Hacker News: bspammer

New comment by bspammer in "We've made the world too complicated"

bspammer — Sat, 16 May 2026 11:30:48 +0000

Child mortality rates have dropped off a cliff in every country in the world in the last 100 years. More people than ever have access to clean drinking water, to toilets, to doctors.

Fewer people die in wars. Fewer people die in pandemics. The Black Death killed half of Europe.

This purely pessimistic, nihilistic view of the modern world is as widely inaccurate as a purely optimistic one.

New comment by bspammer in "iOS 27 is adding a 'Create a Pass' button to Apple Wallet"

bspammer — Tue, 05 May 2026 13:06:59 +0000

You can double tap the lock button to open your wallet with all your passes. Also it automatically raises the brightness for QR passes to make it easier for readers.

You could do the same thing with shortcuts I guess but using the first class feature is nice.

New comment by bspammer in "Incident with Issues and Webhooks – Resolved"

bspammer — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:35:41 +0000

The individual numbers for git operations, pull requests, and actions are all still single-nine.

New comment by bspammer in "Android now stops you sharing your location in photos"

bspammer — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:15:06 +0000

This kills an entire class of useful crowdsourcing web apps though. Just off the top of my head, contributing to OSM is much easier when you can just take a bunch of photos and see them displayed on a map.

New comment by bspammer in "Starfling: A one-tap endless orbital slingshot game in a single HTML file"

bspammer — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:53:24 +0000

This is a really nice little game. My feedback is that on mobile at least, the text that pops up often blocks vision of the ball, which is quite frustrating. I would move it down a bit

New comment by bspammer in "Taste in the age of AI and LLMs"

bspammer — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:31:55 +0000

It’s an unbelievable lack of self awareness. I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt because surely no one would stoop to that level, but 5 paragraphs in and I’m certain it is AI written.

New comment by bspammer in "Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps"

bspammer — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:47:50 +0000

I think the actual best footage of the launch was from Everyday Astronaut on youtube, including a great shot of the booster separation

https://www.youtube.com/live/QOsSRRBMNoc?t=6h49m36s

New comment by bspammer in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

bspammer — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:30:34 +0000

In case you haven't seen, AI-written comments were recently banned here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079

New comment by bspammer in "The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI"

bspammer — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:32:47 +0000

It's because it's AI written with all the usual over-the-top grandeur and a ridiculous number of negative parallelisms.

> No regression. No noise. Just compounding.

> the transition is measured in years, not decades.

> not by decree, but by ruthless compounding.

I'm not interested in what an LLM thinks about the social implications of LLMs.

New comment by bspammer in "Why I love NixOS"

bspammer — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 18:25:46 +0000

Yep disk space and learning curve are the two major downsides to Nix. The former has never been a problem for me in practice, just run garbage collection once a month. The latter was a big problem, but is now mitigated for most people by LLMs.

New comment by bspammer in "Why I love NixOS"

bspammer — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 18:21:07 +0000

LLMs are a real gamechanger for Nix, highly recommend giving it a go again.

New comment by bspammer in "A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)"

bspammer — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 09:23:46 +0000

Both of the serious ones are not specific to Japan, I got told off in China for standing chopsticks up in rice. I suspect anywhere with a significant Buddhist population will have the same taboo.

New comment by bspammer in "4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches"

bspammer — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:17:58 +0000

The most embarrassing part of that article is the comment section. Not a single dissenting voice.

New comment by bspammer in "Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?"

bspammer — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 22:00:10 +0000

I’ve been frustrated by this for years, you just know that if there was a mobile data deadzone on a motorway they’d fix it immediately.

Meanwhile on the train 30 miles from London, nothing.

New comment by bspammer in "The American Healthcare Conundrum"

bspammer — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 07:09:42 +0000

Because people aren’t objects.

New comment by bspammer in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

bspammer — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:33:43 +0000

Just to play devil’s advocate, I have found prediction markets genuinely useful despite never placing a bet.

In 2024 all of my social media feed was convinced the US election was going to go the other way. I have left wing politics and accordingly the algorithm wraps me in a bubble. It was all videos of empty trump rallies and Kamala hype. Polymarket was the main counter signal I had that the election wasn’t going to go the way I hoped.

Similarly when the room temperature super-conductor hype was happening in 2023, the prediction market for it being real never went above 25%. It’s extremely useful to be able to look at that as a layman and go “ok this probably isn’t real”.

New comment by bspammer in "The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ"

bspammer — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 10:05:58 +0000

The em dashes are the only thing making it look AI-written. I think it was human written by someone who likes em dashes.

New comment by bspammer in "Show HN: We analyzed 1,573 Claude Code sessions to see how AI agents work"

bspammer — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:18:14 +0000

Heavy use of /rewind helps with this - it's much better to remove the bad information from the context entirely instead of trying to tell the model "actually, ignore the previous approach and try this instead"

New comment by bspammer in "Dolphin Progress Release 2603"

bspammer — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:23:15 +0000

> All of this just to let Dolphin play online with real Wii consoles in a game whose official servers are since long dead and whose replacement servers have a peak of only 15 concurrent online players.

Knowing there's people out that who have such absurd levels of dedication makes me so happy.

New comment by bspammer in "Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]"

bspammer — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 09:01:59 +0000

I had a genuine feeling of dread reading that, wow.