Hacker News: ellyagg

New comment by ellyagg in "Most arguments are about ego, not ideas"

ellyagg — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 16:13:30 +0000

> I could well be wrong about this :)

Exactly. You assume and imply for most of your comment that the OP is wrong about his premise.

But people aren’t equally wrong about things. Some people are more right more often. So how should your POV change if you accept his premise that he’s usually right in these situations? Then could you make a fair reading of his post?

New comment by ellyagg in "Most arguments are about ego, not ideas"

ellyagg — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 16:07:50 +0000

You would be steel-manning his essay if you assume he’s right in these arguments. Unless you believe that no position is more correct than another or that no one is more often correct than others, you can imagine scenarios where the author is often more correct than the people he is dealing with.

New comment by ellyagg in "Slate EV truck starts at $24,950"

ellyagg — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 13:49:29 +0000

I noticed recently it’s cool to match the color of your vehicle to your house

New comment by ellyagg in "Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?"

ellyagg — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:31:30 +0000

Right so it’s gonna be a litmus test for knowledge workers going forward if they can separate style over substance. Genai tells are style. You have to be able to evaluate the ideas.

New comment by ellyagg in "Stop Advertising in Your Commits"

ellyagg — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:13:41 +0000

It’s both

New comment by ellyagg in "Why is Inkwell stuck in review"

ellyagg — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:44:52 +0000

of course you don’t wanna go through somebody else’s orifice

New comment by ellyagg in "No Terms. No Conditions"

ellyagg — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:34:19 +0000

I don’t know, but it’s kind of boring to speculate since computers easily beat us at chess and go.

New comment by ellyagg in "“Collaboration” is bullshit"

ellyagg — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:42:31 +0000

The reason you want to enforce a culture of collaboration is because that’s how you bubble up the smart people. The alternative is gatekeeping and cronyism.

New comment by ellyagg in "More common mistakes to avoid when creating system architecture diagrams"

ellyagg — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:20:48 +0000

Use an accessible color palette

New comment by ellyagg in "Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?"

ellyagg — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:46:32 +0000

Thank you for your service. Hopefully something like this can put pressure on airlines to understand how hostile their internet services are and that it matters.

Last year I flew roundtrip to the Philippines on Philippines Airlines. Each way they claimed they had internet and each time, they sent an email reneging the day before the flight.

The same thing happened when my sister-in-law flew with them a couple months earlier.

These are long flights during which I expected to be able to work. Just so infuriating.

New comment by ellyagg in "Grandparents are glued to their phones [video]"

ellyagg — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 18:17:48 +0000

My aunt is 80 and thank goodness she has an iPhone. She’s bedridden and spends all day on it. She has no children but I lived with her for a while when I moved out of my parent’s, and we text often.

New comment by ellyagg in "Obscure islands I find interesting"

ellyagg — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 19:00:35 +0000

How do you envision the castaways made a bad impression? It's not like every band of explorers immediately tries to open a Walmart or something.

My guess is that the dominant society anywhere will make you pay for not knowing their culture.

New comment by ellyagg in "Show HN: Dead man's switch without reliance on your infra"

ellyagg — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 20:20:37 +0000

Now two isolated systems have to fail. Redundancy is fault tolerant. Nothing is fault proof.

New comment by ellyagg in "AI is an impediment to learning web development"

ellyagg — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 18:53:25 +0000

Or is learning web development an impediment to learning AI?

New comment by ellyagg in "Ask HN: Why aren't you solving real problems?"

ellyagg — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 23:47:20 +0000

Launching a billion dollar rocket is far easier to solve than the problems you're listing.

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“If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.”

John von Neumann

New comment by ellyagg in "Fraud, so much fraud"

ellyagg — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 14:47:50 +0000

It’s funny how those incentives are so well aligned.

New comment by ellyagg in "Show HN: Visualize database schemas with a single query"

ellyagg — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 18:43:05 +0000

Awesome! This is exactly what I wanted last year when I was helping my wife with her reporting and the only access she had to her company's application database was through Redash.

New comment by ellyagg in "Brain Uses Quantum Effects, New Study Finds [video]"

ellyagg — Mon, 13 May 2024 22:28:49 +0000

If you can imagine, say, being imprisoned in a 10x10 cell for the rest of your life, and how that would affect your own internal sense of "free will", I think you'll realize it's not arbitrary.

One of the debates around free will centers on an idea that free will means actions must be physically random. So, I think people understand that probability and randomness are really important pieces to understanding free will.

The missing link is understanding that probability is a state of mind. It doesn't matter that the physics is deterministic. (Deterministic physics is indeed also responsible for my current unique perception of my consciousness, so deterministic physics can do a whole heckuva lot.)

So, yes, my moment-by-moment decisions in the sea of the universe's physics and other conscious agents are determined by physics, but to all possible computational agents my moment-by-moment decisions and their affect on reality are weighted random.

New comment by ellyagg in "Companies Say They're Using Microphone Audio to Target Ads [audio] (2023)"

ellyagg — Mon, 13 May 2024 22:04:30 +0000

I've been keeping a running gag with my acquaintances over YouTube's recommendations for a while now, because they're so improbably and time-sensitively on the nose.

Yesterday was the worst one yet. We were driving and my daughter was filling out MadLibs by hand in a paper booklet in the backseat. One of the fill-ins we came up with was "pantyliner".

As soon as we got home from the event, I sat down and YouTube gave me an above-the-fold recommendation for a Japanese pantyliner commercial.

I've seen enough. This word never comes up in day-to-day conversation, it's not in my interests, and it's one of the least exciting topics imaginable. None of me, my wife, nor my daughter had hands free to search it up at that time, and besides, we were totally preoccupied with driving and our event until I got home a couple hours later.

For the record, we're an iPhone family and were in a Tesla.

I had been convinced by, I think, a Simon Willison article that this isn't happening. But he's wrong. This is happening.

New comment by ellyagg in "Brain Uses Quantum Effects, New Study Finds [video]"

ellyagg — Mon, 13 May 2024 15:42:47 +0000

It's not an illusion any more than Vegas odds are an illusion. Free will is the (correct) perception by an agent that its actions can't be predicted by other agents. My guess is that there will never be an agent that can predict my moment-by-moment thoughts and actions, so I'll always have free will.