Hacker News: simpaticoder

New comment by simpaticoder in "It's getting harder to focus every day"

simpaticoder — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:20:02 +0000

How long has it been since you've gone a single day without a screen? I don't have a miracle cure, just a suggestion to try going without for a day and see how you feel. Similar to how a pile of work in the corner can make you feel bad until you finally do it. The ratio of suffering time to cure time in both cases is very high.

New comment by simpaticoder in "It's getting harder to focus every day"

simpaticoder — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 11:04:49 +0000

There exist problems which cause years of suffering which can be solved in hours (sometimes minutes). Not every problem is like that, of course, but some are. Procrastination is like that, sometimes posture is like that, and mental effects of social media are like that. At least for now - this may get worse with time. But the solution is not to consume more content - books seem to be a common suggestion. It is to consume no content. Humans evolved to grind most of the time with a little excitement and entertainment now and again, but tech has inverted this. Its "what we want" in the same way a child wants sugar all the time, and its at once addictive and unhealthy. The screen is an insidious habit former and I'm not sure yet if there is any healthy level or use for some people.

New comment by simpaticoder in "New York City to to ban deceptive subscription practices"

simpaticoder — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 21:40:29 +0000

>I agree, but how does one begin to enforce a ban like this?

Look to something that works to modify behavior: credit reports. Make it easy to report an actor for malfeasance, assume they are guilty until proven innocent, and force them to defend themselves to the agency. Since we invent these tools for evil, we may as well use them for good.

New comment by simpaticoder in "Show HN: Getting GLM 5.2 running on my slow computer"

simpaticoder — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 02:24:37 +0000

Let us know how it turns out.

New comment by simpaticoder in "Why low-latency Java still requires discipline?"

simpaticoder — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 16:37:58 +0000

I think it said something very meaningful and actionable (admittedly at a high level) about keeping the hot path deterministic: low allocations (including guidelines for GC frequency targets), don't use vthreads (instead use one thread on a pcore that never sleeps, to avoid amdahl), caution about techiques that work at p99 and fail at 99.999... This is not typical for "enterprise" Java, and is an interesting article for those who wish their systems were more deterministic (but may not be aware of the techniques or their cost). This is not a "how to", but that's fine. It's still good content.

New comment by simpaticoder in "My dad helped build North America's oat supply chain: Can it be remade?"

simpaticoder — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 18:44:03 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by simpaticoder in "Half-Baked Product"

simpaticoder — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:41:53 +0000

No. When the chips are down and your back is to the wall, I don't want the charisma guy, I want the indefatigable reality guy.

New comment by simpaticoder in "The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy"

simpaticoder — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 02:41:19 +0000

You don't need to make libraries illegal to get rid of them, you just need to undermine their value and they'll be defunded and disappear. No passing laws necessary, just pubic ambivalence.

New comment by simpaticoder in "The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy"

simpaticoder — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:19:02 +0000

Ah, like how we don't have pay phones any more because they were made illegal.

New comment by simpaticoder in "Dostoyevsky isn't difficult"

simpaticoder — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 01:57:22 +0000

What disginguishes Dostoevsky is his attention to detail and this unusual ability to describe someone inside and out with a voice that finds some sort of intrinsic fascination with the person no matter how dark, dingy, flawed, or just plain strange they are. It's like he withholds judgement without being clinical. His writing is peppered with these sketches, filled with insight, and it's not just a still-life - he manages to weave in these character studies with action and interaction. Most of us look out and see a lawn, boring and inert. He looks out and sees a lawn comprised of individual blades of grass, growing in soil of a specific kind, some weeds, cut some time ago, insects striving and fighting and dying and reproducing, the effects of weather and sun and shade making microclimates from which whole communities of life escape from or to....if there is anything to learn from him it is his gorgeous attention to details that we know are there but have long since ceased bothering to note.

New comment by simpaticoder in "The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs"

simpaticoder — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:06:06 +0000

>everyone knows that these giant trucks and SUVs are killing people

The number of things I believe "everyone knows" has tended to zero over time.

New comment by simpaticoder in "Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring"

simpaticoder — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 20:23:19 +0000

It won't be rejected. Your resume will be meticulously placed into a human review queue pending the allocation of someone to look at the contents. Meanwhile the position will be filled, and so serving no purpose the review queue will be emptied.

New comment by simpaticoder in "GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally"

simpaticoder — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:01:39 +0000

Actual price $100k and everything is very closed and proprietary. Oddly this MSI system provides "only" 252G vram and 500G ram. I would have expected more vram for this price. Also why 252 instead of 256? https://www.centralcomputer.com/msi-xpertstation-ws300-ai-wo...

New comment by simpaticoder in "Steam Machine launches today"

simpaticoder — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 01:31:02 +0000

Add "in their living room" and the answer is low. But is it a good experience to game in the living room, on the couch? To me that's an open question that is (sadly) very expensive to answer.

New comment by simpaticoder in "Steam Machine launches today"

simpaticoder — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 19:39:31 +0000

Most people don't know if they'll like the living-room PC gaming experience and at this price not enough people will even try. That's sad to me. It could be that with the right hardware and software the experience would be even better than a console, and if that happens then all the other good features of the Steam Machine (it's relative openness, the fact that you own it, etc) could shine. But without proving that people really like the experience, the rest is irrelevant, and lots of early adopters were just priced out of the experiment.

New comment by simpaticoder in "The case against geometric algebra (2024)"

simpaticoder — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 16:11:42 +0000

I like this idea but I get the sinking feeling GA proponents don't really solve problems with GA. Like how Haskell advocates don't write programs and modular synth enthusiasts don't write music.

New comment by simpaticoder in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

simpaticoder — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:39:10 +0000

I agree but you and I aren't the audience and I think experts in general should be a little more holistic when critiquing other people's choices. For any given problem there always exists a perspective from which your solution is over-engineered. People who (like us, I presume) understand processes, files, the command line, compilers, a computer language or two, a bit about computation theory (e.g. Turing, big-O, Knuth..) can get to a very broad swath of places along many different (often shorter!) paths. This is not where most people are starting from.

Speaking of Knuth, imagine being asked to "write a program to add two numbers" and using something like Python instead of assembler, or because really that's complex too, machine code. Do you think that the amount of housekeeping and computer activity is justified for adding two numbers? Objectively, it is not, its just that steady-state dominates the transient over time.

New comment by simpaticoder in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

simpaticoder — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:00:32 +0000

The message you just wrote involved how many complex systems, from your keyboard switches and firmware to your BIOS and OS interrupts, to your browser, the internet and middle boxes, just to say one sentence to someone. It would be much simpler (and more secure!) if you just told me with your mouth, but you didn't do that.

New comment by simpaticoder in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

simpaticoder — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:45:42 +0000

Simpler doesn't mean easier. Consider a chef who at their previous job started using a wood-burning stove. This is an objectively simpler tool than a gas or electric stove, yet it would be very difficult (even impossible, depending on local architecture and regulations) for a new kitchen to add one.

New comment by simpaticoder in "Making Peace with Your Unlived Dreams"

simpaticoder — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 19:50:52 +0000

There is an analogy to be made between the space of human possibility and the space of possible Turing machines: in an unconstrained machine everything is possible and nothing is probable. If you accept constraints (e.g. the shape of a language) then most things become impossible but some things become probable. That is you gain access to some space and lose access to other space. It's a very fundamental trade-off and it's foolish to worry about it too much, especially considering that there is always some level of zoom where every hero, every winner of every game, is irrelevant.

Indeed the underlying insight that our lives are arbitrarily small and irrelevant, (yes, even the greatest titans of politics, tech, science and art), that drives the tech-elite long-now accelerationist ideal. Every life is characterized by [trade-offs + luck] and none of them have any meaning unless we get through the Great Filter. (Sure, this belief is mostly a post hoc rationalization to just do what you wanted in the first place, but I appreciate the attempt to paper over the naked self-interest.)