Hacker News: Spoom

New comment by Spoom in "Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5!"

Spoom — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:39:26 +0000

Your bank sucks. The few times I've done a chargeback, it's been totally pain free. I do advise trying to get a refund informally first as that is expected by the CC networks.

New comment by Spoom in "Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel"

Spoom — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:34:25 +0000

Usually it's the Phillipines or an African country or something, but so very many times.

New comment by Spoom in "United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert"

Spoom — Sun, 31 May 2026 19:38:44 +0000

> Nope. Look at the flight track. They went all the way back.

Good point, I was thinking they were over the ocean and that was naturally the closest airport, but it looks like they could have landed in e.g. Nova Scotia in a shorter time period.

New comment by Spoom in "United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert"

Spoom — Sun, 31 May 2026 19:36:12 +0000

Isn't that what they did?

New comment by Spoom in "Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent"

Spoom — Wed, 13 May 2026 15:00:50 +0000

I thought the same thing but it's still not a good look. The big tech companies offering this sort of thing should probably find ways to give better guarantees about data isolation, even if that requires e.g. clients paying additional fees.

New comment by Spoom in "Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated"

Spoom — Sat, 09 May 2026 00:24:23 +0000

Heya Tom, it's Bob, from the office down the hall

New comment by Spoom in "Changes to GitHub Copilot individual plans"

Spoom — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 02:29:30 +0000

As of right now, it says Pro includes Code and Cowork. (At least, for me. There could always be A/B testing going on.)

New comment by Spoom in "Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data"

Spoom — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:29:07 +0000

While this is true, very often that is the impact of a third party vote in a federal election. See the election of one George W. Bush and the impact of Mr. Nader.

New comment by Spoom in "Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued"

Spoom — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:27:37 +0000

The product isn't Facebook, Quest, or Instagram. The product isn't advertising. The product isn't even people.

The product is the stock price.

Viewed through that lens, keeping the hype going at all costs makes sense.

New comment by Spoom in "Malus – Clean Room as a Service"

Spoom — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:02:30 +0000

Realistically, if it in fact did take 5 minutes to do the cleanroom reimplementation, you could just process updates from the OSS source in realtime.

New comment by Spoom in "World-first gigabit laser link between aircraft and geostationary satellite"

Spoom — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 20:45:15 +0000

I love that this was ostensibly written by Vint Cerf.

New comment by Spoom in "Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions"

Spoom — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 21:41:46 +0000

Good lord, I can only imagine the wasted electricity.

New comment by Spoom in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)"

Spoom — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 18:03:50 +0000

  Location: Pittsburgh, PA, USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Not likely, but would consider remote positions in Canada (I am a dual citizen) and USA and hybrid positions in Pittsburgh
  Technologies: Java, Typescript, Angular, SQL, NoSQL, PHP, Python, CSS, HTML
  Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19-JBiTUOvajWGmigGGf3BKkf_I4x5SnWS6JWEqRkLxg/edit?usp=sharing
  Email: my first name at my first name my last name dot com

Evaluating options after a reorg at Google, where I have been an Engineering Manager for about five years, and a full stack web app developer before that. Prior to Google, I worked at various sizes of startups from 4 to 200 employees, and have freelanced as well. Would consider Engineering Manager, TL, and Senior / Staff+ Eng positions.

New comment by Spoom in "Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app"

Spoom — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:01:08 +0000

> Everybody will slowly move to "web only" as 30% would kill their ability to compete with anybody else.

Frankly, yes, please. I mean, I'm biased as my whole career is in web app development, but there are so many things these days that do not need a whole native app. They're just communicating with a server backend somewhere, using none of the unique native functionality of the phone (much of which is available in browser APIs these days anyway). I can block ads in a web app much more easily. It's much harder to do customer-hostile things like block screenshots in a web app.

Native apps definitely have a place, but I think they're very overused, mostly for reasons that benefit the business at the expense of the customer.

New comment by Spoom in "Proof of Corn"

Spoom — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 18:45:37 +0000

> AI doesn't need to drive a tractor. It needs to orchestrate the systems and people who do.

I've been rather expecting AI to start acting as a manager with people as its arms in the real world. It reminds me of the Manna short story[1], where it acts as a people manager with perfect intelligence at all times, interconnected not only with every system but also with other instances in other companies (e.g. for competitive wage data to minimize opex / pay).

1. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

New comment by Spoom in "Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work"

Spoom — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 18:40:02 +0000

Big companies would outsource this position within a year, I guarantee it. It's highly measurable which means it can be "optimized".

New comment by Spoom in "U.S. unemployment rose in November despite job gains"

Spoom — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 16:26:29 +0000

It's not that simple. I'll point you at this Harvard Law Review article[1] to start but shareholder value is not the only consideration for executives and doesn't even need to override.

1. https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-137/will-the-real-sha...

New comment by Spoom in "Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable"

Spoom — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 23:16:39 +0000

I dread the day that Logitech kills the servers for Harmony. If they don't release the IR code database, they're going to have a lot of people (myself included) pretty annoyed.

(To be clear, they still work today if you can get a second hand remote / hub.)

New comment by Spoom in "How long can it take to become a US citizen?"

Spoom — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 16:22:42 +0000

> Heck, we could just snatch people off the street and declare they cannot prove they are a citizen therefore they have no Constitutional protections.

I'm not sure if you intended this as a joke, but this is happening now, even if you do have proof of citizenship on you[1]:

> Congressman Bennie Thompson, ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, reported that “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a “definitive” determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate” when the app says a person is undocumented.

1. https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/ice-face-recogn...

New comment by Spoom in "How long can it take to become a US citizen?"

Spoom — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 20:05:22 +0000

Anecdotally as someone in a large tech company, fairly common and much easier to get than a lot of visa classes. But then, you have to be Canadian or Mexican (and the Canadian one is generally easier).

Also keep in mind that it's a non-immigrant, non-dual intent visa, so if you end up wanting to stay, you'll need to adjust to another class at some point.