Hacker News: yathern

New comment by yathern in "Why it's impossible to measure England's coastline"

yathern — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:47:06 +0000

Not a bad idea - one issue would be when the circle approaches a 'narrow' section that widens out again. If too big to fit into the gap, the circle method would simply not count any of this as land. I think it would be unreliable compared to moving along the coastline in fixed increments (IE one-mile increments or one-foot increments, depending on your goal)

New comment by yathern in "Most people can't juggle one ball"

yathern — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:29:03 +0000

> Another mistake is completely ignoring the ball and staring into the distance. I'm not entirely sure why, but I've seen it a bunch more with *rats* than anywhere else. In any case, I would recommend you just casually glance up at the ball as it reaches the top of its arc

Is 'rats' a juggling jargon I'm unfamiliar with? Or do rats stare into the distance often?

New comment by yathern in "PGLite Evangelism"

yathern — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:45:24 +0000

I used PGLite for a project (monkeys.zip) and it was absolutely fantastic! Loved how speedily I could have a "real" postgres instance without spinning up docker. Worked really really well with pnpm workspaces and a monorepo setup (EG pnpm run will run the DB package, as well as frontend and backend).

The only downside (and this applies for SQLite as well) is that it runs too well that you can get some bad habits - or at least follow patterns that don't support horizontal scaling which you would want to do in production. A number of problems across different projects have bit me because I relied too long on SQLite (or PGLite) when moving from local dev to setting up cloud infra. This includes things like connection pooling, read replicas, consistency issues with sharding. Maybe all those people who productionize *Lite have a point!

Making of Words.zip (Infinite Word Search)

yathern — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:47:31 +0000

Article URL: https://luke.zip/posts/making-of-words/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47678839

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by yathern in "AIs can generate near-verbatim copies of novels from training data"

yathern — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 17:17:57 +0000

Hmmm I think you're sort of right but not entirely. It's true that a novel consists of a valid organization of tokens, and that this sequence can be feasibly made to be output from a model. But when you say this:

> So there should be a prompt that can cause that sequence to be output

Is where I think I might disagree. For example, the odds of predicting verbatim the next sentence in, say, Harry Potter should be astronomically low for a large majority of it. If it wasn't, it'd be a pretty boring book. The fact that it can do this with relative ease means it has been trained on the material.

The issue at hand is about copyright and Intellectual Property - if the goal of copyright is to protect the IP of the author, then LLMs can sort of act like an IP money laundering scheme - where the black box has consumed and can emit this IP. The whole concept of IP is a little philosophical and muddy, with lots of grey area for fair use, parody, inspiration, and adaptation. But this gets very odd when we consider it in light of these models which can adapt and use IP at a massive massive scale.

New comment by yathern in "Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet"

yathern — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 21:03:03 +0000

> Unless your strategy is to create a photo-lab-like screen in pure black and red, or wear deep-red-tinted glasses, it’s unlikely that a pure colorshift strategy will cut out that big of a chunk of the spectrum.

I absolutely think this is the right approach. The glasses which do 'blue light filtering' which barely change your perception are clearly placebo, but a very strong redshift I think is obviously a different creature.

Show HN: Words.zip (300k words found on an infinite grid)

yathern — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 17:07:29 +0000

Hey HN! About a month ago I launched https://words.zip - a little (infinite) word search game - it's been very slowly growing, but now has over 300,000 words found! Lots of cool things people are doing, using it as a sort of canvas, or just finding the hardest words.

In the last month I added a lot of new features: - challenges (sets of words to find) - lots more stats (word counts) - light mode (got lots of feedback that white-on-black was rough) - a discord with a handful of people now!

Check it out it you haven't already and I hope you enjoy it!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46847564

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by yathern in "Show HN: The HN Arcade"

yathern — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:55:37 +0000

Thank you! Definitely an inspiration, sort of like a human proof-of-work canvas

New comment by yathern in "Show HN: The HN Arcade"

yathern — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:55:12 +0000

Yup! A fairly simple deterministic RNG such that it can be generated both client and server side. This strategy greatly reduces the burden of transmitting all the letters as you scroll around, only needing the subset of found words

New comment by yathern in "Show HN: The HN Arcade"

yathern — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 17:16:07 +0000

Oh that's not a bad idea, and easy enough to implement! I'll definitely get to it later today - I think because I play it on my phone the contrast is less obtrusive, but on a big desktop screen it's a bit boggling to look at

New comment by yathern in "Show HN: The HN Arcade"

yathern — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 14:26:52 +0000

Thanks for the feedback, I've heard similar before and meant to make a lower contrast option - I'll definitely get on it.

New comment by yathern in "Show HN: The HN Arcade"

yathern — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 14:14:40 +0000

Fantastic idea! I didn't see my https://words.zip game here so I'll submit it, even though it didn't get mucht traction on HN - it's up to 288,000 words found now!

New comment by yathern in "In Defense of the .zip TLD"

yathern — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 23:57:19 +0000

I'm okay with it being neutral, neither good nor bad.

In Defense of the .zip TLD

yathern — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 23:39:54 +0000

Article URL: https://luke.zip/posts/zip-defense/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46759858

Points: 6

# Comments: 5

Give the Internet an Infinite Word Search and the Internet Will Draw Dicks on It

yathern — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 21:36:05 +0000

Article URL: https://gizmodo.com/give-the-internet-an-infinite-word-search-and-the-internet-will-draw-a-dick-on-it-2000709697

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46608503

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by yathern in "Show HN: words.zip – Massively infinite word search"

yathern — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 21:10:43 +0000

Take a look around the map! Some people are making drawings, some are just trying to fill a dense area as much as possible, some restrict themselves to only 4 or 5 letter words. Just interesting little projects people are working on

Show HN: words.zip – Massively infinite word search

yathern — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 14:22:03 +0000

Hi HN! This is a word search game I launched in the beginning of this year - didn't get much traction then, but it's been posted around a bit (right now getting some traffic from kottke.org) and now has over 12,000 words found!

Now that it's a little more filled out I figured I'd share it again. Really enjoying seeing what everyone is making on it - it appears most people start by just adding a few words to the big clump in the middle, then adding to other people's projects (or ruining them) and finally working on their own little concepts. My favorite is the kitty to the north. Hope you enjoy!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46588892

Points: 11

# Comments: 5

New comment by yathern in "Shipmap.org"

yathern — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 16:35:31 +0000

A lot of people have called out some interesting things - one thing that I notice is how the cold water ports shut down in the winter (in the northern hemisphere). It's one of those things I've always heard and known about, but to see it visually conceptualized (and the implications on economy and national interests) is very cool

Show HN: Words.zip – multiplayer infinite word search

yathern — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 19:39:27 +0000

Article URL: https://words.zip/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46491417

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by yathern in "Show HN: Words.zip (Infinite Word Search)"

yathern — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 18:53:07 +0000

Thank you! Let me know if you have any feedback