Hacker News: mathieuh

New comment by mathieuh in "Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy"

mathieuh — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:39:23 +0000

Semitic languages are Afroasiatic, not Indoeuropean.

New comment by mathieuh in "How to get better at guitar"

mathieuh — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:55:45 +0000

Same, I finally managed to stick with learning standard notation this year after several false starts and I’m kicking myself I didn’t start earlier. There were a few tough moments where it seemed like I’d never get (learning about key signatures, moving past 1st position) but now I’m starting to get comfortable playing up to the 7th position. It’s so nice being able to just buy a big book of Sor or Giuliani or Carcassi studies or even some Bach transcriptions and play them straight out of the book instead of needing to listen to a performance first and then look at the tab.

New comment by mathieuh in "AI Won't Replace You, but a Manager Using AI Will"

mathieuh — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:19:37 +0000

The way I look at it is I just need to get through the next year or so. I also don't believe AI is going to replace everyone, but I do believe that a lot of "leaders" are going to make cuts. They all read the same blogs and listen to the same podcasts and once one makes a move they seem to tend to follow each other.

Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part but I still don't see AI replacing absolutely everyone. As someone who I'd say tends to be in the upper 20% of performers but not setting the world on fire I'm not too worried about my job completely disappearing but I am worried in the short term about layoffs and chaos when loads of people are trying to find jobs at the same time.

New comment by mathieuh in "You are not your job"

mathieuh — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 04:20:18 +0000

Isn't this exactly Marx's criticism of capitalism through the theory of alienation? Human relationships get mediated and hidden as relationships between commodities and money.

New comment by mathieuh in "The engineer who invented the Mars rover suspension in his garage [video]"

mathieuh — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:52:15 +0000

As Marx put it: "there is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.

New comment by mathieuh in "In a genre where spoilers are devastating, how do we talk about puzzle games?"

mathieuh — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 07:44:15 +0000

Have you tried the Talos Principle (and it sequel)? I also didn't like The Witness but the Talos Principle games are some of my favourites

New comment by mathieuh in "4k tons of potatoes to be given away for free in Berlin"

mathieuh — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:32:19 +0000

Maybe targeted at Americans and using US customary short tons (which is 907 kg)

New comment by mathieuh in "Apple picks Gemini to power Siri"

mathieuh — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 16:18:36 +0000

Mobile digital mapping was already a useful thing though. Even though Apple Maps was initially a failure I still came back to it every so often to see how it was progressing and eventually it ended up pretty good.

Maybe I'm weird but mobile assistants have never been useful for me. I tried Siri a couple of times and it didn't work. I haven't tried it since because even if it worked perfectly I'm not sure I'd have any use for it.

I see it more like the Vision Pro. Doesn't matter how good the product ends up being, I just don't think it's something most people are going to have a use for.

As far as I'm concerned no one has proved the utility of these mobile assistants yet.

New comment by mathieuh in "Amazon will allow ePub and PDF downloads for DRM-free eBooks"

mathieuh — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 13:52:10 +0000

I saw the writing on the wall when they recently removed the facility to download your own books. I downloaded all of them, removed the DRM with Calibre, and now obtain e-books through other sources.

New comment by mathieuh in "Lording it, over: A new history of the modern British aristocracy"

mathieuh — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 04:00:10 +0000

The southeast of England is well-off, everywhere else is less so. It has basically always been like this. There have also obviously been repeated hammerblows since 2008, with austerity (which is still happening), Brexit (a remarkable self-own), and then covid (an unprecedented upwards transfer of wealth). The political and economic establishment is also essentially monopolar, a process begun with Blair and now approaching culmination.

People just don’t have the money to spend on things. Wage growth is non-existent and prices have risen dramatically. For my own part I have get a real “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas” feeling. All we ever hear on the news is how spending will have to be cut yet again and taxes will have to go up.

Being from Northern Ireland I personally hope for unification with Ireland, although without significant changes I worry nothing much will change as Ireland has its own very similar issues.

New comment by mathieuh in "Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?"

mathieuh — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 12:57:50 +0000

I frequently (basically every conversation) have issues with Claude getting confused about which version of the file it should be building on. Usually what causes it is asking it do something, then manually editing the file to remove or change something myself and giving it back, telling it it should build on top of what I just gave it. It usually takes three or four tries before it will actually use what I just gave it, and from then on it keeps randomly trying to reintroduce what I deleted.

New comment by mathieuh in "The elegance of movement in Silksong"

mathieuh — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 07:00:21 +0000

Sekiro was so good at engendering this feeling. The first time you fight Genichiro you will probably die within seconds. The next fight it might take you 20+ tries to beat him. And then the last time you fight him you can basically no-hit him.

New comment by mathieuh in "A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code"

mathieuh — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 07:20:12 +0000

I actually don't think I've ever had AI solve a non-trivial problem by itself. I do find it useful but I always have to give it the breakthrough which it can then implement.

New comment by mathieuh in "Das Problem mit German Strings"

mathieuh — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 01:21:14 +0000

https://datafusion.apache.org/blog/2024/09/13/string-view-ge...

> The concept of inlined strings with prefixes (called “German Strings” by Andy Pavlo, in homage to TUM, where the Umbra paper that describes them originated) has been used in many recent database systems (Velox, Polars, DuckDB, CedarDB, etc.) and was introduced to Arrow as a new StringViewArray[^3] type. Arrow’s original StringArray is very memory efficient but less effective for certain operations. StringViewArray accelerates string-intensive operations via prefix inlining and a more flexible and compact string representation.

Seems to be nothing more than they were invented at a German university. I spent quite some time thinking it had something to do with German’s sometimes-SOV word order.

New comment by mathieuh in "Calling Their Bluff"

mathieuh — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 09:24:49 +0000

In the UK this happens with tax rebates. For the vast majority of people your tax is calculated by HMRC and taken out of your pay and if they make a mistake you just tell them and they will adjust your tax code so you pay less/more tax until it works out.

Some shady companies set themselves up as middlemen and pocket a large proportion of the rebate when you can do it yourself in minutes through an online portal.

New comment by mathieuh in "Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy"

mathieuh — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 02:35:18 +0000

I pay £22 per month to rent a seedbox and I would happily pay more.

New comment by mathieuh in "You know more Finnish than you think"

mathieuh — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 01:57:39 +0000

For an English speaker it would be difficult. It is a highly synthetic language (meaning the markers which tell you which parts of the sentence are doing what), compared to English which is an analytical language (meaning there are extra words like prepositions which tell you which part of the sentence is doing what). This is why Finnish (and other Uralic languages’ words) look so long to us, because where we in English would use prepositions and word order to denote object, subject etc., much of that is expressed in Finnish through suffixes.

Perhaps for a speaker of another synthetic language like Polish it might be easier to learn Finnish as their brain might would already have the wiring but even then, as the article notes Finnish is not an Indo-European language so it is further removed still.

New comment by mathieuh in "Ask HN: Do you struggle with flow state when using AI assisted coding tools?"

mathieuh — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 13:52:34 +0000

I guess I'm just not asking it big enough things. I'm asking it things on the level of an individual function or component. To be honest I really haven't had much success at all with IDE integrations and giving it access to the whole codebase. I get far better results by asking very focused questions, which means I'm only waiting a few seconds for a response.

This is Claude Sonnet 4

New comment by mathieuh in "Show HN: A GitHub Action that quizzes you on a pull request"

mathieuh — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 01:59:57 +0000

Depends how good your QA is. Where I am it is terrible so most of the time I spend in “code review” is spent checking out the code locally and testing it myself.

New comment by mathieuh in "Scientists may have found a way to eliminate chromosome linked to Down syndrome"

mathieuh — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 03:19:35 +0000

It didn’t just happen. It happened through struggle and its continuation is not guaranteed. Look at all the reactionary movements springing up around the world. This is not an area I believe we can settle on “good enough”.