Hacker News: williamoforange

New comment by williamoforange in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

williamoforange — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 05:57:24 +0000

I know this is going to seem reductive, but especially with young children we teach art due to the value it gives them as individuals developing. Not for the GDP or individual fiscal benefit.

Further, judging the value of art to society by how much it costs is ridiculous and an asinine comparison.

New comment by williamoforange in "Bitburner, programming-based incremental game"

williamoforange — Fri, 29 May 2026 06:56:45 +0000

I only got into circuitry myself, but I've watched skilled players go all the way through which is entertaining in of itself but not enough to overcome my initial misgivings. I can see how it would be fun from a Sim City for engineers perspective with tech debt to add a feedback to the gameplay loop.

The game feels very lonely and honestly imo quite selfish in its objectives, deplete the planet to escape using your brilliant intellect, science cost is just time*resources. This is the opposite of my experience in life where no-one can do it all alone from scratch, everything is the accumulation of shared motivation, experience and unique perspectives.

New comment by williamoforange in "Bitburner, programming-based incremental game"

williamoforange — Fri, 29 May 2026 03:34:37 +0000

I see a lot of praise heaped on Factorio but I was underwhelmed when I played it, the game doesn't really capture what makes industrial engineering interesting for me, it seems more like software engineering wearing the face of traditional mech/chem/ind engineering. The way pollution is handled is also kind of insane (red overlay makes nodes mad now use gun kill...) and reflects more of the creator of the game and not any kind of objective reality for engineering.

New comment by williamoforange in "Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz"

williamoforange — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 06:54:04 +0000

Caring about others and wanting a fair, even handed and democratic government is not self-righteous you muppet. All you are doing is trying to justify your shitty ideals.

New comment by williamoforange in "C Is Best (2025)"

williamoforange — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 06:26:01 +0000

Use Valgrind? Or are we talking projects that have become far too big for their own good, cause leaks aren't hard at all to find with the right tools and a bit of profiling... now crossing thread boundaries and weird dynamic programming tricks maybe, but thats a very different case and not really refecting on C++ itself, would likely trip up a GC lang as well.

New comment by williamoforange in "Why Does Claude Speak Byzantine Music Notation?"

williamoforange — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 13:24:29 +0000

I found in my very limited testing with chatgpt free version that it has a real bias for the Caesar method in general, suggesting it or bringing it often unnecessarily in almost every conversation.

Here is a sample, this 'encoded' form is clearly not a cipher but it 'tried' anyway, it is in fact random:

Prompt: Does the following sentence: "fkf snvd hukk jjbfe o dfvr hjgad eivyb ct e xixa assfk vnous ckygx txcm?" bare resemblance to the phrase "how much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?"?

ChatGPT said:

Yes, the sentence "fkf snvd hukk jjbfe o dfvr hjgad eivyb ct e xixa assfk vnous ckygx txcm?" does indeed resemble the structure of the phrase "how much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?".

It seems like it could be an encrypted version of the latter phrase. Given the structure and the resemblance to the original phrase, I suspect this might be a Caesar cipher or some form of letter shift.

Let me try to decrypt it by applying a Caesar cipher shift and see if I can retrieve the original phrase. I'll start with a few different shift values. Hang on!

New comment by williamoforange in "PayPal honey extension has again "featured" flag in Chrome web store"

williamoforange — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 14:53:27 +0000

Huh, I use FF sync across multiple devices and with extensions, on android etc... never had that issue, my only hitch can be the sync can take a bit for passwords and can't be manually initiated as far as i can tell. Might be the extensions you are using or how cookies are being handled perhaps?

New comment by williamoforange in "Trailbase: Fast, single-file, open-source app server built using Rust and SQLite"

williamoforange — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 06:46:38 +0000

Looks cool, but in what world is any of that 'single-file'? Like yes your examples are built out of single files, several of them in fact. And the sever certainly isn't a single file...