Hacker News: travisjungroth

New comment by travisjungroth in "AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study"

travisjungroth — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 18:28:52 +0000

I think for my ADHD child-self, this would have been a huge improvement. I didn’t need help learning, I needed help doing homework.

New comment by travisjungroth in "Activation Energy is a good model for a lot of things"

travisjungroth — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 01:59:01 +0000

I was using it in a way not totally compatible with the article and that was misleading. I think of the activation energy in a person as what flows out, what overcomes the activation energy of a task.

New comment by travisjungroth in "And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway"

travisjungroth — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 13:06:30 +0000

Seems like a better way outcome than getting hit by artillery right now.

New comment by travisjungroth in "Activation Energy is a good model for a lot of things"

travisjungroth — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 12:31:26 +0000

A good person to have on a team is someone with high sensitivity and high activation energy. They’re the ones who notice it’s getting stuffy and open a window (or onboarding is a total pain and rewrite it, etc).

New comment by travisjungroth in "I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program"

travisjungroth — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 22:14:51 +0000

By “experience”, I meant everything a customer goes through at a restaurant. Food quality, value, service, cleanliness, etc. I’m neutral on kiosks so I don’t hold that against them.

Public sentiment (at least that I hear) towards McDonald’s, Subway and Chipotle have dropped a lot.

New comment by travisjungroth in "I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program"

travisjungroth — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:56:26 +0000

Because there’s been a decline in experience across so many fast food and fast casual restaurants over the last ten years, regardless of when they were founded, it seems like something industry wide (maybe data is part of that) rather than a business cycle.

New comment by travisjungroth in "How fast is N tokens per second really?"

travisjungroth — Wed, 20 May 2026 22:13:24 +0000

On top of the other comments, this reads like a half-joke.

New comment by travisjungroth in "You can beat the binary search"

travisjungroth — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 22:10:03 +0000

> If we would guess that there is a bias in the distribution based on recently seen elements, the guess is at least as likely to be wrong as it is to be right.

This is true for abstract and random data. I don't think it's true for real world data.

For example, python's sort function "knows nothing" about the data you're passing in. But, it does look for some shortcuts and these end up saving time, on average.

New comment by travisjungroth in "South Korea police arrest man for posting AI photo of runaway wolf"

travisjungroth — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:56:38 +0000

Or like $5. This is the kind of thing it was very easy to hire people for. Dropping the price to near zero exploded the usage, though.

New comment by travisjungroth in "I don't want your PRs anymore"

travisjungroth — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 21:37:43 +0000

Neither are bug reports or feature requests.

New comment by travisjungroth in "NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers"

travisjungroth — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 02:31:15 +0000

I want all the colors! Give me the full spectral power distribution!

New comment by travisjungroth in "NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers"

travisjungroth — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 02:25:28 +0000

The name for the color doesn’t exist before the name. But, you can distinguish all sorts of colors you don’t know the name for. Look at a smooth color wheel or a wall of paint swatches.

New comment by travisjungroth in "South Korea introduces universal basic mobile data access"

travisjungroth — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 17:03:27 +0000

The provided rights are called positive rights, and the not infringe rights are called negative rights. Freedom of speech is a negative right and a right to legal counsel is a positive right.

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

New comment by travisjungroth in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

travisjungroth — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:09:53 +0000

It keeps it shorter.

New comment by travisjungroth in "Show HN: I built a frontpage for personal blogs"

travisjungroth — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:46:24 +0000

That sounds like PageRank, Google’s original algorithm.

New comment by travisjungroth in "Combinators"

travisjungroth — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 22:12:21 +0000

Perfectly clearly, just for a different audience.

New comment by travisjungroth in "Combinators"

travisjungroth — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:09:04 +0000

No one who would ask that question would be able to understand your answer.

New comment by travisjungroth in "Combinators"

travisjungroth — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:07:14 +0000

More directly than the other comments: No you can’t solve for x and y here and yes your intuition is wrong.

These are functions. I don’t know your level of knowledge in math or programming and what that would mean to you. Here’s an example.

double(x) -> x*2

So, double(3) = 6. You can’t solve for x because x doesn't have a value. It’s a placeholder for whatever you put in.

These combinators are functions that take other functions and return them unmodified. “Unmodified” is a little misleading because it can do things like drop inputs.

New comment by travisjungroth in "A review of dice that came with the white castle"

travisjungroth — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 17:44:08 +0000

Yeah, I’m surprised this didn’t get a low impact. If just setting initial board state isn’t low, what is?

New comment by travisjungroth in "A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)"

travisjungroth — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 17:43:09 +0000

Wouldn’t that be hours and really really slowly? Could do seconds mod 12 (or any other factor of 60, which is a lot).