<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: niam</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=niam</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:24:47 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=niam" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "Corporate political donations shatter record at $646M so far for US midterms"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"Money is speech" is a reddit-ism. The argument is closer to "limiting spending can be tantamount to limiting speech."<p>Should, say, the president of the US (regardless of party) be able to restrict your ability to spend money on a web server because it hosts a forum about humanrights/guns/birthcontrol/etc? Or to run a news channel/blog that focuses on a particular perspective?<p>If not, little prevents the most endowed campaigns from changing their form factor from ads to propoganda platforms. And buying out news platforms becomes more enticing.<p>Whatever line you think is reasonable to draw here, would you trust a bad president with it? And would it actually solve the problem you're identifying?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:24:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469108</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469108</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469108</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "GrapheneOS Defends Data-Wiping Function That Blocked US Border Search"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Interesting that the distinction between phones and boats was not enough to dissuade whatever point it is that you're trying to make.<p>From Chief Justice Roberts in <i>Riley v. California</i>: "One of the most notable distinguishing features of modern cell phones is their immense storage capacity. Before cell phones, a search of a person was limited by physical realities and tended as a general matter to constitute only a narrow intrusion on privacy."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:46:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49086614</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49086614</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49086614</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "Andon (manufacturing)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's not just resolve, either. The org must recognize the problem in the first place, which isn't a given. Especially in smaller/govt orgs. Often, recognition of the problem is wrongly tied to how difficult the foremost suggestion is to implement.<p>And there are orgs for whom any suggestion can itself be so encumbered by uncontrolled red tape and social costs that relatively minor changes become a project.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:14:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48918192</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48918192</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48918192</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This title is easy to misinterpret. If I understand correctly: Codex now encrypts <i>sub-agent</i> prompts and hides those prompts from the user.<p>edit: originally was "Codex starts encrypting prompts, uses cyphertext for inference instead"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Jul 2026 11:54:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48905333</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48905333</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48905333</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "Logseq 2.0 Beta (DB version) is here"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm sympathetic to Logseq here. My guess is that many things are true but do not sum attractively to an audience right now.<p>The db probably <i>is</i> the cleaner place for Logseq's note storage, but invites comparison to Obsidian, whose fundamental unit of information is already a document, where Logseq's is more like a bulletpoint. Logseq being open source where Obsidian isn't could maybe blunt the edge of moving to a less-portable format, but a user can also understandably look at the status of two-way sync and see an unsexy "In-progress" and figure that's not good enough. Logseq also carries some baggage wrt instability, and the argument that the db is the pro-stability move unfortunately needs to be proven over time. Overall seems like a rough spot to be in.<p>I dunno. I like Logseq and wish them a good launch.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 22:15:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48899632</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48899632</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48899632</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "Grok 4.5"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Arguing that "at least John is doing [clown thing] in the open" just dilutes whatever leverage John's supporters had against John on that thing.<p>I find myself unwanting to be on the side of people who willingly give up leverage.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Jul 2026 02:49:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48840386</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48840386</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48840386</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "If you're a button, you have one job"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>One similarly egregious UX issue on the latest Android is that pressing buttons in the dropdown tray doesn't give any feedback until the action is complete. I can press the "turn on WiFi" button and receive zero haptics or visual indication that the phone registered my tap, for over a second, and THEN it will decide "okay! let's shake the phone and change button color now".<p>And if you have a tray button that needs to e.g reach over the network to a HomeAssistant instance that needs to itself reach out to some fuckass IoT vendor server, you may as well not expect any sort of feedback before you close the tray.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 05 Jul 2026 13:55:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794344</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794344</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794344</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They're rigorously sourced in that some set of underpaid clerks is tasked with surfacing their best guess as to what material is most relevant to the court, with optional fact checking competing for their time.<p><a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/supreme-court-errors-are-not-hard-to-find" rel="nofollow">https://www.propublica.org/article/supreme-court-errors-are-...</a><p>So the sources exist, but whether they're quality is another question.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:30:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734167</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734167</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734167</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "The Reversal Curse: LLMs trained on "A is B" fail to learn "B is A" (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Zooming out to the original complaint that "A is B" doesn't imply "B is A" in common English, and then further -- to the goal of having an LLM predict tokens that map closely to truth/logic/helpfulness:<p>I don't think a person speaking plain English in most contexts should be seen as "correct" to answer the question with a non-list answer, even if the question is shaped to expect one, unless there's an established confidence that the shape of the question wasn't made in error.<p>If someone asked me in real life who "my child" is on stage, and I had multiple children on stage, I would first say that I had multiple children there, rather than choosing one from the set. It would be most helpful for an LLM in my position to do the same, rather than infer that [because Timmy is niam's child, niam's child ought to be Timmy when queried].</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 23 Jun 2026 12:48:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48644146</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48644146</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48644146</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "The Reversal Curse: LLMs trained on "A is B" fail to learn "B is A""]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Your question arguably doesn't have multiple answers. There's one answer: the set of children (discounting different orders of the set).<p>The question "Who is her child" has multiple answers <i>because</i> it asks you to deliver a single answer.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 23 Jun 2026 12:13:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48643778</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48643778</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48643778</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"AMD, with nary antecedent aforenotice, has elected to excise"...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:24:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48584913</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48584913</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48584913</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "ICE Appears to Be Buying Immigrants' Tax Identifiers from a Data Broker"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> practically they work together frequently<p>Are the originators of these investigations the same? Might that matter?<p>> Crime shouldn't suddenly be ok if you pay taxes on it<p>Cool. Nobody is making that argument.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:12:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48573407</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48573407</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48573407</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Calling an entity that's forbidden from acting on your behalf an "agent" seems funny but maybe it's meant as a catch-all term. Their use of "assistant" seems better for that purpose.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jun 2026 19:41:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48361625</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48361625</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48361625</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "Creatine raises brain energy levels and slows cognitive decline: study"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Would you suggest that white blood cells are "not all that good for the body" because they're amped up during a bout of sickness?<p>Maybe they aren't! But you can't infer that from the mere correlation. Hence that phrase about its relationship to causation.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 31 May 2026 20:37:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48349501</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48349501</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48349501</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "The real cost of owning a home"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm not sure that your definition of "throwing money away" corresponds to the OP's.<p>OP uses that phrase to imply the (un)worthiness of spend. You're using it to mean that it doesn't build or maintain equity, which is true almost tautologically but wouldn't be very meaningful unless your audience doesn't understand what it means to rent something.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 18:11:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48283499</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48283499</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48283499</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "Does anybody like React?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I like the React model of components being (ideally) a function of state, but I don't touch hooks where possible. And I don't use React itself when I can use the lighter Preact library instead, which provides signals as an escape hatch.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 02:37:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48274352</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48274352</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48274352</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Interesting. Many times I find the opposite case, where my long tail search on Kagi will turn up SOME stuff that's kind of pertinent to the subject, and I'll swap to Google to see if the results are better there, only for it to barely have anything pertinent.<p>The main issue I've had with Kagi is that using "before:" and "after:" just seems weirder than it does on Google, and will throw in some stuff that's visibly outside the ranges I selected sometimes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 25 May 2026 13:32:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48266643</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48266643</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48266643</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "Interaction Models"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>On the presumption that this isn't a joke: em dashes appear in LLM outputs because LLMs were trained on human text which included them organically. It's not as unordinary as memes suggest.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 16:39:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110683</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110683</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110683</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Python does have a huge training set, but I figure lots of that training comes from disciplines where maintainability or system design isn't as heavily incented. Reports, notebooks, dashboards, etc.<p>My early experiments with LLM Python seemed to give me that impression, but I'm wondering if it's better now or people have other experiences.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 13:58:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48108422</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48108422</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48108422</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by niam in "Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't understand what makes these "datacenters" if they're distributed across satellites with WAN-esque interconnect.<p>Are we overloading the term "datacenter"? Or is it not overloaded but somehow able to achieve datacenter-like speeds / (tail) latency even when distributed across satellites?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 16:34:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48051445</link><dc:creator>niam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48051445</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48051445</guid></item></channel></rss>