Hacker News: winstonewert

New comment by winstonewert in "Show HN: Pardonned.com – A searchable database of US Pardons"

winstonewert — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:01:18 +0000

For anyone who might be confused about the pardoning a turkey reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Thanksgiving_Turkey_P...

Model Collapse Ends AI Hype

winstonewert — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 05:25:46 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShusuVq32hc

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47214185

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by winstonewert in "Build Android apps using Rust and Iced"

winstonewert — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 04:40:20 +0000

Perhaps you could refrain from slandering Rust proponents without any evidence.

New comment by winstonewert in "Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws"

winstonewert — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:38:10 +0000

I think the real question has to be: how do we determine what the regulations should be. Today, regulations are typically the product of dysfunctional political processes, and, no surprise, a lot of those regulations are unhelpful and a lot of helpful regulations are absent.

New comment by winstonewert in "How often does Python allocate?"

winstonewert — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 17:33:58 +0000

> but not everything is necessarily backed by the same kind of heap-allocated memory object.

Do you have an example, I thought literally everything in Python did trace to a PyObject*.

New comment by winstonewert in "Tao on “blue team” vs. “red team” LLMs"

winstonewert — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 17:14:35 +0000

The problem is that sometimes it is not a necessary condition. Rather, the tests might have been checking implementation details or just been wrong in the first place. Now, when tests fails I have extra work to figure out if its a real break or just a bad test.

New comment by winstonewert in "People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report (2020)"

winstonewert — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 23:51:20 +0000

Some thoughts:

- It says that 3/4 of people kept working; to me, that seems like a big drop.

- Data is based on a survey of people in the program; I distrust data from surveys on principle.

- There seems to have been a reduction in the payment as they earned money, so its not really UBI as typically advocated.

New comment by winstonewert in "Tin Can – The landline, reinvented for kids"

winstonewert — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 03:57:08 +0000

There is likely a cost to the infrastructure necessary to enable calling 911 that scales with the number of users not the number of 911 calls. Where I'm at, there is a 75 cent per month fee added to phone plans to cover the costs of access to 911. If most people are on the free plan, the margin from the few paying customers won't cover it.

New comment by winstonewert in "Tin Can – The landline, reinvented for kids"

winstonewert — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 22:25:25 +0000

Then I'm sure you're willing to donate the cash to make it happen.

Show HN: Inkwell: book/article authoring platform exports to PDF and ePub

winstonewert — Mon, 19 May 2025 21:17:51 +0000

Article URL: https://inkwell.net

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034960

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by winstonewert in "All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding"

winstonewert — Thu, 01 May 2025 04:10:28 +0000

Perhaps - but they could just do what Microsoft did: bundle a version of Chromium.

New comment by winstonewert in "Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust"

winstonewert — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 21:31:55 +0000

It sounds to me like you are thinking something like: if they use XML, they'll have a well defined schema and will follow standardized XML types. But if they use JSON they may not have a well-defined schema at all, and may not follow any sort of standardized formats.

But to my mind, whether they have a well-defined schema and follow proper datatypes really has very little to do with the choice of XML or JSON.

New comment by winstonewert in "Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust"

winstonewert — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 22:22:47 +0000

My specific claim was that you could represent it in JSON, so you can't claim, as the post I responded to did, that JSON "cannot be used."

I'll fully grant, I don't want to write a document by hand in either of the JSON formats I suggested. Although, given the choice, I'd rather receive it in that format to be parsed than in any XML format.

New comment by winstonewert in "Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust"

winstonewert — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 13:51:17 +0000

I think I can see something of where you're coming from. But a question:

You complain about dates in JSON (really a specific case of parsing text in JSON):

> If they implement dates, sometimes it's unix-time, sometimes it's 1000x off from > that, sometimes it's a ISO8601-inspired string, and fuck sometimes I just get an > HTTP date. And so on.

Sure, but does not XML have the exact same problem because everything is just a text?

New comment by winstonewert in "Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust"

winstonewert — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 13:25:58 +0000

`{ type: "p", children: [{type: "text", text: "How would you represent "}, {type: "b", children: [{type: "i", children: [{type: "text", text: "mixed content"}]], {type: "text", text: " in JSON?"]}`

or:

`{paragraphs: [{spans: [{ text: "How you represent "}, {bold: true, italic: true, text: "mixed content"},{text: " in JSON?"}]}`

New comment by winstonewert in "Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust"

winstonewert — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 04:38:40 +0000

What actually prevents JSON from being used in these spaces? It seems to me that any XML structure can be represented in JSON. Personally, I've yet to come across an XML document I didn't wish was JSON, but perhaps in spaces I haven't worked with, it exists.

New comment by winstonewert in "The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach"

winstonewert — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 19:14:50 +0000

Really? Is there no level of compensation that would make you think that getting punched was worthwhile?

New comment by winstonewert in "No-Panic Rust: A Nice Technique for Systems Programming"

winstonewert — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 23:57:58 +0000

Well, if they did that, then people could expect/demand stability with regard to what scenarios get the checks/panics optimized out. This would be a bit of a burden for the Rust maintainers. It would effectively make the optimizer part of the language specification, and that's undesireable.

New comment by winstonewert in "Should programming languages be safe or powerful?"

winstonewert — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 06:01:06 +0000

But the great thing about Rust is that the panic traces back to the exact place where I thought something couldn't be None, but it was. In Java, I frequently found it mysterious why some variable or parameter was unexpectedly null.

New comment by winstonewert in "My philosophy of exceptions: they're always ambiguous (2021)"

winstonewert — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 15:33:24 +0000

I think the causation runs in the opposite direction. These exceptions for these platforms were implemented in an inefficient fashion BECAUSE they thought that exceptions should almost never be thrown.