Hacker News: tgv

New comment by tgv in "Nordwand Mono – A monospace font for coders and adventurers"

tgv — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 09:29:07 +0000

It is a great place to find fonts. I download them and serve them from our own platform, to avoid precisely the privacy issues.

New comment by tgv in "Nordwand Mono – A monospace font for coders and adventurers"

tgv — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 09:27:54 +0000

It looks nice. The rounded square, boxy shape has a 70s feel to it. The 'm' bugs me a bit, and the <>, but I'm going to use it in my IDE for a while.

Edit: I'm quite fond of the 'k'.

New comment by tgv in "Linux 7.3"

tgv — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 10:37:29 +0000

Lil' TAFKAP, the modern version of Saint Exupery.

New comment by tgv in "How Far Will AI Assistants Go for a Refund They Can't Get?"

tgv — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 10:31:47 +0000

Which will normalize AI justice and make it acceptable for the general audience. By the time they find out they've been screwed, it's too late.

New comment by tgv in "macOS 15.8.2 Breaks OpenGL"

tgv — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 19:44:29 +0000

A remote possibility: macOS can switch between different graphic modes, depending on the application, utilizing different hardware and power profiles. At least, it does so on my laptop, and old one with two different graphics "cards", but I don't know if that's your case.

New comment by tgv in "How Far Will AI Assistants Go for a Refund They Can't Get?"

tgv — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 17:10:08 +0000

Kafka had nothing on Judge Claude. Nothing!

New comment by tgv in "macOS 15.8.2 Breaks OpenGL"

tgv — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 17:07:15 +0000

Was it released for the M4? If so, you might have a hardware problem. Bad display cable, faults on the motherboard, that kind of thing?

New comment by tgv in "Intuitive concurrent programming in any language"

tgv — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 10:37:49 +0000

One example (Carla) showcases asynchronous components. In a game, you can write a big, single threaded loop, but that means that all components must be ready to produce the next frame, so you either reduce the frame rate to give them more time, or you cut the heavy computational parts. When you run each component asynchronously, e.g. the model might update at a higher rate than the frame renderer, leading to a more accurate simulation, or vice versa, giving a better frame rate when the simulator stutters.

Now think more complex, like a factory. If you run a system with many inputs, distributed to multiple monitors and controllers, this approach looks very interesting. If you want to add some extra monitor, e.g. to compare the output of a controller with some other state, it's really easy to add.

It's not magic, of course. You still need to think about what you're doing...

New comment by tgv in "A Princeton PhD applied to 2,300 jobs and still can't get one"

tgv — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 08:47:24 +0000

> There is only one reason you can fail from that point

Really? You make a rather harsh, specific point. Where's the evidence? I'd wager competition and suitability for the job would also weigh in, especially after such a superficial introduction.

> To quote the late Professor Winston from MIT: Your success in life will be determined by three things,

Yeah, that's meritocratic wishful thinking. Criteria obviously missing are: good looks, and a good network, which includes rich or otherwise influential parents.

New comment by tgv in "A Princeton PhD Applied to 2,300 Jobs. He Still Can't Get One"

tgv — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 08:42:33 +0000

Given the range of jobs he seems to have applied to, numbers don't mean a thing. I mean, it ranges from high profile research labs to fast food prep.

> It would be useful to ask some recruiters about the possible red flags for this guy, just to be sure.

Unfortunately, it seems much of the hiring process is automated, and they are not going to tell you how to navigate that.

New comment by tgv in "Intuitive concurrent programming in any language"

tgv — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 08:03:24 +0000

Here are Python examples, that you can test in the playground: https://github.com/lf-lang/playground-lingua-franca/tree/mai...

New comment by tgv in "Tesla Roadster"

tgv — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 09:56:01 +0000

You've got to be kidding. That's mighty uncomfortable when the angle is only a bit steep, the inclined lanes would be exclusive to expensive cars with this kind of capability (which no tax payer will want to subsidise), and when there's a traffic jam that takes a minute longer than your battery capacity, your car will just fall on top of another?

New comment by tgv in "Tesla Roadster"

tgv — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 09:51:25 +0000

I think that's to do with the wake/vortices a helicopter creates. Apparently, the effect is so strong that it can affect lift in a fairly large area over a few minutes. There's a recent case where a light plane took off in the neighborhood of a heli that just landed, and it veers off course, and hits the heli.

New comment by tgv in "Google is silently linking your phone number across all signed-in accounts"

tgv — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:20:01 +0000

Yeah, I was going to say: that path may exist now, but in one year from now, that page is going to look different. They're not going to send an email every time they change the page. And for new comers, they'll bury it in a 2000 line EULA.

New comment by tgv in "C++26 Contracts: Introduction to Preconditions and Postconditions"

tgv — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:17:25 +0000

SPARK (Ada) has compile time pre and post conditions, and it works well. If you declare the post-condition Collatz (n) = 1, the compiler can't help you, and compilation will fail. If you've got a difficult condition, you're going to have to help the theorem prover, often by introducing "ghost" functions, or by simply softening the condition. In the latter case, you can't prove total correctness, but you can often still prove things like absence of run-time errors.

New comment by tgv in "Why do LLM pelicans look like this?"

tgv — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 17:42:09 +0000

Randomness does not equate creativity. It's more of a liberty to move in entirely different dimensions altogether. I cannot imagine increasing the temperature leads to a lavishly dressed, ultra-realistic pelican on a Mad Max bike on the same plain prompt. Unless such pictures are part of the training data labeled "pelican on a bike," of course.

New comment by tgv in "Google is silently linking your phone number across all signed-in accounts"

tgv — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 17:36:34 +0000

That's mighty generous of them. Does the mail contain an opt-out link?

New comment by tgv in "Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe"

tgv — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 10:23:31 +0000

I understand what you're saying, but these systems are introduced as cost savers. The problem is that "management" then absorbs these savings, and doesn't invest in keeping them up-to-date. It may be a cut-throat business, but that 3% margin is only for a very little bit depending on the cost of maintaining the fridge's controller. Now the costs may well exceed whatever they thought they'd saved.

New comment by tgv in "Auto Research: Integer multiplication below n log n"

tgv — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 06:34:45 +0000

> You can always always tradeoff time vs space

Not always, isn't it? The theorem says that there exists a function that can be sped up, but not that every function can be. A trivial counter example would be the identity function on a TM. It's simply a HALT/ACCEPT. There's no way to reduce that.

The space/time trade-off is also not infinitely flexible, since it takes time to fill space. And lookup tables have to be constructed at run-time, or they'll be of finite size, and hence only a constant speed-up. Perhaps you were thinking of that theorem, the linear as wikipedia calls it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_speedup_theorem

New comment by tgv in "Food processing influences metabolism and brain activity"

tgv — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 10:54:24 +0000

How many turns and twists have we seen regarding egg consumption? I don't put a lot of faith in these studies. They offer a bit of an indication, but nothing more.