Hacker News: thijson

New comment by thijson in "Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down"

thijson — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:16:38 +0000

It's a slow moving train wreck. I hope the consequences of these petulant actions scar the minds of voters for years to come. We're seeing the yield on treasuries creeping up, I think that's one of the consequences.

New comment by thijson in "When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs"

thijson — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:56:10 +0000

This is anecdotal, however I remember hearing about farmers trying to maximize for egg production. Multiple hens would share a cage. The initial criteria was to only breed the hen that produced the most eggs. Overall egg production declined though. It turns out that the best performing hen was doing so at the cost of the others, ie. eating more than its fair share, being combative. The strategy that worked in raising overall egg production was breeding all the hens from the best performing cage.

New comment by thijson in "When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs"

thijson — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:16:22 +0000

These kinds of late design decisions can cost a huge amount of money. And it may cost lives because it's now shoe horned in, less reliable.

New comment by thijson in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

thijson — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:39:05 +0000

Climate change is inevitable, whether we exist or not. The sun will continue to get hotter over the next few billion years. Life is a struggle, it sounds like you would rather just give up. I guess evolution is working as intended.

New comment by thijson in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

thijson — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:31:40 +0000

Our DNA was largely coded by prior generations that didn't really have a choice of reproduction, it just kind of happened because it's a natural result of sex. That connection has been severed in modern civilization. It's going to take a while for our DNA to adapt.

New comment by thijson in "US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money"

thijson — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:41:27 +0000

I think Greenspan called it hedonics.

New comment by thijson in "Fed's Kashkari says 'now is the time to start slowly moving' rates up"

thijson — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:51:12 +0000

Isn't that when the Fed stepped into the reverse repo market in order to allow the banks to extend and pretend?

New comment by thijson in "Fed's Kashkari says 'now is the time to start slowly moving' rates up"

thijson — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:49:27 +0000

Using Euro's apparently.

New comment by thijson in "Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code"

thijson — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:50:03 +0000

After typing in the program, I found that single stepping the program in a debugger greatly helped with understanding.

New comment by thijson in "Sam Altman is now talking to the White House about decelerating AI"

thijson — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:08:46 +0000

I'm sensing a pattern here. Weren't foreign made grid tied inverters just banned?

New comment by thijson in "Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI"

thijson — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:46:21 +0000

I remember something similar happening where software was going to be outlawed from export:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann

After a report from RSA Security, who were in a licensing dispute with regard to the use of the RSA algorithm in PGP, the United States Customs Service started a criminal investigation of Zimmermann, for allegedly violating the Arms Export Control Act.[5] The United States Government had long regarded cryptographic software as a munition, and thus subject to arms trafficking export controls. At that time, PGP was considered to be impermissible ("high-strength") for export from the United States. The maximum strength allowed for legal export has since been raised and now allows PGP to be exported. The investigation lasted three years, but was finally dropped without filing charges after MIT Press published the source code of PGP.[6]

New comment by thijson in "Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth"

thijson — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 14:22:35 +0000

We could only book our business travel through American Express. It must have made economic sense at the c suite level, I wasn't seeing it at my level, the flights were consistently more expensive.

New comment by thijson in "Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time"

thijson — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 09:52:35 +0000

I remember going to a university as a high schooler in the 80's and being amazed to see the GUI of an Apple computer, and the mouse pointer would change to an hour glass while waiting for something, When the hour glass filled, it would rotate and fill again. That animation blew me away, I was still using DOS at home.

New comment by thijson in "Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time"

thijson — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 09:45:51 +0000

Windows 3.11 was pretty unstable, because it wasn't using protected mode. I remember how unstable the Macs were back then too before the introduction of OSX.

Applications also had to voluntarily give up control of the CPU, cooperative multitasking. That's bad when an application crashes and takes down everything with it.

New comment by thijson in "Fundamentals of Wireless Communication (2005)"

thijson — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:11:21 +0000

We used Proakis in grad school. For undergrad we used:

Communication Systems by Simon Haykin

New comment by thijson in "John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement"

thijson — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:30:31 +0000

I've watched youtube videos where the farmer is complaining that his million dollar combine has to do a regen cycle. Each hour that machine is running is costing the farm hundreds of dollars in depreciation.

New comment by thijson in "Costco is the anti-Amazon"

thijson — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:45:05 +0000

I know that I trust products from Costco being good quality, I'm less likely to regret my purchase decision. I've been burned with stuff I got on Amazon being crappy.

New comment by thijson in "Costco is the anti-Amazon"

thijson — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:39:41 +0000

Just got a window air conditioner on the Costco web site, delivered to the home. That was 25% cheaper than in the store.

New comment by thijson in "Costco is the anti-Amazon"

thijson — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:37:30 +0000

I used mine in Iceland too. It was one of the cheaper places to eat there. Still expensive though compared to the USA. I heard that the Costco hot dog and a soda is still $1.50 in Hawaii, that's a bargain.

New comment by thijson in "Explanation of everything you can see in htop/top on Linux"

thijson — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:23:10 +0000

For top if you use the > character it will sort by memory usage. I use that sometimes to figure out why my host is becoming laggy. Also you'll see swapd is taking up CPU.