Hacker News: wowoc

New comment by wowoc in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

wowoc — Mon, 18 May 2026 11:49:46 +0000

"Earth is flat" is an objective statement. "I experience consciousness" is subjective, similarly to "I am experiencing pain". If someone tells me "pain doesn't exist" while I know it exists (because I have experienced it), I can be certain that that person is wrong. Even though I can't prove it to him.

New comment by wowoc in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

wowoc — Mon, 18 May 2026 11:46:45 +0000

Thomas Nagel's definition of consciousness is pretty good: "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."

New comment by wowoc in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies. How it happened"

wowoc — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:34:02 +0000

The article on AP literally has a graph showing outsized growth of Poland compared to these countries (measured in GDP per capita).

New comment by wowoc in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

wowoc — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:28:59 +0000

Yet you can see crowds of young anti-woke Germans on X claiming that Poland's been growing only because of their (i.e. the Germans') money.

Also, the reason you've given doesn't explain why it worked so much better for Poland than for Czechia, Slovakia and a few others.

New comment by wowoc in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

wowoc — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:22:26 +0000

Exactly. Which proves that people who keep saying that Poland's growth is only due to EU's money should finally stop.

Another argument: Poland's GDP had already been growing at a similar pace before it joined the EU (but after it got rid of communism).

New comment by wowoc in "Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only"

wowoc — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:55:26 +0000

OpenAI's ToS seems OK to me, it's just Microsoft and Anthropic.

New comment by wowoc in "Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only"

wowoc — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:57:16 +0000

Well, OpenAI doesn't seem to have clauses like this. Europeans are allowed to use it for commercial purposes under the ToS. (But check it yourself, I'm not a lawyer).

I reimplemented my startup idea from scratch with Codex a few months ago, just for peace of mind.

New comment by wowoc in "Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only"

wowoc — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:12:11 +0000

Anthropic does a somewhat similar thing. If you visit their ToS (the one for Max/Pro plans) from a European IP address, they replace one section with this:

Non-commercial use only. You agree not to use our Services for any commercial or business purposes and we (and our Providers) have no liability to you for any loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption, or loss of business opportunity.

It's funny that a plan called "Pro" cannot be used professionally.

https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms

New comment by wowoc in "Claude Code CLI was broken"

wowoc — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 09:40:17 +0000

Running sed commands manually in 2026? Just tell Codex to fix your Claude Code

New comment by wowoc in "Poland’s Central Bank Secretly Paid YouTubers to Slander Cryptos"

wowoc — Wed, 21 Feb 2018 09:33:17 +0000

No, it wasn't the government - just a private company running within a state-sponsored accelerator. The government withdrew their funds after finding out about it.

New comment by wowoc in "Let's Colonize Titan"

wowoc — Sun, 27 Nov 2016 13:28:23 +0000

The article says that the water ice could be used as a source of oxygen, needed to power the combustion of hydrocarbons as fuel. But the oxygen is trapped in water molecules, wouldn't it need to be freed from the hydrogen atoms first (which requires energy)?

New comment by wowoc in "Use PNG image compression to send large numbers of rows to the browser"

wowoc — Sat, 26 Nov 2016 09:36:40 +0000

How does decompression speed compare to gzip?

New comment by wowoc in "Google launches its own festival to bring together music and technology"

wowoc — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 18:23:46 +0000

Ah, all right, thanks. That's just me not being a native speaker.

New comment by wowoc in "Google launches its own festival to bring together music and technology"

wowoc — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 16:17:13 +0000

What does it mean that it is "presented by Pixel"? Will it be streamed from a Pixel phone?

New comment by wowoc in "Germany’s Chinese investment problem"

wowoc — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 14:55:06 +0000

I don't have pro-nationalistic views, that's a purely economic issue to me - its result is a long-lasting drain of capital. I did feel somewhat weird after posting that though, and @lossolo caught me.

New comment by wowoc in "Germany’s Chinese investment problem"

wowoc — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 13:33:39 +0000

The same happened in Poland (and other countries from behind the Iron Curtain). Most stuff here has German or French owners now.

Have language drops its indentation based syntax

wowoc — Tue, 27 Sep 2016 12:23:25 +0000

Article URL: http://havelang.org/post/embrace_braces/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12589043

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by wowoc in "Have: a new language that transpiles to Go"

wowoc — Fri, 23 Sep 2016 09:12:33 +0000

That too, but I rather meant predeclared named types. According to Go specification, types that you define with "type Name OldName" are named, but "int", "string" and the rest are named too. Go disallows declaring methods on predeclared types.

https://golang.org/ref/spec#Types

New comment by wowoc in "Have: a new language that transpiles to Go"

wowoc — Thu, 22 Sep 2016 21:20:22 +0000

Sure, the AST node for "when" is here: https://github.com/vrok/have/blob/master/have/ast.go#L159

Type checker checks the condition before every branch in "when" statements, and sets the "True" flag if it evaluated to true.

Then the code generator just skips over branches that don't have the "True" flag set: https://github.com/vrok/have/blob/master/have/generator.go#L...

New comment by wowoc in "Have: a new language that transpiles to Go"

wowoc — Thu, 22 Sep 2016 21:16:06 +0000

Your example looks good as well. Opening gives more flexibility with how the code can be structured, say that you have two interfaces:

  type I interface {
    A()
  }

  type J interface {
    B()
  }

And you have two structs that implement them, you can then group methods from the same interface together:

  type X struct{}
  type Y struct{}

  func (x X) A() {}
  func (y Y) A() {}

  func (x X) B() {}
  func (y Y) B() {}

I've seen that used in the Golang codebase, and sometimes it does seem useful.