Hacker News: MichaelAza

New comment by MichaelAza in "Comet AI browser can get prompt injected from any site, drain your bank account"

MichaelAza — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 17:52:09 +0000

Yes, they will move fast and they will brake things, and some of those breakages will have catastrophic consequences, and then they can go "whoopsy daisy", face no consequences, and try the same thing again. Very normal, extremely sane way to structure society

New comment by MichaelAza in "Death by AI"

MichaelAza — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 10:50:16 +0000

The AI summaries are what made me switch. I don't love the idea of using Google products for all the obvious reasons, but they had good UX so that's what I kept using. Enter the AI summaries which made Google search unusable for me, and I was more than happy to pay Kagi

New comment by MichaelAza in "Sycophancy in GPT-4o"

MichaelAza — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 03:59:00 +0000

I actually liked that version. I have a fairly verbose "personality" configuration and up to this point it seemed that chatgpt mainly incorporated phrasing from it into the answers. With this update, it actually started following it.

For example, I have "be dry and a little cynical" in there and it routinely starts answers with "let's be dry about this" and then gives a generic answer, but the sycophantic chatgpt was just... Dry and a little cynical. I used it to get book recommendations and it actually threw shade at Google. I asked if that was explicit training by Altman and the model made jokes about him as well. It was refreshing.

I'd say that whatever they rolled out was just much much better at following "personality" instructions, and since the default is being a bit of a sycophant... That's what they got.

New comment by MichaelAza in "Canada's parliament rocked by allegations of treason and foreign interference"

MichaelAza — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 15:32:33 +0000

From reading the report mentioned in the article, it seems (page 63) that once counterespionage intelligence is shared with police no special provisions exist in the law to protect sources and methods of collection from being exposed in court. Obviously no self respecting domestic security service would take that risk, and the Canadian parliament is rightfully criticized in the report for not doing enough to change the relevant laws

New comment by MichaelAza in "Brexit has failed for UK, say clear majority of Britons – poll"

MichaelAza — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 19:03:29 +0000

Seems like a plausible explanation. Thanks for explaining it.

New comment by MichaelAza in "A Hobby Coding Biography"

MichaelAza — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 18:59:30 +0000

Very interesting. If I try to think back, my first hobby project must have been in 10th grade. At that point I very well nearly memorized the C# part of the MSDN, as well as CLR via C# and some other programmimg books (maybe GoF?) but haven't actually written any code that does anything useful. In 10th grade everyone in our class was doing some sort of ASP.NET project for school and a lot of the other students were having trouble with the data layer and SQL stuff, so I decided to code up an ORM (a thing I knew existed, but haven't actually used) and later a utility library for exposing REST APIs which were both used by most of my classmates. It was a fun project. Later projects included a script that tells you where to live based on your public transit needs, a wordle clone for the original GameBoy, and probably other even less useful stuff.

New comment by MichaelAza in "Brexit has failed for UK, say clear majority of Britons – poll"

MichaelAza — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 18:41:01 +0000

> [Britons beleave Brexit] has hampered government attempts to control immigration

I'm not very well versed in UK politics but what's the narrative behind this? In what way do Britons believe Brexit has made controlling immigration harder? While the ways it has hurt trade and the economy in general are obvious to me (both on the factual level and what I presume Britons believe) I have a hard time imagining what they could possibly think on this subject.

New comment by MichaelAza in "Saint Helena Island Communications"

MichaelAza — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 17:05:08 +0000

Under Telephone History it says:

> The current PABX-based system went live over the weekend of 27-29th July 1990

A PBX serving a whole country, even a small one, is wild. From what I could find [1] the system used was a UXD5 exchange [2] which is technically a PSTN exchange intended for rural areas and based off the Monarch 120 PBX [3].

The architecture of the UXD5 is common to a lot of telephone exchanges of the time (possibly modern ones as well?) with actor based message passing, actors running on different levels (more real time vs less real time) and a combination of assembly and a high level language (in this case, Coral [4]). Fascinating stuff.

[1] https://techmonitor.ai/technology/cable_wireless_has_contrac...

[2] https://sites.google.com/site/monarchcallconnectsystem/uxd5-...

[3] https://sites.google.com/site/monarchcallconnectsystem/monar...

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORAL

New comment by MichaelAza in "Pessimistic thoughts on startups (2020)"

MichaelAza — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 17:30:24 +0000

In the same way that you could have the best chair design but without the resources, the wood or the steel or what have you, and without the proper tools to shape them, your idea is still just going to be an idea. Would you say that the wood in this scenario has value in and of itself, beyond the value the worker may imbue into it? How about the tools? We as a society have come to recognize the people who dole out access to resources as providing value, but they don't, neither in principle nor in reality. As I said in my earlier comment, the only value one might ascribe to them is only in picking the best ideas and they obviously don't do that. We obviously need a better way to fund creative ideas for the betterment of all.

New comment by MichaelAza in "Pessimistic thoughts on startups (2020)"

MichaelAza — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 13:32:26 +0000

It is valuable in the sense that someone productive can extract value from it, i.e. secure funding for a company that may actually produce a product that makes someones life better. That is the same sort of value a natural resource like, say, wood has. It has no value in and of itself, unless imbued with the skillfull work of a productive person. An investor needn't add anything besides capital to the mix. Now, some investors do add expertise or other actual skills of value but that doesn't have anything to do with them being the source of capital, per se. You could argue that investors are proactive in choosing investments that have a good potential for ROI but that doesn't correlate to actual value for actual people, as all the very profitable but very stupid Web 3 and other fad investments show. Sometimes they aren't even profitable, but that's another matter. So yes, investors are as worthless as wool or wood or gold without the time and skill and labor of the worker who preforms the alchemy of transforming this worthless commodity into value.

New comment by MichaelAza in "[dead]"

MichaelAza — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 07:54:28 +0000

I have to assume that the answer is suicide which is tragically all too common in the trans community. They are denied basic medical care and the psychological pain is too much to bare. Tragically this mechanism of targeting trans people and, basically, encouraging their suicide is happening or is starting to happen in some western countries as well. I guess the world is united in this at least - hate for queer folk.

Was Yellowstone’s Deadliest Wolf Hunt in 100 Years an Inside Job?

MichaelAza — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 17:16:32 +0000

Article URL: https://theintercept.com/2022/07/20/wolves-yellowstone-ranger-montana-greg-gianforte/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32215538

Points: 10

# Comments: 9

Ask HN: Social skills for hackers

MichaelAza — Fri, 29 Dec 2017 22:21:40 +0000

Coming a bit late to the party, but I'm coming to understand that just being a highly skilled professional won't get you far without networking skills.

Since it doesn't seem to come easy to a lot of us - how did you learn to network, have people like you, keep a conversation going etc.

Any recommended books? Videos? Courses?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16032429

Points: 2

# Comments: 4

New comment by MichaelAza in "Gut Driven Development"

MichaelAza — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 22:54:03 +0000

I'll note that from my experience as a programmer and a manager the best coders (and best code) was done by the people who "just felt this is the right way". Usually the code produced is exactly good enough for the task at hand, and by creating a code base that can be easily refactored (for example, with lots of automated tests) it can be easily changed later. I always tell my junior programmers who tend to ask a lot of questions and get stuck up on process - code whatever you feel like coding. I trust your judgment. I'll correct you during CR if needed.

New comment by MichaelAza in "ZeroMQ 4.2.0"

MichaelAza — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 13:10:31 +0000

I've been seeing the occasional post from his blog about the choice to die but didn't connect them to ZMQ until I saw this.

ZMQ, as a library, is a work of art and Code Connected is by and far one of the best programming books I have had the pleasure to read. That, coupled with the deep and interesting posts on his blog show we have lost a truly great mind.

New comment by MichaelAza in "Inside the Chicago Police Department’s secret budget"

MichaelAza — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 19:19:17 +0000

While I agree that the U.S. and other criminal systems do not stress rehabilitation enough (or at all), the problem with all the things you mentioned aren't rehabilitation-centered.

Civil forfeiture is plain unconstitutional. The legal idea behind it, that property is charged with a crime, and so it doesn't matter if a person is guilty/inocnent or even charged is simply absurd. Plea bargains cause people to plead guilty even if they aren't because they fear the lengthy process of litigation that is many times stacked against them. In doing so they may, depending on juresdiction, lose access to wealfare and other forms of government help that is many times vital to these people. As to losing the abbility to vote after being convicted, it's blatantly undemocratic and absurd. A person convicted of a crime loses some rights but that is done for the benefit of society and the convict himself, to allow hime to rehabilitate and become a productive member of society. A convict shouldn't lose rights if they don't directly contribute to the societies well being or his own. A person voting doesn't constitute a danger to society.

New comment by MichaelAza in "Introducing Network Containers"

MichaelAza — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 20:12:10 +0000

So what is, exactly, the current state of the art in container networking? To the best of my understanding all current solutions (including this one) create one big LAN where all containers can see each other, but I'm certainly no expert.

How would one go about creating a network of containers more in line with traditional physical networks, with virtual switches, routers etc. ?

Braid is Turing Complete

MichaelAza — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 16:53:38 +0000

Article URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.0784

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10319679

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Orthographic Pedant: Bot that scans popular repositories for common typos

MichaelAza — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 22:11:46 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/thoppe/orthographic-pedant

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10315134

Points: 9

# Comments: 3

New comment by MichaelAza in "Orthographic Pedant: Bot that scans popular repositories for common typos"

MichaelAza — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 13:53:13 +0000

Just got a pull request from the bot, and thought this was worth sharing. Now we only need a bot that scans for common code smells and we're golden :)