Hacker News: laserbeam

New comment by laserbeam in "Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience experiments"

laserbeam — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:41:18 +0000

> It points out that the compliant subjects who delivered the shocks weren't always following the procedure they were given perfectly. Which is, of course, expected, since people in general don't follow instructions 100% perfectly all the time

The article quantifies the amount of rulebreaking. The article actually compares rule breaking across participants and notes that those who were better at obeying the instructions of the experiment are the ones who refused to continue till the end.

The article doesn't invalidate the milgrim experiments. It claims that the interpretation from traditional literature is possibly wrong.

New comment by laserbeam in "Why I love NixOS"

laserbeam — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 06:58:14 +0000

That’s my feeling when reading nixos forums. People are willing to help but don’t realize how little newbies know about nix when asking for help. The first month of nixos was a massive uphill climb for me, and that knowledge doesn’t stick well because I get to interact with nix every few months to tweak things, not weekly or daily.

It’s a solid os, and I’m enjoying it, and I love that I can’t break things while tweaking. But the docs are and discussion threads are not written for beginners (it’s really hard to write for beginners).

New comment by laserbeam in "Why I love NixOS"

laserbeam — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 06:50:09 +0000

Can you share some good examples of how you use nix shells with python for one off scripts? I am still figuring out how python interacts with nixos :(

New comment by laserbeam in "Stop Sloppypasta"

laserbeam — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 12:15:43 +0000

This website needs to be simpler, snappier and polite on the homepage. I should be able to send it as a quick reply to anyone doing the deed. Just like nohello.net

New comment by laserbeam in "How the Sriracha guys screwed over their supplier"

laserbeam — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 11:58:48 +0000

To be fair, if I had a company and won a lawsuit like that... a lawsuit which makes for a good underdog story, I'd let my PR team use it as much as they desire! That lawsuit is a golden asset for them now.

New comment by laserbeam in "“Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server"

laserbeam — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:03:39 +0000

It needs a Discord Server because MS Teams is just that good X_X

New comment by laserbeam in "I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's “free” and ad-supported"

laserbeam — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:08:35 +0000

I would honestly expect AI ads to be invisible, and for them to just be injected by the provider as part of the prompt. For example, you ask for something about firefox, but the AI tells you that firefox has a nasty ugly way to solve your problem and it would be easier to install chrome.

New comment by laserbeam in "Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems"

laserbeam — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 10:17:36 +0000

> against the spirit of science to keep them from the general public

Within science, participants have always published descriptions of methodology and results for review and replication. Within the same science, participants have never made access to laboratories free for everyone. You get blueprints for how to build a lab and what to do in it, you don't get the building.

Same for computation. I'm fairly sure almost all (if not all) algorithms in these suites are documented somewhere and you can implement them if you want. No one is restricting you from the knowledge. You just don't get the implementation for free.

New comment by laserbeam in "Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI"

laserbeam — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 11:58:31 +0000

Ladybird has a strong "all dependencies built in house" philosophy. Their argument is they want an alternative implementation to whatever is used by other browsers. I'd argue they would never use a third party library like servo as a principle.

New comment by laserbeam in "Defer available in gcc and clang"

laserbeam — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 20:40:38 +0000

Defer is not spooky action at a distance. It is an explicit statement that gets executed as written. Unlike (for example, a familiar feature which C doesn’t have) operator overloading… which causes code that looks like one thing (adition for example) behave like another (a function call). Defer does exactly what it says on the tin can (“move this line to the end of the scope”), just like goto does exactly what it claims to do.

Macros (in general) are way spookier than a defer statement.

New comment by laserbeam in "Defer available in gcc and clang"

laserbeam — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 06:53:12 +0000

I would say the complexity of implementing defer yourself is a bit annoying for C. However defer itself, as a language feature in a C standard is pretty reasonable. It’s a very straightforward concept and fits well within the scope of C, just as it fit within the scope of zig. As long as it’s the zig defer, not the golang one…

I would not introduce zig’s errdeferr though. That one would need additional semantics changes in C to express errors.

New comment by laserbeam in "Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability"

laserbeam — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 14:48:09 +0000

The problem is notepad itself would download and execute bad stuff if you click the evil link. If you would paste that same link in a browser you'd be ok.

And the problem is a notepad app is expected to be dead simple, have few features, and be hard to get wrong while implementing.

New comment by laserbeam in "UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs"

laserbeam — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 11:01:48 +0000

Can we somehow get age verification without IDs? Age verification itself is OK as an idea. I’m happy to show ID to buy alcohol at the store… but the store clerk doesn’t take a photo of that ID and store it in logs somewhere forever.

Can we please get a law where kids won’t just take their parents’ IDs and upload them to random places?

New comment by laserbeam in "cURL removes bug bounties"

laserbeam — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 08:46:26 +0000

For weak bank logins, my guess is that reimbursing all account takeovers is cheaper than having a complex login process that would scare away non-technical customers. Or, well, I could see myself making that decision if I were more versed in finance than in computer science and I had a reasonable risk assessment in front of me to tell me how many account takeovers happen.

New comment by laserbeam in "I set all 376 Vim options and I'm still a fool"

laserbeam — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 07:46:28 +0000

I found that moving between empty lines is the nicest way to navigate most code across all programming languages, markup languages and just regular text. I don’t have to think, I don’t have to count, I just move and select text big chunks at a time… (not in vim, but I first saw someone have key bindings for this in vim)

New comment by laserbeam in "Microsoft please get your tab to autocomplete shit together"

laserbeam — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 12:43:01 +0000

The insane behavior in the post is not that you get fancy completions, but that the completion does not match the preview. If the computer starts doing A when you asked it B, it is equivalent to a trash can.

New comment by laserbeam in "Snitch – A friendlier ss/netstat"

laserbeam — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 13:32:15 +0000

> I know picking the right defaults is hard

I think we understand that UX problem much better now than developers did back in the 70s. In general, not just for ss/lsof

New comment by laserbeam in "Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions"

laserbeam — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 18:21:26 +0000

How will this hit OSS projects which rely heavily on github actions? I’m thinking of projects like nixpkgs, which is the backbone of nixos and always has dozens of actions queued or running. (I am using nix as an example for scale, but I am not involved in the project and my description might be inaccurate. I’m also not familiar with nix’s financials at all.)

New comment by laserbeam in "Poor Johnny still won't encrypt"

laserbeam — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 07:27:55 +0000

Ask yourself. If you want things to be encrypted by default in the world, would a florist be able to self host nextcloud?

New comment by laserbeam in "Poor Johnny still won't encrypt"

laserbeam — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 05:36:53 +0000

I know you are not being facetious. My problem is random Joe on the street sees it as a bug. He really does care more about actually being able to talk with his wife than Signal’s mathematically correct principles. He needs it to be reliable first, secure second.