Hacker News: paultopia

New comment by paultopia in "NASA Force"

paultopia — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 19:19:21 +0000

Based on the name I’d thought it was going to be another militarization project, thank god it isn’t.

New comment by paultopia in "Cloudflare Email Service"

paultopia — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 21:19:47 +0000

Hah, what I wish Cloudflare would supply in the email space is a “prove you’re a human” except for access to my inbox

New comment by paultopia in "Every Law a Commit – US Law in GitHub"

paultopia — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:28:30 +0000

This is awesome… the code of federal regulations would be a fantastic next project.

New comment by paultopia in "Nasdaq's Shame"

paultopia — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:50:47 +0000

So the next question becomes: is there anything out there that’s like an almost-index? Like something that acts like a passive index fund, except when acting like an index fund would be obviously idiotic (for e.g. if following the rules suddenly becomes “invest everything in Elon Musk and pray he doesn’t bankrupt you with a tweet), the person in charge has the discretion to say “doing that would be stupid, no?”

New comment by paultopia in "Nasdaq's Shame"

paultopia — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 23:41:12 +0000

Uh, can someone explain this to me like I’m 5, but somehow still have money invested in index funds? It makes me sound like my invested-in-vanguard-total-market-indexes-and-fidelity-target-date-funds money is going to be mechanically dumped into Elon Stock because of FinanceWord FinanceWord FinanceWord gobbledgook FinanceWord but is that the correct reading?

New comment by paultopia in "Willingness to look stupid"

paultopia — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:28:02 +0000

Successful professor with a very theoretical (as opposed to empirical) research trajectory here: this feels extremely accurate to me.

I see this with students all the time: they're so afraid of making mistakes that they refuse to write anything.

I often say "I think in print." If I believe something is true and I can defend it, I publish it. If it turns out to be wrong, fine, I'll correct it in the next paper and the conversation has moved forward. Nobody is going to think I'm an idiot for being wrong.

This, however, might work better the more senior one is. There may be a failure mode, at least in academia, where you start publishing mistakes and lose all credibility. But then again, I know a lot of people who have published a lot of mistakes starting young and who seem to still be doing fine, so... perhaps not!

New comment by paultopia in "Vim-pencil: Rethinking Vim as a tool for writing"

paultopia — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:40:25 +0000

I love this. I use various text editors mostly used by devs (moving back and forth between emacs and sublime on mac and textastic on ipad) for serious longform writing all the time, usually using markdown + pandoc, and it has a bunch of advantages and disadvantages.

IME the main advantages are (1) not having to fight with useless Microsoft word (and similar) behavior, bloat, bugs, etc. and (2) being able to mix in a spot of code as needed, for example compiling different sections together, doing a bit of text replacement and templating etc.

The main disadvantage is that the tooling isn't really there. I've done a stupid amount of yak shaving trying to get things like footnote folding in emacs, word count, etc., the spell checking is waaay behind, outline formats don't really work right (though they also don't really work right in word etc.)

So three cheers for anyone working on making the tooling problem better!!

New comment by paultopia in "What “The Best” Looks Like"

paultopia — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 18:27:15 +0000

> Seniority here also unfortunately often correlates with age. The best startup employee will usually be someone early in their career who doesn’t have as many responsibilities or as much need for consistency due to having more dependents. They may have fewer immediate cash flow constraints, fewer “adult responsibilities.” Kids need braces and karate classes, and if Mom is doing 996 at a ten-person company paying her peanuts, offering a crappy health care plan, promising an epic payout ten years from now, that’s a real mismatch. Startups are an extreme sport, and generally inadvisable for anybody who’s not in a safe position to speculate on their career for several years.

Oooof. Following this paragraph is a recipe for age and family status discrimination lawsuits. (A number of states prohibit both, and federal law prohibits the former above 40). Quite possibly sex discrimination lawsuits as well if a court quite plausibly concludes that someone who makes decisions this way will also be averse from hiring women of childbearing age or life stage.

New comment by paultopia in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

paultopia — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 21:15:55 +0000

https://gowder.io ---I'm fairly proud of this design, which was meant to be an homage to the old palm pilots! needs some updating though :-)

New comment by paultopia in "A university got itself banned from the Linux kernel (2021)"

paultopia — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 20:23:08 +0000

Woah, the thing that leapt out at me, as a professor, is that they somehow got an exemption from the UMN institutional review board. Uh, how?? It's clearly human subjects research under the conventional federal definition[1] and obviously posed a meaningful risk of harm, in addition to being conducted deceptively. Someone has to have massively been asleep at the wheel at that IRB.

[1] https://grants.nih.gov/policy-and-compliance/policy-topics/h...

New comment by paultopia in "Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices"

paultopia — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 04:14:41 +0000

As another commenter in this thread pointed out, pricing is the bare minimum for retail. We’re not talking about general sloppiness, we’re talking about misleading consumers on the basics of their transactions.

Yes, lots of businesses have thin margins. But the law (such as contract law and the laws against consumer fraud, which are implicated here) sets the things that a business can’t economize on in order to meet those margins. It’s the same as food safety: restaurants also run really thin margins, but they’re not allowed to store the meat on the counter because refrigeration is too expensive. If they do that, they get shut down by the health inspector.

Businesses “should” comply with consumer fraud laws for the same reason they “should” comply with health codes.

New comment by paultopia in "Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices"

paultopia — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 21:42:06 +0000

A justification for lying to poor people about the prices of things they're trying to buy? Do tell.

New comment by paultopia in "Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices"

paultopia — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 15:42:57 +0000

At a certain point we have to acknowledge that a huge share of our economy is just raw predation.

New comment by paultopia in "Tabloid: The Clickbait Headline Programming Language"

paultopia — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 03:49:32 +0000

It’s been too long since something like this has happened. Kudos.

New comment by paultopia in "The end of the rip-off economy: consumers use LLMs against information asymmetry"

paultopia — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 19:22:59 +0000

Interesting—-just a couple of days ago, I actually figured out my new favorite prompt, which was “find me reviews for X by established publications as opposed to SEO-driven content farms”—-seems to work reasonably well to cut out the first several pages of google results for reviews of any product

New comment by paultopia in "The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks"

paultopia — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 03:29:52 +0000

Hah I still have some Zip disks sitting in a drawer, completely unreadable

New comment by paultopia in "StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game"

paultopia — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 19:41:55 +0000

I have to shamelessly show off my personal webpage, which is designed to be a rough emulation of how I remember palm OS looking back in the day, at least when you load it on a phone. https://gowder.io --- took me way too long to hack together the CSS for this in like 2017 :-)

New comment by paultopia in "StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game"

paultopia — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 19:37:54 +0000

Now that Pebble is coming back why not bring Palm back too? I miss my circa 1999 PalmPilot so bad. I even had a gigantic ugly wireless modem for it that I used to check e-mail.

New comment by paultopia in "The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks"

paultopia — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 16:16:35 +0000

The differences in disk size and software needed to access the Hawking material is typical of the early floppy disk era. "There wasn't one system that dominated the market," Talboom explains. "It was a bit of a wild west out there."

Good heavens this makes me feel ancient. Do today's BBC readers really not know that there were two main sizes of floppy disk?

New comment by paultopia in "Apple Vision Pro upgraded with M5 chip"

paultopia — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 18:52:24 +0000

... so does this mean that the rest of us will one day be able to buy the previous model for some price less than your firstborn??