<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: chaosharmonic</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=chaosharmonic</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 27 May 2026 18:21:30 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=chaosharmonic" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "The worst job interview I ever had"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've had some rather <i>interesting</i> interviews myself, with several of my most ridiculous stories ironically being from here.<p>One guy -- the reason I started building a tracking tool, after I noticed that his email was autofilling when I went to send him a message -- ghosted me after I wasn't available the first day and time he suggested. Which was also a holiday.<p>Another place, a stealth startup, was a panel interview with their three founders -- two tech leads and the CEO. The tech leads actually had really interesting discourse, and I wish I could remember the name of the guy who told me that "testing means never having to use my brain for the same thing twice." It actually never occurred to me before that an interview could provide you with useful knowledge, let alone that an interviewer could make a point of imparting those things on purpose. However, their CEO asked me to commit 5 years of my life up while also refusing to tell me anything at all about what the company did.<p>Within the past year I also encountered one that expressly asked me for things I didn't like about a previous employer; badgered me when I didn't want to elaborate about a specific, traumatizing, walking HR complaint of a man; and then -- after I described vaguely how organizations and their leadership change over time -- explicitly asked me to rate that individual on a scale.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 27 May 2026 17:21:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297418</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297418</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297418</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "The worst job interview I ever had"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I once had an interviewer ask me, several years back, about the religious affiliations of my college.<p>It's <i>supposed</i> to mean "at work," but that doesn't at all mean that you can assume the interviewer is going to understand that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 27 May 2026 17:02:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297142</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297142</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297142</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"Generous" means nothing in a context where severances in are entirely voluntary, and aren't actually a standard that you can reliably expect.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 17:18:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48226099</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48226099</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48226099</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I should probably note a detail I left out here: I myself care a <i>lot</i> about standards, and simply am stating that I wouldn't push teams around me to suddenly drop Tailwind even if I personally would rather not have to rely on things like it everywhere. Less that my opinion goes away and more that I don't presume it's the only valid option at scale.<p>But in my personal projects, I myself have just stopped using libraries entirely for styling.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 17 May 2026 20:07:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172746</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172746</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172746</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I would think manipulating CSS through user input is both less common as an application pattern and less critical as an attack surface.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 16 May 2026 16:07:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48161394</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48161394</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48161394</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Personally, I'm not sure from my own dives into it that I'd still insist on bare CSS in a professional codebase any more than I'd insist on plain DOM manipulation. And I do at least see Tailwind classes as being a <i>little</i> less of a DSL than other, similar tools. But while I'm not going to be a purist about it at a workplace, I both agree with you and have noticed a layer even beyond your point: that overreliance on these things leads to not learning <i>HTML</i> beyond a junior level.<p>It gets really easy to lean on class-based CSS and use a `<div>` for everything instead of ever learning what a semantic element is.<p>And <i>that</i> contributes to other bad habits, like writing a bunch of JavaScript to define behavior that could just be natively handled by your browser.<p>A weird personal irony is that because no employer has ever asked me to directly write CSS, what's actually made me better at CSS is <i>JavaScript</i> -- namely that my understanding of selector logic has improved a lot after picking up Web scraping.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 16 May 2026 16:03:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48161362</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48161362</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48161362</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Um. I don't have the link <i>directly</i> in front of me, but the tl;dr of the OP's point (that I was referencing/quoting in the above comment) was that, in the US, our efforts around suicide prevention are last resort options, that we offer <i>instead</i> of actually fixing any of the things that make people here suicidal. We gut mental health resources, <i>and</i> fuck people over in pretty much every other critical, material way -- healthcare and otherwise... But meanwhile we make a big deal about how we have a hotline, and how the number is even easy to remember now.<p>It's sort of like how we give enormous amounts of money to cops (institutionally), <i>instead of</i> funding the safety nets that actually reduce crime. Actually (edit), those analogies are kind of related, because the <i>same</i> safety nets are important for driving down both of these things. Yk, because people are more stable in other ways when they aren't in desperation all the time.<p>You might say it's the difference between emergency services and emergency <i>prevention</i>.<p>Edit: I did eventually find the source. <a href="https://linkedin.com/posts/tabitha-lean-5786011a3_nspc26-activity-7456137147872452608-hEfq" rel="nofollow">https://linkedin.com/posts/tabitha-lean-5786011a3_nspc26-act...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 16 May 2026 01:30:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48155969</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48155969</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48155969</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I saw a LinkedIn thread just the other day that called it the "suicide prevention industrial complex," and that phrase will stick in my head like "orphan crushing machine" or "leopards eating faces"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2026 15:42:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48123403</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48123403</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48123403</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "EU to crack down on TikTok, Instagram's 'addictive design' targeting kids"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Also true.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 15:23:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109668</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109668</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109668</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "EU to crack down on TikTok, Instagram's 'addictive design' targeting kids"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I mean, I'd argue it's worse. Cigarettes don't run your communication networks, and aren't a functional necessity for businesses to advertise their services.<p>On that note, not that I think regulation is the entire solution in the first place (see ATProto for an example of something independent of government that gives me hope for the Internet), but I feel that where a lot of the "protect kids" Internet bills fail is that many of them treat that as a separate, special concern in a lot of areas where they could cover it anyway by just trying harder to protect <i>users</i>.<p>In the US, where I'm writing this, it's sort of like how our age discrimination laws are written just to protect elders, but didn't do anything to protect them from the lower floor that came from letting businesses keep spreading stereotypes about who the minimum wage is for or otherwise pushing hustle culture onto 20somethings.<p>The use of the Internet to astroturf political discourse is an example of this -- you can't fully protect kids from school shootings with an Internet safety bill if you're not also going after bot farms that exist to benefit the "thoughts and prayers" crowd. But you're also never going to <i>see</i> that in an Internet safety bill <i>for kids,</i> because that (and for that matter a lot of our discourse about addictive mechanics in general) explicitly leaves out voters.<p>(clarifying edit: I'm <i>not</i> saying there aren't valid concerns around this topic. I <i>am</i> saying that when we say things like "experimenting on users' mental health without their knowledge is bad," the baseline should be that you don't have to add anything to the sentence for it to be taken seriously.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 14:56:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109259</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109259</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109259</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2026)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Oh that was only <i>after</i> the one that did amount to an interview. I otherwise had to reach out to people individually to hear anything at all.<p>I <i>also</i> applied there some three or so times, and didn't get those either.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 08 May 2026 13:21:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062730</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062730</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062730</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2026)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>FYI, this place says they value transparency but have an explicit policy against providing feedback after interviews. (They <i>did</i> take my documentation PR after the fact.)<p>Attempting to network with people here led them to promise me at least a response (since these roles were still open, and have been), but they ghosted me then -- only to blindside me about it over a year later, when interviewing me for a different role.<p>And while they're not the only place ever to grill me about a bad experience at a prior employer, they <i>are</i> the only place ever to explicitly ask me to tell them something I didn't like about one. Or to rate a previous boss (horrible or otherwise) on a scale of 1 to 10.<p>This, by the way, was all while I accommodated an overseas recruiter by taking an interview at 7pm on a Sunday.<p>I don't at all feel like I encountered the same level of respect, and while I was genuinely interested in their stated values (including but not limited to their value proposition) and their subject matter, based on my actual interactions with them I really can't recommend applying here.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 06 May 2026 20:45:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48041564</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48041564</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48041564</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Also, jumping on the LPCAMM train early creates an eventual path for ARM boards without soldered RAM.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Apr 2026 15:35:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47911139</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47911139</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47911139</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "Framework Laptop 13 Pro"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For those of us that, say, <i>just</i> got a new battery months before this was announced... a while ago (I forget when), there was talk of possibly sharing designs to enable repurposing them as power banks. Any word about that?<p>Also is there a way of exposing an existing touchpad to that new control board for your external one? (Or keyboard I guess, but the use case is that I had to replace my keyboard too, and for what was available at the time ended up just going with a whole input cover. Truthfully, I was already curious about exposing it to USB-C before hearing about this, and prefer wired anyway, but am <i>also</i> curious about the more immediately relevant part of the question.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Apr 2026 04:37:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47859065</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47859065</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47859065</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's because Brian Thompson was functionally a serial killer.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:57:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47725498</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47725498</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47725498</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "Industrial design files for Keychron keyboards and mice"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Likewise, I was unaware of this (and still see it in use regularly, especially on places like Printables as I've recently gotten my hands on a printer myself)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:25:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47722525</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47722525</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47722525</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "Industrial design files for Keychron keyboards and mice"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>On the source-available piece:<p>I'm not saying I'm for those over open source licenses in general, but Prusa brought up some fair questions when discussing the OCL. Essentially: define "personal use." Have I violated a non-commercial license if I print this keyboard and then use it to build someone a website? Does CC-NC mean a Prusacaster -- or any guitar knob with such a license for that matter -- is strictly barred from being taken on tour? Or used to record albums that are then sold? (And I say "guitar" knob, but I'm choosing an example a little consciously that could exist in any variety of controls, instrument and otherwise.)<p>Where <i>are</i> the lines of that when it's physical things? How far downstream does that go if it <i>isn't</i> CC-NC-SA in particular?<p>I'm not really sure that Creative Commons had the idea of physical production in mind, given that it dates back to a time when we were more broadly talking about digital piracy, and I honestly haven't kept up with its evolution much in more recent years. But maybe it just doesn't make the same sense for designs of physical things, for comparable reasons to why it wouldn't make sense for code -- and, conversely, open source projects that opt to use CC licenses for assets.<p>(None of this would stop me from attempting to build/mod one for fun, mind you. It just raises what a more averse person might call risks, and what I will at least call curiosities.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:31:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47721260</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47721260</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47721260</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "EFF is leaving X"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"Open source network that isn't controlled by corporations" <i>is</i> ideological, but not quite in the same way that you seem to be framing this.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:34:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707709</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707709</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707709</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "EFF is leaving X"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You're leaving out "gonna be wild!" and a tirade about personally being let down by Mike Pence.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:33:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707683</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707683</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707683</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by chaosharmonic in "People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I mean, relative to IE, everything else <i>was</i> the alternative.<p>Whereas in more recent years, keeping a closed-source rendering engine that was no longer competitive in implementing the spec, wasn't being used when people had a choice, and <i>was</i> being used as a dependency for core components of the OS, probably wasn't winning many arguments.<p>(Edit: yes, I know Chakra was open source. I meant Trident.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2026 20:16:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47566821</link><dc:creator>chaosharmonic</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47566821</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47566821</guid></item></channel></rss>