Hacker News: nikitau

New comment by nikitau in "We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git"

nikitau — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 09:39:58 +0000

That works under the assumption of the "wisdom of the markets", and we assume VC possesses that wisdom, but laid bare it's just as vulnerable to cronyism as any other institution.

New comment by nikitau in "Peptides: where to begin?"

nikitau — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:56:06 +0000

I have the same feeling about the whole discussion. I know that colloquially we use terms like "protein" to refer to dietary protein rather than the class of mollecules.

But the way "peptide" is used by all the bro/gal-science influencers that push them online makes it blatantly obvious that they have next to no idea what they're talking about.

New comment by nikitau in "I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job"

nikitau — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 06:55:58 +0000

Great stuff. Would make Kafka blush.

New comment by nikitau in "The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying"

nikitau — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:37:53 +0000

Roguelike/lites are is of the most popular genres of indie games nowadays. One of it's main characteristics is randomization and procedural generation.

New comment by nikitau in "Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990"

nikitau — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 07:04:24 +0000

There's also a whole, albeit niche, board game genera of so called 18xx game (eg. 1889 Shikoku) that deal with the economic aspects of 19th century railroads.

Usually dry as sand, but some of the heaviest games out there in terms of complexity.

New comment by nikitau in "uBlock filter list to hide all YouTube Shorts"

nikitau — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 07:38:45 +0000

Nice. I've also been doing this for a while too. I don't like to depend on a lot of addons, so I find the ublock only implementation of it quite elegant and fast. I also try to use filters nowadays to block other types of dark patterns (eg. Infinite scroll recommendations). It's surprising how much you can de-enshittify the modern corporate internet by just blocking tags with some css path filters.

New comment by nikitau in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me"

nikitau — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 23:04:32 +0000

I have a feeling OP used the phrase as a nod to "stochastic terrorism", which would make sense in this instance.

New comment by nikitau in "Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC"

nikitau — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 07:27:48 +0000

And not to mention that a C compiler is something we have literally 50 years worth of code for. I still seriously doubt the ability of LLMs to tackle truly new problems.

New comment by nikitau in "Heritability of intrinsic human life span is about 50%"

nikitau — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 06:21:58 +0000

Maybe I should have been more explicit that here "variance explained by" is used quite literally with the meaning it has in statistical modeling. I get that you meant it in a "correlation not causation" way, but "correlation" in the context of statistics is a loaded term. Interpretability of heritability is difficult in general. Most people struggle with it. But if it truly were 100% (rarely is if ever) it would imply causation solely from genetic factors. Causation from both genetics and environment is always there - heritability just seeks to formalize the measure of proportion.

New comment by nikitau in "Heritability of intrinsic human life span is about 50%"

nikitau — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 17:09:16 +0000

In (quantitative) genetics literature, heritability is usually defined (simplifying a bit) as the proportion of variance of a trait (lifespan, height, etc), in a population, that can be explained by genetics. The rest, by environmental factors, or error.

If height were a 100% heritability means that all differences in height between individuals would be explainable by genetics.

New comment by nikitau in "MicroPythonOS graphical operating system delivers Android-like user experience"

nikitau — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 22:22:24 +0000

Amazing. We have actually gone full circle reactionary on the typing debate where duck typing is considered the "traditional" way by some.

New comment by nikitau in "Giving university exams in the age of chatbots"

nikitau — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 10:19:23 +0000

Open book exams are not a new thing and I've often had them for STEM disciplines (maths and biology). Depending on the subject, you will often fail those unless you had a good prior understanding of the material.

If you can pass an exam just by googling something, it means you're just testing rote-memorization rather, and maybe a better design is needed where synthesis and critical thinking skills are evaluated more actively.

New comment by nikitau in "Box64 and RISC-V in 2024: What It Takes to Run the Witcher 3 on RISC-V"

nikitau — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 17:32:18 +0000

I'm not very familiar with the ecosystem, but I have used this on an RPi4 to run some games through wine.

I'm wondering, how's the landscape nowadays. Is this the leading project for x86 compatibility on ARM? With the rising popularity of the architecture for consumer platforms, I'd guess companies like Valve would be interested in investing in these sort of translation layers.