Hacker News: optionalsquid

New comment by optionalsquid in "You Don't Look Like a Gamer: On Toxicity, Gatekeeping, & Women Who Share Gaming"

optionalsquid — Wed, 13 May 2026 05:15:53 +0000

There is currently a lot noise being generated because people noticed that Anita Sarkeesian consulted on Slay the Spire 2 (an amazing game, by the way). The main subreddit for GamerGate is also still very active. Those people never went away and they never figured out that they were tilting at windmills

New comment by optionalsquid in "For the first time in history, more Americans are moving to EU than vice versa"

optionalsquid — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 13:57:21 +0000

Danish immigration laws are also very strict. Most of our political parties have been competed to further tighten those rules over the last couple of decades. We literally have people advocating to leave the convention on human rights, since it’s getting in the way of that

New comment by optionalsquid in "Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?"

optionalsquid — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 09:50:03 +0000

But researchers are not necessarily paid by corporations, and governments, foundations, and such are generally more willing to hand out grants that forego short-term profitability for long-term gains. And while a company might not be interested investing in research that could undermine one of their core products, that obviously does not apply to competing companies that do not already have corresponding products. What better way to break into a market, than to render your competitors' products obsolete?

New comment by optionalsquid in "Highlights from Git 2.54"

optionalsquid — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:40:27 +0000

Support for config based hooks is very nice.

Only a few days ago, I was just looking for some way to automatically check (and fail) if there are inactive hooks when I try to commit. I already use `advice.ignoredhook`, but it's easy to miss the warning if you commit through VSCode, and possibly through other IDEs.

With this, I can just write a simple script to perform that check, and add it to my global config

New comment by optionalsquid in "Japan implements language proficiency requirements for certain visa applicants"

optionalsquid — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 23:39:17 +0000

It depends on the work you are going to be doing. For example, if you are going to do research, then it is more important that you speak and write fluently in English, than whatever language is spoken in the country you'll be working in.

Though being fluent in the local language will, of course, make your life a lot easier

New comment by optionalsquid in "A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”"

optionalsquid — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 10:17:22 +0000

That's a good point, though I'm not familiar with the (changes to the) geolocation API you mention. Do you have any recommendations for reading up on that development?

New comment by optionalsquid in "A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”"

optionalsquid — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 06:37:21 +0000

It should be opt-in per website, per feature, because IMO it can be quite useful in some cases. Like clicking back on a slide-show bringing you to the overview page, instead of only going back one slide

New comment by optionalsquid in "Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)"

optionalsquid — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 23:27:58 +0000

I dunno. I have yet to change any tmux settings, but I find it perfectly usable.

I guess it depends on what you want out of it. I’ve memorized about nine shortcuts, and that’ll all I’ve ever needed: ctrl+b and c, n, p, s, d, $, ‘,’, or PageUp/PageDown

New comment by optionalsquid in "Claude mixes up who said what"

optionalsquid — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:56:11 +0000

But Dark Souls also shows just how limited the vocabulary and grammar has to be to prevent abuse. And even then you’ll still see people think up workarounds. Or, in the words of many a Dark Souls player, “try finger but hole”

New comment by optionalsquid in "Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature.What can be done?"

optionalsquid — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:47:06 +0000

That doesn't seem very plausible.

Look at the example in the article, which is a fairly typical citation: While you can replicate the title, how do you propose to retroactively publish a paper in a specific journal, in a specific volume, on a specific set of pages, potentially years in the past?

Moreover, citations are most commonly for other people's work. And since you would be more likely to catch fake citations for your own work, the proportion of those is probably greater for fake citations.

So the people who would have to accomplish this, would be an entirely different set of people than the authors who published the fake citation. These people may not even be working together regularly, but you would need to involve every named author, as journals do check this.

And what would their motivation be, to publish based on a title that is potentially nonsense? A single citation that may not even be picked up due to the inescapable differences between the fake and post-hoc real citation?

I can't imagine that anyone would find that worthwhile

New comment by optionalsquid in "GNU Parallel citation request now asks you cite "Epstein files""

optionalsquid — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 08:34:29 +0000

Looking at the log, it seems like the author gives each release a name. “Epstein files” is just the latest out of a number of questionable names, the previous one being “Maduro”:

https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parallel.git/log/src/...

As for why they would use such a naming scheme, I have no idea

The Systemd Age Verification Debate: Developer Responds to Criticism

optionalsquid — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:28:55 +0000

Article URL: https://itsfoss.com/dylan-taylor-systemd-controversy/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47541899

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by optionalsquid in "Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls"

optionalsquid — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 06:03:44 +0000

Going by the Steam hardware survey, 3/4 of Linux users were not using Steam Decks when they got polled. So I’m not sure if a console-esque device is actually required. A large part of the reason why Linux usage is growing, is probably that it mostly just works these days

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

New comment by optionalsquid in "Yorhel, founder of the Visual Novel Database (vndb.org) has passed away"

optionalsquid — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 10:23:15 +0000

This is a huge loss for the visual novel community.

Not just the loss of the person, but also the loss of the developer who was developing and maintaining what is probably the single most important resource for the community.

He will be sorely missed

New comment by optionalsquid in "Astral to Join OpenAI"

optionalsquid — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 22:06:24 +0000

If all you are installing using conda is pypi packages and different versions of Python, then sure, uv is a fine replacement. I use it for that as well. But if you are using other conda/conda-forge/bioconda packages, then uv isn't a replacement since it cannot install those. However, Pixi can replace conda for that use-case and it's about as fast as uv since it uses uv's dependency resolution code

New comment by optionalsquid in "Astral to Join OpenAI"

optionalsquid — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:55:14 +0000

uv replaces pip (and venv, and pipx, and more), not conda. If you want a uv-equivalent that replaces conda, then look at pixi: https://pixi.prefix.dev/

New comment by optionalsquid in "The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying"

optionalsquid — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:42:20 +0000

> And it's used to power effect where you might not expect it (Stardew Valley mines).

Apparently Stardew Valley's mines are not procedurally generated, but rather hand-crafted. Per their recent 10 year anniversary video, the developer did try to implement procedural generation for the mines, but ended up scrapping it:

https://www.stardewvalley.net/stardew-valley-10-year-anniver...

New comment by optionalsquid in "Gram: A Zed fork without AI Slop"

optionalsquid — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 19:31:01 +0000

Supposedly you can also do that in one line in VSCode, via the "chat.disableAIFeatures" setting:

https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_104#_hide-and-disab...

New comment by optionalsquid in "Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down"

optionalsquid — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 17:00:10 +0000

> The logistics operation involved in distributing codes is also very expensive and inflexible. You may need to authenticate payments a dozen times in an hour one day, when you are on a farmers market which doesn't take card payments or you are out dining with friends, and another day not at all.

Neither of the scenarios you describe would require you to authenticate using MitID: Peer-to-peer payments in Denmark are typically done using the app MobilePay, which only requires MitID authentication during setup. And you never need MitID authentication when paying in person, at most you'll need your card's pin-code

New comment by optionalsquid in "EU also investigating as Grok generated 23,000 CSAM images in 11 days"

optionalsquid — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 18:18:25 +0000

Two of the three examples listed in the article appear to involve real children:

> A selfie uploaded by a schoolgirl was undressed by Grok, turning a “before school selfie” into an image of her in a bikini. As of January 15th this post was still live on X. ... Four images depicting child actors.