Hacker News: optionalsquid

New comment by optionalsquid in "Stop making swap partitions–use swap files instead"

optionalsquid — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:26:13 +0000

It also doesn't sound like a particularly good idea on BTRFS, judging by the linked documentation:

https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Swapfile.html

New comment by optionalsquid in "Ask HN: Why can I only downvote select comments?"

optionalsquid — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 05:31:15 +0000

You might enjoy this list of undocumented HN features, which includes an answer to your question:

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...

New comment by optionalsquid in "Steam now requires Australian users to verify their age with a credit card"

optionalsquid — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 10:45:20 +0000

While a Steam account is supposed to be personal and non-transferable, it obviously isn't so in practice. So unless you provide additional information to prove that the owner is still the same person, then it is probably not sufficient to prove the current owner's age.

Looking at the "marketplace" G2A, about 15% of the Steam games sold there are sold in the form of accounts: Instead of a key or a gift, you get a login and a password for an account owning the game being sold. Making the account age a form of identification would no doubt also create a market for aged accounts without games.

New comment by optionalsquid in "Trey Parker and Matt Stone Are Changing the Name of South Park to South America"

optionalsquid — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 04:24:14 +0000

That was conclusively disproven by Schwarzenegger et al., 1994.

New comment by optionalsquid in "bzip3"

optionalsquid — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 15:35:26 +0000

How does memory usage compare between your two runs?

The benchmarks report 687M for their run of zstd, and 12178M and 18301M for the two runs of BZip3. Which itself is a bit eyebrow raising

New comment by optionalsquid in "uv: Deduplicate all files in the wheel cache"

optionalsquid — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 15:51:46 +0000

> The only advantage of uv is to have support for parallel async extraction. If pip extracted multiple files/wheels in parallel without being blocked by the GIL, pip could easily match or outcompete uv.

That sounds like it would be relatively easy to demonstrate: You could tweak uv to perform downloads/extractions sequentially and then compare its runtime with pip. Has any such comparison been done?

New comment by optionalsquid in "Autism mutations drive neurodevelopmental pathology"

optionalsquid — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 05:35:00 +0000

That study suggests that 65% of autistic individuals are undiagnosed. The 90% is only for middle-aged and older.

Skimming a couple (due to time constraints) of the sources mentioned in the study, one source [1] mention that "3 in 10 autistic people of working age are in employment", and the other [2] that "approximately 50% fail to achieve independence in their living status, employment, and close relationships"

It doesn't seem to support the claim that "90% of autistics are undiagnosed and work".

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-buckland-revi... [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-020-04763-2

New comment by optionalsquid in "Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results"

optionalsquid — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 14:27:32 +0000

Alternatively, you can configure Kagi to rewrite Reddit links to point to an alternative front-end via https://kagi.com/settings/redirects

  ^https://(www\.)?reddit.com|https://safereddit.com

EDIT: See here for a list of instances: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib#instances

New comment by optionalsquid in "Bun 1.4"

optionalsquid — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:38:49 +0000

Is that flip-flopping or just different developers having different preferences? Those who complain now would have had no reason to complain back then, and vice versa

New comment by optionalsquid in "Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove"

optionalsquid — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:28:29 +0000

What do you mean that it ruins integrity?

New comment by optionalsquid in "Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove"

optionalsquid — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:23:31 +0000

Practically speaking, most people probably won't know how to undo the watermark. Especially when the suggested method is to run the text through a local model

New comment by optionalsquid in "AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions"

optionalsquid — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 13:00:26 +0000

I use YNAB4 to this day and the cross-device sync still works

New comment by optionalsquid in "DskDitto: Ultra-fast, parallel duplicate-file detector"

optionalsquid — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 11:20:36 +0000

> In it, I learned that there's some interesting quirks about the way the traditional shaXsum tools work, specifically that they focus on a set of inputs from the shell command line, which means that you can exhaust the shell command line length fairly easily (try hashing every file in the Linux source tree, for instance; zsh, bash, and fish will all eventually tell you "Fuck off, there's too many characters in argv")

Did you try to run something like

  sha256sum **/*.*

Because if so, then you'll of course exceed the maximum number of arguments. That applies to all command-line tools that take an unbounded number of arguments.

A simple solution is to use find, which handles that for you:

  find -type f -exec sha256sum "{}" "+"  # 1.4s on my system for Linux 7.1.5

Alternatively, you can combine find with xargs (or parallel), which also handles it and optionally allows you to specify exactly how many arguments to process per call (-n), and how many commands to run in parallel (-P):

  find -type f -print0 | xargs --null -P 8 -n 512 sha256sum  # 0.3s

New comment by optionalsquid in "“We have information that Moonshot distilled Fable for the development of K3”"

optionalsquid — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 06:04:26 +0000

The exact same argument could be made in Moonshot's favor.

Being a bit tongue in cheek, one could also argue that by releasing their models, Moonshot is contributing much more value than Anthrophic. Did Prometheus not create an immense amount of value, when he took fire from the hands of the Gods and gave it to humans?

New comment by optionalsquid in "I Built a Private Genomics Study with Stoffel MPC"

optionalsquid — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:18:22 +0000

I'm not sure I understand how that that would make a material difference. The company might not know who submitted each sample, but the company would still have their entire genomes in their possession. That is no different, than if somebody obtained the data from a biobank. The data in biobanks is normally also anonymized, insofar that you can anonymize whole-genome DNA data

New comment by optionalsquid in "I Built a Private Genomics Study with Stoffel MPC"

optionalsquid — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:00:47 +0000

That's a kit for sample collection. You would then ship off your sample to the company in question, and they would do the actual sequencing, and then send the DNA data and genetic variants they've inferred back to you. I think that defeats what the article author is trying to accomplish, since you still share your entire genome with a third party.

The actual instruments used by that company are a whole lot more expensive, and you have to buy reagents as well: https://www.machinio.com/illumina/dna-sequencers

New comment by optionalsquid in "I Built a Private Genomics Study with Stoffel MPC"

optionalsquid — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:53:36 +0000

> Most genomic studies begin by asking participants to upload one of the most identifying and irrevocable pieces of data they own, their DNA.

I'm curious what the author means by "asking participants to upload ... their DNA", because I am not aware of any study that asked participants to do that.

New comment by optionalsquid in "Back to Kagi"

optionalsquid — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:08:05 +0000

I doubt that my list would be of much use to you, since a lot of the sites relate to specific hobbies.

However, as eloisius mentioned, you can view the most commonly blocked sites. Going through that list is a good start: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights

New comment by optionalsquid in "Back to Kagi"

optionalsquid — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:37:53 +0000

Yeah, it's become quite noticeable. The amount of clearly LLM generated sites that I've blocked just keeps going up and up. The only advantage Kagi has in that regard is that blocks are account wide, regardless of what device you use

New comment by optionalsquid in "Back to Kagi"

optionalsquid — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:33:23 +0000

It probably depends on your country, and what you are looking for exactly, but it works fine for my needs