Hacker News: lobsterthief

New comment by lobsterthief in "Our position on open-weights models"

lobsterthief — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:05:25 +0000

I disagree. It’s possible that AI removed more people from the chain and that more human involvement could have prevented it from happening.

New comment by lobsterthief in "DOGE is done. What happened to its records?"

lobsterthief — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:20:54 +0000

What’s the sample size here? Sounds like anecdotal evidence to me.

New comment by lobsterthief in "ChatGPT Work"

lobsterthief — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 16:44:09 +0000

Yes, the side effect has been me using Reddit via Incognito, which means I don’t see it every time I open iOS Chrome, and also I’m not signed in, so after 14 years I’ve basically stopped using it.

I guess with their IPO “the line must go up”. Very stupid, dark pattern.

New comment by lobsterthief in "Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets"

lobsterthief — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 03:40:34 +0000

… in these trying times?

New comment by lobsterthief in "Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets"

lobsterthief — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 03:36:36 +0000

I agree (from semi-relevant experience). Also, any “poor” country that’s inexpensive enough to fit this requirements probably isn’t one you’d voluntarily live in.

Side note for the original commenter: It would be kinder and more accurate to state “lower cost of living countries” than “poor countries”. There are numerous lower COL countries that offer a higher quality of life a than that of the US but they aren’t “poor” (I moved to one).

New comment by lobsterthief in "Show HN: 18 Words"

lobsterthief — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 02:08:27 +0000

Related: Great new Freakonomics podcast about why we do poorly under pressure[0]

[0] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/choking_radio/

New comment by lobsterthief in "Half-Baked Product"

lobsterthief — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 22:31:08 +0000

You’ve cherry-picked two successful examples but ignored all his failures. He wasn’t even solely responsible for those two successes. He didn’t found Tesla. He didn’t even found PayPal. He’s not an aerospace engineer. The number one predictor of future wealth and success is starting with wealth to begin with.

New comment by lobsterthief in "Trump made more than $1B on crypto deals, part of 2025 windfall"

lobsterthief — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 10:21:57 +0000

In some countries (e.g. Uruguay) it’s possible to ingrain anticorruption ideals into the fabric of society. This lowers the overall level of corruption as citizens are more likely to feel it’s wrong and they’re raised to call out corruption when they see it. I guess we’d call this “social responsibility”. Of course, the social aspect must be coupled with governmental and legislative changes aimed directly at increasing transparency and reducing corruption—this is what was done in Uruguay, at least.

Corruption isn’t eliminated entirely but is drastically reduced. Taxes then get spent on society instead of corrupt politicians. The result is more bureaucracy but it also placed the country lower than the US on the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI)[0]. CPI has its own measurement issues but is the best we’ve got.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

New comment by lobsterthief in "US Supreme Court drug users cannot be prohibited from firearms [pdf]"

lobsterthief — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 11:04:01 +0000

Yes, again, as part of a well-regulated militia…

New comment by lobsterthief in "Louis Rossmann offers to pay legal fees for a threatened OrcaSlicer developer"

lobsterthief — Mon, 11 May 2026 12:49:06 +0000

High-hold hairspray will work wonders for you. I’ve been using it to print, including on glass, since 2014.

New comment by lobsterthief in "US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants"

lobsterthief — Wed, 06 May 2026 13:07:53 +0000

Because the FTC has been defanged, and it was the main body preventing this sort of thing. Along with the CFPB for financial products (I don’t think insurance qualifies though.)

New comment by lobsterthief in "Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic"

lobsterthief — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 13:53:47 +0000

As a CTO this has been my experience as well. I would add in every non-technical C-suite member aiming to use AI as some magic lever to avoid prioritizing projects or engaging in real critical thinking. Too many people are offloading their cognitive decisionmaking to some magic box, thinking it has all the answers, because its output appears magical and complete.

After 25 years in programming I think I’ll finally start that farm ;)

New comment by lobsterthief in "Tariffs Raised Consumers' Prices, but the Refunds Go Only to Businesses"

lobsterthief — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 16:04:00 +0000

Just Google it yourself; numerous legitimate publications have reported on it.

New comment by lobsterthief in "Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data"

lobsterthief — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:12:45 +0000

Unfortunately this SCOTUS is not comprised of those who the founders intended would sit on it.

New comment by lobsterthief in "Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data"

lobsterthief — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:10:25 +0000

I wouldn’t say “would likely abide”, I would say “will abide” based on their actions. They are nothing but an extension of the Trump administration at this point.

New comment by lobsterthief in "Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others"

lobsterthief — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:08:52 +0000

Agreed, I’ve been using Dropbox for 15 years with minimal issues. The key is to ensure it’s running and syncing with the proper settings on both machines.

What can get things into a weird state is if both machines are editing the same file while only one of them is actively syncing. But for basic backup and sync, this is extremely rare.

New comment by lobsterthief in "Someone bought 30 WordPress plugins and planted a backdoor in all of them"

lobsterthief — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:15:10 +0000

And Django is still great!

New comment by lobsterthief in "Someone bought 30 WordPress plugins and planted a backdoor in all of them"

lobsterthief — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:46:26 +0000

But we need to be careful, such strict liability rewards larger companies that can afford such risk. Small companies and freelancers could be left out to dry.

New comment by lobsterthief in "Microsoft suspends dev accounts for high-profile open source projects"

lobsterthief — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:41:58 +0000

I think the laws would need to be generally around not hindering competition. If competition were high, and you had a dozen operating systems to choose from, then you’d move away from this annoying one (Windows). And thus Windows would have a lower incentive to engage in this behavior. But current laws don’t discourage monopolies/oligopolies.

New comment by lobsterthief in "Microsoft suspends dev accounts for high-profile open source projects"

lobsterthief — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:37:41 +0000

This is why the user can’t be trusted to assign severity. Incentives across teams aren’t aligned and they don’t have visibility into other issues even if they were aligned.