Hacker News: pianom4n

New comment by pianom4n in "Show HN: Pardonned.com – A searchable database of US Pardons"

pianom4n — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:43:57 +0000

> without needing so much as a simple majority confirmation vote in the House or Senate

This is intentional. Pardons are part of the checks and balances against the legislative branch.

New comment by pianom4n in "The Oxford Comma – Why and Why Not (2024)"

pianom4n — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:57:13 +0000

It did introduce ambiguity though. Without the comma it is 100% clear that sentence lists 3 people.

New comment by pianom4n in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

pianom4n — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:13:20 +0000

If they are not on PEDs, yes.

New comment by pianom4n in "Death to Scroll Fade"

pianom4n — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 23:18:25 +0000

Apple pages are _completely_ unusable because of this. If I go to product page I am unable to navigate it to extract information about the product. I give up and leave.

https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/

Try to skim this page to get a sense of how much information is on the page. You can't. 90% of the scroll time is stuck in useless animations.

Every time you scroll down you have to wait for the page to render. We've somehow recreated the dialup experience with single page apps.

Your brain is trained on how scrolling works on 95% of pages. Breaking that patterns causes tons of cognitive overhead. You now have to do a double-take every scroll action when you just want to absorb the contents of the page.

New comment by pianom4n in "19 States approved permanent daylight saving time"

pianom4n — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 19:46:41 +0000

Not really. The equilibrium of removing daylight savings will result in schedules somewhere between DST and Standard Time. This just gets you there faster.

The trade off of having 30-minute time zone offsets probably isn't worth it, but this solution isn't immediately "stupid."

New comment by pianom4n in "Enable CORS for Your Blog"

pianom4n — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 23:03:11 +0000

Seriously. This page terrible with multiple annoying rendering delays, and I'm supposed to care about helping their RSS feeds load faster?

New comment by pianom4n in "I don't know how you get here from “predict the next word”"

pianom4n — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:00:45 +0000

Are you seriously comparing a random hacker to a lifelong academic for their odds of becoming a crypto shill?

New comment by pianom4n in "I don't know how you get here from “predict the next word”"

pianom4n — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 06:51:41 +0000

Do you think the submitter intended this as an ad? His post history doesn't seem suspicious.

Or do you think article's author wrote this an an ad? He's a reputable academic who seems impressed with an AI tool he used and is honestly sharing his thoughts.

For reference he published the 80 page inflation mini-book 2 weeks ago asking for feedback: https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/inflation

New comment by pianom4n in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

pianom4n — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:41:39 +0000

There are times when an em dash can be used in place of a semicolon, but I don't think that's the usual LLM usage. Instead it's replacing a replacing a comma, colon, or period.

Unless you're talking about restructuring your sentences to allow for a semicolon; that's fine.

For example that semicolon could have been an em dash, but I don't think it's the type that LLMs over favor.

New comment by pianom4n in "It's hard to justify Tahoe icons"

pianom4n — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:59:36 +0000

It's hard to take complaints about UI consistency seriously when the cursor is changed for no reason at all (with a barely-different hover state, too).

New comment by pianom4n in "Is your AI system illegal in the EU?"

pianom4n — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 20:57:45 +0000

And a GDP 2/3 the size. And way less than that by disposable income.

Even users from "rich" EU countries are worth ~30% of a US user to most companies.

New comment by pianom4n in "You can't fool the optimizer"

pianom4n — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 20:08:27 +0000

But that's undefined behavior, so the compiler is free to ignore that possibility.

New comment by pianom4n in "Measuring Latency (2015)"

pianom4n — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 19:42:41 +0000

For context this article was written when 95%+ of websites used HTTP 1.1 (and <50% used HTTPS).

New comment by pianom4n in "Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright"

pianom4n — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 19:57:18 +0000

You must never drive on a curvy roads then. Every car I driven waits until the approaching car is fully around the corner, blinding them for a full second before dimming, instead recognizing the headlights around the corner and dimming earlier.

New comment by pianom4n in "The myth of outrunning your diet"

pianom4n — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 14:52:13 +0000

That's running 5 miles a day. Everyday. That takes months of training for an already fit young person to build up to.

90 minutes of extra walking is a lot of time to offset a snack that could be eaten in 1 minute.

New comment by pianom4n in "io_uring is faster than mmap"

pianom4n — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 17:38:43 +0000

The in-memory solution creates a 2nd copy of the data so 50GB doesn't fit in memory anymore. The kernel is forced to drop and then reload part of the cached file.

New comment by pianom4n in "Good EU regulations"

pianom4n — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 01:06:22 +0000

I actually can't tell. The majority of these are literally examples of bad regulations. They have mass appeal without care for 2nd order effects.

The top of the page is a banner rallying against a regulation that would fit right in on the page.

And the fact that the site is a laggy mess just makes it a bit surreal.

New comment by pianom4n in "Should we design for iffy internet?"

pianom4n — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 20:28:38 +0000

Despite the title, the article doesn't talk about "iffy internet" at all. It's all about "slightly slow" internet which is a complete non-issue except for large downloads (e.g. modern games).

Congested and/or weak wifi and cell service are what "iffy" is about. Will a page _eventually_ load if I wait long enough? Or are there 10 sequential requests, 100KBs each, that all have succeed just to show me 2 sentences of text?

New comment by pianom4n in "Someone at YouTube needs glasses"

pianom4n — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 20:22:04 +0000

The dummy "loading" grey boxes it shows are still this size. Such a great "user experience."

New comment by pianom4n in "Street address errors in Google Maps"

pianom4n — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:57:46 +0000

"Is the parcel in the geographical bounds of the city name entered?"

The "city name" on an address isn't really a "city". SFO's address is "San Francisco, CA", but is not within SF city limits.

Queens NY addresses have "cities" that are just neighborhoods.

Applying any kind of logic to addresses will just be a minefield.