Hacker News: selfsimilar

New comment by selfsimilar in "Wake up! 16b"

selfsimilar — Sun, 24 May 2026 16:36:40 +0000

16 bytes equals immediate “black magic” and “it’s a witch”. I get it in the abstract - generative art and CAs and fractals have infinite depth. But this is madness. I love it so much

New comment by selfsimilar in "I'm going back to writing code by hand"

selfsimilar — Mon, 11 May 2026 17:41:47 +0000

> For 7 months I'd been prompting and shipping without ever sitting down and actually reading the code Claude wrote. I'd look at the diff, verify it compiled, test the happy path, move on. But now something was fundamentally broken and I couldn't just prompt my way out of it.

I stopped reading after this, because this is the dumbest way to vibe code anything larger than a single-use tool.

Claude is a collaborator, and honestly a decent voice of dissent, but it will never offer that unprompted. "Make this thing" - "OK".

You need to review the code. You need to say "I want this, AND HERE IS THE LONG-TERM VISION. Now offer critique and the trade-offs for various implementations."

Or just realize that in every hand-written project you learn the contours of the problem space as you go along and if the tool is big enough you'll feel the urge to do a green-field rewrite of hand-rolled code after a few years. You get there quicker with the robot's help. This is not a new lesson.

New comment by selfsimilar in "Volunteers turn a fan's recordings of 10K concerts into an online treasure trove"

selfsimilar — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 12:34:19 +0000

I saw Aadam at almost every show I went to in the early aughts, and he recorded a few of my shows, too! Great guy!

New comment by selfsimilar in "The dead Internet is not a theory anymore"

selfsimilar — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:23:41 +0000

Hashcash was a proof-of-work system that would have put a computational tax on email. I don't know what kept it from getting more traction other than simple chicken-and-egg network effects, but it's a good idea, and worth resurrecting.

http://www.hashcash.org

New comment by selfsimilar in "The seam through the center of things"

selfsimilar — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:45:42 +0000

I know nothing about this author, but this reads to me a lot like late Philip K Dick but without the "what is real" element. After his religious event in 1974, he wrote some real bangers - A Scanner Darkly, Valis, The Divine Invasion - alongside his religious exegesis. This feels a bit like an alternate timeline where PKD saw even more drugs as the way to chase this feeling, but somehow came out the other side.

New comment by selfsimilar in "Nano-vLLM: How a vLLM-style inference engine works"

selfsimilar — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 17:27:17 +0000

Number one indicator? A single punctuation mark that's trivial to make on most keyboards (option-dash on macOS). And generally people who write software are extra fixated on punctuation for obvious reasons: missing semi-colons break your build, etc. Maybe in some other niche message board people will use dash and em dash interchangeably, but here?

Also, if the a single character is how you're red-flagging LLM output, do you know how easy it is to avoid? I didn't use it here at all, but how do you know I didn't run this through some slop-machine to tighten my prose? It's really low-effort take to say "just avoid em dashes so we know you're not an AI".

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-em-dash-responds-to-...

New comment by selfsimilar in "You Can Just Buy Far-UVC"

selfsimilar — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:40:06 +0000

The best training for immune robustness is going outside and get exposure to a wide range of stuff. But for indoor spaces, air quality is going to be dominated by the microbes and viruses of the people in the space itself. For public spaces and shared residential spaces with poor airflow this would be great - grocery stores, nursing homes, etc. For condos, apartments, SFH, etc. it's probably less necessary, but probably wouldn't hurt. Or nice to have when company comes over, or someone in the house is sick and "polluting" the air.

New comment by selfsimilar in "Show HN: Xoscript"

selfsimilar — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:15:26 +0000

"The language is intentionally neutral and apolitical, without any stance on social or political issues."

I don't applaud or condemn this, but it's strange that it's on the home and history pages. Putting this in a code of conduct document for collaborators might make sense, but on the home page? Maybe I'm the weird one, but for most languages I consider them a tool. So it's like going to the hardware store and seeing a hammer that has a label "This is not a Liberal or Conservative hammer." Yeah, buddy I know. It's just a hammer.

Recreating the THX Deep Note (2009)

selfsimilar — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 13:33:04 +0000

Article URL: https://earslap.com/article/recreating-the-thx-deep-note.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45781523

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by selfsimilar in "Electromechanical reshaping, an alternative to laser eye surgery"

selfsimilar — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 12:52:47 +0000

I think the word you're looking for is "astigmatism".

New comment by selfsimilar in "The FBI Seized This Woman's Life Savings–Without Telling Her Why"

selfsimilar — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 11:24:42 +0000

Here’s a Propublica article about a Louisiana town that exists financially from traffic fines.

https://www.propublica.org/article/fenton-louisiana-brought-...

New comment by selfsimilar in "The Origin of the Pork Taboo"

selfsimilar — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 17:48:13 +0000

Octopodes don't actually have a very long lifespan, as adults die shortly after mating. Which is only to say that the decision to consume is more complicated for this creature than others, because if the goal is to minimize suffering, an ethically aquaculture-farmed octopus harvested after mating will not live much longer anyways.

And I've always found the argument that "more intelligent/sentient creatures deserve more protection and rights" to be basically a post hoc defense against cannibalism. We can't know what "suffering" feels like to less intelligent and "simpler" animals so why make our sentience a criterion for the morality of eating? Just from a safety concern we shouldn't be eating humans, but not because we "suffer uniquely more" than other species.

New comment by selfsimilar in "Surely You're a Creep, Mr. Feynman (2019)"

selfsimilar — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 22:43:02 +0000

The same impulses of MAGA culture warriors to protect US history against "woke" is explored here. Our cultural icons are all flawed, because they're human, but examining them critically is very hard because we project so much on them. Navigating this moment is very hard because of "cancel culture" and "anti-cancel culture". We can't and shouldn't erase these men (and it's overwhelmingly men) from history, but trying to add any nuance or criticality to their story is very difficult in our current moment.

New comment by selfsimilar in "World on a Wire"

selfsimilar — Sat, 07 Dec 2024 14:19:17 +0000

There’s an obvious religious element to this. Whether it’s the idea of Maya or that this realm is but a precursor to heaven or hell. I think that at least some people believe that morality is more arbitrary if this realm is not ”real”. And just as people seek refuge in religion or other ideologies in order to give their life meaning, if this realm is not, in fact, real, then the meaning they thought they had established evaporates.

New comment by selfsimilar in "Failure Analysis of the Arecibo 305 Meter Telescope Collapse"

selfsimilar — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 15:32:28 +0000

It's in Puerto Rico, a US territory that has toyed with formally joining the union as a proper state. This is NOT a developing country.

New comment by selfsimilar in "Ask HN: Any tools to do generic WiFi imaging?"

selfsimilar — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 17:13:51 +0000

Walabot DIY 2 in expert mode looks great! Definitely a bit more single-purpose for walls - only works on flat surfaces and probably has trouble w corners. Great suggestion, thanks!

Ask HN: Any tools to do generic WiFi imaging?

selfsimilar — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 15:43:44 +0000

I have an older house (1950s) and I'd really like to see behind my walls without physically excavating so I can try to run some wires without encountering surprise obstructions. There are tools which use WifI to do detect humans[1] (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wi-fi-routers-used-to-dete...) [2](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40897828) but I'm looking for a way to use Wifi for more general imaging. There's a paper from 2017 ("Holography of WiFi Radiation)[https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11...] and many other scholarly papers about object detection via WiFi, but I haven't been able to find any off-the-shelf products/projects that would just build a 3D environmental density map without any object detection. The resolution doesn't have to be great - not looking for millimeter scale features e.g. structural weakness. Is there anything out there that comes close? Given recent archaeological uses of drone LIDAR and satellite tomography, I figure the software for interpreting this kind of data should be pretty robust by now, just maybe it hasn't filtered down to the consumer market.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40946613

Points: 97

# Comments: 68

New comment by selfsimilar in "Our bacteria are more personal than we thought, new study shows"

selfsimilar — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 14:53:58 +0000

Dogs eat other dogs' excrement in part to keep a healthy and diverse gut culture. I prefer kissing.

New comment by selfsimilar in "Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time"

selfsimilar — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 18:49:28 +0000

[citation needed]

Degrowth Can Work

selfsimilar — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 13:30:43 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04412-x

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38804655

Points: 13

# Comments: 7