Hacker News: obelos

New comment by obelos in "I haven't lost a customer service fight in seven months"

obelos — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:28:21 +0000

I saved about $65k this way, having Claude guide me through the process of assuming the (very low interest) mortgage on my house instead of having to refinance it under current rates. When I first contacted the mortgage servicer they said my loan wasn't eligible. I used Claude to do the research citing why my loan did qualify, drafting the letters and request packages with all the supporting evidence, directing me to the proper government complaint portals when the lender still tried to stymie the process. Cost me about 5-6 hours of time over all and will save me >$60k over the course of the loan.

New comment by obelos in "Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root"

obelos — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:53:20 +0000

The funding for this is to pay for a culture war, not a distro.

New comment by obelos in "Where did all the public bathrooms go?"

obelos — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 21:21:04 +0000

Apparently a lot of “temporarily embarrassed billionaires” on here defending their future legacies with downvoting.

New comment by obelos in "Where did all the public bathrooms go?"

obelos — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 06:21:31 +0000

“You have nothing, sure, but you still better participate in this social contract that has actually offered you no security or even basic shelter, else we give you even less nothing.” Like... why? Why would that person care? It's called the social contract, not the social religion. A contract has terms that are supposed to be fulfilled by both parties. If one party isn't holding up their end, why would the other?

New comment by obelos in "Where did all the public bathrooms go?"

obelos — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 06:14:33 +0000

Far and away the strongest predictor of homelessness is not mental illness or drug addiction, it's housing costs. Housing cost and the subsequent increase in homelessness is the precipitator that promotes addiction and exacerbates manageable mental health issues into mental health crises.

New comment by obelos in "Where did all the public bathrooms go?"

obelos — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 23:26:08 +0000

When the social contract fails you, why pay any regard to it at all? It's not a matter of pure, exogenous choice to do those things. It's not some abstract preference that surviving in the margins has afforded the freedom to exercise. It's a way to make sense out of the world and to have some shred of a sense of agency in a world where a person otherwise has no power.

New comment by obelos in "Where did all the public bathrooms go?"

obelos — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 22:51:16 +0000

Sure, and thankfully there aren't nearly as many of them out and about abusing more things if they have a private place always available to spend their time. Conscientiousness is one of the handful of measurable personality traits, and there's a scale to it because some people have more of it than others. That's not going to change. What we can change is the degree to which less conscientious people are forced to lean on the conscientiousness of others around them in order to live every moment of their lives. The collapse of social safety net—pilfered in order to pay for mega yachts and renting entire cities for a wedding receiption—in the West and particularly the US pushes those less conscientious people out into the world all the time.

New comment by obelos in "Where did all the public bathrooms go?"

obelos — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 22:02:39 +0000

People don't want to “abuse” commons like public restrooms, parks, buses, and so on. They do so because they have no choice, having been displaced out of having a private place to do the things they're now forced to do in public places. This is all just an outcropping of the housing crisis, which is itself an outcropping of the billionaire crisis. End billionaires, and we have the resources to de-gild this age.

New comment by obelos in "Norway Salmon"

obelos — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:41:07 +0000

That is... unintuitive. Wouldn't the escaped salmon have to be able to get back upstream enough to where the wild salmon are laying/milting?

New comment by obelos in "AI changes the economics of software rewrites"

obelos — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 20:49:27 +0000

This was my approach to a large rewrite I'm working on. First create the multiple layers of test suite to map out existing behavior at the unit, API, and integration level (something that should have been done incrementally over the 20 years this software has existed), then predicate the new code on the tests. It's been remarkably effective.

New comment by obelos in "Swedish parliament abolishes permanent residence visas for migrants"

obelos — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 23:15:23 +0000

They're pro-“fertility talking points” at least, but rarely in favor of economic and social policies that encourage child rearing.

New comment by obelos in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

obelos — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:23:43 +0000

I'm not sure it's really from the lack of change, though. I've used Claude, Kimi, and other LLMs to write a ton of Perl that's jacked up with weird sugaring packages like Moose and Function::Parameters with reified types, and they seem to pick up the new idioms pretty effortlessly. It's a really unexpected fluency, frankly.

New comment by obelos in "God sleeps in the minerals"

obelos — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:28:10 +0000

For us nerds in the Portland/PNW area, the Rice Museum out in Hillsboro—despite a name suggesting it has an exhaustive display of rice varieties—has a terrific collection of large and unique mineral specimens. https://www.ricenorthwestmuseum.org

New comment by obelos in "LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger"

obelos — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 19:35:56 +0000

I've most frequently heard this referred to as “Gell-Mann Amnesia,” and yes, LLMs are fertile ground to find it.

New comment by obelos in "Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers"

obelos — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 21:56:57 +0000

“Sure, it will probably happen again, but what if we made some money along the way?!”

New comment by obelos in "Congestion pricing in Manhattan is a predictable success"

obelos — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 20:49:33 +0000

I think there's also a dominating bias that people who walk/bike/bus are poor and thus make bad customers. “If they had money, they'd be in a car!”

New comment by obelos in "A Typical Workday at a Japanese Hardware Tool Store [video]"

obelos — Mon, 12 May 2025 18:52:36 +0000

Also nationalized control of healthcare costs.

New comment by obelos in "CVE program faces swift end after DHS fails to renew contract"

obelos — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 15:32:16 +0000

I'm pretty sure this is a joke reference to Ted Lasso.

New comment by obelos in "Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting"

obelos — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 20:31:19 +0000

It makes more sense when you interpret it as an attempt at humiliation, not diplomacy.

New comment by obelos in "Undergraduate shows that searches within hash tables can be much faster"

obelos — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 21:53:06 +0000

I think you're forgetting to put “all the times ignorance didn't produce a breakthrough” in the denominator.