Hacker News: nmeofthestate

New comment by nmeofthestate in "The foolishness of "natural language programming" (1978)"

nmeofthestate — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 18:08:39 +0000

You misunderstood my comment - I meant that if instructing a programmer to program something is "natural language programming" (what AI agentic coding is), then they had "natural language programming" in 1978. I wasn't saying they had AI in 1978.

New comment by nmeofthestate in "The foolishness of "natural language programming" (1978)"

nmeofthestate — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 08:38:59 +0000

It's the same as "natural language bricklaying" where you make walls appear by speaking instructions to a brickie whom you're paying.

New comment by nmeofthestate in "The foolishness of "natural language programming" (1978)"

nmeofthestate — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 08:35:08 +0000

If AI is natural language programming then they already had it in 1978, because AI is in fact "asking a programmer to write code for you". And you can even ask them to do it at different levels of abstraction!

New comment by nmeofthestate in "What Is Gridifcation"

nmeofthestate — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:05:20 +0000

Pfft - this doesn't make a general point about quantisation - he completely altered the drum part. He didn't just shift things by minute amounts to hit the "exact" timing while maintaining the swing. Of course if you remove swing then it's completely changed - it could also be quantized while maintaining swing.

New comment by nmeofthestate in "Eight Bits of Trust; eMudhra's CA keys cracked in milliseconds"

nmeofthestate — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 11:52:58 +0000

Just seems weird for anyone to focus on trying to crack private keys starting with absurd 8-bit values that "nobody would use for a private key", let alone bother to do it at all, given the search space.

New comment by nmeofthestate in "Eight Bits of Trust: eMudhra's CA keys cracked in milliseconds"

nmeofthestate — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 11:30:47 +0000

I wonder how someone stumbled upon this - maybe leaked by someone inside eMudhra?

Since there's nothing to indicate that the private key was all zeroes and one non-zero lsbyte, and presumably nobody would try to brute-force a private key.

New comment by nmeofthestate in "BBC licence fee to be extended with 'YouTube tax' to force more to pay"

nmeofthestate — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 13:13:44 +0000

If it's government funded from general taxation I don't see how that changes.

New comment by nmeofthestate in "BBC licence fee to be extended with 'YouTube tax' to force more to pay"

nmeofthestate — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 13:12:55 +0000

You currently need a license if you watch live broadcasts on UK TV channels (whatever technology is doing the live streaming), or use the BBC's on demand service iPlayer. You can watch other on demand services such as Netflix, on demand services provided by non-BBC UK TV channels, YouTube, without a license.

New comment by nmeofthestate in "BBC licence fee to be extended with 'YouTube tax' to force more to pay"

nmeofthestate — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 13:09:56 +0000

No you're right. The idea that UK legislators, of all people, would push through ridiculous unenforceable legislation is simply not plausible.

New comment by nmeofthestate in "BBC licence fee to be extended with 'YouTube tax' to force more to pay"

nmeofthestate — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 13:06:28 +0000

I'm so happy to be able to not watch any UK terrestrial television, and avoid having to pay a license fee as a result. It's total shite - when you don't watch it and occasionally witness it in other folk's houses, you really see the decline. Just complete garbage.

I'll be so annoyed if they go ahead with this change and I can no longer avoid funding it.

New comment by nmeofthestate in "California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops"

nmeofthestate — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 10:46:11 +0000

Sour is the word they were going for I think. Wine isn't bitter IME.

New comment by nmeofthestate in "English: A vs. An"

nmeofthestate — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 09:59:55 +0000

A related quirk is English people saying "an hotel" (pronounced an otel). It's a subset, and specifically more popular with English speakers as opposed to non-English British. Also, someone else claimed the English don't say "an historic" - incorrect. Again it's not universal.

New comment by nmeofthestate in "Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption"

nmeofthestate — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 15:04:05 +0000

No I agree with that, but if it's "activists" I would expect them to claim credit otherwise it's all pointless. The same doesn't follow for Russian fuckery, IMO.

New comment by nmeofthestate in "Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption"

nmeofthestate — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:54:18 +0000

Russia spends a huge amount on manipulating western citizens via the internet, let's not play dumb about that. You may not think that it has any effect, but apparently Russian intelligence does.

New comment by nmeofthestate in "Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption"

nmeofthestate — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:52:04 +0000

>Might be related to today's yearly 'Prinsjesdag' in the Netherlands:

Russia may have heard about that annual event as well, of course.

New comment by nmeofthestate in "Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption"

nmeofthestate — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:48:31 +0000

We should see some claim of responsibility if it was indeed anyone other than the usual suspects.

New comment by nmeofthestate in "Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption"

nmeofthestate — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:45:29 +0000

Explosive-equipped drone attack on airport - Russia! Numerous arson attacks on businesses supplying Ukraine - Russia! Country invaded, cities destroyed, tens of thousands of civilians killed, raped, tortured - Russia.

New comment by nmeofthestate in "I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea"

nmeofthestate — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 11:56:10 +0000

Mountainous jungle terrain?

New comment by nmeofthestate in "Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?"

nmeofthestate — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:39:00 +0000

You should just ask AI, since you used AI to make the encoder and write your HN post.

New comment by nmeofthestate in "Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude"

nmeofthestate — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:05:07 +0000

ChatGPT 5.6-Sol via CoPilot is absolutely fine in my experience - no weird LLM-ese.