Hacker News Reader

passivegainson Don't Just Say Hello

That's not really the same thing though. They do have a bit of respect for your time and attention, they are writing your damn message already, and you know that because of the dots. The people who prompted this website are leaving the conversation trapped in purgatory until you respond.

passivegainson A brief history of federal lift ticket regulation

None of the skiers I know ski because they want to spend a lot of money, they spend a lot of money because they want to ski. (Hauling yourself up a freezing cold mountain might not sound like much fun but they quite enjoy it.) Nothing but skiing will do.

None of the hunters I know hunt because they want to spend a lot of money, they spend a lot of money because they want to hunt (birds or otherwise.) (Crouching in a tree or a swamp for hours on end might not sound like much fun but they quite enjoy it.) Nothing but hunting will do.

Hobbies are almost never drop in replacements for each other.

passivegainson Gloomberb

Does the GUI have Bloomberg's data source?

passivegainson Advertise in ChatGPT

"We need most of our population working full time to keep ourselves fed because running a farm is really hard" is a technical problem, not a societal one. You can solve it with fertilizer and the cotton gin or whatever.

"There's a bunch of us now and barter isn't cutting it anymore" is a technical problem, not a societal one. You can solve it with coinage and banks or whatever.

"The internet used to be fun and useful but now it sucks" is a societal problem, not a technical one. You can't solve it with a federated twitter clone or yet another secure messaging protocol or whatever.

passivegainson A new way to reflect on how you use Claude

Remember that time grok told people not to use it for second opinions on their medical records? ...on second thought that might be an exception that proves the rule.

passivegainson A new way to reflect on how you use Claude

I don't know why this sentiment isn't more common. LLMs are basically two things: 1. chatbots 2. automation for the process of googling something and copy-pasting the first result. The only people I know who use it for more than those two things ask them to perform tasks they can't do reliably, don't check the output, and then they're just wrong most of the time. If they had just used it as slightly different google search they'd have been fine.

passivegainson Correlated randomness in Slay the Spire 2

Putting this into my rotation of excuses. "It wasn't my fault! They were hacking, also my fingers were slippery and the deterministic behavior of psuedorandom number generators guaranteed we would lose anyway."

passivegainson “Too dangerous to release” or just too expensive?

The text is just as you predict, but in fairness to the author using a .ai domain is a good way to set expectations up front.

passivegainson An update on Steam / GOG changes for OpenTTD

I mean, yeah. There's enough nukes locked and loaded around the globe to end human civilization as we know it in minutes. Nobody's made a bomb that can fix socioeconomics.

passivegainson Code is cheap. Show me the talk

if it helps, that kind of thoughtfulness is how to learn the things that matter most. you're already on the right track.

passivegainson Python numbers every programmer should know

this is absolutely true, but there's an additional nuance: yes, python is fantastic, yes, it's easy and forgiving, but there are other languages like that too. ...except there really aren't. other than ruby and maybe go, every other popular language sacrifices ease of use for things that simply do not matter for the overwhelming majority of programs. much of python's popularity doesn't come from being easy and forgiving, it's that everything else isn't. for normal programming why would we subject ourselves to anything but python unless we had no choice?

while I'm on the soapbox I'll give java a special mention: a couple years ago I'd have said java was easy even though it's tedious and annoying, but I've become reacquainted with it for a high school program (python wouldn't work for what they're doing and the school's comp sci class already uses java.)

this year we're switching to c++.

passivegainson Python is not a great language for data science

I think the key thing not obvious to most data scientists is they're not using python because it meets their needs, it's because we've failed them. twice.

1. data scientists aren't programmers, so why do they need a programming language? the tools they should be using don't exist. they'd need programmers to make them, and all we have to offer is... more programming languages.

2. the giant problem at the heart of modern software: the most important feature of a modern programming language is being easy to read and write. this feature is conspicuously absent from most important languages.

they're trapped. they can't do what they need without a programming language but there are only a handful they can possibly use. the real reason python ended up with such good library support is they never really had a choice.

passivegainson Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

I'm not sure immortality is a good standard to hold forks to. the original project won't last forever either.

passivegainson Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

I got good results from running cables around the entire perimeter of a room to avoid crossing doorways. Doesn't work so well on bathrooms though.

passivegainson The email they shouldn't have read

Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird is a creative writing exercise which didn't actually happen and isn't verifiably true to any degree. There were never any Finches, Ewells, Robinsons or Radleys, yet readers often find it quite powerful because they're perfectly aware the story's events have played out between real people many, many times. They don't need to be told the real names of people who have been in lynch mobs to know real people have been lynched. Email servers aren't quite as heavy a subject, but we know these things happen.

passivegainson Which NPM package has the largest version number?

I decided my life could not possibly go on until I knew what "elvisgogo" does, so I downloaded the tarball and poked around. it's a pretty ordinary numpy + pandas + matplotlib project that makes graphs from csv. one line jumped out at me: str_0 = ['refractive_index','Na','Mg','Al','Si','K','Ca','Ba','Fe','Type'] the university of st. andrews has a laser named "elvis" that goes on a remote controlled submarine: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~bds2/elvislaser.htm I was hoping it'd be about go-go dancing to elvis music, but physics experiments on light in seawater is pretty cool too.

passivegainson How can England possibly be running out of water?

they sell water, too!

passivegainson "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec"

This came up in some of the comments: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-315... if you click the links instead of copy/pasting into your reader you get a page full of raw XML. It's not harmful or anything but it's not a great look. You can't really expect your users to just never click on your links, that's usually what links are for.

passivegainson Monero appears to be in the midst of a successful 51% attack

I think they mean the manufacturer would just keep most of the stock for themselves. Reminds me of that famous Scarface quote: "You should get high on your own supply, it's a great idea that won't end horribly."

passivegainson When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support?

I'd probably go with something like Open Regular Generalized ASseMembly.

passivegainson Yt-transcriber – Give a YouTube URL and get a transcription

the volunteer open source effort behind youtube-dl and its forks/descendants are so impressive in large part because of how many features they provide and thus have to maintain: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#usage-and-options this tool won't provide the list of available thumbnails or settings for HTTP buffer size, but I think that's a pretty reasonable tradeoff.

passivegainson “Reading Rainbow” was created to combat summer reading slumps

There's something beautiful about the kid using performance as language. They've hit upon the greater truth that reading and speech are important because text and the spoken word are powerful mediums, but what truly matters is what they allow us to express to each other.

Though I have worked with children enough to sympathize with the not-beautiful part of this story too. (also that book sounds rad as hell.)

passivegainson Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 Incident on July 14, 2025

I was going to reply about how New Zealand is as far from almost everywhere else as the US, but I found out something way more interesting: Other than servers in Australia and New Zealand itself, the closest ones actually are in the US, just 3,000km north in American Samoa. Basically right next door. (I need to go back to work before my boss walks by and sees me screwing around on Google Maps, but I'm pretty sure the next closest are in French Polynesia.)

passivegainson Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

and then populating document to cover all the aspects of selected law

I'm fairly certain lawyers exist specifically because this is infeasible.

passivegainson BuyMeACoffee silently dropped support for many countries (2024)

Only because the state asserts their existence with violence.

I'm comfortable saying if a foreign nation rolls military vehicles across a border and starts shelling apartment buildings, those buildings' residents have every right to assert their existence with violence.

We certainly have little-to-no say in how the states in which we live behave, but we're all subject to their whims.

I can't say for certain how much my state listens to me specifically, but if they do, I'd tell them their whims should be such that other states can't do the roll-across-border-blow-up-apartments thing. (to anyone, not just me.) Those are good whims. Everyone should be subject to those whims.

passivegainson BuyMeACoffee silently dropped support for many countries (2024)

if someone, for example, exchanges funds with a foreign nation to evade sanctions while they illegally occupy another, it really is their state's business.

passivegainson Prolog's Eternal September (2017)

the author is pretty up front about this: I would like to live in a world where professors consider Prolog worth knowing and put in the effort. That probably isn’t realistic. He clearly wishes he's wrong, which makes three of us.

passivegainson Memory-safe sudo to become the default in Ubuntu

there's competing specs, holy wars, etc. but POSIX is kind of like what you're describing. popular distros are usually mostly-but-not-completely compliant.

passivegainson Memory-safe sudo to become the default in Ubuntu

apt won't on its own, but if you're using the official images there's probably a service running that's calling it, probably for security patches etc.

The bigger problem is upgrading packages deliberately but being surprised by the results. My team's current favorite is the upgrade process itself suddenly having new interactive prompts breaking our scripts.

passivegainson MS Paint IDE

what I wouldn't give for a 1U RTG...