Hacker News: ocrow

New comment by ocrow in "Netstrings (1997)"

ocrow — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 06:10:15 +0000

Seems like a coherent, sensible proposal, as one might expect from djb. Any notable protocols use them?

New comment by ocrow in "Americans Are Smashing Flock Cameras"

ocrow — Sun, 17 May 2026 18:14:30 +0000

It's rational to oppose Flock cameras in particular, while admitting that secure publicly accountable camera use for police purposes may have a legitimate place. YouTuber Benn Jordan did a pretty decent break down of how Flock is not that.

https://youtu.be/Pp9MwZkHiMQ?si=9CwwNcxbqOjB4DXm

New comment by ocrow in "The peril of laziness lost"

ocrow — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 01:53:12 +0000

I've tried this approach of instructing the LLM to look for opportunities to abstract, but it's not good at finding the commonalities after the fact, when possibly related functions have already diverted unnecessarily. It writes "sloppy" code, that is to say code that is locally correct but which fails to build towards overall generalizations, but that sloppy code is a cul-de-sac: easy to write, but adding to messiness, and really tough to improve.

When a good programmer writes a new feature, they are looking for both existing and new abstractions that can be applied. They are considering their mental model of the whole system and examining whether it can be leveraged or needs to be updated. That's how they avoid compounding complications.

In order to take a big picture view like that, the LLM needs the right context. It would need to focus on what its system model is and decide when to update that system model. For now, just telling it what to write isn't enough to get good code. You have to tell it what to pay attention to.

New comment by ocrow in "Flock Hardcoded the Password for America's Surveillance Infrastructure 53 Times"

ocrow — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:57:54 +0000

To most effectively enable stalking applications

New comment by ocrow in "Spherical Snake"

ocrow — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 22:04:36 +0000

Yes! Curiosity is the way to open these doors. The first step is to keep a log of your thoughts. Anything that pops up, write it in your ideas book. Having ideas isn't an all or nothing. It's a practice. Get into the practice of writing down your small ideas and you will develop the ideas muscle.

New comment by ocrow in "Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help"

ocrow — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 18:50:06 +0000

I had a family member who had sudden onset of massive seizures. He could not remember any of his passwords or hints at all. It was a real challenge getting into any of his accounts to figure out what needed doing.

New comment by ocrow in "Google Titans architecture, helping AI have long-term memory"

ocrow — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 18:00:08 +0000

A lot of LLM/AI writing these days can feel lost in the weeds – the specifics of very detailed techniques are interesting undoubtedly, but writing that steps back and looks at the big picture, informed by those details, could be very useful for people who want to think about where this all may be going.

New comment by ocrow in "XY Problem"

ocrow — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 16:58:19 +0000

This is a good check on how good your help request is. Hopefully the problem statement includes a brief summary of the approaches already tried and why those were dismissed.

New comment by ocrow in "Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland"

ocrow — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 15:29:15 +0000

They can ask. We're the ones choosing to ignore his wish.

New comment by ocrow in "Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland"

ocrow — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 15:25:39 +0000

I think Alzheimer's is a particularly difficult case. Before diagnosis, many of us imagine that we wouldn't want to exist in a highly deteriorated state with no ability to care for ourselves. But as you start to decline, you still feel like yourself, just a very forgetful version of yourself. On which day do you decide that what remains of your mind isn't enough to make your available future days better than no future days?

The instinct for self preservation is strong. Knowing what will come requires foresight and clarity. You may lose the capacity for informed decision making before the point where it's clear that there's not much to live for.

Many of us lack the insight that Kahneman perhaps had that in order to take control of the end you may need to leave some good days on the table.

New comment by ocrow in "Show HN: Smart email filters to unfuck your email"

ocrow — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 15:05:02 +0000

Mid X here. The name doesn't bother me. If it works that'd be fine. OTOH this doesn't solve a problem I have. I rigorously unsubscribe all promotional emails, and that seems to work fine.

New comment by ocrow in "The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five Year Mistake"

ocrow — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 17:52:43 +0000

To unpack that a little, he looks to the writings of the early developers of object oriented programming and identifies the ways this assumption became established. People like Bjarne Stroustrup (developer of C++) took on and promulgated the view that the inheritance hierarchy of classes in an object oriented system can be or should be a literal instantiation of the types of objects from the domain model (e.g. different types of shapes in a drawing program).

This is a mistake is because it puts the broad-scale modularization boundaries of a system in the wrong places and makes the system brittle and inflexible. A better approach is one where large scale system boundaries fall along computational capability lines, as exemplified by modern Entity Component Systems. Class hierarchies that rigidly encode domain categorizations don't make for flexible systems.

Some of the earliest writers on object encapsulation, e.g. Tony Hoare, Doug Ross, understood this, but later language creators and promoters missed some of the subtleties of their writings and left us with a poor version of object-oriented programming as the accepted default.

New comment by ocrow in "The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five Year Mistake"

ocrow — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 17:31:04 +0000

It's more specific than that. See sibling comment

New comment by ocrow in "The first non-opoid painkiller"

ocrow — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 14:37:25 +0000

The drawback of Ibuprofen is that it tends to cause damage to stomach and intestinal linings. That's why you are advised to take with food and/or lots of water. You don't want it absorbing all in one place. Long term use exacerbates the effect, making it more likely to cause ulcers and eventually internal bleeding. My partner ended up in the hospital with a serious internal bleed caused by taking Ibuprofen daily for chronic pain. I'm not saying don't use it, just be aware of the risks.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9715832/

New comment by ocrow in "It is hard to recommend Google Cloud"

ocrow — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 06:42:12 +0000

For one, the OpsWorks configuration management tool is being replaced with Management Console, which is more encompassing, but different. You have to manually migrate or rebuild any deployed resources from one to the other.

New comment by ocrow in "NoTunes is a macOS application that will prevent Apple Music from launching"

ocrow — Tue, 21 May 2024 15:30:03 +0000

It's quite configurable, allowing different key combinations for different window arrangement functions, but the most useful one is that it allows you to bring a single window from another application to the top without rearranging the rest of the stack. This is useful if you are switching back and forth between windows from two different apps each of which has several other windows open, for example a browser and a text editor.

New comment by ocrow in "I don't want to fill out your contact form"

ocrow — Sat, 04 May 2024 17:31:48 +0000

The rate of spam to a form is roughly constant over time, whereas the rate of spam to a published email address goes up over time as the site is repeatedly scanned by spam robots and the address added to more and more spammer lists. While spam detection is good, it isn't perfect. As your total volume of spam goes up, so does the amount that sneaks through the filters. Additionally, at a certain point it becomes impossible to look in your spam filter for misclassified real email. Eventually you're overwhelmed and have to change emails. If you're going to publish an email address you have to consider it a burnable resource that you will replace once the volume of spam is too high.

If the author hasn't experienced this, I think it must be because they haven't done the exercise of leaving a live email address on a public website for years.

New comment by ocrow in "Ask HN: How to manage phones and PCs for elderly parents?"

ocrow — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 17:56:42 +0000

Both Android and iOS, but especially iOS, have made large accessibility regressions by switching to a frequently gesture based interface where all sorts of quite similar swipes do different things changing the screen context and revealing hidden modes. For use by people with e.g. Parkinson's disease this is catastrophic. Voice commands can somewhat compensate, but I think we're all familiar with the many ways in which voice commands can fail to perform even simple requests, and also how sensitive the voice assistants are to changes in both speed and volume of received speech. While iOS does have some good accessibility settings, they are not comprehensive, and overall usability has in some big ways declined substantially, even while more and more tasks have to be done online.

New comment by ocrow in "Ask HN: How to manage phones and PCs for elderly parents?"

ocrow — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 17:38:58 +0000

A financial Power of Attorney is the legal document that gives you the ability to act as that person legally in most ways. It requires only the person to sign the PoA document. Using it often requires some bureaucratic hoop jumping, but that's nonetheless what it does. It doesn't prevent the person themselves from taking legal or financial actions – like giving money to scammers. For that you would need Conservatorship which is a higher level of responsibility and must be reviewed by a judge. At least, that's the situation in the US. Things may work differently elsewhere. And also, for reasons to do with the federal system, Social Security benefits are sort of their own thing and have a different process.

New comment by ocrow in "Nanofont3x4: Smallest readable 3x4 font with lowercase (2015)"

ocrow — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 17:38:33 +0000

They're really stretching the definition of readable.