Hacker News: groby_b

New comment by groby_b in "Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min"

groby_b — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:15:34 +0000

Given it's Meta, I'd put roughly zero trust in the opt out actually being respected.

New comment by groby_b in "My Students Can't Read"

groby_b — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:45:42 +0000

Pangram is basically a made-up number.

I've tried it on large docs I've written well before the AI times, and that are nowhere available on the Internet (so it can't be a corpus issue) - and it is happily classifying me as 60%-80% AI.

New comment by groby_b in "Three Ways to Get Paid (2018)"

groby_b — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:48:49 +0000

Ah, but you only tell them the things they already know and want to hear.

That filter is crucial in any kind of advisory/consulting work. You're there to confirm biases, in 95% of the cases.

New comment by groby_b in "Rosalind: A genomics toolkit in Rust running whole-genome pipelines on a laptop"

groby_b — Tue, 26 May 2026 23:13:33 +0000

It's not quite that clear-cut. Franklin was pretty clear on the helical structure in both research notes and papers, but she didn't quite nail the overall structure (2 strands with opposing winding, complementing bases).

Fundamentally, she suffered the curse of the experimental scientist - waiting for actual data before being willing to build a model. Watson & Crick postulated ahead based on partial data.

New comment by groby_b in "The real cost of owning a home"

groby_b — Tue, 26 May 2026 22:36:41 +0000

> He's under the building doing plumbing or electric one day.

I believe I've encountered that guys electrical work, and it ain't sage :)

(I.e. there are a few of those "fix it all" guys, but they're not always code compliant. They do get stuff done, though)

New comment by groby_b in "Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence"

groby_b — Tue, 26 May 2026 22:35:03 +0000

You understand there's a difference between human lives and the value of a stock, right?

Because otherwise, I don't think this conversation is going to lead anywhere.

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

groby_b — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:41:26 +0000

It really doesn't. Same as we don't say "written with vi" or "written by Emacs", even if it is intuitively clear one of the two is better.

New comment by groby_b in "Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence"

groby_b — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:35:40 +0000

Relatedly, is it OK with you if somebody bets a few million dollars on your early demise?

New comment by groby_b in "Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'"

groby_b — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:15:40 +0000

What those organizations miss is that they drown their teams in organizational red tape. The way to the future isn't tokenmaxxing - it's cutting back on process noise.

New comment by groby_b in "Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame"

groby_b — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:46:58 +0000

And oddly, Germany has the same pollen clouds, France has the same pollen clouds, the West Coast has them. (The three places I saw this year, at least).

It's odd the BBC chose to anchor on Japan when it's really a widespread issue.

New comment by groby_b in "Everything in C is undefined behavior"

groby_b — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:23:00 +0000

"not correctly aligned (probably meaning on an address that’s a multiple of sizeof(int), but who knows)"

I stopped reading there. If you have decades of experience in C/C++ and don't know what that means (and that it's arch specific), I'll assume those decades were mostly the same year over and over.

C/C++ are horrible languages, but they deserve better opponents than that.

New comment by groby_b in "German intelligence offices snub Palantir software"

groby_b — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:57:15 +0000

Obviously. Any European nation that doesn't treat America and companies ultimately under US political control a strategic risk would have to be asleep at the wheel. "Perfidious" is the word.

Palantir doubly so, since it has close ties to the current regime. (No, this is not a political discussion - it's simply about proximity to power, and the interests of said power)

The US-European alliance is on its deathbed.

New comment by groby_b in "Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time"

groby_b — Wed, 13 May 2026 17:49:19 +0000

Every single fucking employee contract in the US mentions that the company has the right to any work done on company equipment and/or on company time.

This is such a bad idea, it's impressive.

New comment by groby_b in "GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values"

groby_b — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:28:09 +0000

8 layers of management???

At gitlabs team size, that means every manager has 2-3 reports? Yeah, I'd be cutting layers too.

New comment by groby_b in "GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values"

groby_b — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:24:35 +0000

That's the thing - you can have it as a lived value, or you can have HR run programs. Very few places have/had both. Given the choice, I'd pick door #1.

(Saying this as a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion, lest there's confusion)

New comment by groby_b in "The map that keeps Burning Man honest"

groby_b — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:32:34 +0000

This is kind of implicit in "hacker camps".

New comment by groby_b in "ProgramBench: Can language models rebuild programs from scratch?"

groby_b — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:01:18 +0000

ffmpeg docs include none of the protocols/file formats.

New comment by groby_b in "Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI"

groby_b — Thu, 07 May 2026 17:42:44 +0000

It would be equally "trivial" to say no to personal compute as well. So maybe the problem is manufactured by all of us.

New comment by groby_b in "Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI"

groby_b — Thu, 07 May 2026 17:40:37 +0000

You cannot be fully free if you're attached to physical goods.

It may sound like pseudo-Buddhist claptrap, but it's also true. Or, I suppose, Fight Club claptrap. It's still true.

The choice is "do you want to participate in society, its benefits and drawbacks". You can't have only one side of that.

New comment by groby_b in "Your Website Is Not for You"

groby_b — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:43:30 +0000

> Here's what I find genuinely strange. A patient doesn't lean over the operating table and tell the surgeon where to cut.

This is extremely funny given we're the industry full of folks that brought the world QS and longevity hacks, together with the peptide boom.

"But that is only because doctors don't keep current/have preconceived notions"

Which would never happen to designers?