Hacker News: patrickmay

New comment by patrickmay in "Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia, UAE"

patrickmay — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:25:31 +0000

This is the answer. Stop operating in authoritarian states and ignore their laws. If those states want to censor what their population can see, it's on them to establish a firewall.

New comment by patrickmay in "Incident Report: Railway Blocked by Google Cloud [resolved]"

patrickmay — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:57:11 +0000

I was also expecting a story about a physical railway being shut down.

New comment by patrickmay in "The sigmoids won't save you"

patrickmay — Fri, 15 May 2026 17:21:00 +0000

Stein's Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

New comment by patrickmay in "AI slop is killing online communities"

patrickmay — Thu, 07 May 2026 22:36:47 +0000

Who doesn't love capybaras?

New comment by patrickmay in "The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy"

patrickmay — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 19:04:44 +0000

> Part of these "corporate" datasets include deep knowledge of the world's best literature and philosophy

Part of those datasets also include 4chan.

New comment by patrickmay in "Technical, cognitive, and intent debt"

patrickmay — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:17:08 +0000

Exactly, well said.

"The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise." -- Edsger Dijkstra

New comment by patrickmay in "Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data"

patrickmay — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 22:20:50 +0000

No major party. There are smaller parties who oppose mass surveillance.

New comment by patrickmay in "Where did my taxes go?"

patrickmay — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:33:57 +0000

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”

― Alexis de Tocqueville

New comment by patrickmay in "I wrote to Flock's privacy contact to opt out of their domestic spying program"

patrickmay — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:33:00 +0000

> Personal information usually does include photos of someone in public without their consent

This is not the case in the United States. There is no presumption of privacy in public. In fact, there is a whole genre known as "street photography" that involves taking pictures in public without explicit consent of the subjects.

New comment by patrickmay in "A perfectable programming language"

patrickmay — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:22:46 +0000

Here's a good summary of the limited evidence for the benefits of strong type systems: https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/

New comment by patrickmay in "A perfectable programming language"

patrickmay — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:11:34 +0000

I came here to comment "We already have Lisp."

New comment by patrickmay in "Bouncer: Block "crypto", "rage politics", and more from your X feed using AI"

patrickmay — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:33:46 +0000

I find that using Control Panel for Twitter (not affiliated, just a happy customer) to see only the Following tab in reverse chronological order makes X tolerable. There is no benefit to For You.

New comment by patrickmay in "Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated"

patrickmay — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 02:39:37 +0000

As a (sometime) TPM, you are the kind of PM I've been looking for.

New comment by patrickmay in "Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated"

patrickmay — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 02:31:39 +0000

I'd bet if you read the Dragon book (yes, I'm dating myself) you'd have something working in less than three months. More importantly, you would understand every bit of it.

New comment by patrickmay in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

patrickmay — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:42:05 +0000

Congratulations on finding out that you have good taste by default.

New comment by patrickmay in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

patrickmay — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:38:57 +0000

> Sometimes we use . . . Oxford commas.

Good writers ALWAYS use the Oxford comma.

New comment by patrickmay in "Ask HN: How to be alone?"

patrickmay — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 22:17:41 +0000

I'm sorry you're going through this and I'm impressed that you are in touch enough with your feelings to articulate it.

There's a lot of great advice in this thread. The best I have is to 1) Join a gym and go consistently. Nothing improves your mood like endorphins. Plus, at 38 you'll be amazed at what kind of shape you can get in. 2) Meditate. Learning to be present and grounded will enable you to decide who you want to be and who you want to be with. One I like is called Quantum Light Breath, particularly the version from Jeru Kabbal. It's a guided meditation so you can do it alone, although it is great in a group as well. Spoiler: It has nothing to do with quantum mechanics or the physics of light. There is a lot of breathing, though.

Good luck.

New comment by patrickmay in "Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting"

patrickmay — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 21:33:40 +0000

I understand and appreciate your perspective. I do, however, disagree with your priorities. I mostly read here, but when I participate I want to interact with humans, not chatbots. I would much rather read a human comment with typos and poor grammar than another piece of anodyne LLM output that shows only that the responsible party doesn't value the human interaction that I do.

New comment by patrickmay in "Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting"

patrickmay — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 21:15:50 +0000

You're giving me flashbacks to PGP key signing parties.

I do like your idea, though.

New comment by patrickmay in "this css proves me human"

patrickmay — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 15:24:24 +0000

I use em-dashes, but I use them incorrectly, with a space before and after, because I think it looks better. I'm waiting to be flagged as an LLM.