Hacker News: chii

New comment by chii in "The game industry is broken – can we fix it?"

chii — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 06:49:13 +0000

> Development cost for that game was around US $1.5 billion.

but is it making the game any better? Or is it just gold plating?

New comment by chii in "NY announces game ownership bill requiring ownership rather than licensing"

chii — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 05:14:36 +0000

> violate treaties the US has signed.

not that has stopped the US doing something.

The fact is, copyright extensions have served corporate interests well and is likely to continue to get extended even more, and more draconian, given how many decompilation and recomps have been done recently.

New comment by chii in "90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks"

chii — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 06:53:49 +0000

> Then it turns out they weren't serious.

the classic revealed preference vs stated preference.

New comment by chii in "eBay Restricts Listings of Radio Equipment, but Exempts Ham-Band-Only Gear"

chii — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 06:26:06 +0000

internet is not shared in the same way the airwaves are.

New comment by chii in "Yet another way to invoke functions without parentheses"

chii — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:04:20 +0000

I believe this is the regular syntax for a set of characters (between "[" and "]"), but the caret symbol ("^") is negation when used inside the set. Therefore, it is simply the negation of an empty set of characters.

New comment by chii in "The insider trading you're allowed to do"

chii — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 13:38:34 +0000

but you don't have any obligation to all potential shareholder as an insider, just the current shareholders. Which is what i was trying to get at with my comments.

New comment by chii in "The insider trading you're allowed to do"

chii — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 11:25:39 +0000

but public implies public to non-shareholders too.

What if there's a secret communications channel for all current shareholders? Do these current shareholders offloading shares (to future shareholders) count as insider trading under this scenario?

New comment by chii in "The insider trading you're allowed to do"

chii — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 11:04:10 +0000

> you don’t share that equitably with the people you have that obligation to, that’s insider trading (in the US).

so if you simply tell the other shareholders to also participate in the insider trading, you'd be free of charges?

New comment by chii in "The insider trading you're allowed to do"

chii — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 11:01:42 +0000

> if you know that the iPhone is years ahead of everything else and you happen to be holding Apple stock, then you won’t let whoever is managing your portfolio sell any of it

This is what executives with stock based compensations can an usually do.

we only regulate the sell side (or buy side), but not the inaction side (where you hold your existing position). I have not thought of a good way to make the market aware of these choices, in a way that enables market efficiency.

New comment by chii in "New Withings Users Must Pay $99/Year for Apple Health Syncing"

chii — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 06:56:57 +0000

> It'll be made illegal in the same way piracy is.

but you dont need a $10k piece of hardware to do piracy.

They'll make high bandwidth/memory devices something that is more difficult to acquire (e.g., you have to license it and be subject to auditing).

New comment by chii in "Meta’s new commercial terms will allow the scraping of news sites: experts"

chii — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 05:39:42 +0000

That's because they don't need to follow the laws of physics, so anything that can be imagined is possible.

New comment by chii in "Tiny Little Office"

chii — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 05:36:59 +0000

if you can't be bothered to learn skills (or even ask an AI to teach it to you for free), then you deserve to not be part of that democratization.

New comment by chii in "Tiny Little Office"

chii — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 14:28:41 +0000

landing page is not proxy for quality, but proxy for how good at marketing your project is.

It could be the case that marketing is high quality, but the actual project low (tho, of course, this doesn't have to be the case).

And vice versa with low quality (looking) landing page.

New comment by chii in "Tiny Little Office"

chii — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 14:22:42 +0000

> keeping it up-to-date with its dependencies etc.

not if the software is functional today, and doesn't require interacting with third party systems (like this tinylittleoffice suite).

By the time the underlying infrastructure (like browser compatibility, or self-hosting OS becoming obsolete) fails, you're likely no longer using it anyway.

The "documents" seem exportable in text format, and in any case, potentially salvageable with another vibe-coded tool if such need arise.

Therefore, the original author is no required to maintain it.

New comment by chii in "AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware"

chii — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 14:11:13 +0000

this is why adblock is completely necessary, not just for your eyes, but for security.

New comment by chii in "TV4 postpones show after AI agent erases edited material"

chii — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:35:46 +0000

may be it's trying to do some good by deleting these shows.

New comment by chii in "The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s"

chii — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 05:31:12 +0000

which is why i think looking at raw electricity usage doesnt make much sense in a globalized world.

Consumption of final products, and exports are what make more sense to look at to see if lives are better today than the 1970's, which the article implies it isn't.

New comment by chii in "Firefox Enterprise"

chii — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:48:23 +0000

people who decide on policy tend not be the same people on the ground doing real work. Therefore management makes a policy, they think they are doing the correct thing, when in actual fact, they're not, but just don't hear or get the right type of feedback (including feedback they trust to be real and isn't just the workers complaining/whinging unnecessarily).

This type of dysfunction occurs quite frequently i find.

New comment by chii in "Where is all the new, good software?"

chii — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:07:37 +0000

expecting it to work well in wasm seems a bit too high of a bar.

It works relatively well in native mode as a standalone app (tho not being an actual photoshop expert, i dont know if the features compete properly, i simply hear that those trying it are impressed).

The excel clone works well enough for me to do taxes on, even tho the look and feel is a bit janky. I would stick with google sheets, but it's a usable replacement if i didnt already have sheets.

New comment by chii in "AI is a tool and using it well takes skill"

chii — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 06:02:21 +0000

or that waterfall works if you get the app done in less time than the initial waterfall meeting. Because now you have time to iterate after examining the output and testing it out to see if there's shortfalls.

Check out this guy one-shotting a game engine (ala unity-esque) app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_uf5OfMGio