Hacker News: marzell

New comment by marzell in "NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers"

marzell — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 23:14:50 +0000

Also there are other variants and tricks around this for other colors as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color

New comment by marzell in "Vietnam bans unskippable ads"

marzell — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 17:46:55 +0000

"correting" lol

New comment by marzell in "The past was not that cute"

marzell — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 14:25:31 +0000

There's good arguments for the case that gatherer communities actually had generally better health and far more free time than farmers and agrarian society.

Farming provided the calories necessary for a population that hunting and gathering could not support (so no going back) but required basically working all day to make it work and survive less than ideal conditions. But prior to farming people often had significant more free time.

New comment by marzell in "Avoid 2:00 and 3:00 am cron jobs (2013)"

marzell — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 01:51:22 +0000

Yeah at that point I think we'd be better off if everything was just UTC and dealt with locally

New comment by marzell in "Left to Right Programming"

marzell — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 19:21:23 +0000

You absolutely can in many engines, for instance in Snowflake... with the small exception that in all supporting engines you actually need to use HAVING instead of WHERE in your second example (because it compares an aggregation, otherwise WHERE is fine).

You can also use "correlated column aliases" (I can't recall the proper name) i.e.

    SELECT
        id AS foo,
        foo || '_1' as foo_n,
        right(foo_n, 1) as foo_ordinal
    FROM MyTable
    WHERE foo = 1;

Again, if this isn't all part of SQL standards, the reality is that a lot of engines have semi-standard (sometimes very proprietary too) ways of handling these now common patterns. For real-world use cases, the standards are unfortunately becoming increasingly irrelevant. I think it would be better in the long term to use standards, but if they can't keep up with actual usage then they will just get ignored.

New comment by marzell in "Left to Right Programming"

marzell — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 12:54:03 +0000

> Per the SQL standard, you can't use column aliases in WHERE clauses, because the selection (again, relational algebra) occurs before the projection.

Except this works in most major vendor SQL implementations. And they all support relation aliases in SELECT... Seems the standards have long fell behind actual implementations.

New comment by marzell in "Dust from car brakes more harmful than exhaust, study finds"

marzell — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 18:44:08 +0000

Some factors I think are involved, but I don't see mentioned - EVs produce more readily available torque in general, and also tire choice heavily factors in EV range (low rolling resistance), which has a negative impact on tread life

New comment by marzell in "How corn syrup took over America"

marzell — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 04:55:22 +0000

We make corn that isn't even considered a food, legally. We subsidize that using a lot of tax dollars, to the absurd point that we pay farmers to NOT grow corn and leave fields empty. Everyone is paying for way more corn than is needed through taxes, while people claim this keeps costs low (it's more, you are just paying it in taxes). And then we come up with excuses to use more of it, like corn syrup and ethanol. This is absolutely absurd.

New comment by marzell in "Query Apple's FindMy network with Python"

marzell — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 17:46:06 +0000

Long before the richest man on earth bought Twitter to be his personal megaphone to help him prepare to become president in order to boost all his personal endeavors, the letter X has been used as a sort of contraction to replace common morphemes like "cross", "trans" etc, in places where the physical representation "x" likens to a cross or crossing of some sort, or in reference to the Greek letter Chi. Must we change our use of language to support this guy, too?

Xtian Xmas xfer tx/rx xor...

New comment by marzell in "Simple tasks showing reasoning breakdown in state-of-the-art LLMs"

marzell — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 18:24:15 +0000

I believe the "thinking out loud" is fundamentally part of the process of "text completion" which is what it is doing. Certainly we can (and do) break things apart and add layers that could be used to effectively do this by adding more steps and processing time. But ultimately in a single turn, the entire conversation up to that point (including instructions you may have added telling it to not think out loud) is the input, and the output will reflect that.

New comment by marzell in "Today Microsoft Banned My Country Iran from Minecraft"

marzell — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 15:38:34 +0000

I'm not arguing your point, but this is the general state of gaming today. A significant portion of "single player only" games require you to be online, contain "online" content, and access to the game can/will be effectively removed when servers/services go offline.

New comment by marzell in "Horcrux: Split your file into encrypted fragments"

marzell — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 17:54:24 +0000

The second point, yeah that's relevant.

On the first point, just give each person n-1 shards, each missing a different one. Then any 2 can decrypt. Or configure it for however many participants there are and they minimum number needed to encrypt.

New comment by marzell in "Horcrux: Split your file into encrypted fragments"

marzell — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 17:32:23 +0000

What's the practical benefit over just sharding a decryption key and handing out multiple shards to each person?

New comment by marzell in "My favourite API is a zipfile on the European Central Bank's website"

marzell — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 21:13:08 +0000

for something a bit more robust, check out DuckDB. It's a library you can embed, use it to run SQL on local files as well as connect to databases, do joins, analytics, etc.

New comment by marzell in "AOLserver is America Online's Open-Source web server (2010)"

marzell — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 04:17:08 +0000

Same. It took me years to even figure out I could just buy programming books from the store. But progs like Magenta and AOHell, plus the F1 help/documentation built into vb and the like, set me on the path.

New comment by marzell in "Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?"

marzell — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 16:55:22 +0000

I was unaware that Game Neverending was the origin of Flickr. Interesting as Glitch[0] was also the origin of Slack. Seems to be an interesting theme in Stoot's career.

[0] https://www.glitchthegame.com/

New comment by marzell in "Samsung “space zoom” moon shots are fake, and here is the proof"

marzell — Sat, 11 Mar 2023 18:10:03 +0000

If we aren't already living in a simulation, then we've begun a feedback loop so that in the near future, we very well may be.

New comment by marzell in "Paul Graham AI Essay Writer"

marzell — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 22:01:11 +0000

Well I asked for discussion about Smurfette as a sex symbol, and instead I got an article about She-Ra, sexualization of cartoons, and interesting discourse about Pixar and being able to do things in animation that you can't do otherwise [0]. Still it was pretty good even though it didn't mention Smurfs.

[0]https://www.paulgrahamai.com/recPKFXrH5aI6KUks

New comment by marzell in "IRS Free File: Do Your Taxes for Free"

marzell — Sat, 21 Jan 2023 03:39:09 +0000

|what is contributing to what portion of your tax bill

Do you have an example of what other products provide for this? Does IRS Free File do better in this regard?

New comment by marzell in "Endless Horse"

marzell — Fri, 30 Dec 2022 02:04:33 +0000

infinity is not a number.