Hacker News: mentat

New comment by mentat in "Tesla Roadster"

mentat — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 18:34:43 +0000

You could but the government won't let you buy one from China.

New comment by mentat in "Dithered QR Codes"

mentat — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 01:39:39 +0000

This made me wonder if you could do it with color and apparently you can: https://1mentat.github.io/qr-code-shenanigans/

New comment by mentat in "Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?"

mentat — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 22:31:08 +0000

30 minutes with /goal for the solution from Sol w/ high.

New comment by mentat in "Temporary Cloudflare accounts for AI agents"

mentat — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 14:27:03 +0000

You’re very sure because you’ve built one at scale? This is such peak HN. And you have plenty of other people who have never built a billing system at scale to agree with you. The OP is right, this is in fact very very hard for the reasons they say.

New comment by mentat in "My stages of learning to be a socially normal person"

mentat — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 21:34:05 +0000

The idea that most people who are doing professional public speaking are reliable narrators is a bit quaint. There is a lot of room for framing that you have to allow for story telling. If you think that all story telling is about reliable narration, you're going to have a tough time being successful at it or interacting with others who are.

New comment by mentat in "Don’t teach during code reviews"

mentat — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 21:14:38 +0000

I ask a lot of questions on code reviews as it's usually less easily perceived as conformational and I have come to assume that I'm missing context when something is really off. Assume that coworkers are competent but may either have or lack context. If your coworkers are genuinely incompetent, then a new position might be better than fighting though PRs.

New comment by mentat in "Canada buys 88 F-35 fighter jets for $14.2B"

mentat — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 02:04:37 +0000

Wasn't aware that Canada had moved to 1940s Europe...

New comment by mentat in "John Carmack Leaves Meta"

mentat — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 01:26:50 +0000

Saying this seriously a few decades after computers were room sized is I think a bit short sighted. Betting against technical progress especially in density / materials / weight is not a good bet.

New comment by mentat in "Bipartisan Legislation to Ban TikTok"

mentat — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 18:06:02 +0000

You don't think the US government requires information sharing?

New comment by mentat in "5.1 Magnitude Earthquake Near San Jose, CA"

mentat — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 19:38:09 +0000

Seemed even a bit longer before that on the peninsula coastside. The whole thing felt magical, to even know that much beforehand.

New comment by mentat in "TSMC to begin 3nm chip production next month"

mentat — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 14:50:47 +0000

See regulatory capture.

New comment by mentat in "U.S. Mass Shootings On Rise No Matter How You Define Them"

mentat — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 14:25:27 +0000

That was designed as a fundamentally subversive set of lessons. I doubt we even have the will to make an accurately subversive movie version of Diamond Age (look at what happened to Altered Carbon), much less create that sort of "book".

New comment by mentat in "Amazon Elastic File System Update – Sub-Millisecond Read Latency"

mentat — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 15:20:01 +0000

Being on call aligns incentives. If it's someone else's problem when what you just design and build then it will operate less well.

New comment by mentat in "White hat hacker awarded $2M for fixing ETH-creation bug"

mentat — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 15:51:02 +0000

Really exceptional response. A surprising number of people aren't aware of moral constitution, practically, even though this was a core topic for at least the last few hundred years. Interesting times we live in.

New comment by mentat in "White hat hacker awarded $2M for fixing ETH-creation bug"

mentat — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 15:43:31 +0000

I don't think big bounties are capital gains.

New comment by mentat in "Reasons for servers to support IPv6"

mentat — Sat, 29 Jan 2022 16:43:14 +0000

What kind of firewall work didn't have default drop? Once you take that off the table you really do have a problem but I've only seen that one in 20 years of professional work.

New comment by mentat in "Hellofresh employees' open salary initiative"

mentat — Sat, 15 Jan 2022 18:02:15 +0000

It's plenty for people who already have a pile of cash. That seems a bit problematic right?

New comment by mentat in "Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects"

mentat — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 14:30:46 +0000

Thank you for your straightforward appraisal. Makes me take Matrix a lot more seriously.

New comment by mentat in "Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again"

mentat — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 22:39:49 +0000

You don't have health checks?

New comment by mentat in "Pfizer and Biontech provide update on Omicron variant"

mentat — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 14:53:01 +0000

How can you look at rate and range of mutation and make blithe comments on how many will die based on original covid rates?