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nothrabannosiron Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

It is a faithful translation of the original Dutch. Dutch is structurally very similar to English so this type of nuance carries over pretty much intact.

Dutch: “Dat was niet enkel onzorgvuldig, het was fout.”

English: “That was not just careless—it was wrong.”

I’d say the only difference is the em dash.

Whether you consider it proof of AI is up to y’all.

nothrabannosiron SBCL Fibers – Lightweight Cooperative Threads

I strongly recommend having a look at the mailing list to get some context:

https://sourceforge.net/p/sbcl/mailman/sbcl-devel/thread/CAF...

and

https://sourceforge.net/p/sbcl/mailman/sbcl-devel/thread/CAC...

This will certainly speak to some people taking part in some of the more controversial discussions taking place on HN recently, to put it mildly.

nothrabannosiron Levels of Agentic Engineering

I would ignore any HN content written by a ghost writer or editor. I guess I would flag compiler output but I’m not sure we’re talking about the same thing?

I’m on the internet for human beings. I already read a newspaper for editors and books for ghostwriters.

Not for long though, HN is dying. Just hanging around here waiting for the next thing , I guess…

nothrabannosiron Rebasing in Magit

In a conversation about magit, this is comparing jumping off a sidewalk to powered flight.

nothrabannosiron After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

(tangent of the decade : prefixing your debug printfs with NOCOMMIT helps catching them before commit :) sample precommit hook and GitHub ci action I wrote is at https://github.com/nobssoftware/nocommit but it’s just a grep)

nothrabannosiron A decade of Docker containers

Nix doesn't make sense if all you're going to use it for is building Docker images. It only makes sense if you're all in in the first place. Then Docker images are free.

nothrabannosiron Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

Yes just to be clear I edited that original commnt from “there’s no law he’s breaking” to “for every such law, there’s another one which exonerates him/them”, so technically speaking I think we agree: he is breaking laws.

my impression from more closely following the actual Supreme Court (and federal) cases and reading the opinions as a total layman is that the laws and cases are rarely clear cut, nor isolated. They constantly pull in context and other laws and try and guess what congress meant. And many times the judges make very fair points. Things I thought were clear , actually aren’t. And I’m happy that they’re erring on the side of reticence when it comes to punishing the executive because that is a power that can (and will!) be used against the other side, in a constant escalation of partisanship. That was my original point.

This all is why I’ve come to the impression that a congress with a strong point of view is the most robust way out. If congress passes clear laws with unequivocal language about what should and shouldn’t happen in which specific transgressions of power, the judiciary will uphold it. They may be partisan in the details if that’s how you want to see it, but they will absolutely not ignore clear language from congress. These are still real judges.

nothrabannosiron Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

Ok fair point.

nothrabannosiron Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

> 2.) Trump was convinced of felony. That does not apply to him, because he is a president.

There are cases for which Trump should have been tried, but the NY one about mislabeling funds was not one of them. It was a massive reach, and I bet you <10% of the people clamoring about how he's now a "felon" know what he actually did wrong.

Meanwhile he pressured georgia secretary of state to "find votes", in a recorded call; he should have been tried for this but it didn't get brought to the courts. This was a failing of the executive: you cannot expect courts to rule on a matter which is never brought to them.

Half the country voted for this. At some point this is democracy in action. If you commit election fraud and somehow nobody charges you, i guess the same will apply to you. :(

The NY case had poor facts but was well fought. The Georgia case had good facts but was poorly fought.

nothrabannosiron Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

I wish you made some concrete points rather than condescendingly rephrasing your opinion different ways a few times.

SCOTUS has actively thwarted the current administration’s efforts :

- tariffs

- national guard deployment

- foreign aid

- deportation of man to Salvador

These cases , as well as the cases they’ve ruled in favor of the administration , have been couched in reasoning based on the actual laws passed by congress so far. Read the majority opinions and the concurrences and it is clear that this is not some arbitrary “hey he got us here so let’s do what he wants” (In particular Gorsuch), but they’re actually basing their rulings on the written text.

Meanwhile there is a body whose literal job it is to arrange those texts. And you can elect them come fall. I don’t know how to answer your last , ostensibly rhetorical?, question , other than: yes how do you think any of the current laws got here? That’s what congress does.

Go vote in the midterms for the love of god.

nothrabannosiron No right to relicense this project

Yes I think we agree? I was even thinking specifically about John Deere but I’ve never bought a tractor so it seemed a gauche comparison :)

nothrabannosiron Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

Which actual law should send them to jail?

The law is constantly applied to Trump and his administration. The judicial branch keeps reining him in: National guard, ice, tariffs—-literally TFA for Pete’s sake.

Parent post isn’t about any specific law, it’s about wanting to see a result and working backwards from there: my political opponents should go to jail.

Guess what will happen? The administration after that will send your politicians to jail. And the bananificiation of the US will be complete.

If you genuinely want Trump to go to jail , get Congress to create actual laws that he’d be breaking, with actual clear unmistakable language about its consequences. Raise the votes in the midterms. SCOTUS will enforce it: they have done so, every time, when Congress is clear and decisive. They have indicated as much!

The judicial branch is the only one left doing its job. The law applies. You don’t like how it looks, and you’re not alone, but it applies.

Edit: Let me rephrase: rather than try and find a single law by which to hang the executive , of which I’m sure there are a million, my impression is that for every one of them there’s a commensurate law which exonerates them. Congress keeps protecting the president. Congress is the most powerful of the three branches, by design . To genuinely see someone going to jail, From The executive branch , Congress needs to make a clear, unequivocal, statement.

nothrabannosiron Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

If the lesson by now isn’t “be careful wishing for powers you don’t want the other side to use against you” then I don’t know what will drive that home…

nothrabannosiron No right to relicense this project

Then we would stop checking them into our source control repositories.

nothrabannosiron No right to relicense this project

By allowing them to benefit from the work of others who do. Directly or indirectly.

I’m not good at car maintenance but I would benefit from an environment where schematics are open and cars are easy to maintain by everyone: there would be more knowledge around it, more garages for me to choose from, etc.

nothrabannosiron No right to relicense this project

The GPL exists for the benefit of end users, not developers. It being a chore for developers who want to deny their users the software freedoms is a feature, not a bug.

nothrabannosiron Layoffs at Block

I mean fair in conversation, not in negotiation.

We're talking about worker's comp here. In this thread specifically, the UK is brought up as having generally "better" severance packages. But that's only half the story if you count things which the workers pay the companies when they're the ones quitting.

I worked in the UK, I've had to "pay" for that notice period by hanging around where I didn't want to. It's the other side of the coin which somehow doesn't get mentioned when people bring up Europe as somehow having better employee protections. They might, but notice periods ain't that.

If I had to put as much money into a company's retirement as they put in mine, I wouldn't turn around when I retire and say, wow, great comp package. No: this was a symmetrical deal we made, this time it's working out for me--in a parallel universe it's working out for you; it's a wash.

Severance packages are comp. Notice periods are just properties of the contract. They're not a severance package.

I find this an important distinction because it lets companies pull the wool over your eyes by pretending they're being generous, when really they're just paying you the exact same thing you'd have to pay them were you the one quitting. That's not a package, that's just salary.

nothrabannosiron Layoffs at Block

Double counting the notice period is unfair IMO. You already pay for the notice period by having the notice period when you want to quit. Companies having to pay you the notice period when they fire you is symmetrical and IMO is not a severance package. Maybe that's just my assumption, but IMO a severance package is the asymmetrical pay-out when one party quits an agreement, not the communal wager you both put down when you enter the contract.

Put another way: if both parties agree on a shorter or longer notice period, I wouldn't expect that to affect any potential severance package. It's just the notice period.

nothrabannosiron What does " 2>&1 " mean?

The aws cli has a set of porcelain for s3 access (aws s3) and plumbing commands for lower level access to advanced controls (aws s3api). The plumbing command aws s3api get-object doesn't support stdout natively, so if you need it and want to use it in a pipeline (e.g. pv), you would naively do something like

  $ aws s3api get-object --bucket foo --key bar /dev/stdout | pv ...

Unfortunately, aws s3api already prints the API response to stdout, and error messages to stderr, so if you do the above you'll clobber your pipeline with noise, and using /dev/stderr has the same effect on error.

You can, though, do the following:

  $ aws s3api get-object --bucket foo --key bar /dev/fd/3 3>&1 >/dev/null | pv ...

This will pipe only the object contents to stdout, and the API response to /dev/null.

nothrabannosiron Show HN: Quantifying opportunity cost with a deliberately "simple" web app

> He made a bold claim that one day it might reach $100k per coin. I remember thinking it sounded unrealistic - and even if it wasn't, I wasn't going to break my rule.

> ... The opportunity cost came out to tens of millions of dollars.

It doesn't sound, though, like you'd have held until 100k. This calculation only applies to people who'd have held for some reason; e.g. just after the conversation, you slipped into a coma and you just woke up now.

But I usually hear it from people who "could've bought at $2 but didn't!"

If you didn't buy at $2, you wouldn't have held at $4. If you didn't buy at $300, you wouldn't have held at $600. Etc.

Me neither fwiw :)

nothrabannosiron Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

This is ironic in the context of Dang’s opening comment on this sub tree.

nothrabannosiron Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

I never had this integrated with an editor but maybe I didn’t try hard enough. With CDKTF, a stock typescript IDE automatically has tab complete for every provider you want. That + being able to use functions, variables, loops, arrays, and structs for composition made it a completely different experience.

If those things all end up coming to terraform I’m all ears. For now it seemed more like a compilation target.

nothrabannosiron Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

Couldn't disagree more.

I have written both TF and then CDKTF extensively (!), and I am absolutely never going back to raw TF. TF vs CDKTF isn't declarative vs imperative, it's "anemic untyped slow feedback mess" vs "strong typesystem, expressive builtins and LSP". You can build things in CDKTF that are humanly intractable in raw TF and it requires far less discipline, not more, to keep it from becoming an unmaintainable mess. Having a typechecker for your providers is a "cannot unsee" experience. As is being able to use for loops and defining functions.

That being said, would I have preferred a CDKTF in Haskell, or a typed Nix dialect? Hell yes. CDKTF was awful, it was just the least bad thing around. Just like TF itself, in a way.

But I have little problems with HCL as a compilation target. Rich ecosystem and the abstractions seem sensible. Maybe that's Stockholm syndrome? Ironically, CDKTF has made me stop hating TF :)

Now that Hashicorp put the kibosh on CDKTF though, the question is: where next...

nothrabannosiron Undo in Vi and Its Successors

undo-tree-visualize is easily one of the biggest wow factors for unfamiliar users. Cannot unsee, cannot go back.

nothrabannosiron Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout

Or please just put the prompt in a blog post instead.

nothrabannosiron 14-year-old Miles Wu folded origami pattern that holds 10k times its own weight

Totally of the same persuasion as you, I'll say I did hear a very good counter point when Magnus Carlsen said in an interview at 30 he feels he can't compute lines as deep as he could previously, and his edge is now his experience. That was rather convincing.

Most of the folklore around "neuroplasticity" I've found pretty underwhelming. But yeah, if even he says it at that level of consistent practice, that seems like a good yardstick.

nothrabannosiron Ex-Tech –> Homeless in SF

"It begun my psychosis" is a literal statement.

Maybe if you miss that sentence, the rest can fly under the radar. Assuming one also ignores the commonly reported correlation between homelessness and mental illness. But try and have those two elements front of mind, and re-read the article: it should be abundantly clear that this is in no way a healthy person down on his luck--this is a story of someone going through a mental break.

nothrabannosiron EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear

That sounds like another problem then :)

In the EU (or maybe just my country of origin?) there is certainly statutory warranty. Length and coverage varies per product category.

nothrabannosiron EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear

> ... the vendor tells them to go the manufacturer...

Maybe this is the problem. Retailers should cover the statutory warranty on any product they sell.

nothrabannosiron Ex-Tech –> Homeless in SF

In this particular case they had an upcoming court date in SF.