Hacker News: twic

New comment by twic in "Study links GLP-1 drugs to bigger jump in women's employment than a degree"

twic — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:50:07 +0000

Mild counterpoint: a friend of mine, a professional woman, started on GLP-1 drugs some time ago. She has lost weight, but she also says she's had significant cognitive improvements, more focus, better sleep, etc. It would be great to have research which explicitly teases out these various effects.

New comment by twic in "Uber SubmitQueue: a high-performance speculative merge queue"

twic — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:23:37 +0000

> A well done monorepo is a huge force multiplier on a large organization

How so?

I work at a company which uses a monorepo, and I haven't seen any upside to it yet. We have a tools team that's invested a vast amount of work in it. Still seems strictly worse than a 'normal' polyrepo setup. I haven't understood why so many people are so enthusiastic about it.

New comment by twic in "Anime User Interfaces"

twic — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 01:18:15 +0000

Frustrating that these aren't labelled! What's this NASA-ish one from? https://64.media.tumblr.com/75c79a0906e422a7072b9148b52d9501...

I didn't spot any of the weirdpunk machinery from Wings of Honneamise:

https://www.inetres.com/gp/anime/woh/woh07.jpg

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DaYuAvpp7S6/

Or Golden Boy's computer made out of paper: https://youtu.be/A1R1Du2PsZ4?t=610

Or its Japanese-phonetically-respelled SunOS rc script: https://youtu.be/A1R1Du2PsZ4?t=1196

Or any of the computer bits in that episoder really. By the way don't watch Golden Boy if there are any people who are not, uh, extremely cultured around.

New comment by twic in "Map of the world's great castles and fortresses"

twic — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:13:35 +0000

An Italian friend was excited to visit a castle, and on arrival disappointedly exclaimed "but this is a "fortezza!".

New comment by twic in "My falling-out with the rationalist community"

twic — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 22:01:04 +0000

See? Immortality through memes!

New comment by twic in "My falling-out with the rationalist community"

twic — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 22:35:42 +0000

It's not just that they aren't free of bias. They appear to incubate truly wacky stuff - Leverage Research [1], the Zizians, all the AI/x-risk stuff. I am not the only person to have noticed this [2]. There's something about their approach that appears to actually make people more susceptible to nonsense, not less.

[1] https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/the-inside-story-of-le...

[2] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-are-there-so-many-rati...

New comment by twic in "My falling-out with the rationalist community"

twic — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 22:24:33 +0000

> Timecube was an incoherent stream-of-consciousness website filled with bizarre cosmological claims.

Was? Timecube.net will outlive any and all faddy Silicon Valley cults.

New comment by twic in "Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux"

twic — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 11:38:57 +0000

Reviving? I'm still running a 2007 EeePC 1001HA on Fedora.

New comment by twic in "For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides"

twic — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:39:08 +0000

Terrible, the cytoskeleton is the best bit of the cell!

(not just grumpy because that's what I did my PhD research on)

New comment by twic in "The Steinwinter Supercargo"

twic — Wed, 27 May 2026 07:01:05 +0000

Reminds me more remotely of scoops used in coal mining, in very low-ceilinged seams:

https://www.komatsu.com/en-us/products/equipment/room-and-pi...

New comment by twic in "Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"?"

twic — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:22:23 +0000

> The worst part, by far, was the emptying / prepping.

As described in one of the great modern tales of legend:

https://singletrackworld.com/2009/02/the-picolax-thread-retu...

New comment by twic in "Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)"

twic — Mon, 25 May 2026 22:10:52 +0000

Where does that come from though? I don't see any flow control or anything else compute-y in the bytecode itself. I know unpickling can run Python code, but i wouldn't say that makes the bytecode itself Turing-complete.

New comment by twic in "Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)"

twic — Mon, 25 May 2026 14:36:17 +0000

The Python pickle format is a bytecode [1], although not a Turing-complete one, I think.

[1] https://formats.kaitai.io/python_pickle/

New comment by twic in "Neoclassical C++: segmented iterators revisited"

twic — Sun, 24 May 2026 11:40:47 +0000

If a tool had been replaced by a better tool, wouldn't it be natural to discuss that?

New comment by twic in "Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby"

twic — Sun, 24 May 2026 10:49:02 +0000

Perl is what I've spent the last thirty years running away from.

New comment by twic in "Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby"

twic — Sun, 24 May 2026 10:48:35 +0000

Not bad, but the subprocess invocation is too verbose given this is a staple of shell script type work, and the string mangling is a bit painful.

New comment by twic in "Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby"

twic — Sat, 23 May 2026 12:38:11 +0000

Not sure if this is related, but i'd love to see more scripting languages (mostly Python) offer facilities which let them take over from shell script for more scripts and one-liners.

Think about what it would take to write this in Python right now:

  for wmv_file in $(find $1 -name '*.wmv'); do
    echo -n "${wmv_file} "
    ffmpeg -i $wmv_file ${wmv_file%.wmv}.mpg 2>&1 | grep kb/s: || echo "ERROR $?"
  done

With a few handy variables and functions predefined, this could be something like:

  for wmv_file in find(argv[1], glob="\*.wmv"):
    print(wmv_file, end=" ")
    result = do("ffmpeg", "-i", wmv_file, basename(wmv_file, ".wmv") + ".mpg")
    if result: print(grep(str(result), "kb/s:"))
    else: print("ERROR", result.status)

New comment by twic in "Points are a weird and inconsistent unit of measure"

twic — Sun, 17 May 2026 10:07:33 +0000

Swatch Internet Time! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

New comment by twic in "Points are a weird and inconsistent unit of measure"

twic — Sun, 17 May 2026 10:04:19 +0000

The article mentions:

> the German and Japanese point is 0.250 mm

It's probably the sanest adaptation of the point to the metric system. A traditional point is close to a third of a millimetre, but that's too weird.

Since the Q is close to 3/4 of a traditional point, it's also quite easy to convert from traditional multiple-of-three point sizes: 9 pt -> 12 Q, 12 pt -> 16 Q, etc.

Although it's even easier just to call those 3 mm and 4 mm!

New comment by twic in "RISC-V Router"

twic — Fri, 15 May 2026 07:08:05 +0000

This is pretty much what GL.iNet does. A nice slick interface for normal people, full OpenWRT nerd power a couple of clicks away for HN readers.