Hacker News: winternewt

New comment by winternewt in "Claude Code Cheat Sheet"

winternewt — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 05:58:31 +0000

What version of Claude Code is this? I don't have the /cost command mentioned here.

New comment by winternewt in "How do I cancel my ChatGPT subscription?"

winternewt — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:59:03 +0000

Unless the bubble bursts and tons of failing AI companies dump used graphics cards on the market.

New comment by winternewt in "How do I cancel my ChatGPT subscription?"

winternewt — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 08:24:46 +0000

And if you don't want to buy a Mac? A 80 GB NVidia GPU costs $10,000K (equivalent to 30 years of ChatGPT Plus subscription) and will probably be obsolete in 5-7 years anyway. What are my options if I want a decent coding agent at a reasonable price?

New comment by winternewt in "Gold fever, cold, and the true adventures of Jack London in the wild"

winternewt — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 16:12:53 +0000

No need to speculate. The article was published in 2019 and the movie is now six years old.

New comment by winternewt in "Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes""

winternewt — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 12:24:43 +0000

When I was a kid reading Marvel comics, Spiderman seemed like a bad and relatively uninteresting super hero. His problems were trivial personal issues and he rarely left NYC, fighting local crime or villains like Green Goblin who were just broken humans. Meanwhile the Fantastic Four were in regular contact with government institutions, went into space, and fought interstellar aliens. They just seemed better and more important. Not to mention the Avengers.

As an adult, while Marvel isn't my favorite thing anymore, I find Spiderman to their most interesting superhero.

New comment by winternewt in "What happened to WebAssembly"

winternewt — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 11:41:02 +0000

The use case I always envisioned from the sidelines was that I could ditch a poorly designed, garbage-collected mess of a language (JavaScript) for something typesafe, with predictable performance, cache locality by default (as in not making everything a reference), no GC, generics, etc. But WASM won't be there until it has first-class access to the DOM, in my opinion.

New comment by winternewt in "C++ says “We have try... finally at home”"

winternewt — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 15:58:04 +0000

You are allowed to throw from a destructor as long as there's not already an active exception unwinding the stack. In my experience this is a total non-issue for any real-world scenario. Propagating errors from the happy path matters more than situations where you're already dealing with a live exception.

For example: you can't write to a file because of an I/O error, and when throwing that exception you find that you can't close the file either. What are you going to do about that other than possibly log the issue in the destructor? Wait and try again until it can be closed?

If you really must force Java semantics into it with chains of exception causes (as if anybody handled those gracefully, ever) then you can. Get the current exception and store a reference to the new one inside the first one. But I would much rather use exceptions as little as possible.

New comment by winternewt in "C++ says “We have try... finally at home”"

winternewt — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 12:03:56 +0000

Destructors are vastly superior to the finally keyword because they only require us to remember a single time to release resources (in the destructor) as opposed to every finally clause. For example, a file always closes itself when it goes out of scope instead of having to be explicitly closed by the person who opened the file. Syntax is also less cluttered with less indentation, especially when multiple objects are created that require nested try... finally blocks. Not to mention how branching and conditional initialization complicates things. You can often pair up constructors with destructors in the code so that it becomes very obvious when resource acquisition and release do not match up.

New comment by winternewt in "Snitch – A friendlier ss/netstat"

winternewt — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 11:08:50 +0000

That's not a feature that the developer has control over. All they can do is try to develop a good tool.

New comment by winternewt in "Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices"

winternewt — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 07:04:36 +0000

The worst part about MS Office isn't the direct user experience, because I can usually choose to use other software. The worst part is that I and everybody else are subjected to the documents that Office produces. Their defaults and their UX inevitably produce stuff that is hard to read and inconsistent, unless you fight the software really hard and make sacrifices with your desired output. And there's no escape from it. Another specimen of Word's 2.5 cm margins, 200-character lines in poorly designed knockoff Helvetica will probably find its way to my mailbox before the end of the day.

New comment by winternewt in "Cloudflare Down Again – and DownDetector Is Also Down"

winternewt — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 11:31:52 +0000

What are you implying by linking to that article?

New comment by winternewt in "Google Antigravity exfiltrates data via indirect prompt injection attack"

winternewt — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 11:02:35 +0000

You're not explaining why the trifecta doesn't solve the problem. What attack vector remains?

New comment by winternewt in "Reverse engineering Codex CLI to get GPT-5-Codex-Mini to draw me a pelican"

winternewt — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 07:50:00 +0000

I see where you're coming from. But I often find that when I have some idea or challenge that I want to solve, I get bogged down in details (like how do I build that project)... before I even know if the idea I _wanted_ to solve is feasible.

It's not that I don't care about learning how to build Rust or think that it's too big of a challenge. It's just not the thing I was excited about right now, and it's not obvious ahead of time how sidetracked it will get me. I find that having an LLM just figure it out helps me to not lose momentum.

New comment by winternewt in "The product of the railways is the timetable"

winternewt — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 09:51:11 +0000

You misunderstand my point. I'm not saying that the purpose of Hermès is to sell bags. I'm saying that the _product_ that Hermès sells is status, and the product of a restaurant is a dining experience.

New comment by winternewt in "Rating 26 years of Java changes"

winternewt — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 06:57:07 +0000

Maybe not slower once it has warmed up, though for memory-bandwidth bound use cases I would still say the lack of mutable records has you fighting the language to get reasonable cache locality (and everybody will hate your code for not being good Java). The fact that everything is a pointer kills the CPU execution pipeline and cache.

But even for I/O bound applications it still feels slow because excessive memory usage means more swap thrashing (slowing down your entire OS), and startup time suffers greatly from having to fire up VM + loading classes and waiting for the JIT to warm up.

I can start a C/C++/Rust based web server in under a second. The corresponding server in Java takes 10 seconds, or minutes once I have added more features.

New comment by winternewt in "The product of the railways is the timetable"

winternewt — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 09:31:02 +0000

The article got off on the wrong foot from the start by separating the purpose from the product. To my mind the purpose is the product and always will be.

New comment by winternewt in "German government comes out against Chat Control"

winternewt — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 16:53:33 +0000

It's actionable if you have some imagination. Raise funds for a nonprofit. Start lobbying on both sides of the aisle. Enlist an advertising company to show the dystopian future if something like chat control comes into effect, poll for focus groups and target them. Find ways to undermine and expose the forces that are pushing for authoritarian legislation.

New comment by winternewt in "German government comes out against Chat Control"

winternewt — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 19:26:56 +0000

Promote a better constitution that protects people from laws like this?

New comment by winternewt in "Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant"

winternewt — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 08:55:25 +0000

I think we already ticked that box

New comment by winternewt in "How to stop AI's "lethal trifecta""

winternewt — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 07:57:38 +0000

Humans and LLMs are deterministic in the sense that if you would rewind the universe, everything would happen the same way again. But both humans and LLMs have hidden variables that make them unpredictable to an outside observer.