Hacker News: wrqvrwvq

Horstine the Whale: An Obituary

wrqvrwvq — Fri, 22 May 2026 21:28:20 +0000

Article URL: https://www.eugyppius.com/p/horstine-the-whale-an-obituary

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48241900

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by wrqvrwvq in "Chess puzzle I found in my dad's old book"

wrqvrwvq — Wed, 13 May 2026 22:53:27 +0000

fun demo. could be a daily puzzle combining various commenter suggestions. There are (didn't verify personally) 388 solutions. The daily puzzle could remove 1+ pieces and ask for a 1+ move guess.

Also a click on a square could auto place a queen and a second click would swap to the bishop. Every click could auto-check.

A separate discovery mode could start blocking out the squares visually as you place pieces. For a lot of people, that would be easier than the mental representation.

New comment by wrqvrwvq in "Making the news available at no cost is a victory"

wrqvrwvq — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:04:43 +0000

Discussion of the free-press in america or elsewhere invariably suffers from lack of historical perspective. Without oversimplifying, the press has always been biased and ideologically motivated to a degree that few appreciate. Because of "all the president's men" and other films lionizing the press' infallible, dogged, ruthless dedication to the truth, people suddenly believe that every journalist is "supposed to be" a paragon of truth-seeking objectivity, dogmatically devoted to the dissemination of "truth to power", but historically and today and even during watergate, the press was a gang of jackals doing yellow muckraking. This has its purpose and we shouldn't hate journalists for doing their job, but it's a complete category error to assume that the press is there to report honestly and objectively.

New comment by wrqvrwvq in "YC's Biggest Scandals"

wrqvrwvq — Sun, 10 May 2026 23:36:50 +0000

out of all the companies listed, yc would of course choose something like this. "wow you're going to defend american soldiers????" yc and this site are chinese ops run by the scummiest sinotrash on earth. steal millions and deliver vaporware? "oh sounds like a failed business". try to protect soldiers from drones? "oh sounds like you're the terminator highly unethical sar."

New comment by wrqvrwvq in "US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos"

wrqvrwvq — Sat, 09 May 2026 05:39:47 +0000

unc's thrashing out

New comment by wrqvrwvq in "Life During Class Wartime"

wrqvrwvq — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:13:21 +0000

How would something like this exist at all if it weren't true?

https://x.com/PabloAntonio/status/2051401704395227410#m

New comment by wrqvrwvq in "Life During Class Wartime"

wrqvrwvq — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:12:50 +0000

These kinds of operations are rampant in all cities. There's a line of people to waiting to sell their ebt/stamps.

https://x.com/PabloAntonio/status/2051401704395227410

New comment by wrqvrwvq in "Life During Class Wartime"

wrqvrwvq — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:32:55 +0000

I don't think just paying people will make any difference at all. Most of the chronically poor in US at least have underlying problems such as addiction, schizophrenia or other affective disorders. Most chronically homeless people have turned down multiple state subsidized living options or have been booted from them for anti-social behavior. Studies routinely show that 30-40% of food stamps are sold for pennies on the dollar to pay for drugs or other unnecessary things.

The other major issue with "free money" is that it is purely inflationary, unlike wages which offset most of their price pressure by providing a commensurate amount of goods/services. When you hand everyone a million dollars the price of everything just goes up, both because there's a flood of money and because there's even less incentive to produce something to buy with it.

I think there's any compassionate argument to be made for helping the indigent, but easy ideas like "taking money from job creators and value producers to pay for needles and degeneracy" are never going to work at all.

It's a bit of a trope to say that billionaires are hoarding wealth via financial shenanigans when all of their wealth is tied up in job and value creation.

The us govt wastes by some estimates 30% of its budget. Trillions annually. Have to start with the waste and fraud. Empty daycares are not a good use of hard-earned tax dollars and have a massively pernicious effect on the society. They're not taking care of kids or paying teachers. Just pure inflationary greed.

New comment by wrqvrwvq in "He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice"

wrqvrwvq — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:36:09 +0000

Bizarre thread so far. Some threads seem to attract a certain type of boosterism or opinion management. People all rush in to same similar things, without reading the prior comments. Seems designed to wash thoughts into a stream. Maybe coordinated pr or reputation management. It could even be organic but it doesn't seem that way.

New comment by wrqvrwvq in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

wrqvrwvq — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 02:54:40 +0000

That's why there's tomes of overlapping AGENTS.slop folders and 100K lines of "docslop" and people inventing "memoryslop" systems to reduce this token burden. But the agents can't really distill even a simple instruction like "don't delete prod" because those three words (who knows how many tokens) are the simplest that that expression can get and the ai needs to "reread" that and every other instruction to "proceed according to the instructions". It never learns anything or gets into good habits. It's very clear from these kinds of threads that concepts of "don't" and "do" are not breaking through to the actions the bot performs. It can't connect its own output or its effects with its model context.

New comment by wrqvrwvq in "Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy"

wrqvrwvq — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:27:09 +0000

People say this without any evidence. This ai-post is just regurgitating hn-thread "received wisdom". The evidence for the existence of a library is thin and hard to piece together, but points to more than a myth. I appreciate that people want real proof of anything, but dumping an ai-slop summary is hardly doing any better than accepting the existence of a large library.

Mike Stonebraker Turing Award Winner: Postgres, Disagreeing with Google [video]

wrqvrwvq — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:17:10 +0000

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

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876044

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by wrqvrwvq in "SpaceX Strikes Deal With Cursor for $60 Billion"

wrqvrwvq — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 22:58:21 +0000

ai trends seem to mirror general coding/software trends but compressed. People used to edit programs with sed, but the ide proved to be more powerful from every perspective. cli tools always have their place for "power-users" and other specialized intermediate usecases like tui's, but in general the ide has overtaken every aspect of cli use and many devs hardly ever use the terminal. I suspect a similar thing will happen with ai.

New comment by wrqvrwvq in "Ex-CEO, ex-CFO of iLearningEngines charged with fraud"

wrqvrwvq — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 02:12:45 +0000

great to insert partisan talking points here. the last admin has no culpability so this is a great argument. thanks.

New comment by wrqvrwvq in "Ex-CEO, ex-CFO of iLearningEngines charged with fraud"

wrqvrwvq — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 02:05:00 +0000

There is probably some phrase for describing this type of business activity. "If it's sophisticated it's actually legal" (no fault settlement). As a limited legalist this is actually the way it works and it's somewhat normal. A better lawyer provides better advice and steers company activity towards more defensible practice. If all the major ai players want to set money on fire for totally unmaintainable hobbies then so be it.

You know what I haven't ever seen? a good blogpost from an AI

wrqvrwvq — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:22:55 +0000

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711588

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by wrqvrwvq in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

wrqvrwvq — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:32:13 +0000

what are you morons still even pretending to do??? I agentically replace myself and it sucks not only the entire financial proposition of my company out of itself, but also just sucks. nice ...

New comment by wrqvrwvq in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

wrqvrwvq — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:30:25 +0000

ahhh, i have no idea what i'm doing...! lol , but a bot wrote this, im not even responsible

New comment by wrqvrwvq in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

wrqvrwvq — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:29:20 +0000

hilarious that there's 10 billion lines of context being shuffled around and argued over but paying a dev 100K is a techno sin. Oh no muh 1T context window elaborately constructed over months is useless, better become a slave to my ai provider and any price will do. plz write my code but for free but for all my company's value.

New comment by wrqvrwvq in "Every Law a Commit – US Law in GitHub"

wrqvrwvq — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 01:25:45 +0000

I think law as code or the "legal code" as code is a proposition that hasn't been fully imagined. There are a few other cs-language projects to describe tax law as code and some of them have some traction, but if law were immersed more in code, we could test it better and reason about its effects with more context.

If you pass a law to reduce theft, you could include tests based on official statistics about whether or not theft is going down, and with some scientific rigor (CBO is usually quite reliable for instance), the law could "amend itself" either by sunsetting itself, if it isn't measuring up to expectations, or have an automatic budget increase if it's succeeding.

It's a bit far-fetched, given how indeterminate most government programs' intentions actually are (e.g. just hand out billions for "healthcare" and allow untold fraud to proliferate because it benefits our donors and voters), but every law should serve a purpose and we should automate its evaluation.