Hacker News: ptrl600

New comment by ptrl600 in "Regression: malware reminder on every read still causes subagent refusals"

ptrl600 — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 05:48:15 +0000

Interesting how so much money is wasted, likely because they put a period instead of a comma.

New comment by ptrl600 in "The Prompt API"

ptrl600 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 05:50:49 +0000

Perhaps we could have one column of text that contains the content with no tone, and a second column of text that contains only the tone with no content.

New comment by ptrl600 in "The Prompt API"

ptrl600 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 05:12:55 +0000

It would hide all comments in the thread, including this one.

New comment by ptrl600 in "The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode"

ptrl600 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:58:46 +0000

Why didn't they open the source themselves? What's the point of all this secrecy anyway?

New comment by ptrl600 in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

ptrl600 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:46:34 +0000

Hey, the user doesn't need a Google account, that's good. Still a danger of frog boiling but not as bad as I was expecting.

New comment by ptrl600 in "I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job"

ptrl600 — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:51:53 +0000

Bring on the AI interviews. I can memorize all the trivia they want. At least then I have a fighting chance, otherwise it's no interview with no reason given. More productive to sweet talk clankers.

New comment by ptrl600 in "Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable"

ptrl600 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 11:24:44 +0000

Looks like a shoo-in for my next phone!

New comment by ptrl600 in "Libxml2 Enterprise Edition (AGPL, from the previous maintainer)"

ptrl600 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 14:28:58 +0000

I'd assume it's riffing on Java EE.

New comment by ptrl600 in "What's the best way to learn a new language?"

ptrl600 — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 16:05:14 +0000

Assimil, L-R method (parallel texts w/audiobook), essentially redoing a grade school education, AJATT, ginormous Anki decks full of sentences...

New comment by ptrl600 in "Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring"

ptrl600 — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 23:05:38 +0000

Just like in Asimov's "Monkey's Finger".

New comment by ptrl600 in "You can't trust the internet anymore"

ptrl600 — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:46:24 +0000

Websites with poor SEO practice are often more trustworthy.

New comment by ptrl600 in "Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android"

ptrl600 — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 20:44:02 +0000

Friction hopefully means "you have to plug in a USB cable" and not "you have to associate your phone with a particular Google account, then go through a process with Google's customer service to approve your phone for sideloading" etc.

New comment by ptrl600 in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

ptrl600 — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 12:31:39 +0000

Captured? To do what with?

New comment by ptrl600 in "Perl articles are being memory wiped from Wikipedia"

ptrl600 — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 12:19:47 +0000

Because it puts the history of the article behind a lock

I wonder if there are any privileged Wikipedia accounts who have defected and are doing a sci-hub thing.

New comment by ptrl600 in "TikTok unlawfully tracks shopping habits and use of dating apps?"

ptrl600 — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 02:41:56 +0000

I wonder if that "fake permissions" Android sandboxing thing from like a decade ago still works.

The right to lie to apps should be part of the new tech Magna Carta

New comment by ptrl600 in "Should CSS be constraints?"

ptrl600 — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 20:30:13 +0000

The Python library "enaml", which is kind of wrapper around QT, has a constraint-based layout engine: I think it's successful, I made a fairly complicated GUI and it didn't have any performance issues. Of course I was only developing for desktop...

New comment by ptrl600 in "Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?"

ptrl600 — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 10:47:11 +0000

I had a laptop in the mid 00s which made a strange buzzing sound when scrolling a document in Adobe Reader, and in no other context.

New comment by ptrl600 in "The Penicillin Myth"

ptrl600 — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 02:43:10 +0000

Low kolmogorov complexity equals suspicious

New comment by ptrl600 in "`satisfies` is my favorite TypeScript keyword (2024)"

ptrl600 — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 21:52:50 +0000

This is wordier than just "as const", what advantage does it give? (I am a newbie and genuinely don't know)

edit: perhaps the advantage only comes into play for mutable values, where you want a narrower type than default, but not that narrow. Indeed, this is covered in the article, but CTRL+F "as const" doesn't work on the page for whatever reason, so I missed it.

New comment by ptrl600 in "Over-regulation is doubling the cost"

ptrl600 — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 07:28:04 +0000

In the situation that the personnel and legal code of the government depend very little on the outcome of elections in practice, would you say that the incentives for a government would be rather different?