Hacker News: tarentel

New comment by tarentel in "US special forces soldier arrested after allegedly winning $400k on Maduro raid"

tarentel — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 13:55:13 +0000

I don't know the exact legality of it all, but Polymarket wasn't operating in the US up until recently. Even though they are now, they maintain two separate markets. One that is somewhat regulated in the USA and a blockchain based market outside the US. For most of its existence it has very much been offering things that were illegal in the US even though they are based in NY.

New comment by tarentel in "Not buying another Kindle"

tarentel — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 19:28:33 +0000

I get the DRM hate but I've had a kindle, a few at this point, for roughly 14 years. I've read over 6 books this year alone. Not sure it's the device if you've only manage to read 6 books in 20 years.

New comment by tarentel in "How to get better at guitar"

tarentel — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:42:51 +0000

When learning a new piece you should play all the way through once. You should play through it again, stopping at all the problematic areas and making note of them, but continuing. After that there are a lot of ways to go about practicing a piece. I think repetitions on the problematic areas in conjunction with working backwards, especially if you want/need to memorize the piece, is fastest.

Playing through the whole song from the beginning over and over again is not an efficient way to learn a new piece of music.

New comment by tarentel in "How to get better at guitar"

tarentel — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:34:26 +0000

It depends on what your goals are. If you're doing it for fun or as a creative outlet this is great advice. If you're trying to actively get better you won't do it this way after a certain point. You need to be actively practicing and engaging your brain. It does matter what you play and how you play it.

New comment by tarentel in "Swift 6.3"

tarentel — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 13:46:39 +0000

> could plug into the C/C++ ecosystem. Hence all the numeric stuff people were doing in Python powered by C++ libraries could've been done with Swift.

In 2015-2017 you could interop with C, C++ support wasn't added until very recently.

I do agree with you though and I am not sure what the exact reasoning is, but Swift is definitely an Apple ecosystem language despite the random efforts to gain traction elsewhere.

New comment by tarentel in "Asia rolls out 4-day weeks, WFH to solve fuel crisis caused by Iran war"

tarentel — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:01:09 +0000

Right this is a terrible title. An equally bad and catchy title would have been Asia orders people to take stairs instead of elevators.

New comment by tarentel in "Why Objective-C"

tarentel — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:06:56 +0000

That is an API choice from Apple that isn't something inherent to objc. This is true of any method. It is up to the person who wrote it to decide how to handle a nil being passed in.

New comment by tarentel in "Why Objective-C"

tarentel — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:22:01 +0000

I go back and forth. I do miss the simplicity of objc at times though. I think in a short amount of time someone can become close to an expert in objc. Swift is already incredibly complicated and there's no end in sight.

New comment by tarentel in "Why Objective-C"

tarentel — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:20:10 +0000

I don't think objc has the equivalent of a null pointer exception. You can freely send messages to a deallocated object. Since ARC, it is rare, at least in my experience, running into any memory related issues with objc.

New comment by tarentel in "Fentanyl makeover: Core structural redesign could lead to safer pain medications"

tarentel — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:12:03 +0000

This seems only partially correct. If by "they" you mean Germans then yes, Heroin was engineered by them, or at least first made commercially available by Bayers. The US government had nothing to do with it. It was marketed as a less addictive alternative to morphine although I highly doubt anyone who made it actually believed it was safer. I have no source for this but I think it is a safe assumption to make.

The temperance movement was mainly related to alcohol. There were groups who wanted abstinence from everything but that was not its primary focus. They may have played a part in said act but I don't know. They were definitely not the driving force behind it though. Racism played a bigger role than the temperance movement. The government was also aware there was a very real problem with drug addiction.

New comment by tarentel in "Osaka: Kansai Airport proud to have never lost single piece of luggage (2024)"

tarentel — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 20:53:05 +0000

What percentage? I imagine it is insanely low. The risk to reward ratio of making money off a random bag at the airpot has got to be as low, if not lower than, the actual percentage stolen. One thing I've never been worried about it is organized crime, or anyone really, stealing my bag at an airport.

New comment by tarentel in "Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]"

tarentel — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 17:08:38 +0000

Not sure that's true. I am by no means gifted in the sense of Terence Tao, or even people much more gifted than me but far less gifted than him, but I did well in school up to a certain point in college. I never really learned how to study until I got fairly far in my education process. I put very little effort into school up until that point. That's when I actually had to put effort in and it was quite a wake up call.

New comment by tarentel in "What Is a Centipawn Advantage?"

tarentel — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:23:22 +0000

To your last point, the centipawns thing doesn't make a whole lot of sense from an interpretation perspective because it is so shallow. WDL can give you much more insight into how tame or chaotic things are. A 1 pawn evaluated advantage with a 95% chance to win is wildly different from a similar evaluation and a 50% chance to win. The first position likely has an obvious tactic that leads to a win, the latter may require perfect play for 15 moves that only a computer can calculate.

Also, from a computer perspective, a >= 1 pawn is usually sufficient for a computer to win 100% of the time so it's not really interesting and says very little about whether a person could win 100% of the time.

New comment by tarentel in "Velox: A Port of Tauri to Swift by Miguel de Icaza"

tarentel — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 15:04:46 +0000

One of the biggest issues I ran into years ago was debugging outside of macOS was a nightmare. Even now, debugging is a terrible experience on a non-trivial project. I am not really sure if it the size of the projects I've worked on, interop with objc, compiler configs, project configs, or what, but it has always been a bad experience. I used it on/off for a project on Linux and the debugger didn't work at all. This was so long ago I am sure that has changed but at least so far in my experience, lldb will stop working at some point. I've worked on large Obj-C and C++ codebases and never ran into any of the problems I've run into with swift in this area.

New comment by tarentel in "AI generated music barred from Bandcamp"

tarentel — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 19:07:40 +0000

Wasn't your intention whatever you typed in? That doesn't make you an artist and I don't want to hear the music AI made that you happened to type some words to and hit enter.

New comment by tarentel in "Apple Creator Studio"

tarentel — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 17:16:31 +0000

Tons of professionals use logic. Really, you will find money making musicians using any of the major daws. Pro tools might still be the standard for recording studios but that's likely it.

New comment by tarentel in "Apple Creator Studio"

tarentel — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 17:07:27 +0000

Logic Pro gets regular updates. I believe most of it is AI driven nonsense but they are making changes. Flashback capture was a nice fairly recent addition and surprising this wasn't implemented sooner. There are also regular bug fixes and performance improvements. I can't speak for the other apps.

https://support.apple.com/en-afri/109503

New comment by tarentel in "Apple Creator Studio"

tarentel — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 16:44:29 +0000

They offer a 3 month trial already.

New comment by tarentel in "Apple Creator Studio"

tarentel — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 16:42:48 +0000

It helps that you have to continue to buy their hardware to keep running said software. I guess they could be greedy and keep making me pay for Logic every few years so I'm happy they don't do that but they're still making money off my initial purchase of logic just in a different way.

New comment by tarentel in "Eat Real Food"

tarentel — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 17:17:52 +0000

I am not sure if you're disagreeing with the original poster here but you're both saying the same thing in different units. 1g/kg != 1g/lb which is A LOT more protein and a complete waste of time. As a mostly vegetarian who lifts regularly, I am targeting a bit more than 1g/kg but being from the US it is a lot less than 1g/lb. :p