Hacker News: AmalgatedAmoeba

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn't taken over the world"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 11:48:21 +0000

As someone with non-ascii and non-latin-1 characters in my surname, I can tell you that the ascii->utf8 migration still hasn’t finished.

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 07:10:27 +0000

Naturally. And the editors, typesetters, designers, proof readers, etc. should get paid for their work. It is just a question of ownership and power imbalance. The problem with the current mainstream system (both in books and music) is that the publisher often effectively owns the work - not the author.

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "CLion Is Now Free for Non-Commercial Use"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Thu, 08 May 2025 12:30:33 +0000

Sure and the incremental compiler work is genuinely amazing. I was objecting purely to the notion that this new crop of systems languages is “designed from day one” around LSP, which doesn’t seem to be quite true

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "CLion Is Now Free for Non-Commercial Use"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Thu, 08 May 2025 10:50:29 +0000

Are they though? * Rust was designed before even vscode was released * Zig, Odin, JAI are all designed by people that don’t use LSP and don’t like it * Don’t know about Carbon, but it currently doesn’t look like it’s gonna kill anything

It seems to me that rust analyzer is something of an exception

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "JavaScript Views, the Hard Way – A Pattern for Writing UI"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 14:03:37 +0000

ngl, a lot of the times, an in-memory “database” that gets backed up to a file is perfectly reasonable. Even consumer devices have dozens of gigabytes of RAM. What percentile of applications needs more?

Just because a technology works well for a few cases shouldn’t mean it’s the default. What’s the 80% solution is much more interesting IMO.

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "Show HN: Zxc – Rust TLS proxy with tmux and Vim as UI, BurpSuite alternative"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 17:42:39 +0000

Isn’t that basically emacs with evil mode?

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "AI-powered conversion from Enzyme to React Testing Library"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 12:15:19 +0000

Fair enough :) It was very much an exaggeration. But, I do wonder how far would “dumb” text editing go in this scenario. And, more importantly, whether it wouldn’t be faster overall than writing a tool that still requires humans to go through its output and clean/fix it up.

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "AI-powered conversion from Enzyme to React Testing Library"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 11:37:42 +0000

Yes, the 80% claim comes from comparing 9 tests converted by both the conversion tool and humans and comparing the quality - “80% of the content within these files was accurately converted, while the remaining 20% required manual intervention.” Not sure what to make of it since they claim only 16% of files get fully converted.

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "AI-powered conversion from Enzyme to React Testing Library"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 10:33:18 +0000

The conversion is between two testing libraries for React. Not to be too cynical (this sort of works seems to me like a pretty good niche for llms), but I don’t think I’d be that far off of 80% with just vim macros…

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "'Right to roam' movement fights to give the commons back to the public"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Wed, 22 May 2024 15:38:00 +0000

You can file a suit against anybody for anything. If it’s obviously without merit, it’s likely to get dismissed pretty quickly. But there’s nothing stopping you from filing it.

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "Ask HN: Were arrow keys a mistake? Should they just have been delegated to HJKL?"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 06:04:25 +0000

I don’t think the specifics of the placement matter all that much. I’m a happy nvim user with a dvorak layout. Only ‘h’ is on the home row, but it’s not a problem. The issue with normal arrow keys is that you have to lift your whole hand to reach them, which is way less precise and much slower than just moving a finger.

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "Google workers arrested after protesting company's work with Israel"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 03:07:29 +0000

Incredibly enough, you can also talk to people in person. Does wonders.

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "Google fires 28 employees involved in sit-in protest over $1.2B Israel contract"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 03:02:01 +0000

From my experience, the best performing companies foster a culture of ownership. Owning the features/products you work on, the team you work with, and, to some extent, the company as a whole. The other limit is a completely detached and mercenary workforce. This is also a part of the reasoning behind ESOPs.

The fact that those people didn’t feel like they had any other way of voicing their disagreements with the company’s direction (and having them heard), does not bode well for the long term future of Google. Loosing passionate people that care deeply enough about your company to criticize it is seldom a good thing.

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "The Good Soldier Švejk (2018)"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 07:53:31 +0000

I think it’s pretty clear the comment was referring to the partition of the sudetenland, which Poland was absolutely a (albeit minor) participant in. But thank you for linking the article. I’ve always kinda assumed that Poland was given the territories by the Nazis as a way to spread the blame. Turns out they demanded it themselves outside of the Munich conference.

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 04:24:06 +0000

I don’t know how much this is bias on my part, but sending weapons to Gaza feels more equivalent to arming anti-russian partisans in the alternate reality where the march on Kyiv wasn’t a failure and the Ukrainian government collapsed.

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "Saturn's largest moon most likely uninhabitable"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 03:11:54 +0000

Perhaps, but recognizing clickbait should be within the grasp of everybody, even if they aren’t experts on the subject matter. Maybe that’s where an LLM would fit - evaluating the likelihood of an article offering something of substance.

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "ADHD may have been an evolutionary advantage, research suggests"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 15:42:15 +0000

It’s not a disorder if it’s not sufficiently disruptive :-) There are no absolutes in psychology.

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "Saturn's largest moon most likely uninhabitable"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 15:39:05 +0000

Unless the GPT would be responsible for setting up the incentive structures, you’d end up with the same monotonous clickbait. The problem are people who give bad (science) reporting their attention and therefore money. PopSci journals are just answering the demand.

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "New bill to bar wealthy colleges in the US from accepting federal student loans"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 14:30:07 +0000

Why not? What’s the point of the state paying for higher education? I’d say encouraging social mobility and making more people into high value creators.

New comment by AmalgatedAmoeba in "Understanding Keyboard Events Better"

AmalgatedAmoeba — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 18:40:33 +0000

Wouldn’t consider it a real alternative, but you increase/decrease indentation in insert mode with ^t/^d