<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: dualvariable</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dualvariable</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 20 Aug 2026 15:15:30 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=dualvariable" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "I don't enjoy the Internet any more"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> HN never seemed to be very full of joy or whimsy to me (the culture seems to afraid of "being like Reddit")<p>Reddit is full of the same hundred jokes being endlessly recycled in slightly different variants, along with people desperate to come up with a good pun to make their life complete.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 19 Aug 2026 01:36:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49355455</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49355455</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49355455</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Republicans are the party of pulling up the ladder behind you.<p>They don't give any shits about free market economics or struggling entrepreneurs.  They care about protecting their own money.<p>And it isn't about big business; that's the Democratic Party. It is about hoarding wealth and gaining more.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:21:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49335373</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49335373</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49335373</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I'm of the opinion that, if your solution requires perpetual majority control of legislative, executive, and judicial branches, your solution is in fact a campaign slogan.<p>You mean like overturning Roe v. Wade?  Can't ever happen, right?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:52:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334062</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334062</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334062</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "Self hosted email continues to steeply decline"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>LLM content immediately distracts my attention to the fact that it is LLM content, and I focus immediately on that "meta" issue to the exclusion of whatever the content is.<p>And generally I find that the content isn't that high quality.  You're getting someone who superficially appears like an expert and looks like they've thought through the problem, but if you know anything about the problem, you'll find that the articles are usually weak (Gell-Mann Amnesia).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:50:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334026</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334026</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334026</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> the data says they have enough loyal-to-a-fault customers<p>honestly, this is the biggest problem with american capitalism these days.<p>consumers that just act like zombies and never modify their behavior, no matter how much they get abused.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:01:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289701</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289701</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289701</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They're probably going to figure out how to aggressively monetize and enshittify LLMs at some point.<p>We're likely at the "golden age" of LLM-assisted web searching and summarization.<p>Hopefully open models keep it cracked open, but expecting enshittification is always the safe bet these days.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Aug 2026 02:18:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252580</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252580</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252580</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "What Happened to HackerOne?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Bug bounty programs were overrun with low-effort slop nearly a decade before LLMs were introduced; I can't imagine what they're like now...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 04:56:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49239340</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49239340</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49239340</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The weather app isn't a native app either:<p>> According to Windows Latest, the high memory consumption is due to the fact that Weather is not a fully native Windows application. Instead, it is essentially an MSN Weather web app built on Microsoft's WebView2 framework. Task Manager shows multiple Chromium-based subprocesses running simultaneously, which contributes to the unusually high RAM usage.<p>If you have Edge or Chrome open (or anything else that similarly uses Chromium) then the incremental increase in RAM usage from the Weather app is likely much smaller than the headline 1GB.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 09 Aug 2026 22:20:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49236751</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49236751</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49236751</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Let's just pause for a second and steep in the irony of "we're all in on AI, except where there are visible consequences."<p>I've got Alanis Morissette jamming in my head right now.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:37:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49217475</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49217475</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49217475</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> At first I was gonna say that if a person prefers the response of an A.I. to yours it is a reflection of your own lack of understanding, articulation, effective communication, etc.<p>I think that people in general need to be better at receiving information that isn't perfectly pitched to them.  It is a useful life skill to be able to understand the substance of someone's argument, and to look past the superficial way that it is presented.  Postel's law applied to human communication.<p>Someone can be very frustrated and angry, and it can be upsetting to hear how they're presenting their argument, but they can be correct.<p>Another person can also whisper everything you want to hear in your ears, but lead you down the wrong path.<p>In a well-functioning society, I would think our senior leadership would be experienced and actually good at doing this and it would be expected of them.  Flipping that around and blaming the subordinate for how they've pitched the message is backwards and probably not societally healthy.<p>Agreed, we are definitely ******.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:12:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212649</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212649</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212649</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>People used to Google for information; before that, they used to read books.<p>If you use LLMs for that kind of information-gathering purpose, and then do the work to read and check the references, it wouldn't be any more harmful.<p>The problem is that LLMs respond personably, with a bunch of ego-glaze added on top, and people are too intellectually lazy to dig in any further.<p>If we changed LLMs so that they were much more neutral like the starship computer on ST:TNG we'd probably see less intellectually harmful behavior caused by their use, but the companies behind them want to sell ego-glazing because most people lap it up like capnip.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:03:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212514</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212514</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212514</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded, it's politicians and the voters who put them there.<p>Disagree there.<p>Tech companies and their owners are part of the system of monied interests that have entirely captured our government, and that's why we don't have the funding to fix all our infrastructure.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:56:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49191050</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49191050</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49191050</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Cause civilizational collapse then.<p>And of those nuclear tests, 528 were above ground, and only 200-300 of them were probably true airbursts.  And all of them were in areas like atolls, deserts, and Arctic tundra where nothing burns.  Their climate impact was near zero because they caused no fires and no dust, and they were spread out over 35 years.<p>That is different from thousands of detonations in an afternoon causing raging fires all over the globe.  Estimates are that it would generate around 150 billion kg of stratospheric soot.  For comparison, yearly generation is around 7-8 billion kg of soot, generally confined to the troposphere and therefore rains out fairly quickly.  A nuclear exchange would produce 20 years of soot and dump it into the stratosphere, above the rain.<p>The largest pulses of soot that we've ever observed are the 2019 Australian megafires and the Canadian 2023 fires.  These were roughly less than or equal to 1 billion kg and produced measurable climate effects that lasted months.<p>A full nuclear exchange would likely produce -10C of global cooling in its immediate aftermath, which would be catastrophic to agriculture and civilization.  It would stabilize on the order of decades, but there would be a lot fewer humans in the world.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:46:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187167</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187167</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187167</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, arguably the war in Ukraine is teaching everyone who is listening that nobody is willing to be the first to use nukes and destroy the planet, which means that nuclear powers can actually fight wars--which is incredibly dangerous, of course.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:41:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49170526</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49170526</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49170526</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "The Dunning-Kruger effect may just be a data artefact (2020)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://xkcd.com/793" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/793</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Aug 2026 05:40:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49164674</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49164674</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49164674</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, if we had a country that was run by Unions, rather than Corporations so that abuses of power by those that ran the Unions was a big deal, I'd have a different opinion.  But right now, I'm pretty happy to blindly back Unions, because they've been completely gutted.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:19:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49145890</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49145890</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49145890</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "The Maxwell Conjecture Is False (GPT 5.6 Sol)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>From the intro to the paper:<p>> In J. C. Maxwell’s 1873 treatise on electricity and magnetism he discusses
the number of equilibria of the electric field generated by n point charges
[5, §113]. Apparently unaware of this, M. Morse and S. S. Cairns in 1969
posed the problem of finding an upper bound for the number of equilibria [6,
p. 293]. The first general bounds were supplied by A. Gabrielov, D. Novikov,
and B. Shapiro in [3] who, based on their reading of [5, §113], formulated the
‘Maxwell conjecture’ which states that if the critical points of the electrostatic
potential generated by n point charges are all non-degenerate then their
number cannot exceed (n − 1)^2. These bounds were later improved by V.
Zolotov in 2023 [8] and further improved by H. Edelsbrunner, C. Fillmore,
and G. Oliveira in 2026 [2]. Maxwell’s bound is trivially achieved for n = 2
but it is not known even for n = 3 if 4 is the maximum number, except in the
case of equal charges [7]. Further related problems in classical electrostatics
are discussed in [1].<p>And reference 3:<p>> [3] A. Gabrielov, D. Novikov, and B. Shapiro, Mystery of point
charges, Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. (3), 95 (2007), pp. 443–472.<p>This is pretty niche and the conjecture was only proposed about 20 years ago.  It was actually not conjectured by Maxwell himself.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jul 2026 18:01:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49126560</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49126560</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49126560</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> What's the benefit of this type of stacked PRs over a well-curated set of commits, and reviewing per commit?<p>What I can see is that you can easily append commits to e.g. the first PR in a stack, which would insert them into the middle of sequence of commits.<p>This will require rebasing and fixing the subsequent PRs in a stack the same way you'd need to rebase and fix the subsequent commits in a mega-PR.  But it makes the right thing easy (keeping all the commits to the foundation of the change together) rather than makin the wrong thing easy (appending fixup commits across the entire change in a random order so that the actual foundational change is lost).<p>Keeping all the foundational commits together also keeps all the discussion over the foundational change together.<p>You could argue that you'd want to only do the foundational PR and stop, but doing the whole stack of PRs gives the reviewers more information about where you're going, and allows work to continue asynchronously.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:24:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114505</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114505</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114505</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, I'm on a gaming Discord where the 30+ year-old game modders who run it had to ban memes.  If you don't, you'll end up with 15-year-old kids spamming memes into channels because that's just how they "talk" online.<p>And the "meme police" who will complain about misusing meme formats seem really regressive and anti-creative to me.  Some satirist should skewer all the young adults who think that meme formats need to be defended.<p>[I also read The Selfish Gene back in the 90s, long before memes were just jokes]</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:14:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49087002</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49087002</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49087002</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dualvariable in "Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Liberals are going to find it very comforting that they're not one of "the lowest white men".  The people the quote is referring to won't be persuaded at all.  It solves nothing.  There's no solution offered to the propaganda problem.  It is the flip side to the culture wars that it is describing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:03:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49086856</link><dc:creator>dualvariable</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49086856</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49086856</guid></item></channel></rss>