Hacker News: thechao

New comment by thechao in "Swift at Apple: Migrating the TrueType hinting interpreter"

thechao — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 11:24:06 +0000

Its a set cover problem, and is NP-hard. 4100 of something probably runs nicely in your laptop in a reasonable amount of time.

New comment by thechao in "Show HN: I Derived a Pancake"

thechao — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:58:03 +0000

I go down to Abby Jane in Dripping Springs to get my freshly made sourdough, thankyouverymuch.

New comment by thechao in "Show HN: I Derived a Pancake"

thechao — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 22:16:11 +0000

A ten hour wait doesn't really strike me as a pancake? You should have a "it's 730am, there's four screaming girls, only two of which are related to me, the dogs are begging for scraps, and the demand for pancakes has crossed into Veblen goods territory."

New comment by thechao in "What Is a Dickover?"

thechao — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:08:47 +0000

REI threw a dickover on top of my checkout page just before I could pay. Dismissing the dickover cleared the checkout page.

New comment by thechao in "The dead economy theory"

thechao — Fri, 29 May 2026 20:14:14 +0000

The leverage doesn't end unless the AI-owning capital class Terminates the rest of the population.

New comment by thechao in "A few interesting modern pixel fonts"

thechao — Wed, 27 May 2026 13:32:59 +0000

Maybe Morse is just "out", right now, in the geek population? I shall send out the signal for us to unite: ... ___ ... ___ ...

Hm. Morse makes adding an ellipsis remarkably challenging!

New comment by thechao in "A few interesting modern pixel fonts"

thechao — Tue, 26 May 2026 21:28:46 +0000

_ .... . ... .... ___ ._. _ . ... _ .._. ___ _. _ .__ ___ .._ ._.. _.. _... . ._ __ ___ ._. ... . _._. ___ _.. . .._. ___ _. _ ._._._

New comment by thechao in "A few interesting modern pixel fonts"

thechao — Tue, 26 May 2026 21:26:21 +0000

I felt personally attacked when LLMs came out: I'm an avid user of "—", bullets, numbered lists, and the word "delve". It's been a miserable couple of years.

New comment by thechao in "We need to add 6k seats to Congress"

thechao — Tue, 26 May 2026 13:17:04 +0000

I still think biased sortition is the way: after voting, eliminate any candidate with less than (say) 1/11th the vote. Choose the winner proportional to the number of votes they received. It has the following nice properties:

1. Extreme candidates have very little chance of winning;

2. The system is (formally) fair in the long run; and,

3. It secures the election against tampering from both domestic and foreign actors.

Also, frankly, the sort of person who's good at winning an election is almost diametrically opposite from the sort of person you want as a leader. It's hard to combine "ideologue" with "rational compromise ready actor".

New comment by thechao in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

thechao — Wed, 20 May 2026 22:28:15 +0000

You can build a census of all gen-2, degree-2 formal products of polynomial like terms. If you insist on instituting your own rewrite rules and identity tables, it is straightforward — maybe an 15 minutes of compute time — to perform a complete census of all of the algebraic structures that naturally emerge. Every even vaguely studied algebra that fits in the space is covered by the census (you've got to pick a broad enough set of rewrite- and identity- operations). There's even a couple of "unstudied" objects (just 2 of the billion or so objects); for instance:

    (uv)(vu) = (uu)(vv)

Shows up as a primitive structure, quite often.

If you switch to degree-3 or generator-3 then the coverage is, essentially, empty: mathematics has analyzed only a few of the hundreds (thousands? it's hard to enumerate) naturally occurring algebraic structures in that census.

New comment by thechao in "The Mercury logic programming system"

thechao — Wed, 20 May 2026 03:09:21 +0000

The closest that I could find to a "what the fuck is this?" page is:

https://www.mercurylang.org/about.html

New comment by thechao in "Tesla Wall Connector bootloader bypasses the firmware downgrade ratchet"

thechao — Fri, 15 May 2026 12:12:04 +0000

I do as well with a NEMA?

New comment by thechao in "MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble"

thechao — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:50:38 +0000

90 would've been impressive. 9 out of 8 is rookie numbers.

New comment by thechao in "Knitting bullshit"

thechao — Wed, 06 May 2026 14:05:14 +0000

I'm from Texas and we use bullshit & tall-telling as an entertainment art (this is my background; I do t think it's specific!). This definition of bullshit is spot on; I'm pretty proud of my ability to bullshit-for-entertainment, so AI bullshit really grinds my gears... it's so bad.

New comment by thechao in "Knitting bullshit"

thechao — Wed, 06 May 2026 14:02:15 +0000

I think the question he's asking is this: is it an ad ouroboros, or is there some other (nefarious?) intentionality behind it?

My hot take: porque no los dos?

New comment by thechao in "Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027"

thechao — Mon, 04 May 2026 15:48:58 +0000

I think the USB & speaker are the weak links for water ingress. Also, a removable battery would (probably?) significantly weaken the phone. So, if you dropped it, it'd be more likely to sustain real damage.

New comment by thechao in "Credit cards are vulnerable to brute force kind attacks"

thechao — Fri, 01 May 2026 22:57:42 +0000

I discovered this "quirk" when the local ice rink started charging me for dozens of charges — I was watching them come in. There were two "child2 thechao"s (insert crazy common name); and ... they just picked one and started charging. They didn't want to reverse the charges because the mom of child2 didn't want to pay.

New comment by thechao in "American Dads Became the Parents Their Fathers Never Were"

thechao — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:42:45 +0000

I got to spend a bit more than 2 years doing math homework 1:1 with my youngest. Now, she's moving up to honors & gets 100% without any help. I miss all that time we got to hang out, do homework, watch videos of cats, etc.

New comment by thechao in "Full-Text Search with DuckDB"

thechao — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:15:15 +0000

My honeymoon with duckdb wore off pretty quickly when I need to compile it, myself, into a single-file concordance. I understand it's open source, so I'm free to be ignored. But, it's positioning itself as a drop-in replacement for SQLite; a large part of SQLite's appeal is its ergonomics — its single-fileness — letting me deliver a rational object to my users.

EDIT: "drop-in replacement like SQLite", not "for SQLite".

New comment by thechao in "He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice"

thechao — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 14:07:10 +0000

About once a week I ask ChatGPT to give me a reasonable diet for recomp with weight loss. It consistently insisted I have at least 7 meals consisting of at least 30g of protein per meal, but the protein source can't be whey or casein. When I ask "why" it cites a bunch of studies ... but most of those "studies" are N=1 of a college or Olympic level athlete. If, instead, I grab a large scale lateral analysis, it says "3 meals" with about 1/2 of the protein.

It'll defend both sides (mutually contradictory) to the death. NOTHING will budge it from its initial stance.