Hacker News: lynguist

New comment by lynguist in "Swiss AI Initiative (2023)"

lynguist — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 07:21:44 +0000

Staff nationality of Swiss higher education institutions:

- Universities: 55% Swiss, 45% foreign - Universities of applied sciences: 75% Swiss, 25% foreign - Universities of teacher education: 87% Swiss, 13% foreign - Professors: 49% Swiss, 51% foreign - PhDs/scientific collaborators: 30% Swiss, 70% foreign - Professors of ETH Zurich: 31% Swiss, 69% foreign

New comment by lynguist in "Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight"

lynguist — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:12:53 +0000

Honestly the only organization of the past few years to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. And I truly don’t mean this in any hyperbolic way, but believe that this organization has done the most to enable human collaboration and thus enable a precursor to peace and progress and prosperity.

New comment by lynguist in "Native Instant Space Switching on macOS"

lynguist — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:00:13 +0000

I… think that actually Liquid Glass was put on the iPhones to make sure that older iPhones that still have relatively fast chips can show up finally slower than the brand new ones, and that with this stress there’s again a much larger slope in difference between an older iPhone and a newer one which causes enough nagging in users to upgrade = buy a new one.

New comment by lynguist in "Nobody knows how the whole system works"

lynguist — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 08:32:13 +0000

No I think the problem is AI coding removes intentionality. And that introduces artifacts and connections and dependencies that shouldn’t be there if one had designed the system with intent. And that makes it eventually harder to reason about.

There is a difference in qualia in it happens to work and it was made for a purpose.

Business logic will strive more for it happens to work as a good enough.

New comment by lynguist in "Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product"

lynguist — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 18:30:15 +0000

I’m so jealous of you. You can just go and make a product as if it was software, with no “respect” to boundaries and restrictions, even though you’re not even in the lamp business. And then you have a China contact, and China can just manufacture anything as if it was software, but it’s a real life physical object. And the commitment, the fearlessness, the rudeness of just making it work.

I believe people like you will become very rich (because you’re so compatible with money making), but I have a prejudice that you lack depth in your understanding and intentions.

I almost never feel jealous but while reading your blog I could feel this feeling of freedom of creating that I seek and I couldn’t help but. Congratulations.

New comment by lynguist in "Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants"

lynguist — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 12:41:17 +0000

For a single time fix (“rewire brain to be healthy again”) you need psychedelics (psilocybin has seen multiple studies where its effect is way better than psychopharmacological drugs). A single dose can make you healthy for a year to come, potentially also for life as you’re no longer a potential victim to it ever again.

New comment by lynguist in "A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks"

lynguist — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 19:37:38 +0000

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/February

The pronunciation of the first r with a y sound has always been one of two possible standards, in fact "February" is a re-Latinizing spelling but English doesn’t like the br-r sound so it naturally dissimilates to by-r.

New comment by lynguist in "“Food JPEGs” in Super Smash Bros. and Kirby Air Riders"

lynguist — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 12:15:08 +0000

Also hugely popular in German speaking Switzerland under the name of Vermicelles.

New comment by lynguist in "Games’ affordance of childlike wonder and reduced burnout risk in young adults"

lynguist — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 15:35:05 +0000

There's a certain culture that prefers "efficiency", punishes non-productivity, and every little slack, even enjoyment of life must be "earned". In that culture these video games that are pure playfulness (but it doesn't just have to be video games, it could be poetry, whatever, just something with no productivity!) are the antidote.

I'm happy I wasn't born into this culture. (I've seen and heard absurd, almost comical examples of this from my colleagues, like justifying not replacing a black and white TV in the 1990s... From my point of view they're ascetics, but from their point of view they're normal.)

New comment by lynguist in "The Penicillin Myth"

lynguist — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 07:32:01 +0000

For me the biggest plot hole of the popular penicillin discovery myth is clearly the open window story, including its multiple side plots with meteorological events.

And that that story exists and has PREVAILED despite the fact that everyone knows that the same building was housing a mycology laboratory only a flight of stairs away, and that it was the mycology colleague La Touche who identified the penicillin.

New comment by lynguist in "We remain alive also in a dead internet"

lynguist — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 17:55:53 +0000

This makes sense once you understand the definitions of Hegelian an sich vs für sich and Lacanian objet petit a. It might look like rumbling to you but it is a very precise philosophical-technical text that does pure analysis. I liked it really a lot and gained much from it.

New comment by lynguist in "We remain alive also in a dead internet"

lynguist — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 09:27:57 +0000

I have never seen this idea expressed so clearly. Thank you for your comment.

New comment by lynguist in "Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work"

lynguist — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 15:26:54 +0000

I discussed this premise with my LLM and we came to this following conclusion which I find quite elegant:

> In any bounded system under feedback, refinement produces diminishing returns and narrowing tolerance, governed by a superlinear precision cost.

> There isn’t one official name, but what you’ve articulated is essentially a unified formulation of the diminishing-returns / sensitivity-amplification law of creation — a pattern deep enough that it keeps being rediscovered in every domain that pushes against the limits of order.

New comment by lynguist in "Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages"

lynguist — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 21:51:36 +0000

I wouldn’t program with it but I find it extremely aesthetic.

New comment by lynguist in "Swiss Bank Sygnum Unveils Bitcoin Yield Fund as BTC DeFi Demand Grows"

lynguist — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 01:06:04 +0000

Sygnum started as a pure cryptocurrency bank, initially without a banking license. They did all the steps and received a full banking license. (Most other companies in the same sector in Switzerland don’t have a banking license.) So just to say it again in different words: this is not a traditional Swiss bank, it was established only a few years ago.

New comment by lynguist in "The pivot"

lynguist — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 21:45:54 +0000

I still don’t understand.

In actual history whale oil made airplane engines go (as lubricants) until the 1970s when they switched to synthetic.

Most whales were killed in the 20th century to make planes go, not in the 19th to make city lights burn.

New comment by lynguist in "Sony PlayStation 2 fixing frenzy"

lynguist — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 08:41:52 +0000

Same with the original Sixaxis PS3 controller without rumble! I liked that lightweight controller a lot!

It was also short lived and replaced with the PS3’s version with rumble included – they were saying it’s because of a patent dispute.

New comment by lynguist in "macOS 26 Tahoe's Dead Canary Utility App Icons"

lynguist — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 05:41:35 +0000

What is the Intel 915?

New comment by lynguist in "How does the US use water?"

lynguist — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 09:35:11 +0000

You pay for fuel for your car => Saudi monarchy gets it share because they supply it => while they completely waste 20% for “supercars” and vanity, they still have enough money to do whatever they want including => they grow alfalfa next to you to feed their local cattle

New comment by lynguist in "Intel CEO Letter to Employees"

lynguist — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 22:05:35 +0000

Intel headcount in 2022 was 131,900. Intel’s projected headcount for 2025 is 75,000. Intel fired 43% of its staff over the course of 3 years (when approximating natural retirements at zero and assuming a stop in new employments).