Hacker News: stevula

New comment by stevula in "Ontario auditors find doctors' AI note takers routinely blow basic facts"

stevula — Fri, 15 May 2026 02:09:34 +0000

I think that is how the smarter agents do things? Just like Claude/ChatGPT sometimes does a web search they can do other tool calls instead of just making a statistical guess. Of course it doesn’t always make the bright choice between those options though…

New comment by stevula in "Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy"

stevula — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:11:11 +0000

Whereas modern English only distinguishes grammatical number by singular/plural (and Old English had dual), some languages even have trial (three).

Russian distinguishes paucal (few) from plural (many). It’s not super common but there are some other languages that do it.

New comment by stevula in "Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy"

stevula — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:01:10 +0000

I thought courts martial and secretaries general (and Knights Templar/Hospitaller, et al) were Anglo-Norman/French borrowings. Do you have any examples of native English phrases following that pattern?

New comment by stevula in "1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6"

stevula — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 02:08:09 +0000

Most tools do, yes.

New comment by stevula in "How important was the Battle of Hastings?"

stevula — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 02:04:07 +0000

Probably “more”

New comment by stevula in "El Paso ICE Camp East Montana under quarantine after measles outbreak"

stevula — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:41:32 +0000

There are plenty of unvaccinated people this side of the border and it seems to be a growing trend. If the government is going to intern people in close quarters then they should probably make sure to vaccinate them. I would not be optimistic about the level of medical care sick patients will have access to in this scenario.

New comment by stevula in "The Waymo World Model"

stevula — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 07:30:45 +0000

If they paid for themselves then the DoT wouldn’t have a multibillion dollar highway budget, and that’s not even including all the state funding.

New comment by stevula in "Date is out, Temporal is in"

stevula — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 19:21:13 +0000

To preserve backwards compatibility and not require all those old sites to update, the legacy behavior would have to be the default, with opt-in for the new behavior.

New comment by stevula in "A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera"

stevula — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 21:50:54 +0000

I seem to recall a scene from the book where a man is smoking a cigar in an office and prints out his computer output rather than reading from a screen. It was delightfully retrofuturist (or whatever the opposite of anachronistic is).

New comment by stevula in "Microplastics: No longer a "maybe""

stevula — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 06:38:34 +0000

Why stop there? It’s in meat, water, mother’s milk, and newborns are even born with microplastics already in them.

New comment by stevula in "Ask HN: How to deal with long vibe-coded PRs?"

stevula — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 21:45:57 +0000

The problem is other people/teams making PRs to your code that you then have to maintain or fix later. It’s in your interest not to half-ass the review, creating an asymmetric amount of work for you vs them.

New comment by stevula in "Just use a button"

stevula — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 18:39:11 +0000

What is the use case? It’s hard for me to think of a reason you’d want to wrap a link in a button. If you want to navigate, use an anchor. If you want to trigger JS logic, use a button with onclick handler. If you want to navigate while doing some side effect like an API call, use an anchor with onclick handler (and don’t prevent default).

New comment by stevula in "China's New Rare Earth and Magnet Restrictions Threaten US Defense Supply Chains"

stevula — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 02:39:04 +0000

Hey, leave us humanities majors out of it. Most of us have studied critical thinking skills and ethics, which could have easily been used to avoid the various geopolitical messes we’re in right now.

New comment by stevula in "Rails on SQLite: new ways to cause outages"

stevula — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 05:52:39 +0000

The Stack Exchange link is incorrect about -ite being etymologically derived from lithos, as one of the commenters there noted. Maybe a misunderstanding of this wiktionary note or similar:

> But by the Hellenistic period, both the masculine -ίτης (-ítēs) and the feminine -ῖτις (-îtis) became very productive in forming technical terms for products, diseases, minerals and gems (adjectives with elliptic λίθος (líthos, “stone”)), ethnic designations and Biblical tribal names.

The meaning of that is not that -ite is etymologically derived from lithos. It’s trying to say that mineral names like “hematite” (αἱματίτης - literally “blood-red”) are originally adjectives agreeing with an implied noun lithos.

New comment by stevula in "What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?"

stevula — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:33:09 +0000

“Developed countries have reduced population growth” is a far cry from “looming human extinction”.

New comment by stevula in "Title of work deciphered in sealed Herculaneum scroll via digital unwrapping"

stevula — Mon, 12 May 2025 18:32:59 +0000

Originally there was no minuscule/majuscule (uppercase/lowercase) distinction in Greek writing (or Latin for that matter). They did have handwritten forms designed to be written faster, which is what the ω is in this case. Of course, those handwritten forms evolved often evolved into the forms we think of as lowercase forms today.

New comment by stevula in "Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart"

stevula — Mon, 05 May 2025 19:17:31 +0000

This is, I think, a learned distinction and not universally observed. I only learned this distinction in university.

New comment by stevula in "23andMe bankruptcy: With America's DNA put on sale"

stevula — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 19:55:15 +0000

Of course, if your relatives uploaded their data then a lot of info about your DNA is exposed regardless of whether you uploaded yours personally.

New comment by stevula in "iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max"

stevula — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 20:33:25 +0000

Homeless are not common at any of these places. They’re mostly downtown or close to public transit and tourist spots (Downtown, Castro, Mission). They aren’t known for climbing big hills (Coit Tower) or frequenting museums. I suspect there are some in GGP but it’s such a big place I don’t remember encountering many there (and also probably not the most attractive place for them to sleep at night).

New comment by stevula in "Discovery of Roman water wells in England proves trial and error"

stevula — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 18:17:07 +0000

Technically the British Iron and Bronze Ages are prehistoric since British recorded history begins with the Roman conquest in 43 AC.