Hacker News: mainmailman

New comment by mainmailman in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

mainmailman — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:54:30 +0000

So because children were forced to work dangerous jobs it's okay for adult religious leaders to have sex with them? I'm not sure I follow that.

You should research polygamy in the mainline (Brighamite) sect if you haven't already. One of the last marriages to the the mormon prophet Lorenzo Snow was to a 15 year old. Snow was 57 at the time. This was not normal despite any assertion about children working.

Source: www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/1c2omo0/the_wives_of_lorenzo_snow/

New comment by mainmailman in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

mainmailman — Mon, 11 May 2026 18:08:58 +0000

Thank you, it's been all but confirmed that lot of "AI layoffs" are due to reaching a workforce equilibrium from Covid era over hiring.

Saying AI for anything, good news or bad news, is a get out of jail free card for execs who want to appease shareholders.

New comment by mainmailman in "Norway set to become latest country to ban social media for under 16s"

mainmailman — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:09:18 +0000

What?

New comment by mainmailman in "Norway Set to Become Latest Country to Ban Social Media for Under 16s"

mainmailman — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:08:53 +0000

I could see a scenario where well meaning parents prevent kids from going online, and with the promise of a safer internet through ID laws allows their children to get online more. Total conjecture though, I would like to see data on that too.

New comment by mainmailman in "Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th"

mainmailman — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 17:05:19 +0000

What is Anna’s?

New comment by mainmailman in "Why Is France Moving from Microsoft Windows to Linux"

mainmailman — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:15:26 +0000

It'll be interesting to see how large microsoft's footprint is in the country after this. The article talks about the government's objectives, but I wonder how the private sector will react.

New comment by mainmailman in "Good Sleep, Good Learning (2012)"

mainmailman — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:25:36 +0000

There are bars everywhere

New comment by mainmailman in "An interactive map of Flock Cams"

mainmailman — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 22:39:49 +0000

Why do anything at all?

New comment by mainmailman in "How OpenAI, the US government and Persona built an identity surveillance machine"

mainmailman — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:32:01 +0000

I loved it, I’ve never seen something like it

New comment by mainmailman in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened"

mainmailman — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 10:32:04 +0000

This is enough to make me never use ars technica again

New comment by mainmailman in "Read Something Wonderful"

mainmailman — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 14:18:25 +0000

Brave

New comment by mainmailman in "The highest quality codebase"

mainmailman — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:28:17 +0000

Yeah I don't see the utility in doing this hundreds of times back to back. A few iterations can tell us some things about how Claude optimizes code, but an open ended prompt to endlessly "improve" the code sounds like a bad boss making huge demands. I don't blame the AI for adding BS down the line.

New comment by mainmailman in "The highest quality codebase"

mainmailman — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:26:13 +0000

I'm not a C++ programmer, but wouldn't your example be a fairly structured problem? You wanted to improve performance of a specific part of your code base.

New comment by mainmailman in "What Happens When an "Infinite-Money Machine" Unravels"

mainmailman — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 15:03:59 +0000

You might like Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell. Very eye opening on how groups from religions to crossfit classes exploit humanity's tendency to form groups and follow charismatic leaders, even after the "cult" becomes toxic to the individual members.