Hacker News: sam_bristow

You have to beat the models at something

sam_bristow — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 03:11:30 +0000

Article URL: https://www.seangoedecke.com/you-have-to-beat-the-models-at-something/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49495350

Points: 41

# Comments: 8

New comment by sam_bristow in "Orbital Construction Pioneers"

sam_bristow — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 10:11:24 +0000

Are they planning to pull a Jimmy Hofa with Jesus...

New comment by sam_bristow in "The Great Automatic Grammatizator (1954) [pdf]"

sam_bristow — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:15:02 +0000

A mechanically-minded man reasons that the rules of grammar are fixed by certain, almost mathematical principles. By exploiting this idea, he is able to create a mammoth machine that can write a prize-winning novel in roughly fifteen minutes. The story ends on a fearful note, as more and more of the world's writers are forced into licensing their names—and all hope of human creativity—to the machine.

The Great Automatic Grammatizator (1954) [pdf]

sam_bristow — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:15:02 +0000

Article URL: https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1953-dahl-thegreatautomaticgrammatizator.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48918194

Points: 12

# Comments: 2

Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

sam_bristow — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:38:11 +0000

Article URL: https://web.mit.edu/nelsonr/www/Repenning=Sterman_CMR_su01_.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498385

Points: 793

# Comments: 263

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

sam_bristow — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 01:32:14 +0000

Wait, are these the same GPUs that were diverted from Tesla into xAI a couple of years ago?

New comment by sam_bristow in "Castor: CERN Advanced STORage Manager"

sam_bristow — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:07:17 +0000

The linked page seems to think it does.

"As of June 29th 2020, CTA, the CERN Tape Archive, started to be operated as the successor of CASTOR and gradually replaced it."

New comment by sam_bristow in "Jira Is Turing-Complete"

sam_bristow — Mon, 25 May 2026 20:17:14 +0000

I think that a large part of Atlassian's problem is their network of extension vendors. Every time you look at a feature request for simple things like "as a user I'd like to see a total of the worklog hours I've added to tickets this week" you get a chorus of vendors popping up to sell you their $10/month plugin that approximately covers your request.

If Atlassian actually fixed these papercuts their product would be better but they wouldn't be getting a cut of all subscriptions from the dozens of plugins people install to make it a usable tool.

New comment by sam_bristow in "Jira Is Turing-Complete"

sam_bristow — Mon, 25 May 2026 20:07:51 +0000

Someone should chuck a clean-up ticket on the backlog.

New comment by sam_bristow in "The Self-Cancelling Subscription"

sam_bristow — Sat, 09 May 2026 08:55:58 +0000

It's a completely different failure mode, but this reminded me of an infuriating situation I had a while ago with single-use URLs and safe-links functionality in MS Outlook. I can't remember the exact details but the gist was that Outlook would replace the actual URL with an indirection which would scan the page to check it was safe when you clicked. The result was that every time I would request an activation link it would be expired by the time I clicked it. I ended up having to reverse engineer the safe-links encoding algorithm to get the original URL. I wasted hours.

New comment by sam_bristow in "Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons"

sam_bristow — Mon, 04 May 2026 09:02:36 +0000

No, but it seems to be par for the course for enterprise software.

New comment by sam_bristow in "GitHub Stacked PRs"

sam_bristow — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 02:31:59 +0000

Any idea if their internal version has improved dramatically since they stopped maintaining the public version?

New comment by sam_bristow in "GitHub Stacked PRs"

sam_bristow — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 02:10:27 +0000

What does Facebook use internally these days. I'm amazed that the state of review tools is still at or behind what we had a decade ago for the most part.

New comment by sam_bristow in "Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years"

sam_bristow — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:43:45 +0000

I believe that once the OpenBSD team started cleaning up some of the other gross coding style stuff as part of their fork into LibreSSL that even fairly simplistic static analysis tools could spot the underlying bugs that caused heartbleed.

New comment by sam_bristow in "Why New Zealand is seeing an exodus of over-30s"

sam_bristow — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 08:11:41 +0000

I'll give you most of those criticisms, but I'm a little surprised you think our tax system is overly complicated. For the vast majority of people it's pretty much just a progressive PAYE income tax handled by your employer and a flat 15% GST/VAT on purchases without all the carve outs that seem common elsewhere.

Genuinely curious what I'm missing.

New comment by sam_bristow in "Ada 2022"

sam_bristow — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 21:27:38 +0000

Assuming your discomfort is around the defense side of things here's an example of a diving reberather system using Spark/Ada from a while back.

https://youtu.be/zL9vVs5vHuQ?si=-thG-FkelkW6oFfb

New comment by sam_bristow in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

sam_bristow — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:31:56 +0000

One of my the papers I share around a lot is "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2002)"[1]. I like it because it's not purely about software so the examples resonate better with some exec level people in other teams I work with.

[1]https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1167285

New comment by sam_bristow in "uBlock filter list to hide all YouTube Shorts"

sam_bristow — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 23:55:37 +0000

I currently pay for YouTube premium but I'm strongly considering stopping again. For me it's a combination of prices creeping up (small part) and the worsening UX and engagement-bait (big part). It's the same reason I dropped Spotify a few years ago.

New comment by sam_bristow in "Show HN: A 45x45 Connections Puzzle To Commemorate 2025=45*45"

sam_bristow — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 07:08:32 +0000

2025 had a bunch of bits of fun mathematical trivia:

45² = 45 x 45 = 2025

Also,

9² x 5² = 2025

40² + 20² + 5² = 2025

My favourite?

1³+2³+3³+4³+5³+6³+7³+8³+9³ = 2025

New comment by sam_bristow in "Blue-Green Marker Light Standard for Autonomous Vehicles Gets Approved"

sam_bristow — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 07:38:18 +0000

I imagine pink is considered too close to red tail lights.