Hacker News: 0xffff2

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage"

0xffff2 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:50:08 +0000

Do you have any evidence to support your claims? I keep a pretty close eye on my usage and have never seen it deviate from "1x/3x requests per time I hit enter". Is there a reproducible scenario I can try that will charge multiple requests for a single prompt?

New comment by 0xffff2 in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

0xffff2 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 05:04:15 +0000

But we've been bombing them for a month... They hide the boats in caves or something? (I'm really trying to learn here, not trying to argue)

New comment by 0xffff2 in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

0xffff2 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 04:25:42 +0000

I basically believe you're right, but I can't wrap my head around this: How is it that they still have any control at all of the strait after all of this? Is their significantly depleted missile force enough of a threat as long as they have any credible capability whatsoever left?

New comment by 0xffff2 in "AI may be making us think and write more alike"

0xffff2 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:19:32 +0000

> I'd argue that they're above average for the population, and below average for experts. Can they draw as well as an expert/professional illustrator? Probably not. Can they draw better than almost anyone who isn't a expert/professional illustrator? Probably.

That's pretty much the definition of "average" (as most commonly used, to refer to "mean" rather than median or much less commonly mode), isn't it?

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Claude Code login fails with OAuth timeout on Windows"

0xffff2 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:59:14 +0000

I'm forced to do this at work. It adjusts the net value to very close to zero. Github's pay per prompt pricing model is phenomenal for users to the point of blowing Anthropic's subscription offering out of the water, much less API pricing. At Copilot pricing, it's quite a useful tool if carefully managed. At API pricing, it's very hard to find a use case for AI.

Of course, I have no idea how MS is justifying the Copilot pricing. I can't imagine any world in which it is sustainable, so I'm trying to get as much as I can out of it now before they jack up prices.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "One ant for $220: The new frontier of wildlife trafficking"

0xffff2 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:36:41 +0000

I mean, have you met human beings? You might as well complain that someone else's stamp collection isn't a useful pet.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

0xffff2 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:57:01 +0000

This is just like the debate over YAML. In both cases, the language is simple enough, and people use it sanely enough in practice that I just don't care about the warts. Contrast this with something like C++, where the warts are less avoidable and therefore more worthy of notice. Markdown as I use it is functional and simple and no one has suggested an alternative I like better, so I keep using it.

Also, as I use it, Markdown is effectively plain text. I very rarely look at "rendered" markdown. I guess in practice I actually use "plain text" that just happens to look a lot like markdown by this article's definitions.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "NHS staff refusing to use FDP over Palantir ethical concerns"

0xffff2 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:52:50 +0000

As usual when people say "the US", we're papering over the fact that the United States is really 50 countries in a trench coat.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "NHS staff refusing to use FDP over Palantir ethical concerns"

0xffff2 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:51:38 +0000

Sorry for being too American to understand, but why would you need to talk to any medical professional to put a bandaid on your kid? Is this about NHS being paying for the bandaid? About medical expertise to apply a bandaid?

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Live: Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

0xffff2 — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 02:04:30 +0000

Yep, I work with them every day, since I am myself a NASA contractor. I'm curious what you think the major distinction is between a contractor and a civil servant in the first place. I work directly as part of a division (used to be "on site" before 2020, but now I'm remote so that doesn't quite fit) doing 80% the same job as any of my civil servant colleagues. I really don't think the range of opinions is all that different on either side of the fence.

I'll repeat that there are a lot of problems, but it's not nearly as bad as some people on the internet make it out to be.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Live: Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

0xffff2 — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 23:42:41 +0000

For sure this is 90% inertia, although like Bridenstein in the first administration, who turned out to actually be a pretty good administrator in the grand scheme of things, I'm cautiously optimistic that Isaacman is working in good faith to make NASA the best it can be. (Which isn't to say that I agree with him 100% mind you.)

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

0xffff2 — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 22:55:54 +0000

I do hope the doomers who think that the entire US government has been completely gutted will take note of this. The government workforce is in a bad spot for sure, SLS is far from a perfect program, but this still demonstrates that we are doing some real work still.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Midnight train from GA: A view of America from the tracks as airports struggle"

0xffff2 — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:40:11 +0000

Different people have different standards. I've done many sleeper trips and several coach trips across the country over the years. Coach was fine when I was a teenager, now that I'm approaching 40, I'll pass.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix"

0xffff2 — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:22:40 +0000

What $900 laptop with a similar form factor and build quality to a Macbook Air am I supposed to buy instead? I did quite a bit of research on this a couple of months ago, with a strong preference for a Linux compatible device (I've never been a MacOS user, and I'm done with Windows after 10 dies all the way). After weeks of research, I came to the conclusion that my best bet was to buy a Macbook Air and hope that Asahi support for M4 chips comes sooner rather than later.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics"

0xffff2 — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 01:54:44 +0000

> But for me and for plenty of people I've worked with earlier in my life, swapping gloves was way faster and easier than washing hands again. Plus, washing your hands like 40 times in a shift is going to dry them out. It's not great.

You and your former coworkers must have magic lubricating sweat or something. I have literally never encountered someone with this opinion before in my life. And I was a combat medic before I was a line cook, so I think I know a thing or two about gloves. Even in the medical field, there were times when medics skipped the gloves because they were treating their buddies under fire and the time to get gloves on wasn't worth it to them (for anyone unfamiliar, gloves in field medicine are mostly about protecting the provider, not the patient).

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics"

0xffff2 — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 17:57:12 +0000

> I don't know why you think food service workers aren't constantly putting on new gloves, but doctors and nurses are. Like, if you're cutting up chicken for an hour you're not, but if you're moving from chicken to veggies you absolutely are.

I think that because I was a food service worker and it's impossible to change gloves during a rush. Nitrile gloves and sweaty hands simply do not mix. There are also many more forms of cross contamination than just raw meat to cooked food.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash"

0xffff2 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:22:20 +0000

https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/1s1mgc...

Sorry for the late reply, and sorry for linking to reddit, but it was the first place I could find the right video. I saw this video linked at least a dozen times in the hours following the incident. I believe the clip you linked to is from the same video, but with the beginning cut off.

At approximately 1.5 seconds in my link, you can see one set of lights perpendicular to the runway turn off. I admit the the lighting/colors are not as crisp as I would like, but the lights that turn off are positionally consistent with the Runway Entrance Lights and the time at which they turn off (approximately 2 seconds before the plane enters the intersection) is also consistent with the operation of the Runway Entrance Lights system.

Furthermore, if the system was not operational it should have been NOTAMed as such, and I can find no such NOTAM so my default position is that the system was operational.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash"

0xffff2 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:55:06 +0000

Put the costs on the carriers, not hand the job over to them.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash"

0xffff2 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:54:00 +0000

In this specific incident, there was a system in place called Runway Entrance Lights [0] that does serve as an automated sanity check on controllers commands. The surveillance video that is circulating shows that the system was working and indicated that the runway was not safe to enter. It's not clear yet why the truck entered the runway anyway.

0: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl

New comment by 0xffff2 in "LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash"

0xffff2 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:51:04 +0000

Yes, I get that. But an airport is not a rail network. The question is how you would actually implement physical interlocks on an airport in a way that works and is safe while controlling movement of everything from a pickup truck to an A380? It's an incredibly hard problem to solve. And keeping in mind too that the Runway Status/Entrance Lights first started development over 30 years ago and are still only deployed at 20 airports, despite being a vastly simpler system than one controlling physical barriers.