<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: BlackFly</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=BlackFly</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 09:28:40 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=BlackFly" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We fear that these drugs have developmental impacts but beyond that we also forbid them in restaurants and indoor environments quite generally even for adults. So adult usage is tolerated in their own home or in the outdoor public environment (although some further restrictions apply here).<p>I am sympathetic to the idea that social media may also have social development impacts separate from their negative social impacts, but my experience in life is that actually people appear to socially degenerate with overexposure. Thus we probably need some regulation analogous to forbidding smoking in restaurants but for social media or limiting gambler's access. But indeed, maybe on top of that we also need bans for minors.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 10:41:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48474311</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48474311</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48474311</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Network effects from the other side:<p>If one parent forbids their child then their child becomes a pariah. If no child is able to access social media then they will all interact without it. So yeah, a parent needs their peer's children to also not use social media so that their child is not left out.<p>In general I'm against age based bans. I think there are alternatives where we would identify and just generally regulate the harmful features of social media. In the meanwhile, I feel empathetic towards the difficulties of parenting in this era.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:02:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48444825</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48444825</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48444825</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "Cannibalistic attacks between gray seals leave telltale “corkscrew” injuries"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Have you met someone who claimed that their dog liked being slapped? When I imagine such a situation I imagine a person who is just excusing abuse because of the priors in my life, I have an easy time imagining this since I have encountered more than one such person. Impossible is probably too strong of a word, but I mean that you must interpret their behavior and interpretation is to me more a form of estimation not knowing, these examples are intended to show that non-verbal communication is still deficient when compared to a person with problems with verbal communications. Whether it is ok (ethical) to slap another individual that hasn't done anything to you is dependent on knowing their preferences and that takes communication and hence we apply our ethics based on communications.<p>"Insects die for carrots," is a problem for vegans who base their preference on the idea that killing any animal is wrong for sustenance. A person willing to kill a cow because they like the way the flesh tastes or finds it more nourishing simply isn't going to see a problem with an insect dying for a carrot. One person is holding themself to a higher standard and therefore is vulnerable to this critique. Animals need to die so that we may live, people quibble about where the line should be drawn but the line exists for almost everyone (excluding the Jain vegetarians, but practically speaking it exists for everyone).<p>I am not so much conflating those two as arguing that a) anti-specism much like freedom of speech has all kinds of caveats built in and isn't absolute even in the few people that would preach it, b) anti-specism doesn't form a basis for ethics because there are more absolute truths that override it but also render it unnecessary.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 27 May 2026 14:30:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294970</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294970</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294970</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Post hoc, ergo propter hoc?<p>> But the article doesn't consider whether restricting children's wanderings is the REASON it is so much safer for children now.<p>The article considers exactly that.<p>> Similarly, in an international study that looked at 7 to 15 year old children across 16 different countries they found that most english-speaking countries were in the lowest autonomy tier (12th- Ireland, 13th- Australia, 16th- South Africa). Americans weren’t surveyed, but countries like Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Japan, and Denmark scored the highest on autonomy.<p>These countries are considered because they would generally be considered roughly as safe as one another (generally safer than America). These countries are the counterexample to your hypothesis: you can simultaneously have safe and independent children.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 11:33:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48278293</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48278293</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48278293</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "Cannibalistic attacks between gray seals leave telltale “corkscrew” injuries"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We definitely apply our ethics and premise it based upon communication.<p>Given a stranger, all I can do is, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and make assumptions about how they want to be treated. This will be generally more successful given my broader exposure to the world or if they are from the same culture as me but individual differences can be stark. After some interactions where they can make their preferences known to me I can then follow the better precept of, "Treat others how they want to be treated," assuming the actions required of me are not especially burdensome and I can find compromises with them otherwise.<p>I have an easier time imagining a severe autist in a consensual BDSM relationship than that I could believe that someone knows that their dog actually likes being slapped. I have an easier time believing this because an autist in abstract may have some communication problems but it is not impossible for them to make their preferences known. These are both so hypothetical though, real situations would require much context of which communication forms a basis (I am not saying we don't understand dogs at all, just that the gap is large).<p>There is no real anti-specism. What there is the proposition that a central nervous system is a prerequisite for consciousness and from that stems moral value (few people argue that we shouldn't enslave and consume members of the Brassica species). But even then, few of the staunchest vegans are against pesticides or anti-parasitic medication, how many animals (insects) must die to bring one carrot to my table? I don't know the answer but it will always be more than 0. Meanwhile, it is instead possible to believe that the guinea worm has as much inherent moral value as a human but that it is ethical for humans to try to eradicate the guinea worm completely.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 25 May 2026 12:07:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265901</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265901</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265901</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "Migrating from Go to Rust"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> In logic, equivocation ("calling two different things by the same name") is an informal fallacy resulting from [...] knowingly and deliberately using words in a different sense than the one the audience will understand.<p>Of course I mean data race, most people in such a thread will implicitly understand that is the race meant. Nobody building a webshop with limited supplies wants to prevent "first come first served", it barely makes sense to think about preventing that kind of race<p>Data races have obvious real world analogues, they are just so obvious people naturally synchronize. You can look over someone's shoulder while they update a paper master copy and observe data tearing as they erase a field and start writing in another value while that is inconsistent with the rest of the form. It is easy to see that data is being modified and wait until the writer is complete instead of memorizing a partial update and walking away to make decisions on the basis of the incomplete information. A good mutex/rwlock is like having a private separate room to go into to make the update so that no overeager person can even observe the partial update (some languages have non callback style mutexes so there the mutex/lock is the analogue of the visual cue that someone is performing the update). I don't find this at all strange to consider. In a concurrent system it is just all too easy to forget that there are other threads (analogue of people) reading/modifying at the same time. So rust makes that manifest through the borrow checker and it becomes obvious.<p>Rust prevents more than just data races. Even in single threaded code, if you have a reference to a struct (without explicitly choosing interior mutability), you are guaranteed that its value has not changed since the last time you read it, despite other parts of the code having a reference to it. You don't need to make defensive copies. Some people may find this useful, but generally it won't be enough to convince someone to drop their current language in favor of rust. This transfers into multi-threaded code as well: only a single thread can make modifications to a struct through a reference xor as many threads as you want can read from the struct with references. You can easily write go/java/python programs that have these features and so don't feature data races, but they are difficult to reason about: how do you know that there is only a single reference featuring mutation or many threads only reading? The answer requires non-local knowledge which is difficult to reason about and this is enough for some people to consider rust where the answer is local (defined by the variable).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 25 May 2026 11:38:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265707</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265707</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265707</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "Migrating from Go to Rust"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Certainly you pay a price for lifetimes but you buy compile time race condition detection via the borrow checker's aliasing-xor-mutability enforcement. So all that is happening is the complexity of concurrency is being made explicit and therefore easier to reason about. Many applications can be architected in a way that wouldn't ever trigger a race, so for people working on that it isn't something they would need to reason about and they can call it unneeded complexity. This is the simpler vs. simplistic distinction also made in the article. If you can be simplistic, garbage collection is less cognitively demanding, but if you are designing race free algorithms with shared memory then rust will be. I do believe more developers and applications live in the former.<p>The better example actually comes from the article: returning a struct and an iterator over that struct isn't possible in rust. Heck, initializing a struct to return an iterator might lead to issues. Most people will encounter this before needing a linked list and the lesson it teaches will help out with the linked list.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 25 May 2026 06:53:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48264152</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48264152</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48264152</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "Cannibalistic attacks between gray seals leave telltale “corkscrew” injuries"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We have absolutely no way of reconciling ethics with animals. In human society, the same individuals will often be using force against others but those individuals may be the police or criminals. The notion of righteousness or injustice in a given situation is contingent on context. Until we can speak with animals, we lack that context. Violence is not inherently wrong: we do not know their nature.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 14:17:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180271</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180271</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180271</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "Someone Shared a Real Monet Painting as AI and Asked for Critiques"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Rarely do people get the right takeaway from this effect. Take a normal bottle of red wine and some top tier, swap them around so the ordinary is in the expensive bottle and vice versa. Serve them. People prefer the ordinary wine in the expensive bottle.<p>Bad takeaway: taste is meaningless.<p>Good takeaway: qualia depends on many contextual cues beyond the obvious.<p>Part of the appreciation of Monet is the fact that it was made by Monet. The art pieces 4′33″ or Black Square are early examples of this within the are world. Many pieces will have you saying, my 8 year old could have done this, so why is this piece famous? Critiques and appreciation are often not literal because we cannot properly express these subconscious effects.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 16 May 2026 10:07:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158712</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158712</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158712</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> When you use an LLM agent correctly you are adding value beyond just the prompt, and those three additional paragraphs won't just be extra noise.<p>So send me the prompt and the three extra paragraphs that you wrote. The improved LLM will generate the additional context for me if I need it. But heck, maybe I wrote that context myself or have read it many times and don't need it parroted back to me.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 08:51:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48105814</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48105814</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48105814</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As these products improve, one person sending the output and not the prompt will remain useless. The prompt captures the intent and level of real consideration of the person sending it, the receiver can augment that with additional information if they want to.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 10 May 2026 05:48:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48081345</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48081345</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48081345</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The unfortunate reality of the internet is that anonymity is abused by troll farms and genuine human interaction is corrupted by their astroturfing and political propaganda. Anonymity in the hands of the powerful is so much more corrupting than the liberty it imparts to the weak.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 10 May 2026 05:36:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48081290</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48081290</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48081290</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "Mythical Man Month"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>All available evidence points to it being an incremental improvement at best. Higher claims are attributable to the psychological effect of the AI sycophancy problem which erases the Dunning-Kruger effect and makes even experts extremely overconfident.<p>You still have to read the output of your LLM. Learning by reading alone and not doing is not nearly as effective.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 09 May 2026 05:24:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072051</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072051</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072051</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "Async Rust never left the MVP state"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think that callbacks are actually easier to reason about:<p>When it comes time to test your concurrent processing, to ensure you handle race conditions properly, that is much easier with callbacks because you can control their scheduling. Since each callback represents a discrete unit, you see which events can be reordered. This enables you to more easily consider <i>all</i> the different orderings.<p>Instead with threads it is easy to just ignore the orderings and not think about this complexity happening in a different thread and when it can influence the current thread. It isn't simpler, it is simplistic. Moreover, you cannot really change the scheduling and test the concurrent scenarios without introducing artificial barriers to stall the threads or stubbing the I/O so you can pass in a mock that you will then instrument with a callback to control the ordering...<p>The problem with callbacks is that the call stack when captured isn't the logical callstack unless you are in one of the few libraries/runtimes that put in the work to make the call stacks make sense. Otherwise you need good error definitions.<p>You can of course mix the paradigms and have the worst of both worlds.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 08:52:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019754</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019754</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019754</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't have the bias towards green that the "test" suggests for the very reason I pointed out. I and others understand the perspective of the test but you don't seem to understand how it fails to meet its own goal since you are caught up in browbeating people that are trying to explain it to you.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2026 09:06:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47945875</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47945875</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47945875</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The attempted point being to measure and compare how people classify colors between blue and green when given a false dichotomy between the two.<p>But it cannot do that without bias, since people always have the third choice to drop out when they don't like their choices. There is also another bias, which is people will just select some random option when they want to say something equivalent to "blue-green" but don't have the choice, then they get a result biased in that direction but what has actually happened is they have given up. This random choice might be culturally biased towards people's preferred color. I personally selected green when that occurred for me and then just sat on green hammering that. Oh, I'm more willing to say green than other people? Meaningless, I wouldn't have called those colors green in a conversation.<p>When presented in a forum people also have the choice of criticising the false dichotomy which is what you are experiencing here. The point of posting it here is to get this sort of feedback, so...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:18:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47935012</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47935012</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47935012</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A recipe isn't copyrightable but is still protected under trade secret law. I imagine that the same would apply. I think the major difference with software copyright is that I can just decompile your binary or copy a binary and give it to other people. For SAAS companies that don't distribute binaries, I imagine they basically have the same protections against rogue employees.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:27:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47933578</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47933578</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47933578</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Let f ... be Riemann integrable and F ... differentiable.<p>What many people don't notice the first time they read this in the fundamental theorem of Calculus is that this is a double criteria. That f needs to be integrable seems like an extraneous point when F is differentiable. This holds also for the Lebesgue integral. The understanding is usually that if F is differentiable then its derivative is integrable, that is, people understand the integral as an anti-derivative but the Riemann/Lebesgue integral version of the fundamental theorem of calculus only proves that if the function you want the anti-derivative of is integrable, so you have this separate requirement to prove that f is integrable having already proven F to be differentiable (to f).<p>However, this theoretical (because if you aren't a mathematician you won't be bothered by this sticking point, you'll just insist that the integral is the anti-derivative when an anti-derivative exists) defect is ameliorated by the Henstock–Kurzweil integral which is (I feel) a lot easier to define and understand than the Lebesgue integral. It is practically the Riemann integral with just a minor tweak: the delta in the delta-epsilon proof is allowed to vary by location (essentially, as you approach non-integrable singularities, you tend the delta towards zero).<p>For the Henstock-Kurzweil integral, if F is differentiable then f is (Henstock-Kurzweil) integrable. This happens because not every derivative is Riemann or Lebesgue integrable, you need a stronger integral.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:19:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875433</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875433</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875433</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "Dependency cooldowns turn you into a free-rider"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think what you actually want is audit sharing as the cooldown period. No audit shared with the community yet? The package is still in cooldown. Or you can risk it and run unaudited dependencies or audit it yourself and potentially share that.<p>It seems to me that many organizations are relying on other companies to do their auditing in any case, why not just admit that and explicitly rely on that? Choose who you trust, accept their audits. Organizations can perform or even outsource their own auditing and publish that.<p><a href="https://mozilla.github.io/cargo-vet/" rel="nofollow">https://mozilla.github.io/cargo-vet/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 06:27:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775411</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775411</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775411</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by BlackFly in "Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The California law is the closest thing to what we do in the physical world but better. We already decided as a society to limit the purchase of pornography, gambling, alcohol, tobacco, prostitution, drugs, via age gates and require the merchant to be liable for that. We already find this reasonable as a society. The California law recognizes the tracking problems of requiring a verifiable id online and instead recognizes that parental self-assertion at the point of account creation is enough.<p>Since tracking children is generally illegal, you can also voluntarily lie and label yourself as a child when you don't want to access such content.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 22 Mar 2026 06:25:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47474980</link><dc:creator>BlackFly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47474980</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47474980</guid></item></channel></rss>