knuckleheads (u/knuckleheads)

knuckleheads commented on The Pleasure of Patterns in Art thereader.mitpress.mit.ed... · Posted by u/prismatic

gilleain · 4 days ago

Totally agree. I used to really dislike Rothko paintings as I fell into the same trap of thinking there was 'nothing to it'. Well, try actually painting something with so few colours, and essentially no geometry. It's really hard to make something that looks good!

knuckleheads · 4 days ago

Hahah just realized you could talk about Rothko’s basilisk as a mental trap of sorts the same way you could for Roko’s basilisk.

knuckleheads commented on The Pleasure of Patterns in Art thereader.mitpress.mit.ed... · Posted by u/prismatic

gilleain · 4 days ago

An interesting feature of repetitive geometric art that took me a long time to appreciate is that the discipline of getting an even cover of paint in a highly repetitive painting is surely very difficult.

Take Bridget Riley - we are so used to how mechanical painting (that is, 'printing') makes getting such even cover, and straight lines trivial that doing it by hand seems no more impressive.

https://www.moma.co.uk/how-to-paint-like-bridget-riley/

knuckleheads · 4 days ago

Relatedly, I didn't "get" Rothko's paintings until I saw one in real life last year. Easy to look at through a screen and not get the effect that it has, what with everything on the screen being so pixel perfect. For me, looking at those Rothko's in real life had me thinking there was a pattern in the color somewhere just out of reach for me, that if I looked closer I could see a pixel or catch a line somewhere that would tell me what was really driving all the colors. It drew me in in person in a way that it simply could not via the screen or some sort of other reproduction. What he did with colors is magical and the stories around others calling it easy or trivial to do and then failing hard themselves are also fun to consider afterwards.

knuckleheads commented on Figma will IPO on July 31 figma.com/blog/ipo-pricin... · Posted by u/nevir

worthless-trash · a month ago

Glad i'm not the only one who saw it that way.

knuckleheads · a month ago

"Write me a comment for a hacker news comment that explains what figma is and why it's such a great business"

knuckleheads commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025) · Posted by u/david927

slig · a month ago

Hoping to see the English version soon! By the way, I'm also working on a daily games website with a subscription model (it's not live yet!), and I'm considering a price range exactly like yours. Are you having success with your subscription model? This thread [1], specifically this comment [2], was a letdown, but I haven't given up.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595184 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43600346

knuckleheads · a month ago

Ask me in a few months about subscriptions, I'm only a few weeks into having this thing be something even remotely playable. It's more or less the nytimes model and they seem to make it work. Right now, my girlfriend is very helpfully finding very obvious bugs in it most nights that I am fixing, and then after that I hope to get English in there.

I have also read that thread previously and disagree with ads being the only way to go. I think if the game is good enough and, for three emojis in particular, people learn more about their target language, that they will happily pay for it. I know I would at least, and I personally don't think I'm so weird. Friends have surprised me by signing up as soon as I sent it to them, specifically on the language learning value proposition, so I think there's something there. But, if it was just a puzzle game for fun only, then I might agree that the model doesn't work. We will just have to see!

knuckleheads commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025) · Posted by u/david927

knuckleheads · a month ago

https://www.threeemojis.com/ , a daily word game for learning foreign languages. It's been a lot of fun to work on, and it's almost something that I am very proud of. For now it's only playable in German, and someday I hope that it will include many more languages. Today's puzzle shows the challenges of making something like this because there are a lot of old ancient words in there (that I am working on filtering out).

knuckleheads commented on EPA says it will eliminate its scientific research arm nytimes.com/2025/07/18/cl... · Posted by u/anigbrowl

eviks · a month ago

You've made a few basic fails: federal register is, well, only federal, so you've ignored all the non-federal ones. But then even at the federal level you've missed laws that contain the rules, and then the court decisions that directly impact how a rule is interpeted. And all that, of course, isn't enough, to understand them you'd also need to read professional literature that explains all of those rules.

Then the rules aren't static, so you'd need to print the full legal version for each change, so it wouldn't be neatly stuck into years, but more frequently.

Then there is the bigger elephant in the world - the actual world! Since you drain the whole wide world of blood, count all the rules that they produce out there.

Also, did you do math in JS wat to get

4.1 million pages * 1 liter per page = 115 liters (not million)

> about 40 years to

Then you've also forgotten to count all the future regulations

knuckleheads · a month ago

The Federal Register is the log of the changes, the Code of Federal Regulations is the product after applying all those changes. The Code is only about 190,000 page, so about 20 times less, which means if you abandoned your antisocial ways and made one friend (and, big stretch, another one to account for future growth of the code), the two/three of you could bleed out a copy of the updated Code by yourself each year for the foreseeable future.

knuckleheads commented on EPA says it will eliminate its scientific research arm nytimes.com/2025/07/18/cl... · Posted by u/anigbrowl

eviks · a month ago

> someone always rightly responds "these regulations are written in blood."

No, that's just a lazy ignorant response, there is not enough blood in the world to provide enough ink to write all those rules.

knuckleheads · a month ago

Ran the math and and it's factually incorrect to say there's not enough blood in the world to write out all these rules.

There's about ~8 billion people in the world today. Estimates say an average adult has 5 liters of blood in their body, so let's say 2.5 liters per person to account for children. That's about 20 billion liters of blood for available for your macabre comparison.

Looking at the federal register[0] and running some javascript on the page [1], we get an estimate of 4.1 million pages in the federal register in it's whole history. We could get into page yields for various types of printing and how that effects how many pages could be printed, but at a generous one liter per page, it's obvious it could be done.

Skipping some more estimates, but the federal register would require about 1 oil-drum of blood or 115 liters to write out, which would only take one person donating blood at the recommend safe rates about 40 years to complete by themselves. A long time for sure, but if you start today, you could hopefully see just how wrong you were before the end of your life.

[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/reader-aids/federal-register... [1] $("tbody > tr > :nth-child(9) ").text().split("\n").map(function(l){return parseInt(l.trim().replace(",",""))}).filter(function(l){return l ? l: 0}).reduce(function(a,b){return a+b},0)

knuckleheads commented on Why Algebraic Effects? antelang.org/blog/why_eff... · Posted by u/jiggawatts

knuckleheads · 3 months ago

First time in a long while where I’ve read the intro to a piece about new programming languages and not recognized any of the examples given at all even vaguely. How times change!

knuckleheads commented on Era of U.S. dollar may be winding down news.harvard.edu/gazette/... · Posted by u/gnabgib

knuckleheads · 4 months ago

He's been on a bit of a book tour recently and his name kept ringing a bell for me dimly every time I saw him pop up, and then one day it hit me, Rogoff is the economist who was found to have made a serious mistake in their paper about the effect of debts levels on GDP growth a decade and a half ago. The paper argued that the higher the levels of debt, the more gdp growth slowed down and reversed. This paper as used to support a lot of austerity policies in response to the GFC in the years following 2008. Some, at the time, grad students looked into though and found that there were lots of serious mistakes with the paper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt

Leaving a comment for others just in case others are experiencing that same mis-connect. As far as the article goes, we'll see! I'm inclined to think that is true, that the US is retreating from the world stage and the dollar will follow, but whether that happens now, later or never, I couldn't say. Interesting times!

knuckleheads commented on Why rents are still rising too fast economist.com/finance-and... · Posted by u/jcartw

_fat_santa · 5 months ago

I really don't understand the anti-landlord sentiment. Folks seem to get this idea that your average landlord has no costs, takes on no risk, and just sails away with the rent they collect every month and spend it on a lavish vacation.

Newsflash but buying property introduces significant costs, complexity and risk. By renting you simply choose to pay a monthly fee to a business that will provide you that same property but will take on all that risk instead of you.

knuckleheads · 5 months ago

I ask sincerely, have you ever had a bad landlord? Because if you had, you would understand why some people would hate them. Many people do not have the choice to buy a home and so must rent, and often they have to deal with terrible people.