Hacker News: profunctor

New comment by profunctor in "Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model"

profunctor — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:32:18 +0000

With a harness you could feed the code to a linter and if there are errors feed that to a model automatically. It’s amazing that the models are good enough that I haven’t bothered doing this

New comment by profunctor in "Gender Equality and Work"

profunctor — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:47:52 +0000

Children will pay nothing, same as very mentally ill or extremely disabled people.

New comment by profunctor in "The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI"

profunctor — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:32:14 +0000

Why? The dashes?

New comment by profunctor in "The happiest I've ever been"

profunctor — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:18:16 +0000

Make it so that they don’t birth and rear but instead birth and then rear with a partner who will contribute equally. Also financial subsidies so that a child becomes at least neutral in terms of cost. Social help to make raising a child less exhausting. Improve the climate to that we can be positive about the child’s future. All difficult but not impossible.

New comment by profunctor in "Claude Chill: Fix Claude Code's flickering in terminal"

profunctor — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 15:40:06 +0000

Perhaps the engineer could sit down for 8 hours a day during the work week. The Silicon Valley obsession with having no life and working weekends is so endemic.

New comment by profunctor in "GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT"

profunctor — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 17:31:06 +0000

Is this proven?

New comment by profunctor in "A Fond Farewell"

profunctor — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 14:11:34 +0000

Book stores did not stop existing. They are everywhere. Book sales are up in recent times.

New comment by profunctor in "Tesla changes meaning of 'Full Self-Driving', gives up on promise of autonomy"

profunctor — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 12:53:26 +0000

The reason is cost, LIDAR is expensive.

New comment by profunctor in "Dotfiles feel too personal to share"

profunctor — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 19:48:44 +0000

This article feels like it’s about what and how this person stores their dotfiles and then has two lines about them feeling too personal to share. I’m surprised it’s so highly voted since it’s basically “I use stow”.

Must be due to the interesting title.

New comment by profunctor in "The case for having roommates even when you can afford to live alone"

profunctor — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 15:10:15 +0000

Having roommates (aka sharing a home) when you leave your family home has been the norm forever. Roommates are not poverty

New comment by profunctor in "What's happening to reading?"

profunctor — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 16:13:54 +0000

How do you expect them to make a living? News and magazines were always behind a paygate.

New comment by profunctor in "Jacksonpollock.org (2003)"

profunctor — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 17:50:34 +0000

Have you seen them in real life? They are much more interesting in person.

New comment by profunctor in "Google kills diversity hiring targets"

profunctor — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 21:19:11 +0000

Ireland did not eliminate its native population.

New comment by profunctor in "What is metformin's secret sauce?"

profunctor — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 21:08:44 +0000

If your pr deploys a machine learning model then that would be a suitable comment. I suppose the idea is similar, we can determine that this drug helps so a (hopefully) statistically significant degree so even if we don’t know how it works we want to use it.

New comment by profunctor in "How I write code using Cursor"

profunctor — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 12:27:50 +0000

If you are using vscode in the copilot chat you can use @workspace and it tries to get the relevant files and context.

New comment by profunctor in "Earthworms have transformed the Isle of Rum's landscape"

profunctor — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 10:34:41 +0000

To be honest after reading this article I think the title should be “Humans have transformed the isle of Rum’s landscape”

New comment by profunctor in "[dead]"

profunctor — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 14:01:58 +0000

Yes and to add on to that, the reason this decision is criticised is that it is very difficult or even impossible to properly blind a puberty blocking study. If you give people fake puberty blockers and then they start to go through puberty blockers they will be aware. Same goes for the reverse.

New comment by profunctor in "[dead]"

profunctor — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 11:59:16 +0000

Edit: I did a bit more reading and had a look at an trans group’s reaction to this report: https://transactual.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/TransActual-Br... . Certainly not as clear cut as the article makes it out to be. It seems like a decent amount of the evidence regarding puberty blockers was excluded for dubious reasons.

Interesting article. I have to say I was shocked at the lack of evidence re puberty blockers. I was not shocked that the nhs was trying to hide any true measurements of the effectiveness of its treatments.

At the end of the day we all want kids to have a good, happy life. If puberty blockers are not some easily reversible intervention with few side effects then maybe we should not give them out. Although I’m not sure that it has been proven to be harmful, more research needed?

I am a bit conflicted with the authors opinion that we should not offer full medical transition to adults. I mostly believe adults should be able to do as they wish if they are not hurting anyone (seemingly in accordance with the authors liberal ideology). But we all have to agree that at 18 we were not always capable of making the right decisions for us. I know trans people who transitioned in their late 20s and they are the most happy they have ever been.

Thankfully we have true scientists happy to do the hard yards of creating reports like the one described. Brave and difficult work.

New comment by profunctor in "Alexei Navalny has died"

profunctor — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 11:49:23 +0000

What do you want to world to do? Russia is already under increasingly crippling sanctions and many countries are funding + arming its opponent in a war.

New comment by profunctor in "UK Fell into Recession in 2023"

profunctor — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 13:04:18 +0000

Free school meals don’t happen everywhere at all times. Food banks are incredibly stretched. Many people are not “reasonable” but have alcohol/ drug dependencies or mental health issues and so their children suffer. Even if they manage to give their kids enough food the rest of their life can be incredibly difficult.