<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: alopha</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alopha</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 01:24:42 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=alopha" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alopha in "SpaceX S-1"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Starlink is a cash machine because the costs are externalised to the rest of the company, all in it's a money pit.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 21:37:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214498</link><dc:creator>alopha</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214498</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214498</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alopha in "Why is Google Maps back to showing old satellite images of Altadena?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's no promo packet material in spending money on making the product a bit better with up to date imagery so why would anyone bother?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 09:40:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177295</link><dc:creator>alopha</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177295</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177295</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alopha in "Trusted access for the next era of cyber defense"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's a lot of waffle to try and say 'we've got a really scary next model coming too real soon, promise!'</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:05:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47771520</link><dc:creator>alopha</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47771520</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47771520</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alopha in "Ransomware Is Growing Three Times Faster Than the Spending Meant to Stop It"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The idea that the spending needs to grow linearly with the growth is a damning indictment of the mindset of the vast ineffectual mess that is the cybersecurity industry.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Apr 2026 10:43:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47763854</link><dc:creator>alopha</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47763854</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47763854</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alopha in "Switzerland Built an Alternative to BGP"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's some pretty cool stuff (and startups) out of EPFL!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 Mar 2026 07:13:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47422511</link><dc:creator>alopha</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47422511</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47422511</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alopha in "Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Now we're down to just an upper house absolutely stuffed with hundreds of washed up political hacks given a comfortable retirement and party donors. And a few priests.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:00:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342707</link><dc:creator>alopha</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342707</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342707</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alopha in "[dead]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I still don't understand this idea. A different interface every time would be the highest cognitive load imaginable.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Mar 2026 23:45:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47268818</link><dc:creator>alopha</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47268818</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47268818</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alopha in "[dead]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've spent my career designing and building systems to help humans understand data and control computers. While I find this hard to swallow it's also hard to argue with. Tens of thousands of engineers and designers rebuilding slightly different drop-downs is an inefficient world that is unarguably coming to an end.<p>As so much of the first-line decision-making moves to LLMs there's definitely going to be opportunities for much richer and complex output from LLMs - how we can create terse and expressive visual summarisations/interfaces for where humans need to make decisions. But it's a much smaller world.<p>Where I suspect the wheels are going to come off for some though is that it's far, far easier to create a complex, difficult to understand UI than a simple one. And if simplicity and clarity are what enables effective LLM utilisation attempting to skip all that bothersome UX work will go poorly.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Mar 2026 22:50:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47268359</link><dc:creator>alopha</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47268359</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47268359</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alopha in "We Will Not Be Divided"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Trump was threatening Netflix for having a democrat on the board last week. They seized 10% of Intel. They forced Nvidia to tithe 25% of China revenue into a slush fund. The FCC has been used to censor comedy. The ship has sailed and the only consequence has been hand-wringing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 08:49:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47192453</link><dc:creator>alopha</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47192453</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47192453</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alopha in "Mark Zuckerberg to testify in landmark social media trial"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And just stop buying those cigarettes. This is where cultural differences matter, the US has much less concern about the negative societal impact of products than many countries, particularly its erstwhile allies. It's also precisely why it's imperative other countries decouple from US owned social media unless they want to import US values.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Feb 2026 10:04:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47072090</link><dc:creator>alopha</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47072090</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47072090</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alopha in "Tesla is committing automotive suicide"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Tesla's factories have been responsible for deaths, systematic injury issues and wage theft - <a href="https://sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2025/03/30/human-rights-concerns-at-teslas-texas-gigafactory/" rel="nofollow">https://sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2025/03/30/human-rights-co...</a><p>Pretending BYD is winning because of Chinese labor practices alone or primarily is denial of their technological and operational prowess.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:37:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46815416</link><dc:creator>alopha</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46815416</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46815416</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alopha in "France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc."]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Something tells me when the 'something' is a major trade deal with China suddenly it'll be 'oh my god how could you'. The US wants a EU vassal, what they're going to get is an EU that realigned itself to be politically and economically equidistant from the US and China.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 26 Jan 2026 20:25:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46770999</link><dc:creator>alopha</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46770999</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46770999</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alopha in "Your app subscription is now my weekend project"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>37Signals tried that with once.com . Given they're now giving those away for free and haven't said a thing about it suggests it was an abject failure. What you're paying for with SaaS is outsourcing - deployment, maintenance, security, reliability etc are someone else's problem.<p>The code is the easy part but there's ongoing humans needed to make it work. If Agents get to the point they can genuinely autonomously SRE & patch a service everything changes but that still seems a long way off.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2026 23:12:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46726321</link><dc:creator>alopha</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46726321</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46726321</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alopha in "Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Everyone knows. But America is has made it very clear it has no allies, this means every middle power is near obligated to re-position themselves to be roughly in the middle between the two super-powers.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:44:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649300</link><dc:creator>alopha</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649300</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649300</guid></item></channel></rss>