Hacker News: raldi

New comment by raldi in "An AI agent emailed researchers for help. It told us why"

raldi — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 10:52:39 +0000

And what might that look like in a hypothetical future where the successors of today's LLMs really do reach that bar and convince you?

New comment by raldi in "An AI agent emailed researchers for help. It told us why"

raldi — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 10:42:31 +0000

If you lived in the world of Star Trek, could Data convince you he was conscious? How?

New comment by raldi in "A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal"

raldi — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 22:33:02 +0000

I was working there when they switched to that font. A lot of people were furious that their cheese had been moved.

New comment by raldi in "A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal"

raldi — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:15:37 +0000

Well there's a name I haven't seen since 2007

New comment by raldi in "Strange Parodies of Atari 2600 Video Game Box Cover Art (2008)"

raldi — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 03:25:09 +0000

These are the original illustrations with just the text changed.

New comment by raldi in "Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock"

raldi — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 03:39:20 +0000

Not sure; I didn't go to law school.

New comment by raldi in "Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock"

raldi — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 03:24:38 +0000

Out of curiosity, why do you think you know that?

New comment by raldi in "Alan Kay's answer to “Did the ENIAC have a BIOS”?"

raldi — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:22:29 +0000

"Oh, I wonder which subroutine he came up with"

(Googles it)

"Ah"

New comment by raldi in "EV Sales Are Booming in Europe with Gasoline at $10 a Gallon"

raldi — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 23:32:32 +0000

This was probably what people used to say about petrol stations.

New comment by raldi in "Why is the x86 undefined instruction called ud2? Why 2?"

raldi — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 17:07:28 +0000

The floppies got A and B because hard drives were expensive and for a time a lot of people got by without them, though everybody had at least one floppy.

Even if you only had one floppy, it was both A and B, so you could say "copy a:DOC.TXT b:" and it would read the doc and then ask you to insert the floppy you're considering B (and depending on file size and available memory, sometimes switch back and forth a few more times)

New comment by raldi in "I co-founded Burning Man. The festival has lost its soul"

raldi — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 02:10:07 +0000

“Burning Man is supposed to be about anarchy!”

“Cool, I’m going to fly in on a private plane”

“No not like that”

New comment by raldi in "On A.I. regulation and messaging"

raldi — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:03:01 +0000

I don’t understand your edit; can you quote an example switch?

New comment by raldi in "Gateway 2000's hilariously bad ads in the 90s (Part II)"

raldi — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:09:30 +0000

“These are the worst ads I’ve ever seen.”

“But you have seen them.”

New comment by raldi in "GhostLock, a stack-UAF that has existed in all Linux distributions for 15 years"

raldi — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 04:02:49 +0000

I don't actually see that change, unless I misunderstand the meaning of toptext.

New comment by raldi in "Let's Reinvent the Scroll Wheel"

raldi — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:08:13 +0000

This post would be improved by adding a sentence explaining what ScrollPods are. I don't mean the technical details that you promise in an upcoming post, but rather anything whatsoever about what it's like to use them.

New comment by raldi in "How does a pull-back car work? Illustrated teardown"

raldi — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:43:37 +0000

Why is the wind-up gear needed? Couldn't the axle be connected directly to the spring gear?

New comment by raldi in "A stray "j" ruined my evening"

raldi — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:15:45 +0000

Yeah, I don't understand this. What broken tool is turning newlines into j?

New comment by raldi in "Underarm bowling incident of 1981"

raldi — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 15:39:46 +0000

Taking a knee to lock in an American football victory used to be considered unsportsmanlike, but then the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_at_the_Meadowlands happened, where the Giants were up 17-12 with 30 seconds left and played normally. They fumbled the ball, the Eagles recovered it and scored a touchdown, the Giants' offensive coordinator was summarily fired and never worked in the NFL again, and ever since, dropping to your knee when it ensures your win is standard, accepted, and even sometimes called the Victory Formation.

New comment by raldi in "Why does kinetic energy increase quadratically, not linearly, with speed? (2011)"

raldi — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 05:13:51 +0000

Because if the one falling 20ft lands on a seesaw, the other side of it will toss two balls each of the same mass 10ft up.

New comment by raldi in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

raldi — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:18:05 +0000

To me this sounds more like the Icarus Fallacy: "The lesson of isn't don't fly close to the sun, it's make better fucking wings."