Hacker News: plasma_beam

New comment by plasma_beam in "Changes to GitHub Copilot individual plans"

plasma_beam — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 22:56:44 +0000

Because if you’re a vscode user up until a couple days ago you could hammer Opus 4.6 all day every day and pay nowhere close to the Claude Max plan. Many people exploited this and the subsidy is closing.

New comment by plasma_beam in "Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor"

plasma_beam — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:47:13 +0000

Similarly, laptop purist for the past 25 years. I so much prefer the focus of one thing on my screen at a time, and toggling between apps without having to shift eyes on a large monitor. I also like to pick up and work from starbucks or wherever. I feel like we are in the minority overall but I do know some like us.

New comment by plasma_beam in "Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died"

plasma_beam — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 19:38:42 +0000

I see everyone talking about Hyperion, so I will play up The Terror as one of my favorites. The TV series did NOT do it justice.

New comment by plasma_beam in "DOGE Track"

plasma_beam — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:13:26 +0000

I like the layout of this site. However I feel it should be stated more prominently that the primary source of data are online news articles.

New comment by plasma_beam in "uBlock filter list to hide all YouTube Shorts"

plasma_beam — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:30:29 +0000

I only use YouTube with my watch history set to off. So there is no feed, and I only see updates from channels I actually subscribed to. If I want to see some random crap I go search for it but it’s a clean slate next time I open the app. I have found this method of using YouTube to be extremely useful.

New comment by plasma_beam in "Roger Ebert Reviews "The Shawshank Redemption" (1999)"

plasma_beam — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 14:20:52 +0000

This generation will never experience the joy of flipping on network tv on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, seeing Shawshank on, sitting down and just watching it, even though you’ve seen it countless times and it’s the tv-edited commercial filled version.

New comment by plasma_beam in "A spider web unlike any seen before"

plasma_beam — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 14:33:21 +0000

I feel like a lot of the pro-spider replies have never accidentally disturbed or stepped on a momma wolf spider carrying her babies on back and witnessed the pure terror that ensues as hundreds of babies swarm out across your floor.

New comment by plasma_beam in "All New Java Language Features Since Java 21"

plasma_beam — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 14:42:31 +0000

I view this largely as a symptom of the widescale “success” of the bloated J2EE app servers in the early 2000s to mid 2010s. Your Java version and dependencies were locked in and upgrading was a massive effort. A large group of developers stagnated on Java 1.4.2 and 5 and seemingly never updated their use of the language, even when moving to Java 8 and beyond. The legacy stuff keeps ticking along.

New comment by plasma_beam in "Japan's Creepiest Station"

plasma_beam — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 17:23:54 +0000

I'm going to guess the person suffers from vertigo, as have I to a small degree - particularly on the metro escalator in Rosslyn, VA (across the river from DC). The sensation occurs going down or up very tall escalators in a tunnel. When it hits, you feel like you are traveling horizontally with some weird tunnel vision. This is terrifying and can cause you to feel like you're falling - even when you know you are going down or up, your eyes are telling you you're traveling horizontally.

I've also gotten this driving a car through long tunnels as well, going down or up (Baltimore 895 harbor tunnel can do this).

New comment by plasma_beam in "Shallow water is dangerous too"

plasma_beam — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 05:51:55 +0000

Got it, thanks for replying. Sorry this happened and glad she’s ok.

New comment by plasma_beam in "Shallow water is dangerous too"

plasma_beam — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 23:11:40 +0000

As a pool owner (3 feet in the shallow end and eight feet in the deep end) and parent of a three year old plus older kids that grew up with the pool — I can not fathom allowing a four year old to explore the yard on their own when this was there. Even if just two feet deep. A body of water that goes down into the ground (which this fountain appears to be) is dangerous to young children, period. I respect other peoples’ parenting styles but I personally don’t understand.

New comment by plasma_beam in "Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M from Defense Department"

plasma_beam — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 01:00:08 +0000

Most of US government runs significant workloads on AWS now and that’s only increasing. They’ve cornered govt cloud infrastructure (with Azure, GCP, etc. very far behind) so not sure this matters in grand scheme of things.

Anecdotal based on industry experience, no citations.

New comment by plasma_beam in "Meta: Shut down your invasive AI Discover feed"

plasma_beam — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 16:00:02 +0000

It blows my mind how many people still publicly post venmo payments, so this doesn’t surprise me actually.

New comment by plasma_beam in "The key to a successful egg drop experiment? Drop it on its side"

plasma_beam — Thu, 29 May 2025 19:05:40 +0000

In high school physics I procrastinated until the night before our egg drop competition to finally address what I was going to do. I got a medium/large size plastic tupperware container (rigid plastic body with a rigid lid). I took a bag of cotton balls, stuffed them in there as tight as I could, put an empty cardboard toilet paper roll vertically in the center, with more cotton balls designed to go in said cardboard below and above the egg. Taped the lid shut. People laughed at my concoction, especially those that went to great efforts to design theirs. I even tossed mine in the air beforehand to test it, which gave me extreme confidence going into the 30 ft drop that I'd be fine. I was. I do not recall what side it landed on but obviously it bounced several hard times after hitting the ground.

New comment by plasma_beam in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)"

plasma_beam — Mon, 26 May 2025 02:15:17 +0000

Very interested and will reach out, thanks!

New comment by plasma_beam in "NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions"

plasma_beam — Sat, 10 May 2025 03:00:49 +0000

Proud to say that in the early-mid 2000s I was a consultant dev at NSF and worked on the research proposal submission and eval website called Fastlane. They’ve since moved the functionality to research.gov, but my code ran in production for 20ish? years? It was old school Java Struts, JSPs, EJB’s..typical J2EE of the time. Lots of people I worked with decided to leave consulting and became NSF employees. They were good and smart people.

New comment by plasma_beam in "CVE program faces swift end after DHS fails to renew contract"

plasma_beam — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 13:45:57 +0000

This is DHS, not DOD.

New comment by plasma_beam in "CVE program faces swift end after DHS fails to renew contract"

plasma_beam — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 13:42:09 +0000

It doesn't appear to have posted to FPDS yet: https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/fpdsportal?q=PIID%3A%2270RCSJ2...

The contract expired today, but had an option period through March of 2026. DHS just needed to exercise the option.

Edit: Note the contract ended today April 16 - so performance would stop midnight tonight if the option wasn't exercised. Government contracts routinely go down to the wire like this, and often are late getting exercised. Why the uproar over this one? Did CISA signal to MITRE that they weren't going to exercise the option?

New comment by plasma_beam in "CVE Foundation Launched to Secure the Future of the CVE Program"

plasma_beam — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 13:34:27 +0000

It hasn't posted to FPDS yet:https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/fpdsportal?q=PIID%3A%2270RCSJ2...

Assuming this is the correct contract, which it appears to be, it had an option period starting today through March of next year. DHS just needed to exercise the option.

New comment by plasma_beam in "You might not need WebSockets"

plasma_beam — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 20:51:24 +0000

You butter bread before it’s toasted? My mind is honestly blown (as I move to kitchen to try this).