Hacker News: ashley95

New comment by ashley95 in "Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses"

ashley95 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:23:10 +0000

Right, maybe I worded my response a bit vaguely. Of course you need to do an opt-in and verify them.

My point was rather that if you are operating a service with human users, there is no need to deal with quoted local parts, mixed-case, non-ascii, etc. You will just run into bugs (oh, the user signed up on an iPhone and the email field was auto-capitalized and now they can't find their account?) for almost no marginal benefit.

New comment by ashley95 in "If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know"

ashley95 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 01:08:57 +0000

Has it finally come time that I have to be nice to Claude?

New comment by ashley95 in "Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses"

ashley95 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 01:06:57 +0000

This is cute and all. But for anyone coming here for real-world advice: just use a regex, normalize to lowercase, and surface any errors to users so they know if their email got rejected. This will avoid 99.9% of issues and work for 100% of real human users. This is what everyone else does, and if you have a user with an esoteric email, they will still be able to furnish another one that passes this validation.

New comment by ashley95 in "The real cost of owning a home"

ashley95 — Tue, 26 May 2026 21:28:10 +0000

The argument is that rate of return only regresses to the mean if you diversify. It's like saying "I hold stock in a single company, so if I hold long enough, my return will average the return of the S&P 500". Your returns will look like the mean only if you diversify across investments, not over time.

New comment by ashley95 in "The real cost of owning a home"

ashley95 — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:20:01 +0000

A big reason why people believe one should own their own home (or that it is prudent to do so) is due to the historical fact that land has gone up in value in many countries with strong population growth (such as the United States).

As the population of the US starts decreasing (due to lower immigration, and historically low birth rates) and the urbanization trend completes, it's unclear why the value of land should go up, and therefore why real estate should increase in value.

The rest of the debate is very dependent on things like tax treatment (e.g. SALT and property taxes), personal preference (stability of fixed rent vs right to stay forever/customize), and transaction costs.

New comment by ashley95 in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

ashley95 — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:41:54 +0000

For those not very familiar with the US immigration system: it can be very confusing and the naming of things is rarely related to their function due to a very thick layer of legal fiction in how it works.

The system sorely lacks reform to align the legal fiction with reality, which is precisely why this news release may sound entirely sensible for the uninitiated.

New comment by ashley95 in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

ashley95 — Sat, 23 May 2026 19:39:54 +0000

Which is so puzzling to me given Trump's impeccable record as a successful and prudent businessman.

New comment by ashley95 in "Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200"

ashley95 — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:30:45 +0000

How is this not absurd? What is the benefit? Space is a harsh environment, with issues due to solar radiation etc, etc. And it's permanently 100ms away from any user.

New comment by ashley95 in "What's a mathematician to do? (2010)"

ashley95 — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:45:44 +0000

I think we also have to be honest and admit that, yes, indeed, there is less novel maths for all of us to be doing. The pioneers came first and discovered a lot of low hanging fruit. There were a lot of geniuses that mined the rest and reached higher in the tree. Now even the smartest mathematicians are left solving abstract puzzles with little utility in the real world. (Don't get me wrong, it's very fun, and sometimes useful too.)

After my PhD in applied mathematics, I decided to leave the field, partly because I feel it really has advanced so far that new discoveries do little to move the needle in the real world. There's enough smart people who obsess over nothing else but maths that I can go and do more practical stuff...

New comment by ashley95 in "I’ve banned query strings"

ashley95 — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:39:42 +0000

Oh duh, makes a lot of sense!

New comment by ashley95 in "The locals don't know"

ashley95 — Sun, 10 May 2026 19:55:57 +0000

The title is a non sequitur from the argument. The point is not to ask for a "bring a non-local to work day" where you tag along to a rando doing their normal routine.

The thing that locals do know a lot of the time, is the spots that are actually great but not hyped up by influencers/social media, the cool spots that are often good by virtue of not being well known, etc. And no one is arguing that the locals know all the best cultural attractions, the point of asking locals for advice is to understand what they see in their own city.

This is where platforms like Couchers.org or whatever come up, where you want to actually understand the locals, more than just see the hyped up touristy stuff (which often can also be phenomenal!).

New comment by ashley95 in "I’ve banned query strings"

ashley95 — Sat, 09 May 2026 22:50:39 +0000

But ?fbclid is not banned?

New comment by ashley95 in "The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it"

ashley95 — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 22:31:56 +0000

> The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with.

In the same way that it was straightforward to deal with job loss from the industrial revolution, or when the US shipped away all its manufacturing capability?

New comment by ashley95 in "UK Biobank health data keeps ending up on GitHub"

ashley95 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 02:03:54 +0000

Really don't think this is any issue given the post we are commenting on...

New comment by ashley95 in "Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training"

ashley95 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 22:34:46 +0000

There is no clean separation between personal and work. It is also more efficient to blend them (if I expect a baseline level of non-snoopiness on my work computer, I will text my boyfriend from my work laptop... obviously beneficial for the firm).

Either way when it comes to ranting about the company: many workplaces don't have a watercooler where all your team mates congregate (e.g. remote/different offices). Also what, you'll rant about confidential work projects over non-work texts?