Hacker News: zelos

New comment by zelos in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

zelos — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:49:45 +0000

I totally agree about school-level homework: it was many years before my pre-frontal cortex developed enough that I could have forced myself to do the work.

That said, though, one thing I don't understand about the heavy users of AI in academia and software development is that the thinking and coding is the fun part. And that's the part so many people seem to be so keen to automate away.

New comment by zelos in "Two EA-18 fighter jets collide at Mountain Home airshow, pilots ejected safely"

zelos — Mon, 18 May 2026 09:36:28 +0000

Seeing and hearing the last remaining Avro Vulcan pull up over the chalk cliffs at Eastbourne a few years back is something I won't forget for a long time.

New comment by zelos in "The Upper Middle Class Trap"

zelos — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:42:25 +0000

It’s the same in the UK, house prices in the catchment area of a good school are significantly higher.

New comment by zelos in "The Upper Middle Class Trap"

zelos — Thu, 07 May 2026 14:19:17 +0000

"a college degree made you stand out. But now that so many have them, it’s table stakes. Now, we spend four years and tens of thousands of dollars to end up in the same place."

That kind of depends what you're measuring, doesn't it? A better educated population is presumably generally a good thing. My life is probably more interesting because I spent 4 years at university learning.

Is that worth the price? I don't know, but it's not the same place.

New comment by zelos in "BYD Seal 08 debuts with Blade Battery 2.0: 1,000km range, 5-min charging, 684hp"

zelos — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:33:23 +0000

That 100kW claim seems pretty unlikely, or maybe it's UK only? Driving long distance in Europe I see the max ~230kW charging of the car everywhere apart from the rare times the charger's broken.

Actually, although UK provision is pretty bad, I got 235kW sustained last week in some small charging station off the M4.

New comment by zelos in "BYD Seal 08 debuts with Blade Battery 2.0: 1,000km range, 5-min charging, 684hp"

zelos — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:41:33 +0000

I've avoided Chinese EVs for political reasons, but it's getting harder. After the lease on my Kia EV6 ends in 6 months I can either upgrade to the new model with a whole 10% more range, or switch to one of the European brands which mostly have around half the charging speed.

The Mercedes CLA seems to be the only model that's significantly better and not totally crazy money.

New comment by zelos in "10 years ago, someone wrote a test for Servo that included an expiry in 2026"

zelos — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:26:55 +0000

Generate fuzz tests using random values with a fixed seed, sure, but using random values in tests that run on CI seems like a recipe for hard-to-reproduce flaky builds unless you have really good logging.

New comment by zelos in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

zelos — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:52:18 +0000

I was forced to work out a 3 month notice period at my previous company in the UK. I don’t see the point of keeping an already-checked out employee around so long when you have basically no way of getting anything but the bare minimum out of them.

New comment by zelos in "4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches"

zelos — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:37:12 +0000

Not to open a can of worms, but there are probably people who still consider Northern Ireland a colony.

New comment by zelos in "Denmark was reportedly preparing for full-scale war with the US over Greenland"

zelos — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:31:48 +0000

Argentina only had 6 Exocets. I think the parent is referring to the failure of the fuses in the bombs the Argentinian pilots dropped on British ships.

New comment by zelos in "The purpose of Continuous Integration is to fail"

zelos — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:47:52 +0000

> Whenever a CI run fails, we can re-run it. If it passes the second time, we are sure it was flaky.

Or you have a concurrency issue in your production code?

New comment by zelos in "Triumph of the toons: how animation came to rule the box office"

zelos — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 11:16:03 +0000

Film franchises tap into nostalgia, too. “Toy Story 5” will be watched by more than a few adults

I always thought the reason Toy Story works for adults and children is that the toys are the 'parents': caring for their child, but with the awareness that their job is to render themselves unnecessary.

New comment by zelos in "Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980)"

zelos — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 10:16:16 +0000

It's been many years since I read 1984, but this seems wrong:

"To Orwell, it must have seemed that neither time nor fortune could budge Stalin, but that he would live on forever with ever increasing strength. - And that was how Orwell pictured Big Brother."

Wasn't the point in 1984 that Big Brother isn't real? So there was no central dictator, just the system.

New comment by zelos in "Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode"

zelos — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 12:48:55 +0000

It was head and shoulders above many of the alternatives for mobile app development back then like Carbide or Codewarrior, though.

New comment by zelos in "Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI""

zelos — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 15:23:32 +0000

LLM output is quickly rendering google search unusable, so it's kind of creating its own speedup multiplier.

New comment by zelos in "Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy"

zelos — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 16:03:11 +0000

Regaining the weight quickly after stopping taking the drugs seems reasonably well substantiated? https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj-2025-085304

New comment by zelos in "Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy"

zelos — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 14:27:52 +0000

It's not just a US thing. Obesity rates in the UK and Germany are similar and I know plenty of people on GLP-1 drugs in the UK.

New comment by zelos in "Microsoft Copilot AI Comes to LG TVs, and Can't Be Deleted"

zelos — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 10:04:42 +0000

Exactly. I disabled internet access on my LG C1 after an update reenabled the setting that pops up adverts over the top of what you're watching.

New comment by zelos in "Installing Java in 2025, and Version Managers"

zelos — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 08:44:36 +0000

There's always Gradle Toolchains as well, which allows you to put the JDK configuration in the branch next to the source code.

New comment by zelos in "Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled"

zelos — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 12:15:38 +0000

The iPhone app has weird bugs too. Currently (for me, at least) the brand text that appears in the overlay box on adverts is black text on a black background and virtually illegible. If they're not even worried about bugs in the revenue-generating ad part of the app, what hope is there for the rest?