Hacker News: schoen

New comment by schoen in "Ask HN: What tech companies do you think have a good moral compass?"

schoen — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 06:23:03 +0000

Gandi SAS (France).

Time and Date AS (Norway).

New comment by schoen in "Pwn.college"

schoen — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 08:33:32 +0000

"The first rule of tautology club is hack the planet"?

New comment by schoen in "My psychophysics as a bilateral cochlear implant user"

schoen — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 05:02:42 +0000

Yes, there's a general voicing assimilation to the preceding phoneme for both -s and -ed! (plus an additional epenthetic vowel insertion if the suffix consonant is too similar to a preceding consonant) It took me a long time to learn this because I am a native speaker and did it automatically without thinking or initially without even noticing that it was realized differently in different contexts in the first place. It's a really fun example of how we can do fieldwork on ourselves (gather a lot of data and try to derive the rule).

New comment by schoen in "My psychophysics as a bilateral cochlear implant user"

schoen — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 21:18:01 +0000

Pretty much all of the difficulty arises from the transliteration of Greek ψ, υ, χ, and φ, and then inconsistent pronunciations of these letters themselves in loanwords (including pronouncing υ as both /aɪ/ and /ɪ/)!

That's not to say that it's not very tricky, just that the difficulty kind of arises from one core reason.

Edit: OK, one s as /s/ after the c and another s as /z/ between vowels is also tricky and doesn't have to do with Greek.

New comment by schoen in "Domain hacks with unusual Unicode characters (2018)"

schoen — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 18:25:00 +0000

Unilever later bought the domain substance.com from my friend. Remarkably, they apparently later let it lapse and someone else registered it. I'd assumed they were going to have a database of chemical substances that were used as ingredients, or something.

New comment by schoen in "Emacs Turns 50"

schoen — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 14:51:45 +0000

It's kind of striking how that joke post about ed (from 1991) presented Emacs as extremely resource-wasteful

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

but I guess trends elsewhere were so keen on adding abstractions that now Emacs is an efficient, parsimonious choice by comparison.

New comment by schoen in "Emacs Turns 50"

schoen — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 14:48:24 +0000

I often thought that a cat could be named /bin/cat. After all, many cats seem to enjoy being in boxes or bins!

New comment by schoen in "Blaise Pascal invented fixed route public transport (2024)"

schoen — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:26:35 +0000

Can I assume you were taking the new electrified Caltrain? It feels a lot nicer than the old diesel Caltrain, including, I think, the comfort of the seats.

Can a good philsophical contribution be made just by asking a question? (2022)

schoen — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 04:17:49 +0000

Article URL: https://philpapers.org/rec/HABCAG

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50239063

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by schoen in "Dungeon Generation in the Gnomish Mines of NetHack"

schoen — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:06:13 +0000

Looking forward to it! I just started my first-ever NetHack 5.0 game to practice a bit.

New comment by schoen in "Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans"

schoen — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:04:30 +0000

I've been working on a theory that a huge fraction of human culture and values could be interpreted as coping mechanisms in the same sense (as making peace with, or finding a way to manage or compromise with, limitations, suffering, or unsatisfactoriness of aspects of life, and concluding that the things thus successfully managed or the means used to cope with them are themselves good). I've been keeping occasional notes for an article on this concept for many years. I particularly don't think that there is only one community, subculture, or ideology that exhibits this psychological tendency.

Maybe someday I can get clearer on this and organize it and write it up!

(Yes, I know about the transhumanist criticism of acceptance of mortality that this LLM's view is more specifically evoking.)

New comment by schoen in "Getting ready to operate GNU Taler in Germany"

schoen — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 18:11:06 +0000

The "fraud" claim is kind of bizarre to me, but it's clear (and not hidden) that Taler intentionally provided less privacy for payees than other designs and systems because of a conscious decision that payees should have less privacy.

I find this objectionable, but not at all deceptive or manipulative.

New comment by schoen in "I can't believe PowerShell is good"

schoen — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 06:21:59 +0000

Introducing natural language uncertainties into a scripting language reminds me of AppleScript, which used almost entirely English words (mainly in sentences or at least verb phrases), but was nonetheless notably definitely not English. It was quite possible to forget at times which English verbs were language keywords and which weren't.

If I remember correctly, AppleScript was inspired by HyperTalk, which also mainly used English keywords in English-inspired syntax, but most HyperTalk wasn't valid AppleScript, and vice versa.

New comment by schoen in "Lula supporters protest against Meta to denounce its 'electoral interference'"

schoen — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 03:52:48 +0000

"Technical error" sounds frustratingly vague and contentless, but it's odd to think about the lack of cultural consensus about whether the ability for others to depict someone with generative AI is more a benefit to him or her, or more a risk. I could imagine someone hearing this and sincerely thinking that Meta was protecting Lula from deepfake attacks (making it slightly harder for people to falsely depict him doing saying embarrassing or offensive things). Uses of AI to mock or attack people often get more attention than uses of AI to praise them.

In the U.S., if someone had programmed a generative AI to be unwilling to depict Obama, I imagine many people would assume that decision was meant to help Obama, not harm him.

New comment by schoen in "Lula supporters protest against Meta to denounce its 'electoral interference'"

schoen — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 03:48:45 +0000

I've heard this theory sincerely expressed from the right about the left and from the left about the right, and I understand that it looks this way to many people, but I suspect it's mainly the out-group homogeneity bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity

New comment by schoen in "Geographical Fun: Being Humourous Outlines of Various Countries (1868)"

schoen — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 21:12:38 +0000

This reminds me of How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers by R. W. Wood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Wood

New comment by schoen in "Anthropic Bans Cruelty to Claude, Still Won't Say What It Protects"

schoen — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:34:18 +0000

The concern is more that Claude is a moral patient rather than a moral agent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_patienthood

New comment by schoen in "Let's Encrypt: 64-Day Certificate Lifetimes Coming Feb 2027"

schoen — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 21:05:11 +0000

I've worked with Let's Encrypt (I mean inside the organization, not just as an end user) a bunch and I feel like I often know or can guess rationales for things, but while I know "why short-lived certs", I surely don't know "why 64".

Is it because it's a round number in binary?

New comment by schoen in "Trump administration is suspending Microsoft from a green card program"

schoen — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 20:59:23 +0000

It leads to the intuition that an economy where 100 people consume 10000 (let's say of energy because it should be inflation-independent) per week and 1 person consumes 100000 is worse than an economy where 100 people consume 9000 per week and 1 person consumes 10000. That is, you can strongly reject or disapprove of changes that strictly increase everyone's wealth or consumption.

I think this is not only mistaken but would wrongly lead people to often oppose economic growth, which is likely to increase inequality at least somewhat in many circumstances, while increasing almost every other measure of welfare. They often point in opposite directions.

The case where inequality is most important is when there are things whose supply is fixed or very inelastic (famously land, maybe housing), in which case you are in more of a long-term competition or bidding war with other people for some of those things. That might be a reason that total consumption is an imperfect metric too, because maybe your consumption of one thing with elastic supply (food?) went way up as the economy grew but your consumption of something with inelastic supply (housing?) went down at the same time.

New comment by schoen in "Tell HN: I've been paying for a rural Tanzanian's education for 10 years"

schoen — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 20:48:47 +0000

Years of seeing ":help uganda" every single day have left me kind of instinctively curious about how to help Uganda, although I have yet to donate to Bram's charity ICCF.