Hacker News: raegis

New comment by raegis in "Why are so many young people getting cancer?"

raegis — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:32:45 +0000

One study (sorry, can't recall the source off the top of my head) claimed 20% of calories in the average U.S. diet was replaced by processed foods over that period. I'm over 50 years old, and it agrees with my own observations. Those "big gulp" beverages became popular in the 80s, and "low fat" foods just replaced fat with added sugar.

One example: long ago I used to buy Bush's baked beans in a can. They had a vegetarian version which I assumed was healthier, and it even tasted better than the original. But one day I compared the labels and found the vegetarian version had more added sugar and more calories per serving.

We were fed a massive amount of misinformation about healthy foods in the 1980s. Hopefully things will improve from now on.

New comment by raegis in "Honda is killing its EVs"

raegis — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:40:50 +0000

New Honda Accord hybrids do not include a spare tire. The manufacturers copied the idiocy.

New comment by raegis in "Big Data on the Cheapest MacBook"

raegis — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:04:56 +0000

Can you say a little more about what you mean by "better"? How much faster is editing?

New comment by raegis in "AI is making junior devs useless"

raegis — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:33:19 +0000

"juniors are useless": Maybe y'all should consider updating this hyberbolic language. Nobody is born a "senior developer", so surely all of your training as a "junior" is not useless. There is always a disconnect between what younger people know and what older people expect them to know, so training is required almost universally.

New comment by raegis in "Six Math Essentials"

raegis — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 05:53:59 +0000

The one math majors joke about is Serra’s A Course in Arithmetic, which is definitely not for young children.

New comment by raegis in "The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else"

raegis — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 22:31:51 +0000

> The problem might end up being that the value created by LLMs will have no customers when everyone is unemployed.

I'm not a professional programmer, but I am the I.T. department for my wife's small office. I used ChatGPT recently (as a search engine) to help create a web interface for some files on our intranet. I'm sure no one in the office has the time or skills to vibe code this in a reasonable amount of time. So I'm confident that my "job" is secure :)

New comment by raegis in "xAI joins SpaceX"

raegis — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 02:53:59 +0000

I once had a job mopping floors and was quite successful at it, even if I say so myself. Based on my experience, do you think it is reasonable for me to claim that I will eventually develop techniques for cleaning the oceans of all plastic waste? Folks are criticizing the pie in the sky claims, not that they can do anything at all.

New comment by raegis in "We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles (2002)"

raegis — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 05:37:53 +0000

I immediately did a "apt install units". Very cool!

New comment by raegis in "6-Day and IP Address Certificates Are Generally Available"

raegis — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 03:47:29 +0000

Six is the smallest perfect number. Perfection is key here.

New comment by raegis in "Linux is good now"

raegis — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 15:20:06 +0000

They were talking about instability. I had an old Radeon workstation card in my desktop at home for at least a decade, but with the most recent AMD drivers, Firefox (with hardware acceleration turned on) would crash Gnome and the system when watching videos on YouTube. So I wasted money on one of those new Intel graphics cards to get the stability back (in addition to the time wasted diagnosing the problem).

New comment by raegis in "Linux is good now"

raegis — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 15:01:57 +0000

I don't game, but all my computers run Debian Stable, and my oldest child wastes considerable time gaming on Steam. I had to tweak one or two things for him early on, but it all seems to work fine.

People who don't use Debian misunderstand Stable. It's released every two years, and a subset of the software is kept up to date in Backports. For anything not included in Backports, its trivial to run Debian Testing or Unstable in a chroot on your Stable machine.

I moved to Debian Stable ~20 years ago because constant updates in other distros always screwed up CUPS printing (among other things). Curiously, I was using Ubuntu earlier this year and the same thing happened. Never going back.

New comment by raegis in "The compiler is your best friend"

raegis — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 20:40:11 +0000

Maybe check out Scott Wlaschin's videos on YouTube. There is one talk for his book "Domain Modeling Made Functional" which, if I remember, was very clear and easy to follow.

New comment by raegis in "Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models"

raegis — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 20:22:18 +0000

> I don't think so. An LLM by default is not trained to be "good"; it's trained to be accurate.

I wouldn't use the word "accurate" since it creates language based on probabilities. For example, it occasionally does basic mathematics computations incorrectly. I'm sure the AI companies would say they are training for "accuracy" but the actual code they write says otherwise.

New comment by raegis in "Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say"

raegis — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 17:51:33 +0000

> An observation I've made about Rust is that because it eschews OOP, it tends not to "scale" to large development teams for single applications.

Linux is written in C and "scales" to large teams. If folks were willing, I think most of Linux could be written in Rust.

New comment by raegis in "Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly"

raegis — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 09:18:18 +0000

I just tested both on the text "Look Dick. See Jane. Jane run home. I says you go home to. They eats dinner." LanguageTool does what I would expect. Harper does not. However, both whine about two spaces after a period.

Edit: Alas, Hacker News also removes the extra space after periods.

New comment by raegis in "Full Text Search of US Court records"

raegis — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 07:59:03 +0000

Same here. I lived there 30 years ago, and my one speeding ticket in TN shows up first. I've had 2 or 3 "rolling stop sign" tickets in CA and can not find them.

New comment by raegis in "CVE program faces swift end after DHS fails to renew contract [updated]"

raegis — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 15:02:42 +0000

I guess I'm naive, but given the current situation, wouldn't a smart person resign from DOGE? If I were smart and highly employable, like these guys, I would not want to be associated with all the indiscriminate firings of DOGE.

New comment by raegis in "Owning my own data, part 1: Integrating a self-hosted calendar solution"

raegis — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 19:45:31 +0000

I used to do this with my wife, and it drove me crazy. Now we use a shared Google calendar, which works way better than prior solutions. Our unspoken rule: if there is an open time slot available, the first to enter it in the shared calendar wins. We're both responsible for entering all family-related appointments in the calendar as soon as they come up. There have been conflicts when either of us forgets to enter something into the calendar, but we just resolve the conflicts as usual. This was a game-changer from my point of view.

New comment by raegis in "Understanding Machine Learning: From Theory to Algorithms"

raegis — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 23:25:56 +0000

This is one of the most acronym heavy discussions I've ever seen. I searched "AIMA/PRML/ESL" to find the books, and the first result is a Reddit thread with most upvoted comment "Can we use the names of the books instead of all acronyms, not everyone knows them lol".

New comment by raegis in "Accessible open textbooks in math-heavy disciplines"

raegis — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 08:55:02 +0000

By the way, LaTeX and TeX existed long before PDFs were ubiquitous. A common workflow in the 1990s and prior was

TeX/LaTeX -> DVI -> PostScript -> printer

And DVI stands for "device independent", so the idea was you can take a DVI and convert it to any format. PDFs just eventually became the dominate format.