<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: billyoyo</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=billyoyo</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:20:58 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=billyoyo" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "Never Give Them Your Face"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm not American, so I'll admit I don't exactly subscribe to your american-centric ideas of what the global pandemic was about (operative word: global).<p>You haven't really explained the link between getting vaccinated and contact tracing, or any other form or surveillance. Getting vaccinated is a simple one-time transactional interaction. There is no intrinsic need for surveillance.<p>With that in mind, why are you against vaccination? Like I said - people being less anti-vaccination should help build a world where surveillance is less necessary. So you should be in favour of it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:20:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632271</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632271</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632271</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "Never Give Them Your Face"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You're describing contact tracing, that is not vaccination. If people were less afraid of vaccinations, invasive practices like contact tracing would be less necessary.<p>Arguing against that sort of contact tracing may have merits (Not necessarily saying I agree but it's a discussion worth having). Arguing against vaccination is dangerous and ends up with people dead.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 22 Jun 2026 15:59:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632013</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632013</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632013</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "Never Give Them Your Face"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What does getting the COVID vaccine have to do with surveillance or grocery shopping?<p>Where I live I simply queued up at the local vaccination centre, got vaccinated, and left. I probably had to show some id or something I guess but no more than accessing any other government services</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:24:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630566</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630566</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630566</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "Python is not a great language for data science"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Using a very common utility in the standard library is to avoid reinventing the wheel is not "clean code"?<p>defaultdict is ubiquitous in modern python, and is far from a complicated concept to grasp.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2025 23:24:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052068</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052068</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052068</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "Steam Brick: No screen, no controller, just a power button and a USB port"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Just to clarify this as well, while sixth form (17~18 years old) is optional in the UK, education is still compulsory until you're 18. you have the option to do this at an apprenticeship or skills based school but lots of people do just default to a levels.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Jan 2025 11:14:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42829372</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42829372</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42829372</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "Trump wins presidency for second time"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What are you talking about? The US has the 2nd heighest emissions behind China, almost double India's. The only countries higher than it per-capita are Canada, Australia and petro-states or tiny countries.<p>And China is already leading the world in moving to renewable technology, they are moving in the right direction (not entirely for altruistic reasons - it fulfils their ambitions of energy self-sufficiency).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 06 Nov 2024 12:42:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42061359</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42061359</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42061359</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's just elitist though isn't it? These games are enjoyed by players from all over the world, including massive numbers of players in countries with far less average disposable income. Its common in many countries to go to an internet cafe to play these games as they don't own their own hardware even.<p>It would also massively reduce the number of players. Competitive multiplayer games rely on large active playerbases for fast and fair matchmaking. That's why free to play has become the dominant model for these games. If you have to pay $1000 to play one of these games, they have no chance vs. the competition.<p>Obviously you can't completely solve this problem, but you can minimize it as much as possible.<p>Also these sorts of "trusted clubs" do exist for certain games (e.g. FaceIt for CounterStrike) but ultimately it still just relies on anti-cheat to establish that trust.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 31 Oct 2024 14:10:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42007102</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42007102</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42007102</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is a naive take. Of course these developers already permaban cheaters. Firstly many of these games are free to play so "getting another license" is a non issue. They're doing hardware bans nowadays which are harder to avoid but not impossible.<p>Half the battle is detection though. If you don't detect cheaters quick enough they ruin enough games that genuine players start getting frustrated and leave. Anti cheats help with this detection.<p>Probably every anti cheat idea you can think of, in terms of detection, prevention and punishment, has probably already been tried by a large online multiplayer game. It is an extremely difficult problem to solve, a constant arms race.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 30 Oct 2024 21:33:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42000625</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42000625</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42000625</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Riot games use theirs (Vanguard) to improve detection of cheating software. basically the idea is by being on from the moment the computer is booted up it can validate the environment better.<p>Here's a recent blog post by riot detailing their recent deployment of the system for league of legends, the biggest online multiplayer game in the world<p><a href="https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-gb/news/dev/dev-vanguard-x-lol-retrospective/" rel="nofollow">https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-gb/news/dev/dev-vanguard-...</a><p>towards the end it talks about how and why it works</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 30 Oct 2024 21:25:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42000544</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42000544</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42000544</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "Machine conquest: Jules Verne's technocratic worldmaking"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It is only "anti-white" in the sense it's criticizing white men from over a hundred years ago who were doing pretty horrible things in the name of colonialism.<p>And the fact they were white is pretty important as they themselves used this as justification for their superiority and thus colonialism.<p>It would be more productive to engage with the meat of the article rather than dismissing it because they mentioned the race and gender of the subjects and engaging in "anti-woke" dog whistling.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Oct 2024 10:45:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41894481</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41894481</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41894481</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "Machine conquest: Jules Verne's technocratic worldmaking"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The article is talking about how his stories inspired real world colonial technocrats in France at the time.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Oct 2024 10:35:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41894444</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41894444</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41894444</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "Machine conquest: Jules Verne's technocratic worldmaking"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The article is just correctly identifying that late 1800s french colonial technocrats were predominantly white males.<p>The article isn't really making a particular point about this, it's just a quick aside. What are you referring to when you say "here we go again"?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Oct 2024 10:01:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41894308</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41894308</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41894308</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "Noise"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>looks like they were playing around with getting gpt to write some code to render the particles</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 05 Oct 2024 09:48:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41748746</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41748746</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41748746</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "Ask HN: How can I learn about performance optimization?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You dismiss a lot of modern technologies as "unnecessarily complicated", you advocate for reinventing the wheel coming across with a very "I know better" attitude.<p>For example you create your own bundler, when modern bundlers are very mature and good.<p>For example you dismiss SSR as unnecessary and then basically roll your own. You dismiss modern frameworks out of hand then list performance improvements they can make for you (e.g. keeping state in html).<p>Your last two performance improvements are about not taking drugs???<p>I'm really pro people doing things themselves for fun and all that but this article and you comment comes across as so arrogant and condescending whilst also seeming to show ignorance (or at least willful dismissal) of exactly where modern JavaScript development is at, and present it as state of the art performance improvements.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 03 Mar 2024 12:00:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39580307</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39580307</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39580307</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "23andMe changed its terms of service to prevent hacked customers from suing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Clearly a bad faith argument. someone with your passwords can do a lot more damage than someone with your DNA.<p>I think DNA is probably sensitive on the level of someone knowing your name and DOB. Not convinced it's much more dangerous than that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 Dec 2023 19:14:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616895</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616895</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616895</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "The Great Sphinx of Giza may have have started out as a natural formation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://www.metabunk.org/threads/claim-ancient-egyptians-could-not-work-granite-without-high-tech-diamond-tools.12963/#post-290360" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.metabunk.org/threads/claim-ancient-egyptians-cou...</a><p>Here's a nice compilation of evidence showing it's completely explainable how they could have made them.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 16 Nov 2023 11:22:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38288229</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38288229</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38288229</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "Who did the Anglo-Saxons think they were?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I didn't mean they literally descended from the scythians, but that they both derive from the indo-europeans from the eurasian steppe, and so cultural memory of this could influence the story the original poster was referencing. Although I realize my wording was pretty terrible, so it did sound exactly like I was saying they were descended from scythians. My bad.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 Feb 2021 14:53:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180439</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180439</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180439</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "Who did the Anglo-Saxons think they were?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Well the (Celtic) Scots did descend from roughly the Scythians. although afaik the Picts are thought to possibly be non-celtic. The Celtics though were all Indo-European, and so originate from the Eurasian steppe.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 Feb 2021 11:25:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26178577</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26178577</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26178577</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "Python’s tug of war between beginner-friendly and advanced features"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's a really minor thing, but decorators are really not a new python feature. The RFC is from 2003, decorators existed in python 2.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Feb 2021 00:54:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26031757</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26031757</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26031757</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billyoyo in "University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You state that "a drop in overall intake as more students realise it likely isn't worth the money". This is completely unfounded and not supported by statistics at all [1]. University intake in the UK across all ethnicities has been on a steady increase.<p>Also, I'm not sure it's true to say UK degrees don't care about the beauty of number's. Again, the statistics show that the number of mathematics students have been according to the overall trend [2]. And anecdotally, comparing with friends from other countries the UK actually seems to have a university system unusually geared to purely academic degrees.<p>It's my personal belief that while of course university is about getting a job, it's also about learning about adulthood for many people. People use it to delay the start of their working life and enjoy a few years of adult freedom, as well as to get a degree. Anecdotally, I know a lot of my friends went to uni almost entirely for this reason and had no idea in their head about what they'd do after yet. But I don't think there's anything wrong with that. In fact with increasing lifetimes I think it only makes sense we continue to delay the age at which we enter the workforce.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/higher-education/entry-rates-into-higher-education/latest" rel="nofollow">https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/16-01-2020/sb255-higher-education-student-statistics/qualifications" rel="nofollow">https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/16-01-2020/sb255-higher-educatio...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 30 Jan 2021 11:28:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25968248</link><dc:creator>billyoyo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25968248</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25968248</guid></item></channel></rss>