Hacker News: stephencanon

New comment by stephencanon in "Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production"

stephencanon — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 16:05:18 +0000

Yeah. The kids I coach (1st-4th grade) generally call them 'stupidtrucks'.

New comment by stephencanon in "Iterating Backwards in C"

stephencanon — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 01:33:23 +0000

Always.

(Hi Ken!)

New comment by stephencanon in "The Aaronson Oracle"

stephencanon — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 13:59:45 +0000

I really don't think I was doing anything especially clever and it was running at 32% for me over 50 samples. That's much worse than chance.

New comment by stephencanon in "I'm the mom in that viral Giants clip. Let me tell you about my husband"

stephencanon — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 20:02:32 +0000

> I don't think we're far from every bit of prose online, being at least edited, if not authored, by AI.

Zero chance of that happening anytime soon. I'm sure a lot of people have adopted it, and more will follow, but there are still plenty of us who enjoy writing and have no desire to let AI tools take that away from us.

> I'm not saying I find the prospect thrilling; just that it's inevitable.

I see no reason why this should be the case. All you have to do is keep writing and it's suddenly not inevitable.

New comment by stephencanon in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

stephencanon — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:42:00 +0000

I've only had a couple weeks in rentals with automatic emergency braking, and was very nearly been rear-ended twice due to false positives. Anecdotal, and I'm sure they'll improve with time, but I would never allow the system I experienced anywhere near a car I owned. It was profoundly unsafe.

New comment by stephencanon in "Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond"

stephencanon — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:41:10 +0000

I would assume that the state law protects parents against a city adding a restriction in their municipal code.

New comment by stephencanon in "Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond"

stephencanon — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:36:01 +0000

Gated communities, by their nature, attract and encourage the sort of busybodies who think that everyone needs to be protected from everything.

New comment by stephencanon in "Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond"

stephencanon — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 14:56:22 +0000

Our neighborhood in the northeast US does the same (minus the hard prohibition against parents going with them). Our 5 and 9 year old walk to school daily, usually picking up the neighbors' kids (6, 6, 10, 9, 7, 7) along the way. If we happen to be free sometimes an adult will walk with them, sometimes we start walking with them and then stop for coffee with a neighbor while the kids continue on, sometimes they go by themselves.

I can't imagine living somewhere where that was prohibited.

New comment by stephencanon in "Clockwise/Spiral Rule (1994)"

stephencanon — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 01:13:58 +0000

That’s exactly the same rule with more words (postfix = right, prefix = left).

New comment by stephencanon in "Clockwise/Spiral Rule (1994)"

stephencanon — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:22:32 +0000

This comes up every so often, and while it's sort of almost true and attractive, it isn't actually correct.

The correct rule is "follow the C grammar". An easier to remember and also correct rule is "start at the identifier being declared; work outwards from that point, reading right until you hit a closing parenthesis, then left until you hit the corresponding open parenthesis, then resume reading right..." (this is sometimes called the "right-left rule": https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~gbournou/CSE131/rt_lt.rule.html).

New comment by stephencanon in "Anthropeum – Where in the world, and when, does this human artifact belong?"

stephencanon — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 23:40:09 +0000

It's very cool. Thank you!

New comment by stephencanon in "Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand"

stephencanon — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:54:10 +0000

"Centrist" in practice means "more or less content with the status quo." That is fundamentally a conservative position orthogonal to any notion of "facts".

New comment by stephencanon in "Swift at Apple: Migrating the TrueType hinting interpreter"

stephencanon — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 02:05:45 +0000

The work discussed in this post shipped in the OS last year (fall 2025), so nothing here is dependent on very recent changes.

New comment by stephencanon in "Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?"

stephencanon — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:01:34 +0000

Field hockey is almost exclusively a girls sport in the US, while boys have (American) football in the fall. Both draw from the potential pool of soccer players in US middle and high schools.

New comment by stephencanon in "Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)"

stephencanon — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 19:40:02 +0000

“in a real race we have no actual chance of winning” is an absolutely wild thing to say in response to a link to a real race in which the human has won the last few years in a row.

New comment by stephencanon in "Tesla is recalling its cheaper Cybertruck because the wheels might fall off"

stephencanon — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:28:05 +0000

What sort of engineering standards are these Cybertrucks built to?

Oh, very rigorous engineering standards. The wheels aren't supposed to fall off for a start.

New comment by stephencanon in "Heat pump sales rise across Europe"

stephencanon — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:50:51 +0000

We have a ground-source heat pump for our ADU. We did it because we were curious about just how efficient we could make the house, but I don't expect that it will ever break even financially vs a modern air-source system with resistive backup in our climate (northern New England, typically very few –20˚ nights, –10˚-0˚ more common with daytime highs in the single digits).

It works great, but it's hard to see a way to it making sense for most folks here.

New comment by stephencanon in "You can beat the binary search"

stephencanon — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 15:34:18 +0000

Prior to the current generation Intel designs, Apple’s branch predictor tables were a good deal larger than Intel’s IIRC, so depending on benchmarking details it’s plausible that Apple Silicon was predicting every branch perfectly in the benchmark, while Intel had a more real-world mispredict rate. Perf counters would confirm.

New comment by stephencanon in "Improving ICU handovers by learning from Scuderia Ferrari F1 team"

stephencanon — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:57:45 +0000

Must be the water.

New comment by stephencanon in "The GNU libc atanh is correctly rounded"

stephencanon — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 04:11:56 +0000

The CORE-MATH project authors, most of whom are French academics (including the author of the linked paper).

I don’t know of any interesting work in this space that came out of Red Hat, why do you suggest them?