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tessierashpool

1,615 karma · joined July 28, 2013

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tessierashpool··on The IRS Is Building a System to Share Taxpayers' Data with ICE
no, they're (illegally) using a private intake system to bypass the courts.
tessierashpool··on The IRS Is Building a System to Share Taxpayers' Data with ICE
no, they're serious, but they're not sincere.

once this system is up and running, they can use it to harass and "deport" (rendition) anybody they want based on what tax-deductible contributions they've made to various non-profits.

(it's rendition because a lot of these people are being sent to countries they're not even citizens of. obviously that pertains when sending people to prisons in El Salvador and Sudan. also, when deporting immigrant parents, they've "deported" US citizens who are children or infants to the countries of their parents' citizenship.)

tessierashpool··on Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
even a swarm of satellites has risk factors. we treat space as if it were empty (it's in the name) but there's debris left over from previous missions. this stuff orbits at a very high velocity, so if an object greater than 10cm is projected to get within a couple kilometers of the ISS, they move the ISS out of the way. they did this in April and it happens about once a year.

the more satellites you put up there, the more it happens, and the greater the risk that the immediate orbital zone around Earth devolves into an impenetrable whirlwind of space trash, aka Kessler Syndrome.

tessierashpool··on CareerBuilder and Monster job boards, file for bankruptcy
Since I had to google it, Metcalfe was one of the inventors of Ethernet.

Fun fact, he predicted in 1995 that the internet would collapse entirely within the following year, and said he would eat his words if it didn't. In 1997, at a web conference, he put a printed copy of the words into a blender and drank a smoothie made with that paper.

tessierashpool··on Writing toy software is a joy
yeah, it's a good post overall, but the humblebrag factor undermines it
tessierashpool··on Writing toy software is a joy
sorry but you’re underestimating the number of people who come here, and the range of backgrounds (and interests) they have
tessierashpool··on Writing toy software is a joy
yeah, that’s what works for me also. LLMs are a nightmare for debugging but a breeze for this.

another good use case: have it read a ton of code and summarize it. if you’re dealing with a new (to you) area in a legacy application, and trying to fix a problem in how it interacts with a complex open-source library, have the LLM read them both and summarize how they work. (while fact-checking it along the way.)

tessierashpool··on Writing toy software is a joy
The problem with Lisp (or at least Clojure) is that abstracting away the boilerplate requires you to correctly identify the boilerplate.

It’s nontrivial to structure your entire AST so that the parts you abstract away are the parts you’re not going to need direct access to three months later. And I never really figured out, or saw anyone else figure out, how to do that in a way which establishes a clear pattern for the rest of your team to follow.

Especially when it comes to that last part, I’ve found pragmatic OOP with functional elements, like Ruby, or task-specific FP, like Elm, to be more useful than Clojure at work or various Lisps for hobby projects. Because patterns for identifying boilerplate are built in. Personal opinion, of course.

tessierashpool··on CareerBuilder and Monster job boards, file for bankruptcy
Since I had to Google it, 3Com was the company behind Ethernet, a wired networking standard that revolutionized offices in the days before remote work. Like with GUIs, the work started at Xerox PARC.
tessierashpool··on Microplastics shed by food packaging are contaminating our food, study finds
The EPA is currently reviewing its ban on asbestos.
tessierashpool··on First methane-powered sea spiders found crawling on the ocean floor
this is correct, because "enemy" starts with a vowel, but it's a fairly gratuitous translation either way, since "know your enemy" comes from Sun Tzu
tessierashpool··on Ocarina of Time Randomizer
I found the Wii U joystick too springy to win OOT or even play much of Twilight Princess. I was able to compensate for the springiness until the penultimate fight with Ganondorf at the top of the castle in OOT, at which point it got too annoying and I just gave up, but with Twilight Princess, I hit that threshold in the fire temple's boss fight. Possibly even just a miniboss.

It's possible I just had a Wii U with an unusually tight joystick or something.

tessierashpool··on NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
> One of the interesting pieces of science that I think a lot of people don't think about is strategic investment.

the Internet itself began with DARPA. the web at CERN. both came from publicly-funded research.

tessierashpool··on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen
[flagged]
tessierashpool··on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen
Having a car that mostly drives itself is the best purchase I’ve ever made.

ok, you can get that with a Hyundai though.

higher-quality, too, yet the Tesla costs more.

tessierashpool··on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen
ironically, this itself is gaslighting
tessierashpool··on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen
If somebody wanted to be... not president, but authoritarian leader of a post-democracy, Musk would be well positioned technologically.

of course, that was his very explicit goal. Thiel backed Curtis Yarvin, who came up for the plan for this and called it RAGE. google it, it's all written down. they hoped to put in Bezos or Zuckerberg and have a more efficiently-run dictatorship replacing our democracy. because they didn't understand politics, they got the ketamine addict instead, who renamed RAGE to DOGE so he could also use it to power a crypto pump-and-dump.

*edit: and because it was never a realistic plan. because they didn't understand politics

tessierashpool··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)
how do you feel about Talespire? it allows pretty fast on-the-fly map-making as long you’re not dealing with significant vertical distances, although it’s got very little in common with LambdaMOO. but MUDs generally seem to be MMRPG precursors at this point, unless there’s an underground community I’m unaware of.
tessierashpool··on Enhancing your MIDI devices with Perl
it was severely overused in the late 90s. its versatility made it very bad for large projects, but people used it anyway because it handled CGI easily. people who were there still bear the scars, and language hipsters know it isn’t popular, even if they don’t know why.

it’s not entirely fair, but on the bright side, at least there’s a kind of logic to it.

tessierashpool··on AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths
spoiler alert: this always happens with new technologies, to some extent. the possibilities that materialize are always an odd subset of the possibilities that people envision when the tech is new. you can get better at predicting that subset by studying economics or the humanities, but randomness also plays a crucial role.
tessierashpool··on In Memoriam: Noah Gibbs
I didn't know him well, but I interacted with him a few times. I liked him, and I enjoyed his book Rebuilding Rails.
tessierashpool··on An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a bleak future for the internet
that’s bonkers. “philosophers and other wordcels” not only insults Borges but the entire world of philosophy. the arrogance and the nonsense in that phrasing are both off the charts.
tessierashpool··on Janet for Mortals (2023)
Elm does something similr. Neither elm/regex nor elm/parser are built-in, but elm/regex encourages you to use elm/parser instead.

btw, I like the namesake, but a language named Janet is pretty much obligated to also prioritize control.

tessierashpool··on We can mine asteroids for space food
underrated comet
tessierashpool··on Music as Language (2019) [pdf]
this is provably false. the demand for generative compositional techniques fuels a lot of the Eurorack market. people pay lots of money for machines that generate musical ideas. and the history of algorithmic composition goes back to at least the 12th century. it’s niche, undeniably, but it’s not zero.
tessierashpool··on Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
I happened to re-read this, and to be clear, I'm not Chinese-American. the "we" there means "everyone else in the English-speaking world except for the actual English."
tessierashpool··on Paracelsus: Revolutionary or Mystic?
fun fact: Paracelsus (real name Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim) is the historical inspiration for the character Van Hohenheim from Fullmetal Alchemist.
tessierashpool··on The decline of the working musician
Josephine Baker was a star. Bach and Mozart were stars. Pythagoras was more famous for music than math, during his lifetime (well over two thousand years ago). The decline of a particular business model is a legit observation but it doesn’t change this fundamental aspect of music.
tessierashpool··on The decline of the working musician
everything in film is like that, though. it’s an industry built on gig work which nonetheless has strong unions. a seeming paradox but it works.
tessierashpool··on Show HN: Hacker News frontpage as a print newspaper that you can personalize
yeah, digging up that screenshot (and the repo) really made me realize how primitive this solution was. it was also a very basic implementation of the whole headline sizes concept.

there was an app called Flipboard at the time which did something similar, but for different news sources, although its model of interactivity was a bit more gimmicky than the endless scroll. (which, for all its faults, is really simple and easy to use.)

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