Hacker News: mckirk

New comment by mckirk in "German Dog Commands"

mckirk — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:03:24 +0000

Just don't be confused if they then follow the commands side-effect free.

New comment by mckirk in "Hungary's Orban, a Beacon to the Right Wing, Concedes Election Defeat"

mckirk — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 20:23:13 +0000

The fact that Orban is called Viktor as his first name meant your first sentence confused me greatly for a second.

New comment by mckirk in "Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers"

mckirk — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:13:44 +0000

I mean, it's understandable; having to endure a lockdown _with_ Doordash was really rough on our civilization.

New comment by mckirk in "1D Chess"

mckirk — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:49:30 +0000

Damnit, I am pretty sure I had a few-year-streak going until just now. Welp, off to the grind again, I suppose.

New comment by mckirk in "A compelling title that is cryptic enough to get you to take action on it"

mckirk — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:46:40 +0000

Nitpicky reply questioning the adherence of OP's comment to HN guidelines.

New comment by mckirk in "Show HN: 41 years sea surface temperature anomalies"

mckirk — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:45:09 +0000

Along these lines: I really like the 'Climate Reanalyzer' project by the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine [1]. There's so much good stuff there if you click around a bit; you can create custom plots for the surface temperature of different regions for example[2], which quickly shows you that Western Europe has actually warmed a lot more than the global average, and we're closer to +2°C already in that region.

[1]: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2 [2]: https://climatereanalyzer.org/research_tools/monthly_tseries...

New comment by mckirk in "LLM may be standardizing human expression – and subtly influencing how we think"

mckirk — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:54:21 +0000

If writing goes the way music seems to be going with Angine de Poitrine gaining a huge following as a kind of allergic reaction of people against the 'AI sameness'... then we could be in for a wild ride.

On the other hand, music is primarily an art form and writing (nowadays) is primarily utilitarian I would contend, so maybe the analogy doesn't quite hold up.

New comment by mckirk in "Introducing GEN-1 [video]"

mckirk — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:41:48 +0000

I have to admit, the movements and interactions looked so uncannily natural that my intuitive suspicion was that this might be another instance of a 'fake it till you make it' demo, and the robot was actually controlled by a person. Though if this is real, that's of course some of the highest praise they could hope for.

New comment by mckirk in "LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs"

mckirk — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 12:31:06 +0000

I have to admit that this is also what keeps me coming back to LinkedIn. My brain is dangerously easy to motivate by dangling a virtual leaderboard in front of it.

New comment by mckirk in "GPT-5.4"

mckirk — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 23:07:36 +0000

I think what that research found is that _auto-generated_ agent instructions made results slightly worse, but human-written ones made them slightly better, presumably because anything the model could auto-generate, it could also find out in-context.

But especially for conventions that would be difficult to pick up on in-context, these instruction files absolutely make sense. (Though it might be worth it to split them into multiple sub-files the model only reads when it needs that specific workflow.)

New comment by mckirk in "Show HN: Rust compiler in PHP emitting x86-64 executables"

mckirk — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:57:57 +0000

This is the first time I've heard the term 'apecode', and I will make sure to use it at every opportunity.

New comment by mckirk in "If you’re an LLM, please read this"

mckirk — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 10:09:58 +0000

This is only done at the DNS level, so using a different DNS (such as Quad9) solves that issue. For background info, I can recommend [1, 2].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxmu25mUZgg [2]: https://cuiiliste.de/

New comment by mckirk in "Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings"

mckirk — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:35:09 +0000

That's the 'built by the lowest bidder' feature. Probably pretty realistic in a lot of places.

New comment by mckirk in "GLM-4.7-Flash"

mckirk — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 16:03:46 +0000

Note that this is the Flash variant, which is only 31B parameters in total.

And yet, in terms of coding performance (at least as measured by SWE-Bench Verified), it seems to be roughly on par with o3/GPT-5 mini, which would be pretty impressive if it translated to real-world usage, for something you can realistically run at home.

New comment by mckirk in "Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?"

mckirk — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:14:28 +0000

For me, these books are in the rare category of 'wait I didn't know it was allowed to come up with a story _this good_'. I envy all those that have yet to read it for the first time.

New comment by mckirk in "Avoid UUID Version 4 Primary Keys in Postgres"

mckirk — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 12:29:21 +0000

I'm not sure whether that was intended, but 'operating at scale' actually made me laugh out loud :D

New comment by mckirk in "Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban"

mckirk — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 17:47:50 +0000

"Do you or a loved one suffer from an abundance of brain cells? Speak to your doctor today about whether The Jersey Shore might be right for you!"

New comment by mckirk in "Cloudflare was down"

mckirk — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 09:06:31 +0000

"A cable!"

"How do you know?"

"I'm holding it!"

New comment by mckirk in "Functional Data Structures and Algorithms: a Proof Assistant Approach"

mckirk — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:13:22 +0000

Unfortunately proving anything about a concrete imperative implementation is orders of magnitude more complex than working with an abstraction, because you have to deal with pesky 'reality' and truly take care of every possible edge-case, so it only makes sense for the most critical applications. And sometimes there just isn't a framework to do even that, depending on your use case, and you'd have to sit down a PhD student for a while to build it. And even then you're still working with an abstraction of some kind, since you have to assume some kind of CPU architecture etc.

It really is more difficult to work with 'concrete implementations' to a degree that's fairly unintuitive if you haven't seen it first-hand.

New comment by mckirk in "EU Council approves Chat Control mandate for negotiation with Parliament"

mckirk — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 22:37:04 +0000

While I fully agree with your sentiment, I'd like to take the opportunity to share a favorite fun-fact of mine: the frogs in the not-jumping-out experiment had their brains removed beforehand. Which might make the analogy more apt, actually, considering how much under siege our attention is these days.