdaone in "Malus – Clean Room as a Service"

lambdaone — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:00:49 +0000

Of course, the trained model they use to do the code generation may itself have been trained on the very open source code they are trying to replicate 'cleanly'.

New comment by lambdaone in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

lambdaone — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:42:08 +0000

Amazing hyperbole, and a deflection from the real issues. You can fight against wrongdoing without actually advocating people being killed.

Right now, climate change is an undeniable fact, its causes well-known, and the evidence for it now part of everyday life. If anything, its effects have been underestimated to date, and 'non-believers' in it are either fools or acting based on morally repugnant principles.

New comment by lambdaone in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

lambdaone — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:38:11 +0000

Yes. The obsession with demonizing AI/data centre loads seems to be a deliberate distraction from the much, much larger carbon loads of the economy at large relative to which IT power consumption is a tiny proportion.

New comment by lambdaone in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

lambdaone — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:34:35 +0000

This is terrifying, and those fighting against stopping or reducing global warming should at this point be regarded as hostis humani generis

New comment by lambdaone in "Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation"

lambdaone — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 12:00:42 +0000

This is a great description of something I've been thinking about in terms of concepts like regression to the mean, clustering and median filtering - the space of LLM output is much smaller than that of the input, precisely because the LLM works so hard to extract minimal-information patterns from its input.