Hacker News: pwdisswordfishy

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user"

pwdisswordfishy — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:08:41 +0000

In my password, I have the Collectivity of Saint Martin flag emoji and United States Minor Outlying Islands flag emoji next to the French flag emoji and US flag emoji. For good measure, also the flag of Chad next to the flag of Romania. I am sure it's not going to cause any issues.

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "Am I German or Autistic?"

pwdisswordfishy — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:39:38 +0000

So ist der Geist!

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)"

pwdisswordfishy — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:02:59 +0000

You can tune a fish, it's that the command for that is fish_config instead.

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"

pwdisswordfishy — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:33:06 +0000

It should not be legal to enforce full stop. If you don't want to be disparaged, make your conduct worthy of not being disparaged. When you're being lied about, sue for defamation; "non-disparagement clauses" are redundant at best, an attack on free speech at worst.

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "Big-Endian Testing with QEMU"

pwdisswordfishy — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 09:58:23 +0000

> it’s easier to draw pictures as a matrix of bytes that are transmitted from left to right and top to bottom

This argument is pretty silly: visualizations can always be changed. For some time I have been thinking that hexdumps on little-endian systems ought to be written right-to-left: in fact, when I once decided to include such a right-to-left dumper in my own software, it took me very little time for me to get used to, and I immediately started regretting I don't have it available everywhere.

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection"

pwdisswordfishy — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:52:25 +0000

> Marc Andreessen was right about web browsers.

Actually, what about web browsers was he right about?

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "Use string views instead of passing std:wstring by const&"

pwdisswordfishy — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 06:46:41 +0000

Or wait until P3655 ships, which will bring std::wcstring_view.

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only"

pwdisswordfishy — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:59:12 +0000

You need a better sense of humour apparently.

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "CodingFont: A game to help you pick a coding font"

pwdisswordfishy — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:05:56 +0000

"Italic" does not merely mean "slanted".

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "CodingFont: A game to help you pick a coding font"

pwdisswordfishy — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 11:56:12 +0000

A coding font is supposed to help you distinguish between characters, not confuse them for each other. Also, ASCII ligatures usually look worse than the proper Unicode character they are supposed to emulate. The often indecisive form they take (glyphs rearranged to resemble a different character, but still composed of original glyph shapes; weird proportions and spacing due to the font maintaining the column width of the separate ASCII code points) creates a strong uncanny valley effect. I wouldn't mind having "≤", "≠" or "⇒" tokens in my source code, but half-measures just don't cut it.

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "Coding agents could make free software matter again"

pwdisswordfishy — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 07:32:14 +0000

Wow, some corps could offload some of their costs to "the community" (unpair labor), while end users are as disenfranchised as ever! How validating!

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "Linux is an interpreter"

pwdisswordfishy — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 01:52:42 +0000

There's no ignoring it. It was raised pre-emptively in the very first comment: "the way that "professional" is used as a euphemism in Americans' bizarre discursive repertoire".

> the phrase "unprofessional professional" means

That's just an oxymoron.

> a professional (ie getting paid) who is behaving unprofessionally (ie exhibiting a lack of professionalism)

A professional who is getting paid, the (only) necessary and sufficient condition for being "professional", is by definition exhibiting professionalism. That's a fact, and it's not any more complicated than that.

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "The loneliness of A Room of One’s Own"

pwdisswordfishy — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 01:51:31 +0000

> reluctance to really talk about class and their own position in the class system in favour of lip service

That's by design, obvs.

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "C++26: A User-Friednly assert() macro"

pwdisswordfishy — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 06:44:58 +0000

But if the assertion fails, the program is aborted before the pointer would have been dereferenced, making it not UB. This explanation is bogus.

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "Linux is an interpreter"

pwdisswordfishy — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 02:01:05 +0000

Nope. There's no broader debate. "Professional" means "X is getting paid for this", not "X is paying something in order for X to be able to do this". It's that simple.

> To put an example, suppose you hire a painter, and they show up with non-work attire, no ladder, no brush, they ask you to buy a can of paint for them and a brush. Compared to a contractor that bills you flat and brins their own ladder, has work clothing and shoes, an air pneumatic spray painter, a breathing mask. Who is more professional?

Literally meaningless. Are both getting paid? Yes? Then they are both professionals.

You can insist on using "professional" in a strained way to try to facilitate some attempt at being judgmental and gatekeepy, but "professional" means what it means. If you mean something else, then say what you mean and leave out the euphemisms.

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "Linux is an interpreter"

pwdisswordfishy — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 19:40:07 +0000

> if we can't afford 1.50$/mo, then we aren't really professionals and are just coasting on real infrastructure subsidized by professionals

This is a strange claim.

Whether someone is getting paid or not to do something is what determines who is a professional, not whether or how much they're paying someone else. (And that's the only thing that matters, unlike the way that "professional" is used as a euphemism in Americans' bizarre discursive repertoire.)

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "Every novel that has ever been published is sitting inside ChatGPT"

pwdisswordfishy — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 16:03:26 +0000

This tweet is misleading (shocker, I know; Twitter and misleading ragebait—who could have guessed?).

It claims that "Up to 90%" (accurate, or at least plausible—but unsurprising) of "Every book you have ever read" (just untrue) is "sitting inside ChatGPT right now".

Meanwhile, 100% of the books that have been scanned into Google Books's scanned books collection are sitting "inside" Google Books's scanned books collection. And 100% of the web pages that Google Search has crawled and indexed are sitting "inside" Google Search's index of the pages it has crawled and indexed.

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "I found 39 Algolia admin keys exposed across open source documentation sites"

pwdisswordfishy — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:08:36 +0000

Because "This has to be one of the dumbest, most reckless threads to have been posted (and so vociferously defended) on HN."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47419913

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "FSF statement on copyright infringement lawsuit Bartz v. Anthropic"

pwdisswordfishy — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:14:20 +0000

OH NO THE POOR CAPITALISTS

New comment by pwdisswordfishy in "4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches"

pwdisswordfishy — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 05:58:55 +0000

> Ofcom really thinks that their laws apply globally.

How silly of them. Obviously, only the US jurisdiction can do that.