Hacker News: passivegains

New comment by passivegains in "Gloomberb"

passivegains — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:05:35 +0000

Does the GUI have Bloomberg's data source?

New comment by passivegains in "Advertise in ChatGPT"

passivegains — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 06:04:34 +0000

"We need most of our population working full time to keep ourselves fed because running a farm is really hard" is a technical problem, not a societal one. You can solve it with fertilizer and the cotton gin or whatever.

"There's a bunch of us now and barter isn't cutting it anymore" is a technical problem, not a societal one. You can solve it with coinage and banks or whatever.

"The internet used to be fun and useful but now it sucks" is a societal problem, not a technical one. You can't solve it with a federated twitter clone or yet another secure messaging protocol or whatever.

New comment by passivegains in "A new way to reflect on how you use Claude"

passivegains — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:13:12 +0000

Remember that time grok told people not to use it for second opinions on their medical records? ...on second thought that might be an exception that proves the rule.

New comment by passivegains in "A new way to reflect on how you use Claude"

passivegains — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:08:55 +0000

I don't know why this sentiment isn't more common. LLMs are basically two things: 1. chatbots 2. automation for the process of googling something and copy-pasting the first result. The only people I know who use it for more than those two things ask them to perform tasks they can't do reliably, don't check the output, and then they're just wrong most of the time. If they had just used it as slightly different google search they'd have been fine.

New comment by passivegains in "Correlated randomness in Slay the Spire 2"

passivegains — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:31:00 +0000

Putting this into my rotation of excuses. "It wasn't my fault! They were hacking, also my fingers were slippery and the deterministic behavior of psuedorandom number generators guaranteed we would lose anyway."

New comment by passivegains in "“Too dangerous to release” or just too expensive?"

passivegains — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:19:19 +0000

The text is just as you predict, but in fairness to the author using a .ai domain is a good way to set expectations up front.

New comment by passivegains in "An update on Steam / GOG changes for OpenTTD"

passivegains — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:36:19 +0000

I mean, yeah. There's enough nukes locked and loaded around the globe to end human civilization as we know it in minutes. Nobody's made a bomb that can fix socioeconomics.

New comment by passivegains in "Code is cheap. Show me the talk"

passivegains — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:56:53 +0000

if it helps, that kind of thoughtfulness is how to learn the things that matter most. you're already on the right track.

New comment by passivegains in "Python numbers every programmer should know"

passivegains — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 19:57:30 +0000

this is absolutely true, but there's an additional nuance: yes, python is fantastic, yes, it's easy and forgiving, but there are other languages like that too. ...except there really aren't. other than ruby and maybe go, every other popular language sacrifices ease of use for things that simply do not matter for the overwhelming majority of programs. much of python's popularity doesn't come from being easy and forgiving, it's that everything else isn't. for normal programming why would we subject ourselves to anything but python unless we had no choice?

while I'm on the soapbox I'll give java a special mention: a couple years ago I'd have said java was easy even though it's tedious and annoying, but I've become reacquainted with it for a high school program (python wouldn't work for what they're doing and the school's comp sci class already uses java.)

this year we're switching to c++.

New comment by passivegains in "Python is not a great language for data science"

passivegains — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 20:21:11 +0000

I think the key thing not obvious to most data scientists is they're not using python because it meets their needs, it's because we've failed them. twice.

1. data scientists aren't programmers, so why do they need a programming language? the tools they should be using don't exist. they'd need programmers to make them, and all we have to offer is... more programming languages.

2. the giant problem at the heart of modern software: the most important feature of a modern programming language is being easy to read and write. this feature is conspicuously absent from most important languages.

they're trapped. they can't do what they need without a programming language but there are only a handful they can possibly use. the real reason python ended up with such good library support is they never really had a choice.

New comment by passivegains in "Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade"

passivegains — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 15:18:00 +0000

I'm not sure immortality is a good standard to hold forks to. the original project won't last forever either.

New comment by passivegains in "Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?"

passivegains — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 21:17:17 +0000

I got good results from running cables around the entire perimeter of a room to avoid crossing doorways. Doesn't work so well on bathrooms though.

New comment by passivegains in "The email they shouldn't have read"

passivegains — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 16:14:21 +0000

Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird is a creative writing exercise which didn't actually happen and isn't verifiably true to any degree. There were never any Finches, Ewells, Robinsons or Radleys, yet readers often find it quite powerful because they're perfectly aware the story's events have played out between real people many, many times. They don't need to be told the real names of people who have been in lynch mobs to know real people have been lynched. Email servers aren't quite as heavy a subject, but we know these things happen.

New comment by passivegains in "Which NPM package has the largest version number?"

passivegains — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 18:12:19 +0000

I decided my life could not possibly go on until I knew what "elvisgogo" does, so I downloaded the tarball and poked around. it's a pretty ordinary numpy + pandas + matplotlib project that makes graphs from csv. one line jumped out at me: str_0 = ['refractive_index','Na','Mg','Al','Si','K','Ca','Ba','Fe','Type'] the university of st. andrews has a laser named "elvis" that goes on a remote controlled submarine: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~bds2/elvislaser.htm I was hoping it'd be about go-go dancing to elvis music, but physics experiments on light in seawater is pretty cool too.

New comment by passivegains in "How can England possibly be running out of water?"

passivegains — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 14:42:20 +0000

they sell water, too!

New comment by passivegains in ""Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec""

passivegains — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 00:05:12 +0000

This came up in some of the comments: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-315... if you click the links instead of copy/pasting into your reader you get a page full of raw XML. It's not harmful or anything but it's not a great look. You can't really expect your users to just never click on your links, that's usually what links are for.

New comment by passivegains in "Monero appears to be in the midst of a successful 51% attack"

passivegains — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:01:32 +0000

I think they mean the manufacturer would just keep most of the stock for themselves. Reminds me of that famous Scarface quote: "You should get high on your own supply, it's a great idea that won't end horribly."

New comment by passivegains in "When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support?"

passivegains — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 14:53:36 +0000

I'd probably go with something like Open Regular Generalized ASseMembly.

New comment by passivegains in "Yt-transcriber – Give a YouTube URL and get a transcription"

passivegains — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 15:21:38 +0000

the volunteer open source effort behind youtube-dl and its forks/descendants are so impressive in large part because of how many features they provide and thus have to maintain: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#usage-and-options this tool won't provide the list of available thumbnails or settings for HTTP buffer size, but I think that's a pretty reasonable tradeoff.

New comment by passivegains in "“Reading Rainbow” was created to combat summer reading slumps"

passivegains — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 16:13:31 +0000

There's something beautiful about the kid using performance as language. They've hit upon the greater truth that reading and speech are important because text and the spoken word are powerful mediums, but what truly matters is what they allow us to express to each other.

Though I have worked with children enough to sympathize with the not-beautiful part of this story too. (also that book sounds rad as hell.)