Hacker News: OGWhales

New comment by OGWhales in "Three men are facing charges in Toronto SMS Blaster arrests"

OGWhales — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:45:27 +0000

Yeah, they really go all or nothing with the lock down mode. There are a lot of things from it I’d like to enable but not everything.

New comment by OGWhales in "Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop"

OGWhales — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:37:59 +0000

Yup, for me I can see the device but when I try to initiate a send it just doesn't show up on the other device about half the time. I've not found a reliable way to fix it either, toggling AirDrop on and off on both devices seems the best way to fix it but only works like 70% of the time.

New comment by OGWhales in "My home network observes bedtime with OpenBSD and pf"

OGWhales — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:47:31 +0000

Fun article! I like your watercolors too, especially the one of them going into the pufferfish's mouth :D

New comment by OGWhales in "Government agencies buy commercial data about Americans in bulk"

OGWhales — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 13:09:13 +0000

There is a big difference between a tavern owner keeping tabs on the comings and goings of their customers and the government having 24/7 precise location monitoring on everyone in the entire country.

One does not violate the 4th and the other does (though they do it anyway).

New comment by OGWhales in "US national debt surges past $39 Trillion"

OGWhales — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:59:20 +0000

I don't see such a clear benefit to eliminating the debt, actually I see a lot of downsides that would likely be worse for our children. The way I understand it, the primary concern is whether the debt is growing faster than the economy can support and whether we're using it for productive purposes or not. A government isn't like a household: treasury debt also functions as a safe asset, a tool of monetary policy, and a store of value for pensions, banks, and investors around the world, a majority of the debt is also a domestic asset. Trying to eliminate the debt would likely mean austerity and major tax increases, which can be more damaging the debt itself.

I don't think people realize that a large share of the government's debt is also a domestic asset. It is still something to be wary of and manage carefully but it is not something that I think is wise to eliminate either. The main concern should be making sure it is being used productively and is not exceeding what the growth of the economy can support (which happens when its used unproductively).

New comment by OGWhales in "Someone needs to go to jail"

OGWhales — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 19:30:50 +0000

There is a real argument about the rise of fascism and the equivalent about the rise of communism is too silly for the bit to work

New comment by OGWhales in "ai;dr"

OGWhales — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 20:24:24 +0000

I've noticed that LLMs generated text often has spaces around em dashes, which I found odd. They don't always do that, but they do it often enough that it stood out to me since that isn't what you'd normally see.

New comment by OGWhales in "FBI couldn't get into WaPo reporter's iPhone because Lockdown Mode enabled"

OGWhales — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 21:14:26 +0000

???

New comment by OGWhales in "FBI couldn't get into WaPo reporter's iPhone because Lockdown Mode enabled"

OGWhales — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 19:48:17 +0000

> Authorities, citing a “foregone conclusion exception” to the Fifth Amendment, argued that Rawls could not invoke his right to self-incrimination because police already had evidence of a crime. The 3rd Circuit panel agreed, upholding a lower court decision.

I do not follow the logic here, what does that even mean? It seems very dubious. And what happens if one legitimately forgets? They just get to keep you there forever?

New comment by OGWhales in "Pandas 3.0"

OGWhales — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 15:26:34 +0000

It depends on the specifics, but I converted a couple of scripts recently that would take minutes to run with Pandas that only took seconds to run with Polars. I was pretty impressed.

New comment by OGWhales in "Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time (2024)"

OGWhales — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 16:25:10 +0000

I heard of some gaming focused one, one of the examples given was AI highlighting of enemies...

New comment by OGWhales in "Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?"

OGWhales — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 13:58:52 +0000

I've not found it that great at programming in cobol, at least in comparison to its ability with other languages it seems to be noticeably worse, though we aren't using any models that were specifically trained on cobol. It is still useful for doing simple and tedious tasks, for example constructing a file layout based on info I fed it can be a time saver, otherwise I feel it's pretty limited by the necessary system specifics and really large context window needed to understand what is actually going on in these systems. I do really like being able to feed it a whole manual and let it act as a sort of advanced find. Working in a mainframe environment often requires looking for some obscure info, typically in a large PDF that's not always easy to find what you need, so this is pretty nice.

New comment by OGWhales in "Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux"

OGWhales — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 18:35:52 +0000

My experience is that one doesn't actually work, though the built-in ad-blocking does work quite well.

New comment by OGWhales in "Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux"

OGWhales — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 18:35:06 +0000

I've found a few that work but many can be buggy or non-functional, just depends on the extension. The only one I use currently is called "Control Panel for Twitter", which seems to work pretty well.

New comment by OGWhales in "US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes"

OGWhales — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 21:41:14 +0000

I don't think a stock market reaction is a good way to measure their impact on the housing market. It's not that they aren't involved in the market, it's that their impact is questionable given the relative size of their participation.

New comment by OGWhales in "If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?"

OGWhales — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 13:23:45 +0000

Would this not still be the case even if labor wasn't entirely outpaced by capital?

New comment by OGWhales in "Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use"

OGWhales — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 21:11:41 +0000

I noticed that as well (though I do think there is a time limit), but decided I didn't want to encourage more of it and still avoid any shorts. I usually watch on a TV anyway, so vertical videos are pretty weird...

New comment by OGWhales in "Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use"

OGWhales — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 21:06:07 +0000

Yeah, I find it odd how hard they push it, like trying to shove it down my throat levels of pushing shorts. I already use their platform heavily, just for regular videos. My guess is they get more data from how you interact with shorts and they find that to be super valuable info over what they get from regular video watching.

New comment by OGWhales in "Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright"

OGWhales — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 16:22:57 +0000

We also need to be far more strict about enforcing properly alignment, so many are pointed too high especially on larger vehicles and pretty much always on anything that's been lifted

New comment by OGWhales in "Steam Frame"

OGWhales — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 00:25:41 +0000

I was able to use this adapter to get my 2070s DisplayPort output to send 4k120hz to my TV, which only has HDMI ports.

Club 3D active adapter: https://www.amazon.com/Club-3D-DisplayPort1-4-Adapter-CAC-10...