Hacker News: wenderen

New comment by wenderen in "The Website Specification"

wenderen — Sun, 31 May 2026 09:19:27 +0000

From the about page (https://specification.website/about/):

> Not a framework. Not a guide. A spec — what is required, what is recommended, and what to avoid.

It's hard to tell how much of the site is LLM slop, but some of the copy sure is.

Chained Assignment in Python Bytecode

wenderen — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 07:50:18 +0000

Article URL: https://loriculus.org/blog/python-chained-assignment/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012555

Points: 20

# Comments: 17

New comment by wenderen in "Solving Project Euler: Problem 45"

wenderen — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 22:25:02 +0000

Neat! I translated my code to Rust line-for-line and the iterator approach significantly outperforms it.

Rust newbie q - why use `x.wrapping_sub()` instead of regular old `x - 1`? Seems like we're never going to underflow `usize` for any of the 3 formulae?

New comment by wenderen in "Solving Project Euler: Problem 45"

wenderen — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 21:45:55 +0000

To help debug - which browser are you using and on which OS?

Solving Project Euler: Problem 45

wenderen — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:04:29 +0000

Article URL: https://loriculus.org/blog/euler-45/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45941613

Points: 9

# Comments: 11

New comment by wenderen in "I hate screenshots of text"

wenderen — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 02:05:30 +0000

This article is a specific case of a more general piece of advice: ask questions well (provide context like clickable links, trim down your query to the minimal reproducible case, pose high-precision questions, etc.).

New comment by wenderen in "Gmail AI gets more intrusive"

wenderen — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 20:04:49 +0000

In addition to the feature being auto-on (for me, at least) and unasked-for, you also need to perform multiple clicks through non-obvious menus (I think one of them was "Audio track"?) to get to the original audio. Another layer of obnoxiousness.

New comment by wenderen in "Everything Else"

wenderen — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 16:41:26 +0000

> I scrolled back, thinking I had missed where they described that

The explanation of that phrase is in... the very next three sentences.

New comment by wenderen in "Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more"

wenderen — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 00:06:13 +0000

Lawrence => Law => Lawson

New comment by wenderen in "Advent of Code 2024"

wenderen — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 13:39:22 +0000

Anecdote to support your comment: The Chinese Remainder Theorem has featured in Advent of Code at least twice IIRC. Not an algorithm the average programmer (average is a very fuzzy term, yeah) would know.

New comment by wenderen in "The Uncomfortable – a collection of deliberately inconvenient objects"

wenderen — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 19:38:46 +0000

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

New comment by wenderen in "X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle next to pro-Nazi content"

wenderen — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:14:57 +0000

(genuine question) Were their ads being placed next to pro-Nazi content at the same rate a few years ago?

New comment by wenderen in "X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle next to pro-Nazi content"

wenderen — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:13:22 +0000

I'm seeing multiple examples of it in this thread at the time of writing! It's baffling. Do they not know how humans brain generally work or are they just being willfully dishonest?

New comment by wenderen in "X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle next to pro-Nazi content"

wenderen — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:07:22 +0000

I'm no adtech expert but I suspect that potential customers would form mental associations between two things that often show up together, like pro-Nazi content and the ads I'm sponsoring, and I wouldn't want that.

New comment by wenderen in "World's most popular painter sent his followers after me because of my review"

wenderen — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 05:56:57 +0000

> The contrary is almost certainly true: picking fights with well-selected made up enemies is an effective way to promote a brand that is based on virtue.

I concur. Anecdotally, I see lots of content from TikTok creators replying to negative comments. At first I wondered why they seemed to be only amplifying negative responses instead of their fans, and then it hit me - those were the videos that did well (i.e. those videos got the most likes, views, shares). Showcasing a "hater comment" turns on the video viewers' tribal instinct. We want to side with the creator, to show the hater their place.

New comment by wenderen in "Ricochet Robots Solver"

wenderen — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 21:53:17 +0000

Another cool solver for the same game https://www.michaelfogleman.com/projects/ricochet-robot/

New comment by wenderen in "Can you understand bird? Test your recognition of calls and songs"

wenderen — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 21:33:37 +0000

Merlin's pretty at good at identifying mockingbirds by sound alone but once in a while it outputs a bird that's not even expected in your area. It rarely makes the reverse error (identifying the call of a non-mockingbird as the call of a mockingbird) in my experience!

New comment by wenderen in "Can you understand bird? Test your recognition of calls and songs"

wenderen — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 19:53:31 +0000

Caution for folks learning about the Merlin app from this thread: it's good at identifying bird calls, especially in North America, where there's a lot of training data, but it's not conclusive and can sometimes lead you astray by misidentifying a common bird as something exotic, or getting confused by birds that mimic other species (like mockingbirds). Treat Merlin Sound ID's suggestions as just suggestions, and use multiple inputs to identify a bird - appearance, structure, plumage, time of year, time of day, behavior, habitat for example.

New comment by wenderen in "Show HN: I made a website that color-codes the world by language"

wenderen — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 18:17:25 +0000

Collecting some of the points other posters made:

1. Languages don't always neatly map to country borders.

2. Linguistically diverse / multi-ethnic countries can have multiple official languages, and some of those official languages are spoken only in a geographical subset of the country.

3. Languages can be mutually intelligible. Urdu and Hindi are mutually intelligible and you can get by speaking Urdu in most parts of North India. The Balkan languages are largely mutually intelligible - correct me if I'm wrong.

Cute visualization, half-baked idea.

New comment by wenderen in "Noulith: A new programming language by the current Advent of Code leader"

wenderen — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 19:17:52 +0000

Would you happen to have a link to your solutions (Github, Gitlab, wherever)?