Hacker News: riffraff

New comment by riffraff in "Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed"

riffraff — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:24:38 +0000

taxes were very low for the majority of civilization and war was way more prevalent than it is today.

New comment by riffraff in "Lisp's Influence on Ruby"

riffraff — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:50:05 +0000

"Some may say Ruby is a bad rip-off of Lisp or Smalltalk, and I admit that. But it is nicer to ordinary people."

(Matz speaking at the LL2 conference some 20+ years ago)

New comment by riffraff in "Historic co-determination helps monasteries navigate digital change"

riffraff — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 13:56:51 +0000

FWIW, "lay monasteries" and hermitages exist, and there are some religious ones which are not strict about who wants to join, the Bose monastic community[0] comes to mind talking of christianity, but there's plenty for other religions.

[0] https://www.monasterodibose.it/en/

New comment by riffraff in "The Unsung Hero of the Lord of the Rings (2025)"

riffraff — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:55:37 +0000

> overlooked by a huge swathe of readers

I think there is no one who read LoTR and ignored Tom Bombadil. If anything, they give him too much importance.

New comment by riffraff in "Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows"

riffraff — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:37:51 +0000

I think GP meant it's not just "laying around", you have to actively look for books.

When I was a kid I had a ton of books from my parents in the house and when bored I could pick one up.

That's not the same as having a computer, tablet or phone, cause kids will gravitate towards non-reading activities.

(If everyone in the family owns an e-reader this obviously would be a different situation)

New comment by riffraff in "Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows"

riffraff — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 05:45:23 +0000

I disagree, people used to read newspapers and magazines. Even if you were not an intellectual or interested in politics you'd read the sports daily, or the gossip column.

This activity has largely disappeared.

New comment by riffraff in "Google Chrome is killing all uBlock Origin bypasses, Edge, Opera to follow"

riffraff — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:22:43 +0000

Brave has its own ad blocker engine built-in rather than as an extension, and it can reuse uBlock's lists

https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

I use brave on my phone and I can't really tell the difference from desktop browser+UO, so I guess it works well enough.

New comment by riffraff in "Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension"

riffraff — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:20:16 +0000

it _is_ a browser feature for e.g. brave, vivaldi and (experimental, afair) firefox.

Popup blockers were also a differentiator, once.

New comment by riffraff in "FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs"

riffraff — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:57:18 +0000

yeah I think in Italy this was introduced in the security push after 9/11, and in other EU countries I also had to provide an id to get a sim card, tho I'm not sure it's all of them.

New comment by riffraff in "Siri AI"

riffraff — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 07:48:30 +0000

I used LLMs last year to plan an multiple week itinerary through Japan with the family, I wasn't super happy with the result so I tweaked it but they provided a useful template and some surprising ideas.

As you guessed, there's a ton of info in the training data on this topic, but there's some value in being able to see it on one place with different options.

New comment by riffraff in "Job: Head of Stonehenge"

riffraff — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:34:05 +0000

I would love to have "Stonehenge architect" as a job title.

New comment by riffraff in "Italy's Bending Spoons, Owner of AOL and Vimeo, Files for Nasdaq IPO"

riffraff — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:11:37 +0000

why is it courageous?

It seems the perfect time to do it while the market is still bubbly.

New comment by riffraff in "Show HN: I Derived a Pancake"

riffraff — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:39:34 +0000

> This is not a pancake in the modern sense, but it is a batter cooked on a flat hot surface, which is the definition of one.

Are you sure it was a batter and not a dough? That would make it an archaic flatbread rather than pancake :)

(tho I guess cattails have no gluten to make kneading possible, but there are other flatbreads made of roots)

New comment by riffraff in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

riffraff — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 04:12:15 +0000

They won't, SpaceX will weigh less then 1% in most indexes, since they're mostly float adjusted, only NASDAQ will overweight them, but FTSE/MSCI/CRSP/SP will not.

It's still quite some money but it won't crush the market by itself.

New comment by riffraff in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

riffraff — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 04:01:42 +0000

Buy inflation linked bonds? They won't yield much above inflation but if you have >1M that's enough to last through retirement.

New comment by riffraff in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

riffraff — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 03:59:31 +0000

Which perpetual bonds yield 6.5% on a UTC basis?

An announcement from the Steering Council regarding the JIT project

riffraff — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:30:28 +0000

Article URL: https://discuss.python.org/t/an-announcement-from-the-steering-council-regarding-the-jit-project/107638

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48421400

Points: 18

# Comments: 0

New comment by riffraff in "SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P"

riffraff — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 04:27:31 +0000

So they did tweak the rule for total market indexes, just not the "curated" ones.

New comment by riffraff in "SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P"

riffraff — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 04:21:08 +0000

They'll still be included in total market indexes (FTSE, MSCI, CRSP).

As I understand it, VTI will be a major thing.

Still, they're float adjusted (for the most part?).

New comment by riffraff in "SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P"

riffraff — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 04:16:20 +0000

You do realize SpaceX valuation is completely detached from the space business at this point?

Their S1 cites (by memory) a 370B addressable market for space stuff and a 27 trillion for AI.

And for AI they counted all Twitter accounts as grok users.

The Spaces eXploration company was a cool company, but it's not what's being sold to the market now.