Hacker News: nurbl

New comment by nurbl in "How We Broke Top AI Agent Benchmarks: And What Comes Next"

nurbl — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 07:47:31 +0000

I think the point of the saying is that as systems tend to expand, sooner or later we become part of them. That means that we can no longer see them from outside, we're now part of the system and our goals and the system's goals will align. Then the purpose of the system can't be anything else than what it does.

New comment by nurbl in "Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died"

nurbl — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:34:26 +0000

Carrion Comfort was my introduction to Dan Simmons, I loved it. Not as good as some of his later stuff but it's really inventive, and never boring.

New comment by nurbl in "Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died"

nurbl — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:31:18 +0000

Well there was no way the show would be quite as good as the book. But I was still pleasantly surprised, it was definitely better than the average TV adaptation. The actors were very good.

New comment by nurbl in "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

nurbl — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:49:32 +0000

Yes. There will always be people who see opportunity in using it destructively. Best case scenario is that others will use it to counter that. But it is usually easier to destroy than to protect. So we could have a constant AI war going on somewhere in the clouds, occasionally leaking new disasters into the human world.

New comment by nurbl in "Video Games as Art"

nurbl — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 12:51:35 +0000

Interesting. I like the discussion about "Shadow of the Colossus", it's one of those few games that goes its own way and really sticks with you.

Also, weirdly, the article references Brian Moriarty's "Who buried Paul?" but not "An Apology for Roger Ebert" which seems even more relevant :D

New comment by nurbl in "Comic-Con Bans AI Art After Artist Pushback"

nurbl — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 16:33:28 +0000

I think the effort is indeed a big piece of it. For example, consider sports. I don't imagine that a lot of sports fans would be interested in watching completely AI-generated video of their favorite teams playing, even if it's totally believable. Surely the main point of the whole thing has something to do with humans at the top of their skill, measuring up against each other, and experiencing it together with them?

For me it's the same with music. I am sure I will be fooled by some AI generated music now and then, but what does that prove?

New comment by nurbl in "Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?"

nurbl — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 12:28:57 +0000

Though in principle they serve similar purposes there are some big differences though. Python with types is still just python. Typescript is a different language from JS (guess it a superset?) and it being controlled by a large company could be considered problematic.

I suppose JS could go in the same direction and adopt the typing syntax from TS as a non-runtime thing. Then the typescript compiler would become something like mypy, an entirely optional part of the ecosystem.

New comment by nurbl in "The React Foundation"

nurbl — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 12:59:26 +0000

I don't have experience from any larger application, but from my smaller usage Preact seems like a drop in replacement. It's been compatible with the react libraries I've tried. It also works great with ES modules. So for simple stuff, I think it's worth a try.

New comment by nurbl in "Low-Level Optimization with Zig"

nurbl — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 10:02:51 +0000

I think a better word may be "explicitness". Zig is sometimes verbose because you have to spell things out. Can't say much about Go, but it seems it has more going on under the hood.

New comment by nurbl in "Discovery Coding"

nurbl — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 11:55:48 +0000

I find that I always learn something valuable by diving in and trying ideas out concretely. High-flying plans can also cause a lot of wasted coding on things that won't work out.

New comment by nurbl in "Show HN: Browse Anime from the Terminal"

nurbl — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 15:30:57 +0000

Apart from the benefits you already mentioned, mainly that TUI applications are usually keyboard driven.

New comment by nurbl in "Free Software Needs Free Tools (2010)"

nurbl — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 12:53:02 +0000

Seems to be precisely what "free-rider" means; entities benefiting from public resources without contributing anything back.

New comment by nurbl in "Want to book a Ryanair flight? Prepare for a face scan"

nurbl — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 12:31:02 +0000

Possible, but taking the bus halfway around the world would also produce a lot of emissions.

New comment by nurbl in "Why I hate the index finger (1980)"

nurbl — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 08:41:33 +0000

The hammer example made me remember something. I did some Aikido long ago, and the instructor spent quite a lot of time showing us how to grip things like sticks. As I remember it, instead of the instinctive way of just forming a fist around it, we should instead start from the little finger, wrapping the fingers one by one, but letting the index finger actually rest more along the handle than wrapping it. That way, supposedly, the grip is just as good, but more flexible and the index finger can help with control.

New comment by nurbl in "The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)"

nurbl — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 13:51:08 +0000

Maybe the story you're referring to is https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

New comment by nurbl in "I've always liked physics games so let's do another"

nurbl — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 09:55:37 +0000

Tricky Towers is fun and while it has various silly features that adds randomness (e.g. wind), it still rewards skill enough to feel fair.

It follows the tetris logic of pieces staying in the "grid", until they touch another piece. Then they turn into "physical" 2d pieces with weight, friction etc. So it's very much like tetris in the beginning but unless you keep your tower very regular, it becomes increasingly harder to place new items. I bet it was a lot of work to tune the physics engine!

New comment by nurbl in "Money Buys Happiness, Even If You're Already Rich"

nurbl — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 18:11:36 +0000

I think a contributing factor is our obsession with measurement. Happiness is hard to prove, and having money is hard to fake. So money can become a proxy for happiness even though it may only be an enabler.

New comment by nurbl in "They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pascal 7"

nurbl — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 13:26:59 +0000

Visidata is a relatively modern example.

New comment by nurbl in "FastHTML – Modern web applications in pure Python"

nurbl — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 13:51:23 +0000

Looks neat! It seems at least superficially similar to https://github.com/getludic/ludic which I quite like too.

New comment by nurbl in "CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops"

nurbl — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 19:06:47 +0000

"Antifragile" is even more focused around this.