Hacker News: taejo

New comment by taejo in "Spaghettifying DRAM"

taejo — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:08:19 +0000

I'm not saying you did and I do think the OP is written with LLM help, but these sentences did make my AI sense tingle: "I just want it to be clear that some of us can pick up Claudisms within just a couple of sentences with no effort. A Claude-generated sentence, in isolation, may not ring any alarm bells. A few of them in a row, however, that's a load-bearing smoking gun right there." The OTT mixed metaphor is part of the problem but I think the sensational tone of the whole post is also part of it

New comment by taejo in "Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change"

taejo — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:09:29 +0000

Painting in such broad strokes, the German system also sounds like the ACA, but it's really not: the high level description really erases key differences.

In Germany there is nothing like bronze/silver/gold plans. All statutory health insurance covers what is required to be covered by regulations, with just a few bonus services, at the regulated tariff plus just a few percentage points of variation. So the 90% of people in Germany who have statutory health insurance [1] have essentially the same coverage. The tariff is a percentage of income (up to a cap), not a flat fee.

[1] not everyone is required to have statutory health insurance, for example employees above an income threshold and self-employed people

New comment by taejo in "Farmer, marketer at odds over sales of white nectarines"

taejo — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 20:46:40 +0000

How do you propose to use AI to grow fruit trees faster?

New comment by taejo in "I Co-Founded Wikipedia. Now I'm Banned for Life"

taejo — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 06:43:19 +0000

"I've opposed Wikipedia for twenty years. Now I'm banned for life." would also be a correct headline, and maybe a more honest one.

New comment by taejo in "How it feels to practice for IOAI in Iran"

taejo — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 05:35:41 +0000

Well done! I had a somewhat similar experience twenty years ago in the informatics olympiads. I had no idea about the whole world of algorithms, complexity, etc. until a friend recommended to do the first round of our national informatics olympiad. The first round was pretty simple programming, the second round was a whole new world.

By the way "Ng" is Andrew Ng's surname, it's not NG with a capital G.

New comment by taejo in "German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function"

taejo — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:39:58 +0000

Btw a visa is a document allowing entry into a country, while VISA is a word mark used by Visa, inc. for their payment cards and network. I think you're referring to the travel document, but since the context also includes payment networks, I'm not 100% sure.

New comment by taejo in "What is f(x) ≤ g(x) + O(1)? Inequalities With Asymptotics"

taejo — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 07:00:33 +0000

The point GP is making, is that everyday mathematics is not done in Lean, but in a language that's more like JavaScript, where equals doesn't always mean equals, + and • mean whatever seems convenient at the time, and objects sometimes change type without notice.

New comment by taejo in "Tomorrow's emoji today: Unicode 17.0"

taejo — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 09:38:32 +0000

Emojis, however, are a Japanese invention (related but different from emoticons).

BTW, even the word emoji (from Japanese e = picture, moji = character) is unrelated to the word emoticon.

New comment by taejo in "Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials"

taejo — Tue, 06 May 2025 20:27:45 +0000

It seems TM SGNL also works when you're messaging with somebody using the genuine Signal app. They aren't gonna make a group chat with your archive bot to message you, and they might not be pleased when you add them to such a group chat.

New comment by taejo in "Blue Prince Is a Roguelike Puzzle Masterpiece"

taejo — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 21:06:12 +0000

NetHack does have ghost files (where you find the levels previous characters died on, including their ghost and their possibly-cursed loot). It's definitely not the same kind of progression as in modern rogue-lites, but it can be a boost to pick up the equipment you found on a previous run.

New comment by taejo in "Zlib-rs is faster than C"

taejo — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 10:55:32 +0000

Mercaptan is a group of compounds, more than one of which are used as gas odorants, so in some places, gas smells of rotten eggs, similar to H2S, while in others gas doesn't smell like that at all, but a quite distinct smell that's reminiscent garlic and durian.

New comment by taejo in "Learn Arabic"

taejo — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 17:06:40 +0000

If the reason someone wanted to learn Arabic was because they thought they could learn one language to do all of those things, it's clear why they might just drop the idea when they learn they can't.

New comment by taejo in "Why can't we remember our lives as babies or toddlers?"

taejo — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 09:04:25 +0000

Rust itself cannot cause tetanus but it can include unsafe blocks which can activate tetanus spores by FFI.

New comment by taejo in "Why Does Integer Addition Approximate Float Multiplication?"

taejo — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 15:48:57 +0000

Excellent comment!

As a historical tidbit I'll add that Romans did develop two ways to write larger numbers.

1. Writing a line (vinculum) over a numeral to multiply its value by 1,000. This was in fact extended to writing a line to the left and above a numeral to multiply its value by 1,000,000, and could in principle be extended to lines below and to the right to multiply by 10^9 and 10^12, and even nested boxes for larger powers.

2. The use |), |)), |))), ... for 500, 5,000, 50,000, ... and (|), ((|)), (((|))), ... for 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, ... These can be continued indefinitely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Large_numbers

Both require an ever increasing number of marks just to write the increasing powers, as well as an ever increasing number of powers being summed, but both increase only logarithmically, so we end up using O((log n)²) marks to write n. This is quadratically worse than positional notation, but exponentially better than just writing M over and over.

New comment by taejo in "I tasted Honda’s spicy rodent-repelling tape and I will do it again (2021)"

taejo — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 20:27:05 +0000

The berries (but not the seeds!) are apparently edible, and I have myself eaten one without noticing any ill effect. IIRC it was indeed the berries that were used in the Agatha Christie novel, so apparently a mistake.

New comment by taejo in "Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more"

taejo — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 19:18:04 +0000

Moreover, in a later picture on the page you can see an example showing a -dóttir name in that field (I had wondered if perhaps it was only used for people who happened to have a "real" surname as opposed to a patronymic, e.g. foreign-born citizens) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_passport#/media/Fi...

New comment by taejo in "South Korea's Democracy Saved Itself (2024)"

taejo — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 12:43:16 +0000

Just a technical nitpick: Hitler was appointed by President Hindenburg, not directly elected. However Hindenburg was directly elected and Hitler was leader of the party that received the most votes (though still a minority).

New comment by taejo in "DHS removes all members of cyber security advisory boards, halts investigations"

taejo — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 21:09:18 +0000

AFAIK it's typical for whitehouse.gov to be completely replaced with every new president

New comment by taejo in "Lies I was told about collab editing, Part 1: Algorithms for offline editing"

taejo — Sat, 07 Dec 2024 17:37:33 +0000

> Do you think that a LLM/"AI" can reliably

No. LLMs definitely have uses where reliability is not a requirement, but that's one requirement which LLMs clearly never meet

New comment by taejo in "Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code"

taejo — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 08:35:37 +0000

The rule is non-free parking. The exception is Sundays.