Hacker News: d4mi3n

New comment by d4mi3n in "United Wizards of the Coast recognized by NLRB"

d4mi3n — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:00:33 +0000

I knew the publishing and game industry weren’t known for good treatment of their labor, but WOTC had a fair reputation in that regard. This has apparently degraded prior to my joining the company and has continued to do so. A big motivator for organizing for many was the steady erosion of pay, benefits, and the lauded perks despite a workload that has and continues to grow tremendously.

New comment by d4mi3n in "United Wizards of the Coast recognized by NLRB"

d4mi3n — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 22:42:59 +0000

Worked in tech for a long time before I got to WOTC. Went through a lot of layoffs and short term executive decisions that invariably leave anyone without preferred stock out to dry. Wish I had a union then. Glad to have one now.

Edit: Words are my own. I am not a rep of WOTC or Hasbro.

United Wizards of the Coast recognized by NLRB

d4mi3n — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:57:32 +0000

Article URL: https://unitedwizardsofthecoast.com/news/2026-06-23-we-have-a-union

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48652028

Points: 113

# Comments: 66

New comment by d4mi3n in "Can we have the day off?"

d4mi3n — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:31:45 +0000

Unless one choses to bargain. Perhaps collectively.

New comment by d4mi3n in "I moved my digital stack to Europe"

d4mi3n — Wed, 13 May 2026 12:35:59 +0000

This is actually a pretty interesting observation as GMail, when it first came out, was just as clunky as all the other webmail clients. At the time, everyone was used to Yahoo!, MSN, etc. and Google was the odd one out with their webmail client.

This changed when they were the first folks out there to get a dynamic interface in the browser (some of you may fondly or not so fondly remember the days of DHTML, XMLHTTPRequest, and the like). Fast forward 10 or 15 years and now GMail is the standard by which everything else is measured.

I'm sure there are some things that are objectively better, but a surprising amount of preference comes from familiarity.

New comment by d4mi3n in "HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub 'no longer a place for serious work'"

d4mi3n — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 14:10:39 +0000

It shows up in API responses when you look up your own user.

United Wizards of the Coast

d4mi3n — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:34:30 +0000

Article URL: https://unitedwizardsofthecoast.com/news/announcing-united-wizards-coast-cwa

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47925425

Points: 234

# Comments: 218

New comment by d4mi3n in "Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back"

d4mi3n — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 13:42:45 +0000

There’s important history and connotation behind pronatalist narratives—particularly with eugenics, xenophobia, and gender (in)equality.

Vogue did a decent overview of this[1] and history is littered with all kinds of examples if you go looking.

1. https://www.vogue.com/article/dark-history-of-the-far-rights...

New comment by d4mi3n in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

d4mi3n — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:11:46 +0000

Humans have a tendency to ascribe intelligence to how well spoken a person or thing is—hence all the personification of LLMs.

New comment by d4mi3n in "Google closes deal to acquire Wiz"

d4mi3n — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:14:10 +0000

Probably a diversification play and a play to see out bigger contracts. If you've worked in the FEDRamp space, you may be aware that Wiz (last a checked, a year or so ago) is one of the few and possibly ownly player certified to operate in FedRAMP Medium/High deployments operating with the technology it does (eBPF instrumentation).

New comment by d4mi3n in "We are building data breach machines and nobody cares"

d4mi3n — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 21:22:45 +0000

There is a reason for hoarding data: it’s an asset on the balance sheet. So long as it is legal to liquidate data for cash, there will be incentives to collect and keep it.

New comment by d4mi3n in "CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements"

d4mi3n — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:08:56 +0000

Well, in the case of a company trying to market to you, it literally _is_ their business. It makes them money.

The problem is that we have markets where we: - Incentivize organizations to pursue profits at the expense of everything else, which includes social good and civic rights - Rarely hold bad actors accountable (and almost never in a timely manner)

Which means, given enough time, we're always going to trend to whatever makes the most money. Targeted advertising makes money, and will continue to do so unless or until we collectively decide to make it a greater risk to profits than it is today.

New comment by d4mi3n in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

d4mi3n — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:46:52 +0000

I think this is interesting in that I feel, grammatically and structurally, LLMs often generate _higher quality_ text than most humans do. What tends to be lower quality is the meaning of said texts.

Say what you want about marketing-isms of your typical LLM, they have been trained and often succeed at making legible, easy to scan blobs of text. I suspect if more LLM spam was curated/touched up, most people would be unable to distinguish it from human discourse. There are already folks commenting on this article discussing other patterns they use to detect or flag bots using LLMs.

New comment by d4mi3n in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

d4mi3n — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:31:14 +0000

That's the rub though, isn't it? This feels like a form of self-censorship in response to some kind of shibboleth born of pattern recognition.

New comment by d4mi3n in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

d4mi3n — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:27:43 +0000

No fancy keyboard required, just a keystroke on Mac (`alt+shift+-`) and Linux (`right alt+something` depending on your distro).

New comment by d4mi3n in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

d4mi3n — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:22:28 +0000

I'm still salty that I can't use em-dashes anymore for fear of my writing being flagged as AI generated. Been using them for years—it's just `alt+shift+-` on a Mac keyboard and I find them more legible in many fonts compared to the simple dash on the typical numpad.

It's so sad to me that good typographical conventions have been co-opted by the zeitgeist of LLMs.

New comment by d4mi3n in "Bridging Elixir and Python with Oban"

d4mi3n — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:32:21 +0000

I suspect this is partly due to the quality of documentation for Elixir, Erlang, and BEAM. The OTP documentation has been around for a long time and has been excellently written. Erlang/Elixer doc gen outputs function signatures, arity, and both Elixir and Erlang handle concepts like function overloading in very explicit, well-defined ways.

New comment by d4mi3n in "Show HN: CEL by Example"

d4mi3n — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:08:11 +0000

I've seen but haven't used CEL. Anybody with experience with competing tech have any strong opinions? I've used OPA, know CEL used by GCP and Kyverno, but otherwise haven't seen anything compelling enough to move away from the OPA ecosystem.

New comment by d4mi3n in "How not to answer the salary question"

d4mi3n — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 20:34:35 +0000

This guide has aged surprisingly well, but I’d add to this: the above response is about as good as you can get—it is firm, non-combative, and moves the conversation forward.

Don’t antagonize your recruiter. You want them to advocate _for you_ when a prospective employer is drafting an offer. Work with them to give them the ammo they need to make that happen.

New comment by d4mi3n in "Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?"

d4mi3n — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:12:11 +0000

Effective use of LLMs in this way is not cheap.