Hacker News: vidarh

New comment by vidarh in "The secrets of the Shinkansen"

vidarh — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:00:31 +0000

When we visited Tokyo last year, what stopped us from even trying was the online information we came across was unclear and suggested we could only get the physical cards at the airport and at some tourist office, and we forgot to look for it at the airport... I don't know if that is correct or not, but compare Oyster in London which is advertised at practically every corner store, so even if you get into town not knowing the system, it's hard not to find somewhere you can get a card (or you can just use contactless - I haven't had an oyster card in years).

The UK is completely chaotic ticket-wise on a national level, though.

New comment by vidarh in "The secrets of the Shinkansen"

vidarh — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 08:52:36 +0000

Even the lowest density US states have most of the population in corridors or areas with sufficient density.

E.g. Montana used to have passenger rail through the most densely populated Southern part of the state. That region has comparable density to regions of Norway that have regular rail service. (There are efforts to restart passenger service in Southern Montana)

And it's not like places like Norway have rail everywhere either - the lower threshold for density where rail is considered viable is just far lower.

The actual proportion of the US population that lives in areas with too low density to support rail is really tiny.

New comment by vidarh in "Can Claude Fly a Plane?"

vidarh — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 08:24:00 +0000

We won't know that until someone has actually investigated how an LLM would do in those scenarios.

New comment by vidarh in "Why it’s impossible to measure England’s coastline"

vidarh — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 06:44:19 +0000

The article is not about practical measurements at all. Doing it manually has nothing to do with it. It is explicitly about why the measured length depends on the precision you choose to measure with.

New comment by vidarh in "Microsoft isn't removing Copilot from Windows 11, it's just renaming it"

vidarh — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:31:29 +0000

Yeah, I mostly stopped checking hardware compatibility for Linux ~10 years ago. Every now and again there's an issue, but it's usually easy to work around, or I wait a little bit and it's resolved. When it got to the point that I felt I didn't need to check any more, it was a big deal.

New comment by vidarh in "Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)"

vidarh — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 22:52:51 +0000

It might have been Brandis' thesis I was primarily thinking about. Of the PhD theses at EHTz on Oberon, I'm also a big fan of Michael Franz' thesis on Semantic Dictionary Encoding, but that only touched on optimization potential as a sidenote. I'm certain there was at least one other paper on optimization, but it might not have been a PhD thesis...

I get the motivation for wanting to use LLVM, but personally I don't like it (and have the luxury of ignoring it since I only do compilers as a hobby...) and prefer to aim for self-hosting whenever I work on a language. But LLVM is of course a perfectly fine choice if your goal doesn't include self-hosting - you get a lot for free.

New comment by vidarh in "Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)"

vidarh — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 20:01:35 +0000

There was a couple of PhD theses at ETH Zurich in the 90s on optimizations for Oberon, as well as SSA support. I haven't looked at your language yet, but depending on how advanced your compiler is, and how similar to Oberon, they might be worth looking up.

New comment by vidarh in "Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage"

vidarh — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 17:44:05 +0000

We have very different levels of use. I hit the weekly limit in two days last week.

New comment by vidarh in "Pro Max 5x Quota Exhausted in 1.5 Hours Despite Moderate Usage"

vidarh — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:53:57 +0000

I hit the limits on the lower tiers of Codex just as fast as with Claude. At the moment I'm cycling between Claude, Codex, GLM5.1, and Kimi. The latter two are getting good enough, though, that I can make things go really far by doing planning with Opus and then switching to one of the cheap models for execution.

New comment by vidarh in "AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It"

vidarh — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:27:05 +0000

And yet there are orders of magnitude more cars than olympic athletes, and most olympic athletes struggle to make much money on it.

So, sure, there will be space for some human achievement for the sake of it, but, most fewer and fewer people will make a living off that.

New comment by vidarh in "Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th"

vidarh — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 09:09:36 +0000

Codex has been good quality wise, but I hit limits on the Codex team subscription so quickly it's almost more hassle that it is worth.

New comment by vidarh in "Creating the Futurescape for the Fifth Element (2019)"

vidarh — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:18:00 +0000

I know, hence why I think he should have gotten a smaller budget so that he was forced to try to contain himself to one story. Then maybe it'd have done well enough for a sequel as well... It feels like he got into it thinking he had this one shot so he better see how many things he could put in it, and as a result ensured he got only one shot...

New comment by vidarh in "Flashback to a time when government reports were works of art"

vidarh — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:44:38 +0000

A subject access request if you just have a mailing list sign-up would require you to provide the information in that mailing-list sign-up and information of how you have processed it. Nothing more, unless you in fact also store other information on a user behind their back.

So, no, it was not an unsolved issue: Just respond. The court case resolved the situation where a company didn't respond, but the request was potentially abusive. Nothing that and legitimate requests are both solved by simply responding.

New comment by vidarh in "France Launches Government Linux Desktop Plan as Windows Exit Begins"

vidarh — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:45:12 +0000

If they were a monopolist, sure. But as an alternative, I'll take it.

New comment by vidarh in "We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git"

vidarh — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 10:57:13 +0000

Radix sort. Decide how many containers you're fine with, and group accordingly.

New comment by vidarh in "I imported the full Linux kernel git history into pgit"

vidarh — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:39:03 +0000

I find it quite funny how this got downvoted. My statement is based on concrete knowledge of a project that tested this, and demonstrated quite conclusively that most people consistently fail to detect AI written text that's gone through even very basic measures to seem more human.

New comment by vidarh in "I imported the full Linux kernel git history into pgit"

vidarh — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:30:13 +0000

By the time git became well known, sure, SVN fell from favour very quickly for good reason. But it had a few years in the sun. Not nearly as long as Git has had at this point.

There were also many holdouts in places that didn't need complex merges.

Having a fixed merge cadence strikes me as both utter madness and totally inflicted nightmare, though. If you're going to merge on a fixed cadence rather than when things are ready, you almost might as well have people push straight to trunk.

New comment by vidarh in "I imported the full Linux kernel git history into pgit"

vidarh — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:26:20 +0000

I mean, there are lots of people here that writes well enough that giving it some style samples and tell it to adapt the text to "this style: [insert post]" wouldn't be the worst idea.

New comment by vidarh in "Am I German or Autistic?"

vidarh — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:24:32 +0000

No single question is. If anything, few parts of an actual autism assessment are that direct. But questions designed to see if a subject takes things too literally, however, will tend to be part of it.

New comment by vidarh in "Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter"

vidarh — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:54:06 +0000

$200 for Claude, $50 to Open AI, and maybe $100 for Openrouter, and a second Claude account paid by a client... Likely to increase.

It easily pays for itself 10x over.