Hacker News: TheBicPen

New comment by TheBicPen in "A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4k Developer Machines"

TheBicPen — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 01:50:35 +0000

I'm partial to "The AI is more A than I"

New comment by TheBicPen in "Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team"

TheBicPen — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:27:01 +0000

> you dont get that much karma if you are consistently posting bad takes.

I wonder how true that is. While this site doesn't have incentivize engagement-maximizing behaviour (posting ragebait) like some other sites do, I would imagine that simply posting more is the best way to accrue karma long-term.

New comment by TheBicPen in "MacBook Neo"

TheBicPen — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 23:36:08 +0000

> Last month, Apple released an update for the iPhone 8 and iPhone X [1]. The iPhone 8 was released September 2017. I seriously doubt 9-year old Android phones, even flagship models, are still getting software updates.

How usable is an 8-year-old iPhone as a primary phone though? I agree that having 8 years of support is a good thing, but at that point the hardware is so degraded that it's not suitable for its original purpose anymore. At that point I'd rather have android just so I can root it and install Linux. Then again, with improvements to phones slowing down in recent years, this is becoming increasingly untrue.

New comment by TheBicPen in "Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras"

TheBicPen — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 05:30:19 +0000

Do you have a link to the agenda? The only Monday meeting I see on the mountain view site is a Board of Library Trustees meeting

New comment by TheBicPen in "Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron"

TheBicPen — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 17:56:32 +0000

The best way to draw a circle in gimp is still the awkward select -> foreground fill workflow. At this point this example is beating a dead horse, but the horse shall continue to be beaten until a proper ellipse tool is added.

New comment by TheBicPen in "High-Level Is the Goal"

TheBicPen — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 06:06:58 +0000

As 1 datapoint to support this, see Audacity moving from WxWidgets to Qt for 4.0.

New comment by TheBicPen in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

TheBicPen — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 23:26:14 +0000

https://thebicpen.ca

New comment by TheBicPen in "Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables"

TheBicPen — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 05:03:38 +0000

Maybe the real humanitarian failure is that the US didn't nuke everybody and start over from the stone age. Can't any societal problems if no societies exist, right?

New comment by TheBicPen in "Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables"

TheBicPen — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 05:00:26 +0000

Does any serious historian believe that fully defeating the Soviet Union after WWII would have been possible? Even with the advantage of nuclear weapons, I doubt the US would have made it very far.

New comment by TheBicPen in "Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables"

TheBicPen — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 04:58:09 +0000

At least NK's human rights abuses are contained within their borders. I hope future generations will look back on the many US invasions of foreign countries over the years and all the war crimes that took place during those invasions with the scrutiny they deserve.

New comment by TheBicPen in "Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service"

TheBicPen — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 18:34:20 +0000

While I agree with you, I find it hard to argue against the view that politicians are elected for the views they held during their campaign. They may change their mind after being elected, but their constituents that voted for them will not all change their mind simultaneously. To the ones that don't change their mind, it does appear to be a betrayal of their principles. A rational politician would not want to gain that kind of reputation out of pure self-interest.

New comment by TheBicPen in "Drilling down on Uncle Sam's proposed TP-Link ban"

TheBicPen — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 19:51:43 +0000

No. But which nation claims to be all about freedom, and which is known for restricting individual liberties for (whatever the people in charge consider to be) the greater good?

New comment by TheBicPen in "Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model"

TheBicPen — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 06:32:26 +0000

> I'd agree but we're beyond hopelessly idealistic. That sort of approach only helps your competition who will use it to build a closed product

That same argument can be applied to open-source (non-model) software, and is about as true there. It comes down to the business model. If anything, crating a closed-sourced copy of a piece of FOSS software is easier than an AI model since running a compiler doesn't cost millions of dollars.

New comment by TheBicPen in "$50 Oil Could Crush American Shale Growth"

TheBicPen — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 06:19:17 +0000

As opposed to every other country where it is somehow not short sighted?

New comment by TheBicPen in "Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall"

TheBicPen — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 05:03:49 +0000

And in France specifically, the first case you open is guaranteed to not be a good item. So it's essentially the same system but with an additional $2,50 entry fee

New comment by TheBicPen in "A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator"

TheBicPen — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 03:35:22 +0000

It's a shame how many platforms are moving away from transparent moderation. I get that there are strong incentives to do so - a user that knows they're banned will immediately try to find a way to circumvent the ban. Shadowbanning delays that reaction if not stopping it outright. But damn does the concept feel dystopian. Like you're being ignored through seemingly no fault of your own. Surely that can't be healthy. And yet the platform is better off because the person isn't trying to circumvent the ban. And don't even get me started on replacing human interaction with AI for shadowbanned users.

New comment by TheBicPen in "WASM 3.0 Completed"

TheBicPen — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 05:32:08 +0000

It's been stuck at stage 1 since early 2022 unfortunately. https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations

New comment by TheBicPen in "WASM 3.0 Completed"

TheBicPen — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 05:25:25 +0000

Where does the 4 come from? I thought it was R+G+B+A, but you already have 3 colour channels in that calculation

New comment by TheBicPen in "Shai-Hulud malware attack: Tinycolor and over 40 NPM packages compromised"

TheBicPen — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 02:04:13 +0000

In 2022, sure. But not today. Even something as simple as generating and running a `git clone && cp xyz` command will create code not directly generated by the LLM.

New comment by TheBicPen in "U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier"

TheBicPen — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 16:53:21 +0000

> First-passed-the-post voting is fundamentally flawed, and so is ranked choice...

What voting system so you think is best? None are perfect but IMO ranked choice is the best as it keeps the good attributes of FPTP without suffering from the spoiler effect