Hacker News: skulk

New comment by skulk in "The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level"

skulk — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:31:58 +0000

> Nor can I get behind the idea that quality of life for folks is on the down trend.

There is a pretty clear down-trend post-COVID here.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...

New comment by skulk in "The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party"

skulk — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 02:36:52 +0000

Immigration in the US is a completely different problem with its own crazy complex history of cause and effect. Using one as a lens to study the other seems foolish at best.

New comment by skulk in "AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers"

skulk — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 04:11:01 +0000

re: questionable legality https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...

> Moreover it's not hard to think of vaguely similar objections to fertilizers.

It's completely different. If LLM companies pulled this out of thin air it would be also different, but no; they've effectively plundered the commons and locked up all the profit for themselves. If intellectual labor goes the way of agricultural labor, I think humanity will have lost something valuable.

And don't come back with the "farmers would have said the same thing about the industrial revolution!" thing again if you're just going to terminate your thought there. Automating agricultural labor brings vast material benefits for all since it lowers the cost of tangible goods needed for life. I'd challenge you take this one step further and explain why automating intellectual labor will provide similar fruits and is therefore something to cheer for.

New comment by skulk in "AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers"

skulk — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 03:23:55 +0000

tractor manufacturers or fertilizer companies didn't suck down the work of generations of predecessors in a questionably-legal fashion only to turn around and sell a heavily discounted version of that back to them. I'm not sure where "parasite" becomes appropriate, but your analogy is poor.

New comment by skulk in "More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)"

skulk — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 14:34:00 +0000

there probably never was any there for a meaningful amount of time, but it's incredibly hard to prove a negative.

New comment by skulk in "The frontier is open-source today"

skulk — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 02:50:49 +0000

If you have a ton of capital, you still can't spin up Claude Opus and compete on price with Anthropic with your new fancy optimizations. With open models you can and that is great for consumers.

New comment by skulk in "Lift Challenge"

skulk — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 14:46:27 +0000

It feels like the US military is 90% racketeering and 10% physically protecting Americans, if that. Most of our protection comes from two gigantic oceans on both sides.

Though, I really do enjoy this racket so I guess I'm not allowed to ask any questions about the ethics of keeping it going.

New comment by skulk in "U.S. science is in chaos"

skulk — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:29:52 +0000

Your motte-and-bailey argumentation here is extremely tiring, and I'd encourage you to take a step back and look at what's being discussed here.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/cost...

US science is in chaos not because of pushback against this evil "demographic tracking and reporting", but rather an extremely capricious attitude towards any research from the administration. This isn't about the practices of the universities choosing who gets a grant. The administration is terminating random grants based on keywords that they find in the abstracts even if the keyword has nothing to do with evil DEI.

> If Science is really the priority, it should be easy to stay neutral on unrelated contentious social issues.

Science is being used to study these contentious social issues. That's the kind of science that's getting suppressed, _but that's not even the issue here_

New comment by skulk in "Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving"

skulk — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:49:02 +0000

This comment shows up on every single emacs thread and for the life of me I can't understand why. It takes one line in a shell to pull down a premade config and if that were to be built on, who would decide what gets put in? I don't think it's worth anyone's time to decide what everyone needs in a premade config.

New comment by skulk in "U.S. science is in chaos"

skulk — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:46:28 +0000

Williams College wasn't content to blindly follow a vague directive restricting their speech. They already received very few grants as the article said. You better bet most scientists at big institutions were tripping over themselves to police their own speech to ensure they aren't uttering any of the new forbidden words like "engender."

> These practices are too ingrained and sacrosanct at this point to let a mere funding crisis throw them off course.

Yes, some people have egalitarian principles. As much as you think there is a conspiracy against your group to keep you down it's just not true.

New comment by skulk in "U.S. science is in chaos"

skulk — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 03:10:05 +0000

This group of people you're describing ("scientists who are only willing to do science if it involves preferential treatment") is simply not real. The idea that academics would cling to DEI statements or refuse funding is beyond laughable, and could only be dreamt up by someone who has never experienced academia.

New comment by skulk in "Ear Training Practice"

skulk — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 03:12:37 +0000

the inverse is true as well-- I can produce or identify any note with zero reference and imagine entire melodies and harmonies and yet am still probably mediocre at best at composing.

New comment by skulk in "Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't"

skulk — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:42:15 +0000

These are very interesting anecdotes. The feeling I've been getting is that the inherent complexity in software hits people at prompt-time because they simply don't have the words to express what is needed. (edit: or don't have the knowledge/patience to interpret what the LLM spits out)

New comment by skulk in "πFS"

skulk — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:26:54 +0000

this statement is equivalent to "pi is a normal number." While most real numbers are normal and pi is suspected to be so, it isn't known.

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

New comment by skulk in "Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap"

skulk — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 15:05:20 +0000

> Your audience, or whoever you aim your work at, should be treated with respect.

I just want to amplify this point. As I was reading this, the LLMisms kept jumping out at me and each one felt like the author looking at me and deciding that my time spent reading this prose wasn't actually worth anything to them.

OP: I want YOUR thoughts, not the next token predictions of a gigantic pile of matrix multiplications. I want your awkward sentences, grammar mistakes, half-baked thoughts, self-doubt, silly jokes. I don't want this pile of grandiose mechanical slop completely devoid of humanity.

New comment by skulk in "Domain expertise has always been the real moat"

skulk — Sat, 30 May 2026 23:08:53 +0000

I've studied how pre-NNUE stockfish worked and the principles of static position evaluation are accessible to a 500 rated player. The rest is writing an efficient search algorithm, which is purely an endeavor in computer science, not chess playing. So your expertise in programming gave you the leg up here, and predictably your opponents experience in chess doesn't help. Your point only serves to bolster TFA's argument.

New comment by skulk in "Domain expertise has always been the real moat"

skulk — Sat, 30 May 2026 22:10:13 +0000

what does actually playing chess have to do with writing an efficient game tree search algorithm beyond a few simple principles? You challenged him to a programming contest and won, as the vastly more experienced programmer. Even though he could use AI, your domain knowledge here proved to be the deciding factor.

New comment by skulk in "White Rabbit – sub-nanosecond synchronization for large distributed systems"

skulk — Mon, 25 May 2026 02:28:17 +0000

Haven't looked into this in depth but sub-nanosecond sync for systems up to 10km apart is interesting since 10km is about 33 light microseconds. There is some trickery going on.

New comment by skulk in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

skulk — Sun, 24 May 2026 18:58:35 +0000

Complaining about 2:1 immigrant to local birth rate has absolutely nothing to do with long-time permanent residents (who are locals). It's clearly a fear that white culture is being overrun by brown/chinese people.

Your comments degrade the discourse at least as much as you think mine do.

New comment by skulk in "My I3-Emacs Integration"

skulk — Sun, 24 May 2026 14:36:05 +0000

it is sad, X11 had a suite of tools like xrandr that worked regardless of your wm/compositor but now with Wayland these tools are compositor-specific (or have to agree to a standard).