Hacker News: hellcow

New comment by hellcow in "GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash"

hellcow — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:32:22 +0000

Sourcehut.

Uses the same email-based patch workflow as Linux. Takes an hour to learn, and they have helpful guides: https://git-send-email.io/. No JavaScript.

New comment by hellcow in "I tried to prove I'm not AI. My aunt wasn't convinced"

hellcow — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:04:13 +0000

LLM slop. See their comment history.

New comment by hellcow in "Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app"

hellcow — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:39:02 +0000

I tried it on my iPhone 13 mini. I believe the model you get changes depending on your phone specs. For me it downloaded a ~1.3GB model which can speak in complete sentences but can’t do much beyond that. Can’t blame them though—that model is tiny, and my device wasn’t designed for this.

New comment by hellcow in "TurboQuant: Redefining AI efficiency with extreme compression"

hellcow — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 12:24:24 +0000

LLM slop. See their other comment which is even more obvious.

New comment by hellcow in "Meta told to pay $375M for misleading users over child safety"

hellcow — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 12:23:21 +0000

LLM slop

New comment by hellcow in "I love my dumb watches"

hellcow — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 23:58:50 +0000

My friend, that’s entirely the point :)

New comment by hellcow in "I love my dumb watches"

hellcow — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 23:55:54 +0000

To the author I’d recommend a Casio Oceanus. The same tech as a G-Shock (solar, atomic, Bluetooth) with the polish of a Grand Seiko at 20% of the price. Better to get one in Japan as the US retailers charge a lot more.

Found that I prefer mine over watches that cost 5x as much.

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

hellcow — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:06:24 +0000

One way to improve things could be to charge for each new account signup if you don’t have an invite from an existing member that vouches for you. Spamming when you risk losing $5-20 per account raises the cost substantially.

Invites could be earned at karma and time thresholds, and mods could ideally ban not just one bad actor but every account in the invite chain if there’s bad behavior.

New comment by hellcow in "What canceled my Go context?"

hellcow — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 13:48:28 +0000

After a decade of writing go, I always wrap with the function name and no other content. For instance:

do c: edit b: create a: something happened

For functions called doC, editB, createA.

It’s like a stack trace and super easy to find the codepath something took.

New comment by hellcow in "Fire the CEO, Introducing the AxO's"

hellcow — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:10:46 +0000

Today I learned. Thank you!

New comment by hellcow in "Fire the CEO, Introducing the AxO's"

hellcow — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:18:35 +0000

Are they rare? Aren’t credit unions worker cooperatives? Insurance is often structured this way, and I’ve heard of farmer collectives too. I have a worker cooperative grocery store nearby. I do photography as a hobby and there’s all kinds of photography cooperatives, including Magnum which is incredibly famous in that world. I’m in an HOA which is another cooperative.

This doesn’t seem rare to me.

New comment by hellcow in "Move tests to closed source repo"

hellcow — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 04:50:09 +0000

This is interesting because it’s also one of SQLite’s monetizations. SQLite is in the public domain, but you need a commercial license to access their TH3 test harness with 100% branch coverage used to validate SQLite on different platforms.

New comment by hellcow in "A simple web we own"

hellcow — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:18:20 +0000

> I publish this site via GitHub Pages service for public Internet access

A whole post about not needing big corporations to publish things online, and then they use Microsoft to publish this thing online...

New comment by hellcow in "Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux"

hellcow — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:28:54 +0000

Please do that too!

There aren’t great open-source search engines, so I’m moving from one proprietary option to the next. But there are great, open-source browsers already, and I refuse to go backwards.

If a good, open-source search engine were available, I would leave Kagi for it.

New comment by hellcow in "Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux"

hellcow — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 14:25:45 +0000

It seems weird to run a closed-source browser on an open-source operating system when so many open alternatives exist—I certainly wouldn’t do it, and I’m a Kagi customer.

Does Kagi plan to open-source Orion on Linux?

New comment by hellcow in "Eat Real Food"

hellcow — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 02:42:20 +0000

> You need cholesterol.

Your body produces cholesterol naturally, without any meat or dairy. In my case it actually produces way more than I need, even on a vegan diet, because of genetic factors. People should test their LDL and evaluate whether eating cholesterol is healthy _for themselves_ as it’s different for everyone.

New comment by hellcow in "California residents can now request all data brokers delete personal info"

hellcow — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 04:41:22 +0000

CloudFlare just decided I’m not a person, so I’m unable to access the website.

New comment by hellcow in "Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop"

hellcow — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 17:07:17 +0000

That's why you'd want to be able to replace the mainboard, screen, keyboard, speakers, trackpad, etc., and not just the RAM. Like https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform, but presumably easier for non-technical people to use.

New comment by hellcow in "Framework Computer Now Sponsoring LVFS / Fwupd Development"

hellcow — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 01:05:28 +0000

You promoted Omarchy repeatedly on Twitter (much moreso than other distros) and DHH repeatedly promoted Framework in kind. You sent DHH a development device for Omarchy. It's worth noting that DHH is also the chair of the board of the Rails Foundation.

So whether it's a sponsorship on your list or not, it's much cozier than I would care to be with someone who holds these views.

New comment by hellcow in "Framework Computer Now Sponsoring LVFS / Fwupd Development"

hellcow — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 23:12:00 +0000

Simply say, "we didn't realise how controversial DHH was, and we will focus our donations/marketing/sponsorships on other projects in the FOSS ecosystem going forward."

The fact Framework hasn't done this in the face of his racist, anti-trans and ableist viewpoints is what I find objectionable.