HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

zaptheimpaler

8,760 karma · joined November 15, 2011

email: hn AT nopeslide
submissionscomments
zaptheimpaler··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
Yes exactly. One country sucking up all the best talent is not good for the world, its a single point of failure.
zaptheimpaler··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
It will help would-be immigrants understand that the US does not want them and that it would be a mistake to invest time and energy trying to build a future in a country that hates them and can nuke their lives at the drop of a hat. It will help other countries that are not the US retain their talent and build up their own industries. A greater diversity in distribution of talent and industry across the world is a more resilient system.
zaptheimpaler··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
This is probably for the best in the long term. They've added enough friction, insanity and disdain for foreigners that no sane person will immigrate and we can start to build stronger industries and trade relationships outside the US.
zaptheimpaler··on Bun's experimental Rust rewrite hits 99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc
I just see a ton of reflexive AI hate here. I don't care if it was vibe coded, if it passes the entire test suite and was vibe coded by the original authors, I trust it as much as the original Bun. These are Jarred's words about it:

> it’s basically the same codebase except now we can have the compiler enforce the lifetimes of types and we get destructors when we want them. and the ugly parts look uglier (unsafe) which encourages refactoring.

> why: I am so tired of worrying about & spending lots of time fixing memory leaks and crashes and stability issues. it would be so nice if the language provided more powerful tools for preventing these things.

This makes me trust it more, not less.

zaptheimpaler··on Bun's experimental Rust rewrite hits 99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc
This is such a bad faith argument. How long would it take a dev or a team of devs to do this with the same architecture and test suite? A hell of a lot longer than 6 days..
zaptheimpaler··on DAG Workflow Engine
I have several sources of data I want to fetch, retry, process periodically. Like exporting Claude chats into .md files that go to Obsidian, fetching Garmin data from the API and processing it for a custom tool, exporting replays for a game, maybe even running some browser automation to get bank CSVs. I have some ad-hoc python scripts for all of this but no central way to manage them, schedule, handle errors and retries, store the original data and processed versions, resume from the last point etc.. is a workflow engine useful for something like that?
zaptheimpaler··on The USB Situation
Very cool, thanks!
zaptheimpaler··on Let's Buy Spirit Air
Thanks I will watch it, looks interesting. But i would say there's also a million documentaries, movies, news reports, examples and more about insane, evil, stupid shit that goes on in various corporations or how organizations turn to shit when acquired by PE as well. We know for example that cigarette companies knew their products caused cancer and other health problems for decades(!) while denying it publicly, and this is the bar regulators expect today - that they will do absolutely anything including letting people die through smoking or pollution or blocking access to healthcare to make a profit. So a co-op going poorly doesn't invalidate the concept.
zaptheimpaler··on Let's Buy Spirit Air
Awesome, I hope we see a lot more of this. Co-ops do work, REI is one, Modo is another and we could have many more. Over and over again companies are slowly destroyed by extractive shareholders or PE firms, the current structure of a public company is not the only possible shape.
zaptheimpaler··on The USB Situation
Do they really? Even on linux, I can look at what bandwidth a device is connected with using lsusb, but there is no way to tell if a low speed is a limitation of the device or the cable. It just displays the speed that was negotiated considering all factors. I've never found a way to get information about a cable digitally.
zaptheimpaler··on Refuse to let your doctor record you
Yep I would agree as a patient. My current doctor types so slow that 6 out of the 10 short minutes in an appointment just disappear while he types. Even with other docs who can touch type, it will free them up to focus completely on the appointment and reduce the hours they spend charting afterwards.
zaptheimpaler··on US special forces soldier arrested after allegedly winning $400k on Maduro raid
I guess I should clarify it to the modern US conservative party. I know there are a few dissenters even there, but 95% of them vote the way he wants and of course we could have impeached Trump and many cabinet officials long ago if they voted that way. They unquestionably enable this administration. I think its fair to say they represent the conservatives broadly, certainly they are the people the nations conservative citizens elected and continue to support.
zaptheimpaler··on US special forces soldier arrested after allegedly winning $400k on Maduro raid
The modern US conservative party really does seem to believe only in that one principle and nothing else. They will pardon actual sex traffickers like Andrew Tate and worse as long as they're on their side. They will defend any action at all by Trump, no matter how vile or illegal or stupid or wrong. It's not a sleight of hand if its true.
zaptheimpaler··on If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
1. Breakdown of community & support structures. Isolated, atomized society. Few friends and family, weak relationships between them, dating market accustomed to infinite choice.

2. Power increasingly shifting to capital over labor, leading to tougher and exploitative work conditions, lower wages, tougher job markets etc. for labor. Also affects us as consumers dealing with oligopolies or monopolies. Somehow we saw a world where a ton of us worked remote, it worked at least 80% as well in exchange for huge worker benefits, but its going away because we don't have any power and no one is looking out for us. Now we have massive inflation and I don't think anyone believes that a big chunk of it isn't just greedy opportunistic price gouging. Every single thing I see about any job in any field, its about how they are losing power, getting more work for less pay, jumping through more bullshit hoops, field is turning from being run by practitioners to being run by psychopaths in PE firms. This is even in medicine, like people who directly help people everyday feel their job lacks purpose because of the amount of paperwork, huge overwork and under-staffing in general coming down to centralization in the health care system, increasing oligopolization and insurance power - same power shifting from labor to capital.

3. Absolute breakdown of government institutions, regulators and justice for powerful people. Epstein files - actual child abusing pedophile billionaires, lawyers, senators all face no consequence besides maybe losing a very cushy job. President pardons all kinds of corrupt buddies. What kind of clown believes in a justice system when this happens weekly? ICE officers kill or abuse victims without consequences. Can't build a single train line in the time China built millions and millions of miles. Congress gridlocked for a decade now. Perception that government is completely ineffective, and not at all accountable to us or working for us. Its linked to point above as well, with capital being more powerful than government, or in bed with them in many cases.

4. Higher exposure to negative news, media algorithms, social media etc. It's all been covered before. Fear and anger sells. Billion dollar companies with 1000s of very smart employees trying their hardest to addict you to their app, which makes your life worse. Seemingly constant state of emergency or crisis, one crisis to the next.

I read the article after writing this, I think the author had very similar points. I think most complaints roughly come down into these buckets and root causes.

The only missing piece is the understanding that this will not fix itself anymore, the will to collectively agree on the bad actors, organize, take back power, enforce consequences.

zaptheimpaler··on If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
I think everyone I see writing anywhere whether these comments or substacks or just talking to in real life, we all pretty much agree on why we're sad. Its the same 5-6 reasons. We all know. There are much deeper analyses showing trends that started in the 1980s that took away our power too.

It's just that the government does not properly measure any of these things and doesn't work for us anymore. We've all been trained to constantly ask WHY things are broken and argue about it but never take any real action to change them. Trained to pretend a protest on a weekend and a post on FB is the height of activism, to forget what really collectively demanding and creating change looks like. The number of atrocities committed by this government weekly is insane, all anyone talks about is keeping up or not keeping up with the news, no concept at all of collective power to make them accountable. Let's just wait 3 years and hope the next government does that - while history clearly shows they will not, and cannot in many cases given the law.

zaptheimpaler··on Columnar Storage Is Normalization
Yeah I feel like papering over the physical aspect actually misses the main motivation for columnar storage in the first place, which is to more efficiently store some types of data and perform OLAP queries on it.
zaptheimpaler··on Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training
There are lots of leaked emails showing Zuck is creepy. Recent one I saw where he is directly in the conversations about targeting teens/children. There's a twitter account [1] that posts emails from tech execs that have come out in legal proceedings - it shows the people at the top are very much informed and driving what happens in their companies.

[1] https://x.com/TechEmails

zaptheimpaler··on Claude Code to be removed from Anthropic's Pro plan?
This just made me gamble on a yearly subscription for Pro, hoping they will grandfather in existing customers..
zaptheimpaler··on Not buying another Kindle
If you use something like an iPad, you can also do all your reading on one device - substack, blogs, books, newsletters, audiobooks etc. You can also just continue reading on your phone at any time if you end up in line, in transit etc. which helps me read more.
zaptheimpaler··on Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game
Age of Empires 4 also does this. It's very cool and saves a lot of space, but it does have some significant downsides at least the way its implemented there - you can't rewind replays, and they become unwatchable when the game updates significantly.
zaptheimpaler··on Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
But things really are different this time. Computers and software were nascent industries with lots of room to grow, lots of software to build in previous transitions. Today software and technology companies are the biggest in the world. Every industry uses software. Getting your web app, mobile app or game discovered is actually a huge problem today because we have so much software. There is not infinite demand for software, or for anything else, even if it seems that way in the early days.
zaptheimpaler··on Slop Cop
This is so dumb. LLMs have some patterns they copied from people, so now people need to stop using those patterns? Not to mention 10000000 famous books, stories, speeches, essays, comments and more are flagged by these stupid tools. These kinds of tools only narrow the scope of our expression and over time can suffocate the entire written language into a single flavour of corporate approved not-slop speak. Yes AI writing is bad, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
zaptheimpaler··on Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
Hetzner is like 1/10th the cost of ripoffs like AWS now, the passport data is deleted after verification and I can actually trust this claim coming from an EU company under GDPR that doesn't have any use for my personal data. You can also just bypass the passport requirement entirely by making a €20 Paypal deposit to the account.
zaptheimpaler··on The "Passive Income" trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs
Yeah, it feels like the author is blaming his personal bugbear but entrepreneurship and independent businesses are facing systemic issues of massive concentration of market power and zero antritrust enforcement.
zaptheimpaler··on Judge blocks Pentagon effort to 'punish' Anthropic with supply chain risk label
This is a case where a person who actually was illegally present is denied release on bond and the court sided with ICE. It does not address illegal detentions or deportations without hearings. There are countless other cases where people are detained despite providing evidence of legal status, of inhumane conditions in detention centers, of ICE directly ignoring court orders, of ICE agents on tape lying about people ramming their car and assaulting, detaining or killing them, of ICE releasing detainees without any of their possessions or IDs on the side of the road in freezing weather, and more.
zaptheimpaler··on Judge blocks Pentagon effort to 'punish' Anthropic with supply chain risk label
lol judges have ruled 100s or 1000s of ICE detentions in various states illegal by now. None of that has stopped ICE from doing what it's doing. This kind of optimism in the law seems naive today because there is no mechanism to actually enforce it. All federal agents have very substantial legal & civil immunity, heads of departments have immunity as well. The head of the legal system is Pam Bondi who isn't even prosecuting child rapists, or Donald Trump who is one.

Even after Kristi Noem ruined countless lives and was responsible for deaths of innocent people, the only consequence she faced is being demoted to some made up job where she still gets paid to do nothing - no fine, no jail, not even being out of work, no accountability, no justice. None of the ICE agents involved have faced any consequences besides a leave either, we don't even know most of their names. The justice system is not working.

People who don't follow the news like most of the tech community are living in some dreamland of a system or treating it as a purely mental battle of optimism/pessimism vs. actually seeing what is happening.

zaptheimpaler··on Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
They didn’t sell it no strings attached, they sold it with explicit restrictions in their contract with DoW and the DoW agreed to that contract. Their mistake was assuming they operate in a country where rule of law is respected, clearly not the case anymore given the 1000s of violations in the last year.
zaptheimpaler··on Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
This is all just completely wrong. Anthropic explicitly stated in their usage use of their products is not permitted in mass-surveillance of American citizens and fully automated weapons, in the contract that DoW signed. Anthropic then asked DoW if these clauses were being adhered to after the US’ unlawful kidnapping of Maduro. DoW is now attempting to break the contract that they signed and threatening them because how dare a company tell the psycho dictators what to do.
zaptheimpaler··on Inputlag.science – Repository of knowledge about input lag in gaming
Very cool! Yeah I love borderless fullscreen mode, its very convenient.
zaptheimpaler··on Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge
When we ask for regulation and oversight from the government, generally we mean regulation and oversight designed to help consumers or citizens and align the interests of institutions with that of the citizens. Yes the US trying to force Anthropic to let them use Claude in mass-surveillance and auto-kill robots is technically regulation, no its not good regulation. It seems to be designed to hurt the average citizen not help them. The oversight that might help here is say the courts or congress stepping in and facilitating a public discussion and legal review on the kind of surveillance the DOW intends to carry out. Is that so hard to understand without being spelled out?
← PreviousPage 4 of 34Next →