Hacker News: lolc

New comment by lolc in "How Blackwing Pencils are Made [video]"

lolc — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:15:10 +0000

More companies should do this kind of advertisement.

New comment by lolc in "The physics of Docker build caching"

lolc — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 01:09:32 +0000

I'd rather read the prompt.

New comment by lolc in "Darktable"

lolc — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:56:47 +0000

I used Ansel for a while, and I agree that Darktable is suffering from feature creep. Ansel right away had some usability improvements. But the amount of regressions introduced was wild. The anger you can read in the messaging was apparently also employed to cut code, and things got flaky. In the end some features I used stopped working in all releases I tried, and I went back to Darktable. Maybe Ansel is stabilizing now, and I should try again.

New comment by lolc in "Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word"

lolc — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:38:01 +0000

I recently re-read Starfish by Peter Watts and man that book rhymes a lot with current events.

New comment by lolc in "Clinical failure rates over the decades: yikes"

lolc — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 10:23:48 +0000

Yeah why is 10% success bad? What is the tradeoff between spent effort and missed cures if we try to tweak the success rate by killing prototypes earlier in the pipeline? While reading I was expecting a reasoned argument... that was stubbornly not coming around.

New comment by lolc in "OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line"

lolc — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 14:16:41 +0000

You can say you don't want the bad guys to get the capability until and after the reality hits you. But this arrogant hope stands in the way of developing an effective response. The handlers of closed models would like you to be dependent on them for protection, this much is clear.

New comment by lolc in "Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode"

lolc — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:31:13 +0000

https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/#datafile-3

New comment by lolc in "Alman: German, Simplified"

lolc — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:37:54 +0000

To native me, Alman sounds like an US American talking German. Unsurprising, if we look at the originator of the proposal.

I've been repeating this to anybody unwilling to listen: What appears like needless complexity in a language may improve the latency and stability in understanding a message. Redundancies are a feature of language, not just baggage.

Certainly, whether the German declination of articles and pronouns is worth it is very much up for debate. But looking at this example, Alman drops a lot of flexibility in how sentences can be arranged, and where nouns may be omitted. Imagine losing relative pronouns in English. That would slow down native speakers but make learning English easier. Good tradeoff? Of course not!

New comment by lolc in "Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts"

lolc — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:26:50 +0000

They must think they have some secret sauce they don't want others to learn. How to optimally instruct sub agents for example. If they hide the sub agent prompts, other models cannot be trained to emulate.

Oh and you can't even use local models or other providers for the sub-agents. You're locked-in.

New comment by lolc in "Road to Elm 1.0"

lolc — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:20:17 +0000

Great hack, thanks! And yea I was missing some native string api when I abandoned Elm at 0.19.

New comment by lolc in "Road to Elm 1.0"

lolc — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 11:10:57 +0000

Haha, yeah I didn't realize there would be a monkey patch route to FFI in Elm. Can't control the runtime. Is there a good read up on this technique?

New comment by lolc in ".self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting"

lolc — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 10:25:10 +0000

> The whole point of HTML's design is that it's incredibly easy for a human to write correctly.

A lot of people (me included) used text editors to write HTML. The process was not easy, and the results mostly not correct.

HTML at the time was intended as an application of SGML. This is the first example of HTML from RFC 1866 that laid out HTML 2.0 in 1995:

    
    Parsing Example
    Some text. *wow*

Using an HTML editor was required if you wanted to get anywhere near that standard.

New comment by lolc in "Ubisoft co-founder Claude Guillemot has died in a plane crash"

lolc — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:26:25 +0000

Yes that's where the word comes from. I was describing how the word was used here. You quibble with established usage. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/analogue#h1

New comment by lolc in "Ubisoft co-founder Claude Guillemot has died in a plane crash"

lolc — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 11:05:49 +0000

Analogue means having the same function. It does not say which came first.

New comment by lolc in "HPV vaccine cuts risk of dying from cervical cancer before 30"

lolc — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 06:46:23 +0000

I was lucky my pharmacist didn't listen to my doctor when I showed up with a prescription for a misdiagnosed disease. Would have delayed getting effective treatment for a life threatening disease. If I'd read forums I could've spotted it too. Don't just listen to your doctor.

New comment by lolc in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

lolc — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:02:55 +0000

> ... which has adversely affected public health or safety.

Why would they tack that on at the end of a very long sentence? Because they don't want to talk about the loss of USS Scorpion. They mention the sub once on the whole page and even misspell it as "Scorpian". Would not trust them as a source.

New comment by lolc in "Why SpaceX 2040 Revenue FCST $4.3T in highly unlikely"

lolc — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 05:46:31 +0000

I'm under the assumption that Starlink will never provide more than one percent of the mobile bandwidth in a developed country. Because they can't match dense antenna webs in cities. Am I wrong?

New comment by lolc in "German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews"

lolc — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:42:30 +0000

From my reading the German court's ruling is that Google are responsible both for claims they made up and claims they rephrase from somewhere else. Because the claims appear as a statement of fact made by Google. If they showed it as "User X on site Y claims Z" they would not be held responsible. Because that's how search engines are understood to work. If they make a wrong quote, they would be responsible for that though.

So my understanding is their unreliable AI summaries are a legal liability for Google in Germany and people can request corrections through the courts.

New comment by lolc in "1worldflag: A blue dot on a transparent background"

lolc — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:56:53 +0000

The flag is not plastic.

https://1worldflag.com/flag/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organza

New comment by lolc in "Show HN: Uruky (EU-based Kagi alternative) now has Image Search and URL Rewrites"

lolc — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:28:27 +0000

Wait do I have to choose what search provider I use for every search? They don't get merged by Uruky?