Hacker News: owyn

New comment by owyn in "Show HN: Hacker News archive (47M+ items, 11.6GB) as Parquet, updated every 5m"

owyn — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 22:29:27 +0000

That's a good point, and I think this will be my last post on this site. I never added much value anyway.

Musk says Tesla's chip fab project to launch in seven days

owyn — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 14:12:42 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/musk-says-teslas-gigantic-chip-fab-project-launch-seven-days-2026-03-14/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47376905

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by owyn in "I made a programming language with M&Ms"

owyn — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 01:39:34 +0000

the bold section headers and bullet points. but who cares. i don't.

New comment by owyn in "I made a programming language with M&Ms"

owyn — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:35:28 +0000

This is AI slop but mildly amusing. Brainfuck did it first.

New comment by owyn in "US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February"

owyn — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:19:22 +0000

Yeah, the scam is to inflate the value of your properties, then claim a write-off when it fails. For "some reason" you can even use other people's money for the investments and claim the losses for yourself. Then you can use that as a deduction when you actually make money again. One scammer in particular pulled this trick for 10 years, rolling it forward and filing a $916 million loss with the IRS in 1995.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/07/us/politics/d...

New comment by owyn in "Baby chicks pass the bouba-kiki test, challenging a theory of language evolution"

owyn — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 06:33:17 +0000

The word "challenge" in the article title is clickbait. I guess the assumption challenged is that this measurable effect is for humans only because we are so special? Good as a headline for a non-science audience that mostly doesn't believe in evolution. It's pretty obvious that our auditory and visual systems are older than humanity as a species. I'd be surprised if the results were anything but confirming. Chickens are not going to learn English. Other species use sound to communicate and that this effect is measurable is pretty cool.

New comment by owyn in "Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems"

owyn — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 01:14:14 +0000

I think the problem is just not enough training on that specific language because it's proprietary. Most useful Mathematica code is on someone's personal computer, not GitHub. They can build up a useful set of training data, some benchmarks, a contest for the AI companies to score high on, because they do love that kind of thing.

But for most internet applications (as opposed to "math" stuff) I would think Python is still a better language choice.

New comment by owyn in "DHS keeps trying and failing to unmask anonymous ICE critics online"

owyn — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 18:37:41 +0000

Yes they did, and that's the problem. Some people support this. It's easier to rile up hatred than to fix any real problems. When you spend years framing ALL immigration as illegal, you get a lot of people (like some of my family members) who will say "well, they ARE here illegally so they just need to enforce the law". And yes there are illegal immigrants in this country, but I don't think this kind of violence is the right solution.

New comment by owyn in "I rebooted my social life"

owyn — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 18:10:06 +0000

It's a "meet 5 random people for dinner/drinks" app. Actually sounds like it could be fun.

New comment by owyn in "Show HN: BusterMQ, Thread-per-core NATS server in Zig with io_uring"

owyn — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 03:03:48 +0000

Downvote for this web site is a horror movie billboard and zig already has a build system which is zig and that's one of it's neat features.

New comment by owyn in "Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)"

owyn — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 04:33:39 +0000

Shadow of Mordor (and the sequel) had something called the "Nemesis" system where some of the Orc Captains you kill (and the ones who kill you) might survive off screen and get stronger and come back with scars and buffs and new nicknames. It didn't do the village/town stuff you are talking about. They talked about doing it in future games but never did.

Didn't find any good technical write-ups. Although apparently it's "patented".

Here's a decent video overview. I hate that everything is video now but this is the world we live in I suppose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fh5qc-ZnaM

New comment by owyn in "Nabokov's guide to foreigners learning Russian"

owyn — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 03:49:40 +0000

Same thing with learning Japanese. Just memorize the symbols. It's phonetic. Of course there are complex meanings and subtleties but that's just how we all play with language. As a foreigner your pronunciation can be good once you get the basics. But you have to match the sounds with the letters. We all did it once. We can do it again.

New comment by owyn in "A centennial look back at Edward Gorey's macabre art and guarded life"

owyn — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 03:22:43 +0000

Gorey was a unique artist. Have had his Amphigorey books on the shelf since I was a youthful edgy goth but I will crack them open again tonight. "The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic Work by Ogdred Weary" is a masterpiece of innuendo from 1961 and that article doesn't even mention it in a story that talks about him being gay though? Lazy journalism.

The introduction says:

"For Others"

The first line is:

"Alice was eating grapes in the park, when Herbert, an extremely well-endowed young man, introduced himself to her".

I was going to type in some more but it is well... pornographic in an interesting way. There is not a single bad word or naked picture, just allowing your own brain to fill in the details with the nuances of language.

I'm sure the book mentions it but some editor must have removed it because of the title.

Downvoting for paywall though. I dunno. Ban WP links?

New comment by owyn in "The Number That Turned Sideways"

owyn — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 04:49:14 +0000

The original post is written by AI so I will read it briefly, but your comment is fascinating. I got through undergrad math by brute force memorization and taking the C. Or sometimes the C-. The underlying concepts were never really clear to me. I did take a good online calculus class later that helped.

However, I have questions: "Turns out the quantity they needed exists, but couldn't be described in their notation" What is this about? Sounds interesting.

"Statisticians just said "oh, that function" and gave it a new name." What is this?

I never understood there is a relationship between quadratic equations and some kind of underlying mathematic geometric symmetry. Is there a good intro to this? I only memorized how to solve them.

And the existential question. Is there a good way to teach this stuff?

New comment by owyn in "Strace-macOS: A clone of the strace command for macOS"

owyn — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 09:33:59 +0000

dtruss requires disabling SIP. This seems like a better option for basic "what just happened?" debugging.

New comment by owyn in "The von Neumann bottleneck is impeding AI computing?"

owyn — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 22:26:57 +0000

If you follow the press release rabbit a few clicks, there's an article in Science describing the NorthPole chip architecture in more detail:

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adh1174

Also they've been working on this for 10+ years so it's not exactly new news.

New comment by owyn in "SQLite's File Format"

owyn — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 17:53:12 +0000

Oh! RDB was the first database I worked with. I forgot all about it. I do remember refactoring the data layer so that it also worked with Berkeley DB, which is also owned by Oracle now. Or maybe it was the other way around? There was no SQL involved in that particular application so it was just a K/V store. Working with a local data file was the primary design goal, no client/server stuff was even on the radar. SQLite would have been perfect if it had existed.

New comment by owyn in "The Two Towers MUD"

owyn — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 18:12:29 +0000

Wow, I spent many hours on those Battletech Muds. It did have a cool realtime battle system but the faction vs faction wars never happened as far as I remember. There were several offshoots, including some that did 24/7 "live" battles that focused on one planet which was much more scalable. Organizing a scouting expedition was pretty fun. There was a Solaris world too. I ran the Kurita mechwarrior school for a while, doing new pilot training, and I was one of the people who could log in to the TK faction leader account. But then I graduated and got a job haha.

New comment by owyn in "Reservoir Sampling"

owyn — Thu, 08 May 2025 17:46:18 +0000

Yeah, this was a google interview question for me too. I didn't know the algorithm and floundered around trying to solve the problem. I came up with the 1/n and k/n selection strategy but still didn't get the job lol. I think the guy who interviewed me was just killing time until lunch.

I like the visualizations in this article, really good explanation.

New comment by owyn in "What It Takes to Defend a Cybersecurity Company from Today's Adversaries"

owyn — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 05:06:43 +0000

I haven't heard of that one. What is RSA time?