Hacker News: dfee

New comment by dfee in "An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail"

dfee — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 05:56:25 +0000

but, you're going to pay either way (assuming you have a custom domain).

New comment by dfee in "AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)"

dfee — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:01:29 +0000

that's fine. doesn't absolve you from responsibilities of recipientship - as you'll inevitably find out (if you haven't already).

New comment by dfee in "An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail"

dfee — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:28:09 +0000

keep going – i was in your shoes 24mo ago.

New comment by dfee in "ICE Shot a Journalist and Threw Him in Detention. He's Approaching 300 Days"

dfee — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:21:18 +0000

irs.gov is without a doubt the SOT ;)

New comment by dfee in "ICE Shot a Journalist and Threw Him in Detention. He's Approaching 300 Days"

dfee — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 21:32:08 +0000

makes it doubly hard when you can't trust a media bias website, either.

solving for "trust" is one of the hardest problems out there in 2026.

New comment by dfee in "ICE Shot a Journalist and Threw Him in Detention. He's Approaching 300 Days"

dfee — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 21:23:22 +0000

admittedly, i don't know anything about this case, but the person at the center of it seems to be Carlitos Ricardo Parias.

the intercept (source link) was rated far left by AllSides (https://www.allsides.com/news-source/intercept-media-bias) and the press release from justice.gov has a very different perspective (https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/illegal-alien-mexico-ch...).

it's very unclear what can be taken at face value.

New comment by dfee in "Pixel Watch 5"

dfee — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:15:04 +0000

i was wondering recently if i could ditch my iPhone for (just) an Apple Watch. i know i can't fully ditch it (an Apple Watch needs an iPhone for management). but, i'm curious about the concept nonetheless: what would it be like to ditch a smartphone for a smartwatch?

New comment by dfee in "AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?"

dfee — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:03:59 +0000

> With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization.

and

> I don't subscribe to the idea that AI generated code is fundamentally bad, just that people lack the right skills today to wrangle agents into writing good code.

those people who lack the right skills today – are they the bad engineers you'd mentioned previously?

New comment by dfee in "uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook"

dfee — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:39:01 +0000

in that money is the atomic unit of economic control, sure.

government's don't surveil for money, unless you bend the argument a bit to say the government has finite resources and is run off money itself. which is kinda true, but also kinda fuzzy (the Fed).

New comment by dfee in "Letter to Governor Abbott on responsible AI infrastructure in Texas"

dfee — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:29:58 +0000

:waves: from California

New comment by dfee in "A walk through of the DeltaNet family of linear attention variants"

dfee — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 18:27:43 +0000

but it biases towards the latin alphabet. so your point is diminished.

New comment by dfee in "Show HN: Whetuu – a zero-config cross-shell prompt written in Zig"

dfee — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 17:47:10 +0000

> Pronounced FEH-too (/ˈfɛ.tuː/). Stress the first syllable. In Māori wh is an f sound, not a w. The macron in ū makes that vowel long, which is why the ASCII spelling doubles it.

oof. deliberate choice?

New comment by dfee in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

dfee — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 17:41:38 +0000

it's totally obnoxious to buy a copy of a book with notes in it and complain about those notes. 2¢

New comment by dfee in "Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers"

dfee — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:19:42 +0000

As Covered in the Hit TV Series Pied Piper, Season 1 (2014): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNi0p7YtmyY

New comment by dfee in "Claude Is Not a Compiler"

dfee — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:40:27 +0000

the infinite string must have more refined properties than infinite length. an infinite string of a repeating char doesn't encode much of interest.

New comment by dfee in "Pseudpocalypse"

dfee — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 23:54:14 +0000

then you'd imagine the inverse is possible: fabricate text that matches a fingerprint - poisoning someone's (psuedo-anonymous) reputation.

New comment by dfee in "Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources"

dfee — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 12:17:19 +0000

HHI and Simpsons are neat new finds.

There's also this other variant of the Simpson's Index: https://www.thesimpsonsindex.com/

New comment by dfee in "Punch yourself in the face with reality"

dfee — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:38:29 +0000

there are two camps: those who have spent the tokens to figure out how to wield AI, and those who haven't. unfortunately, it's not cheap to get to the former category… and i imagine it'd be difficult to lose access to that tooling and fall back to the second category.

New comment by dfee in "Ask HN: Should I do a CS masters at Cambridge or start as a new grad at Amazon?"

dfee — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:21:45 +0000

if you want to offload the decision to a decision engine, might i recommend the following prompt to the LLM of your choice:

> "which should i choose: 1 word only"

the comments are already universally aligned. but, it now seems you want a defense of your preference.

New comment by dfee in "Ask HN: Should I do a CS masters at Cambridge or start as a new grad at Amazon?"

dfee — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:12:07 +0000

I've not worked at Amazon, but work in other big tech. If you were my son, I'd tell you to pursue Cambridge. Amazon employment isn't that special.

(i've been in industry for 18+ years, went to a name brand school, and live in the heart of silicon valley. Cambridge, i'd imagine, gives you at the least a more interesting story, and at the most a different opportunity set. amazon is now the lower bar of what you should hope to attain after Cambridge.)