Hacker News: tgv

New comment by tgv in "Quien – A better WHOIS lookup tool"

tgv — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:55:53 +0000

That's a good way to guarantee nobody will use it. Who is going to test the app in a sandbox with godknowswhat kind of tooling needed to find malicious behavior and read the code? For a tool that's convenient once per decade?

New comment by tgv in "Are We Idiocracy Yet?"

tgv — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:38:59 +0000

It's not about Trump, but society as a whole. The president was a symptom, as is Trump.

> It's an odious premise on its face IMO

It's estimated that 1/3 of your intelligence is hereditary. A modern problem is that classes separate more from each other than before: white collar doesn't really mingle with blue collar, ethnic boundaries galore, etc. Before, people were educated and put on the social ladder according to birth. That made that a lot of smart people stayed in their community. Nowadays, they tend to move away. That means there's a development towards stratification of intelligence. Add LLMs to education, and we're on the fast track.

New comment by tgv in "Solod – A subset of Go that translates to C"

tgv — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:22:25 +0000

As long as you exclude defers in a loop, this can be done statically: count the maximum number of defers in a function, and add an array of that size + counter at the function entrance. That would make it a strict subset.

New comment by tgv in "The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes"

tgv — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:52:44 +0000

> The savings there would be negligible (in modern terms)

A word of praise for Go: it is pretty performant, while using very little memory. I inherited a few Django apps, and each thread just grows to 1GB. Running something like celery quickly eats up all memory and start thrashing. My Go replacements idle at around 20MB, and are a lot faster. It really works.

New comment by tgv in "German police name alleged leaders of GandCrab and REvil ransomware groups"

tgv — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:26:28 +0000

The parent commenter has apparently never heard of organized crime.

New comment by tgv in "Scientists are working on "everything vaccines""

tgv — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 10:48:34 +0000

I hadn't since the pandemic was (more or less) over, but last November I got a booster shot, as people seemed to be getting more sick than before. I know someone who (probably) has long-term covid, and you definitely don't want to catch that. However, I always become sick the next day, so I'm not too eager to get it.

New comment by tgv in "Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection"

tgv — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:29:07 +0000

> a few hundred years ago introspection wasn't all that common

Early death, however, was common. What's your point?

> Marc is not against introspection

One of the people cited spoke of a "zero-introspection mindset." That wasn't Andriessen, but it's rather clear.

New comment by tgv in "OpenClaw privilege escalation vulnerability"

tgv — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:21:02 +0000

The CVE seems to be real.

New comment by tgv in "OpenClaw privilege escalation vulnerability"

tgv — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:18:36 +0000

Your comment is obviously against the rules, but I read it as: Why are people not more careful? This is some unknown, app, with unknown, unvetted depths, and you only like it because other people say it's shiny and AI. It made you giddy, and you forgot that giving a tool permissions is an invitation to hackers. Well, you went ahead and ignored all common sense, and here we are.

New comment by tgv in "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer"

tgv — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 11:00:32 +0000

It's CYA. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, the old saying went. And it was true. Perhaps they should have, but they weren't. Nowadays, Oracle and MS have taken that position. They have the "share of mind," a PR concept that unfortunately succinctly expresses the problem. Someone proposes MS or Oracle, and everybody nods because they've heard about it. If that causes problems, other people will have to solve them anyway.

New comment by tgv in "Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom"

tgv — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:54:17 +0000

Education research is really low quality. Like so many other fields in social sciences, the results rarely generalize beyond the direct findings, and only support the hypotheses in the mildest way. It cannot robustly guide decision making.

The fact that studies on screens vs books cannot get a consistent answer says enough. I checked #3 of your links, and the amount of bullshit is astonishing. The cited articles offer vague, unresearched explanations for contradictory findings, or point at differences in the stimuli, something which should obviously never have happened. After some cherry picking, article #3 treats the remaining studies as equal and reliable enough to throw in a big bag, as if that solves the problem.

Think of it like this: the replication crisis in cognitive psychology was found trying to replicate some of the better studies. The average education research study is several levels below that. It'll have a replicability of 0.1 or worse.

New comment by tgv in "Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom"

tgv — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:27:00 +0000

Why do you think children will learn anything from a remark on a specific problem? If it were that simple, teaching would be easy. (Notice that teaching smart kids is easy).

Much of education requires making errors until you get it right a few times in a row, and paying attention of the errors. Getting an explation of your errors is only part of that process. No LLM can provide the rest of it.

New comment by tgv in "Email obfuscation: What works in 2026?"

tgv — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:02:44 +0000

I use a very simple encryption plus some padding (fluff in the article), but the email address gets updated by JS. This requires JS plus evaluating the resulting DOM. If you don't evaluate JS, the address will be something like "please@activate.javascript". Or you could use "potus@whitehouse.gov", in which case clueless scrapers end up spamming the US government.

New comment by tgv in "What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?"

tgv — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:25:12 +0000

He wasn't happy with the Bolero, and it certainly wasn't his best work. The piano concerto in G was also late, and that's definitely better. I didn't know about the head trauma.

New comment by tgv in "What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?"

tgv — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:15:13 +0000

The best works of Bach and Beethoven are from later in their life, although neither lived to be 85 (65 and 57, respectively), and also wrote great works in their younger years. Bruckner kept improving with age. There are also composers who lost it at a later age: Ravel, famously. Classical music is difficult, so experience does allow a better overall view, something which a lot of short works (such as pop songs) don't need.

New comment by tgv in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

tgv — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:05:56 +0000

There are different outlooks on risk, but the attitude can certainly be described as cavalier towards life, and may signal something stronger.

New comment by tgv in "Google's 200M-parameter time-series foundation model with 16k context"

tgv — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 07:12:56 +0000

Weather forecasts are notoriously iffy, and accuracy drops with time, but we understand the physics behind it (to a large extent). There's also a lot of fine-grained data available. For some arbitrary time series, there's only one data sequence, and the model is unknown. Extrapolation then becomes a lot more magical.

New comment by tgv in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

tgv — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 07:05:10 +0000

Axios has a long history, and is included in a lot of code, also in indirect dependencies. Just check its npm page: it has 174025 dependents as of this moment, including a lot of new packages (I see openclaw and mcp related packages in the list).

And with LLMs generating more and more code, the risk of copying old setups increases.

New comment by tgv in "Interview: Nobonoko, Master of the Minimal Sequencer"

tgv — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:13:50 +0000

To me, the music is a bland mixture of game and elevator music. It totally sounds like sequenced music without using any expression. Minimal, in this case, is just a qualification of the amount of control over the outcome, not an art philosophy.

New comment by tgv in "Police used AI facial recognition to wrongly arrest TN woman for crimes in ND"

tgv — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 15:08:28 +0000

This tool, however, is specifically built for mass surveillance. It serves no other purpose. The tool is broken, and everybody knows it. The tool makers are at least as guilty as those who use it.