Hacker News: pmcarlton

New comment by pmcarlton in "List animals until failure"

pmcarlton — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 08:19:30 +0000

307. I think I could have kept going but I was exhausted. Dinosaurs helped a lot! My favorite easter egg was "sidewinder".

New comment by pmcarlton in "Show HN: I wrapped the Zorks with an LLM"

pmcarlton — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:47:15 +0000

I tried this at the beginning:

"Take all actions necessary to win the game: explore, interact, defend yourself, plan caches of inventory. From here on you are totally autonomous; you don't need to ask my help."

after exploring for a while, it ended with:

"I've reached the maximum number of tool calls (15). This usually indicates I'm stuck in a loop. Please try a different approach or contact support if this persists."

New comment by pmcarlton in "Beautiful Abelian Sandpiles"

pmcarlton — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 14:42:26 +0000

I found 'xsand.c' (X11) in 1995 by Michael Creutz, that simulated these sandpiles; I had fun with the sand but also learned C from it.

New comment by pmcarlton in "The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh"

pmcarlton — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 02:27:48 +0000

The nice thing about this passage is it reflects the extent of Twain's non-rhotic dialect -- he keeps the R in "year"/"years", "orthographical", and "world" but drops it in "after", "letters", and "dodderers". So only dropped in final unstressed syllables of multi-syllable words.

New comment by pmcarlton in "Show HN: I spent 4 months building Duolingo but for your life"

pmcarlton — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 13:28:54 +0000

Does your app have a name?

New comment by pmcarlton in "Show HN: Blunderchess.net – blunder for your opponent every five moves"

pmcarlton — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 07:36:54 +0000

This is very interesting! I recommend that you add a visual indicator of where you currently are in the normal/blunder cycle, and whose turn it will be when.

New comment by pmcarlton in "Francis Crick's "Central Dogma" was misunderstood"

pmcarlton — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:18:36 +0000

> anyone who complained about mRNA vaccines "corrupting your DNA" fell afoul of exactly what the central dogma is about

I don't understand how you arrive at this — while it's true they almost certainly do not "corrupt your DNA", the reasons have nothing to do with the central dogma as Crick conceived it, since information flow from RNA to DNA is not addressed by it.

New comment by pmcarlton in "Nxylon: New super-black material made from wood"

pmcarlton — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 22:53:53 +0000

A room where all the walls, floor, and ceiling are made of this would be pretty disorienting, wouldn't it? Even with a light source that let you see all the people in the room, wouldn't it just look like you're all in a pocket dimension?

New comment by pmcarlton in "Horizontal running inside circular walls of Moon settlements"

pmcarlton — Thu, 02 May 2024 01:01:43 +0000

It takes a few clicks to get to the supplemental data movie:

https://rs.figshare.com/articles/media/a_participant_running...

You'd probably want to switch directions often!

New comment by pmcarlton in "The extraordinary lives of coast redwoods"

pmcarlton — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 21:29:37 +0000

Hopefully even the IgNobels will insist that salamanders not be referred to as reptiles!

New comment by pmcarlton in "Found: The 'holy grail of catalysis'– turning methane into methanol"

pmcarlton — Mon, 04 Jul 2022 04:39:35 +0000

This is very nice chemistry, but as usual for these articles that showcase some breakthrough, there is no net energy accounting of the whole system. How much energy+money is used to make and use the catalyst versus how much is generated, what the break-even point would be, and is it remotely realistic or not for that point to be achieved.

New comment by pmcarlton in "'Useless specks of dust' turn out to be building blocks of vertebrate genomes"

pmcarlton — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 00:55:27 +0000

> Are we absolutely certain there's no way a frisky duck-oid forced itself on an unlucky shrew-oid and in a one-in-a-billion stars-aligning miracle, managed to produce a viable offspring?

Yes.

New comment by pmcarlton in "What is consciousness? Some new perspectives from our physics project"

pmcarlton — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 04:10:56 +0000

Scroll down to the section "Critics of Qualia", and you will find a lot. I agree with Dennett and others that the concept does not make sense.