Hacker News: thfuran

New comment by thfuran in "Apple proposes to take a 15% cut of purchases made outside the App Store"

thfuran — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 22:44:28 +0000

In the US, I think it would require a revolution at this point. In the EU it might be viable.

New comment by thfuran in "Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering"

thfuran — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:35:33 +0000

Sure, rust has better memory safety than most languages, but it also has a strong enough type system that many other kinds of programming errors won't pass compilation.

New comment by thfuran in "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"

thfuran — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 23:06:48 +0000

Phones were getting too thin anyways.

New comment by thfuran in "Em dashes are amazing"

thfuran — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 23:15:20 +0000

As far as I know, the UK styles that recommend spaced dashes are using en dashes where US English would use em dashes, and the ones that actually use em dashes, like Cambridge or Oxford, are unspaced.

New comment by thfuran in "Em dashes are amazing"

thfuran — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 23:11:10 +0000

MLA and APA as well as Chicago.

New comment by thfuran in "Em dashes are amazing"

thfuran — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:41:41 +0000

I think offsetting the em dash with spaces is contrary to almost every style guide.

New comment by thfuran in "Em dashes are amazing"

thfuran — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:39:37 +0000

I think parenthesis are ideal for a parenthetical aside.

New comment by thfuran in "Quickly rewrite Git repository history"

thfuran — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:55:05 +0000

>"cool snap shot system you got there, id hate for it to be use to take a bunch of incremental snap shots with specific notes attached to each one. Why don't you let me bundle those all together real purdy like and no one has to know it took you 20 commits to fix that decade old bug."

It’s more like saying “in any writing process, revising is going to lead to better finished output.” It is absolutely true that no one needs to know that it took you 20 commits to fix that bug. It’s much easier to review 3 commits, one of which contains the refactoring done as part of the fix with the other two each containing changes that address distinct pieces of the bug. The structure of the change is clearer, and the structure of the attached notes will be clearer as well.

New comment by thfuran in "GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization"

thfuran — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:45:17 +0000

If AI is better at being (or simulating; I think the distinction is irrelevant in this context) curious, better at examining that curiosity, better at pursuing it to discovery, better at applying the discoveries, better at sharing the discoveries, and able to push the frontier of knowledge (if that’s even the right word) literally beyond human comprehension in every domain, what usefulness exactly is left? Or are you just implicitly saying you don’t believe AI will ever get all that superhuman?

New comment by thfuran in "Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them"

thfuran — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 20:19:08 +0000

Plus interest

New comment by thfuran in "No Spanish reading crisis?"

thfuran — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 13:04:20 +0000

And it’s my understanding that, auditory vs visual processing aside, studies demonstrate that the brain activation is essentially identical between reading a book and listening to it.

New comment by thfuran in "The git history command"

thfuran — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 01:51:53 +0000

Git is the one treating code like a text file instead of code.

New comment by thfuran in "Price per 1M tokens is meaningless"

thfuran — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 22:44:05 +0000

As always, the relevance of any given benchmark depends on how similar what it’s testing is to your workload.

New comment by thfuran in "It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership"

thfuran — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 15:34:34 +0000

Sure, but we didn’t go from physical media to online delivery of outright purchased digital goods. We overwhelmingly transitioned to subscription streaming or “purchasing” revocably licensed copies with no guarantee of future delivery and drm on any downloaded copy.

New comment by thfuran in "Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps"

thfuran — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 14:55:38 +0000

Any service or product delivered at a loss seems pretty plainly anti-competetive. Whether it is actually subsidized to that extent, I’m not sure.

New comment by thfuran in "It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership"

thfuran — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 01:44:49 +0000

I would argue that it is likely fraudulent to sell with the intent to later reappropriate but separately illegal to actually do so. It’s some manner of theft or destruction of property.

New comment by thfuran in "It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership"

thfuran — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 17:48:09 +0000

I’m not nearly so optimistic. I think we have a generation of kids now who mostly never owned any physical media, having grown up with Netflix instead of vhs/dvd, Spotify instead of CDs, steam instead of retail games, etc.

New comment by thfuran in "I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI"

thfuran — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 19:09:27 +0000

>Yes AI scrapers can easily spoof user-agent, but they fall out of date as the browser updates.

It’s a hell of a lot easier for a company to ensure that its scrapers all report the latest user agent string than it is to get everyone and their mother to update their browsers in a timely fashion.

New comment by thfuran in "Why does kinetic energy increase quadratically, not linearly, with speed? (2011)"

thfuran — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:48:21 +0000

I think you're missing the point. A lot of basic mechanics actually isn't especially intuitive because things like work simply do not map well to everyday experience. I'm not suggesting that work is defined incorrectly or something.

New comment by thfuran in "Why does kinetic energy increase quadratically, not linearly, with speed? (2011)"

thfuran — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 16:14:35 +0000

Holding that block stationary at arms length then. 0 work.