Hacker News: pull_my_finger

New comment by pull_my_finger in "Work out daily? OK, but how socially fit are you? (2023)"

pull_my_finger — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 18:57:41 +0000

While I personally agree with you, there are plenty of "churches" with a focus that seems to be almost or more focused on networking than prayer and worship. Not recommending it, especially not over a real church (if there's an ideology that vibes with you), but they are a thing.

I feel like I can't put enough disclaimers on this though: actively searching for a community/identity/place to fit-in is a pretty vulnerable place to be and there are organizations (e.g. cults) that actively take advantage of that.

[moved from child comment]

New comment by pull_my_finger in "Voxatron"

pull_my_finger — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 01:11:02 +0000

Unfortunately, development is essentially dead afaik. Pico-8, originally just a prototype/development playground for Voxatron, became an instant hit and totally eclipsed Voxatron and now gets all the development hours, now shared with Picotron, which is an even newer product detracting from Voxatron. It's a total shame too, because I'd seen lots of demos of it on volumetric displays[1] which look amazing.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCeZpW8b9J8

New comment by pull_my_finger in "Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)"

pull_my_finger — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 19:31:35 +0000

I don't understand what this is doing. Can't you sideload any ebook onto a kobo anyway? Never had an issue on my Clara

New comment by pull_my_finger in "What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)"

pull_my_finger — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 16:29:53 +0000

I wonder if the real problem isn't being able to write efficient queries, but that developers struggle to add (yet another) programming language. Just use AWK, just use SQL, just use jq, just use xyz. It's a lot of overhead. I would be OK to lose whatever fractional speed difference to be able to write my queries in a different scripting language. If I ever scaled so much that I needed to shave microseconds off my queries, there are already tons of DBs available, maybe just using a different tool or, even better, compile the DB with(out) different scripting support.

New comment by pull_my_finger in "Hackers shoveled snow for company, were rewarded with network admin access"

pull_my_finger — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 19:45:25 +0000

I unfortunately had the infuriating experience dealing with a (government, of course) site that did this. To add to the experience, not only did it silently truncate at registration, but it did NOT truncate on the login fields. And of course, it has a lockout after several failed attempts. UX gore at it's finest.

New comment by pull_my_finger in "No LLM Code in Dependencies"

pull_my_finger — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:29:49 +0000

It's almost like the big companies are playing by a totally different set of rules. How else could Sam, Zuck and co, just blatantly rip pirated, copyrighted, copylefted material and just call whatever repercussions they do (or don't) receive the "cost of doing business". I'm not "anti-AI", I think it's incredible what can be done, but HOW it was produced, and how it's being used is wrong on so many levels.

Spotify is running ads for a design "thing", that's basically a generative AI logo creator. Isn't that one of the few instances that's already been clearly put into law - that you can't copyright AI generated stuff? How can you create a business that's selling uncopyrightable logos (which definitely would need/want to be copyrighted/trademarked)? It's the Wild, Wild West out here.

New comment by pull_my_finger in "No LLM Code in Dependencies"

pull_my_finger — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 19:12:42 +0000

Ethically, selling code or programs built on other peoples code without consent is wrong.

Legally, it's probably also unlawful, unless you believe that smoke they're selling that it was trained on code that was open licensed or in the public domain.

Professionally, it's a poor choice to ship code that wasn't produced with human care and consideration or even thorough oversight or understanding based on recent trends.

Software developers like to call themselves "engineers", but more and more they're showing they're more than happy to be configurators of black boxes of modular software. Whether that means pulling random NPM packages with thousands of other random packages as dependencies (none of which are even browsed or licenses checked), or "vibe coding" slop the LLM spits out.

When the main problem was people assembling random packages, I always likened it to "sandwich artists" at Subway. They just stand behind the counter and configure the product of random combinations of ingredients (someone else's NPM packages). Now it's like they can't even see the selection of ingredients, they just grab handfuls and shove it together until they get something sandwich shaped. Bad times in software.

New comment by pull_my_finger in "On cigarettes"

pull_my_finger — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:38:25 +0000

The amount of cigarette glazing on the internet in the past 1-2 years is crazy to me. On Reddit, there are very thinly-veiled promotional content popping up more and more often like "taste test" videos comparing brands, and one that was a supposedly viral "come smoke with me at the park and I'll give you a free cigarette" thing. Gen Z and hopefully Gen Alpha have some of the lowest smoking rates (idk how vaping factors in or muddles those numbers), but it seems like Big Tobacco has discovered they can get around smoking advertising bans by using social marketing similar to how vape companies were sponsoring tons of influencers on tiktok. I hate it. Why are we letting them advertise this stuff that whole generations know is actually deadly and addictive. Even in this thread, there is a suspicious feeling of canvassers among the comments. Do not like...

New comment by pull_my_finger in "ACL 1.0: A source-available commercial license for the AI era"

pull_my_finger — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:46:18 +0000

How are people handling AI generated code these days? Seems like everyone is using some sort of coding assistant. You can't just ship AI generated (or assisted) code to clients as if it were you're to (sub)license, can you? You don't even hold license to do so, I'd imagine

New comment by pull_my_finger in "A Practical Guide to SSH Tunnels: Local and Remote Port Forwarding"

pull_my_finger — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:25:53 +0000

I've been a very happy user of firefox container tabs, but this is the first I'd heard of container proxies. Any resources on them you can share?

New comment by pull_my_finger in "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society"

pull_my_finger — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 01:37:07 +0000

Only thing that comes to mind off the top of the head is that JGL has been very outspoken against AI and the dangers of kids using it.

New comment by pull_my_finger in "Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures"

pull_my_finger — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 04:07:58 +0000

I'm curious to see if this will embolden game corps to continue mistreating consumers or if they will acknowledge consumers are aware of that ethereal state of their "ownership" of games and start selling more complete products instead of "clients" to servers that can be rug-pulled at any time. I think we all can guess the answer as consumers continue to buy, unfortunately, but this movement is at least a step in the right direction.

New comment by pull_my_finger in "I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer"

pull_my_finger — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:09:41 +0000

Any examples? I guess I only know of his public/FOSS works.

New comment by pull_my_finger in "7.8 magnitude earthquake shakes part of southern Philippines. Tsunami possible"

pull_my_finger — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 02:04:02 +0000

Phivolcs literally gets hugged to death after almost every significant event. Really unfortunate considering the subject matter.

New comment by pull_my_finger in "Love systemd timers"

pull_my_finger — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 15:21:53 +0000

I'm fully ready to drink the "just let systemd do all the things" kool-aid, but I would love to see some sort of introductory/tutorial info into some of the things it can do other than services - i.e. containers and timers. I know man pages exist, but it would be nice if there was more scannable intro out there.

New comment by pull_my_finger in "Is AI causing a repeat of Front end's Lost Decade?"

pull_my_finger — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:51:40 +0000

I don't think we should blame the LLMs, frameworks and the libraries necessarily. In my own experience, it feels like the real problem is a lot of companies (especially start ups) like to talk about "rapid prototyping", but are quite keen to just keep the prototype as the final product. Bootstrap, Rails, Tailwind, Nextjs and now LLM generated code... great for getting something up quickly with a semi-polished look to demo a thing. The real problem is that we're selling prototypes as products.

New comment by pull_my_finger in "What it would take to rebuild U.S. manufacturing might"

pull_my_finger — Thu, 28 May 2026 00:13:56 +0000

I get why the government is keen to do this, but what sane citizen wants to live anywhere near those factories they want to bring back? Nothing like contaminated drinking water, poor air quality, acid rain that ruins your cars paint, noise and light pollution etc, etc, etc. Not to mention they'd surely be built with automation in mind to rug pull and wishful thinking about job creation. No thanks.

Colorado and California Exempt Open Source from Age Attestation

pull_my_finger — Tue, 26 May 2026 22:42:59 +0000

Article URL: https://system76.com/blog/post/co-and-ca-exempt-open-source-from-age-attestation

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48287007

Points: 26

# Comments: 4

New comment by pull_my_finger in "Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD"

pull_my_finger — Thu, 21 May 2026 23:10:11 +0000

Can you detail the transition? What were the pain points? I feel like you lose a lot of the selling point of OpenBSD as soon as you start pulling from ports, but how could you do anything productive without it

New comment by pull_my_finger in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"

pull_my_finger — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:43:18 +0000

What gets me is when this was brought up, they said "requiring explicit permission will kill the AI industry"[1]. No shit! Why do you think all the rest of us didn't build a business/"industry" around stealing shit? They could have done it at a slower pace while respecting copyright laws, but they were too greedy to be first to market and secure a hold.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/news/674366/nick-clegg-uk-ai-artist...