Hacker News: nazgul17

New comment by nazgul17 in "PopuLoRA: Co-Evolving LLM Populations for Reasoning Self- Play"

nazgul17 — Wed, 20 May 2026 22:59:45 +0000

Is my understanding right that the system is limited by the capability of teachers to solve their own problems? The TrueSkill of teachers doesn't seem to increase all that much, but I suppose TrueSkill works like that if the whole population gets better.

New comment by nazgul17 in "When life gives you lemons, write better error messages"

nazgul17 — Wed, 13 May 2026 05:05:04 +0000

You can have both of you provide an error code that your support team can look up in the logs to find the complete error message.

New comment by nazgul17 in "David Attenborough's 100th Birthday"

nazgul17 — Sat, 09 May 2026 01:51:09 +0000

Ahem did you know David wasn't always 100 years old, and that in the past he worked on the field?

New comment by nazgul17 in "Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data"

nazgul17 — Fri, 08 May 2026 01:39:34 +0000

To be fair to the idea, though, while this would make individual instances less secure, it would drastically decrease the leverage for the work bad actors put in.

There is a saying in the software security industry that (I'm paraphrasing from rusty memories) a system is secure if the cost of hacking it is higher than the value it protects.

Each system being completely distinct from another means that the cost of hacking the average student goes up by 9000 (from the article, Canvas is used by 9000 schools).

Still not saying that rolling out your own is the preferred solution, but the idea is not as ludicrous as it would seem, and should definitely be entertained and discussed, at least.

New comment by nazgul17 in "Is my blue your blue?"

nazgul17 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 05:00:42 +0000

Reminds me of the discussions with my wife. She is from Japan and, over there, you cross a traffic light when it's "blue". IIRC, the word was chosen before international agreements, and the colour has shifted towards green since, but it's still more blueish than in other countries. And they still call it "blue".

New comment by nazgul17 in "Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics"

nazgul17 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 03:41:03 +0000

The title makes it sound like a worldwide claim. I understand this forum is USA centric, but we could perhaps add a qualifier in the title?

New comment by nazgul17 in "Laws of Software Engineering"

nazgul17 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:43:12 +0000

I think the general wisdom in that scenario is to keep them around until they get in the way. Let them provide a bit of value until they start being a cost.

New comment by nazgul17 in "Copilot edited an ad into my PR"

nazgul17 — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:51:20 +0000

> The goal was to help developers

Is Microsoft receiving payments for these?

New comment by nazgul17 in "I decompiled the White House's new app"

nazgul17 — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 03:02:52 +0000

GP was arguing against the OP, not a comment, and AI written posts are fair game.

Also, the comment you responded to was criticizing the attack to the substance of the post based on who/what wrote is. The comment neologism actually fits, IMO.

New comment by nazgul17 in "Don't YOLO your file system"

nazgul17 — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 04:37:45 +0000

Agree with the sentiment! But "securing ... in all ways possible"? I know many people who would choose "password" as their password in 2026. The better of the bunch will use their date of birth, and maybe add their name for a flourish.

/rant

New comment by nazgul17 in "What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves"

nazgul17 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 06:51:10 +0000

Is it a good proxy, though? My intuition is that many economic effects play out very differently if they are limited to one country vs the whole world.

To make this more concrete, tax havens only work because most countries keep producing for real. AI will take all jobs, not just Angolan jobs.

New comment by nazgul17 in "Google Workspace CLI"

nazgul17 — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 05:43:53 +0000

Not everyone has or wants yet another package manager in their system.

New comment by nazgul17 in "Setting up phones is a nightmare"

nazgul17 — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 22:38:23 +0000

*Samsung phones. Known for a long time for their crapware infested devices. At the other end of the spectrum, Pixel phones are quite easy and smooth to set up.

New comment by nazgul17 in "I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk"

nazgul17 — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 23:01:49 +0000

This one here is the future I am most scared of.

New comment by nazgul17 in "OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation"

nazgul17 — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 22:29:38 +0000

What makes you think this trend will continue? In a situation with finite resources (eg the number of parameters), the default is to assume things will plateau.

New comment by nazgul17 in "What does " 2>&1 " mean?"

nazgul17 — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 11:30:07 +0000

No, the complaint is that "the syntax is not intuitive even knowing the simpler forms of redirection": this one isn't a competition of them, but rather an ad-hoc one.

I know about manuals, and I have known this specific syntax for half of my life.

Arrow functions etc are mechanisms in the language. A template you can build upon. This one is just one special operator. Learn it and use it, but it will serve no other purpose in your brain. It won't make anything easier to understand. It won't help you decipher other code. It won't help you draw connections.

New comment by nazgul17 in "What does " 2>&1 " mean?"

nazgul17 — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:16:49 +0000

Trying to be language agnostic: it should be as self-explanatory as possible. 2>&1 is all but.

Why is there a 2 on the left, when the numbers are usually on the right. What's the relationship between 2 and 1? Is the 2 for std err? Is that `&` to mean "reference"? The fact you only grok it if you know POSIX sys calls means it's far from self explanatory. And given the proportion of people that know POSIX sys calls among those that use Bash, I think it's a bit of an elitist syntax.

New comment by nazgul17 in "Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid"

nazgul17 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:01:42 +0000

Do we actually know that goodness/evilness is 0% inheritable?

New comment by nazgul17 in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

nazgul17 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:57:35 +0000

Worth pointing out that calculating p-values on a wide set of metrics and selecting for those under $threshold (called p-hacking) is not statistically sound - who cares, we are not an academic journal, but a pill of knowledge.

The idea is, since data has a ~1/20 chance of having a p < 0.05, you are bound to get false positives. In academia it's definitely not something you'd do, but I think here it's fine.

@OP have you considered calculating Cohen's effect size? p only tells us that, given the magnitude of the differences and the number of samples, we are "pretty sure" the difference is real. Cohen's `d` tells us how big the difference is on a "standard" scale.

New comment by nazgul17 in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"

nazgul17 — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:32:51 +0000

The difference with guns, tobacco and alcohol is huge: all negatives aside, giving kids what they want makes the life of a parent so much easier. Take it away and many parents will fight. Sugar is in the same game.