Hacker News: rainsil

New comment by rainsil in "GPT-5.5"

rainsil — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 08:21:20 +0000

There are actually many parts of the world where such voices are routinely positive or neutral[0]. People in more collectivist cultures often have a less-strict division between their minds and their environments and are more apt to believe in spirits and the ‘supernatural’ as an ordinary part of the world, so ‘voices in the head’ aren’t automatically viewed as a nefarious intrusion into the sanctity of one’s mind.

Modern western cultures treat such experiences as pathologies of a sick mind, so it makes sense that the voices present more negatively.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250902-the-places-where...

New comment by rainsil in "Tax Wrapped 2025"

rainsil — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 05:34:56 +0000

Australia simply forces people to save a portion of their income into investable retirement accounts. Because the money goes towards productive investment rather than funding what is essentially a government-run Ponzi scheme, retirees on Superannuation live much better than Americans that rely on Social Security. There is a small Age Pension for those who don’t have enough Superannuation income for whatever reason.

In principle the US could phase such a system in by redirecting future Social Security payroll taxes to 401(k)s while maintaining existing commitments. But because Social Security is so deeply underfunded, workers would need to keep up solidarity payments for decades without any expectation of reciprocity once they retire.

Still, everyone would be better off in the long run.

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

rainsil — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 11:51:48 +0000

According to the US Copyright Office, fully AI-generated works aren’t eligible for copyright because they don’t have human authors. They’re in the public domain by default.

See: https://library.osu.edu/site/copyright/2026/02/06/artificial...

New comment by rainsil in "Leaked chats expose the daily life of a scam compound's enslaved workforce"

rainsil — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:56:58 +0000

We have quite a bit of insight into Indian scam centers thanks to the work of scambaiters like Jim Browning[1] who frequently hack into their CCTV cameras and desktops.

The big difference is that the workers in India are voluntarily employed. In fact they often work for companies that do legitimate customer support as well, so they maintain the facade of doing “service” for their “clients”.

It’s also worth noting that Indian call centers focus more on tech support scams rather than romance scams.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/JimBrowning

New comment by rainsil in "EU Council has withdrawn the vote on Chat Control"

rainsil — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 15:46:36 +0000

That’s a good thing. Expanded slogans have object-level meanings. Acronyms just stand as identity markers, and are much easier to dismiss.

It’s harder to argue against “Make America Great Again” or “Black Lives Matter”. Their object-level meanings are fairly anodyne and positive. It’s much easier to argue against “MAGA” or “BLM”, since the meaning is obscured by the acronym.

Political movements with nice slogans should avoid turning them into acronyms.

New comment by rainsil in "Meta Horizon OS"

rainsil — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 00:19:15 +0000

It seems like if you created a new operating system to solve these problems and it gained some traction, you'd fracture the landscape even more.

Unless your operating system happened to be superior to all the existing solutions in all aspects with no tradeoffs.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/

New comment by rainsil in "Meta Horizon OS"

rainsil — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 23:12:49 +0000

What unexplored space do you think is ripe for a totally new operating system?

New comment by rainsil in "About communication safety in Messages"

rainsil — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 17:36:26 +0000

But couldn't you just claim somebody else's name/address (such as your neighbor's) when you go vote? Or is a photo stored on the voter roll?

New comment by rainsil in "Why is it so hard to give Google money?"

rainsil — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 19:29:57 +0000

So they'd split off Google Ads then create another ad platform to sell ads on their properties? Why would anyone use the independent Google Ads?

New comment by rainsil in "Goodbye Medium, hello Ghost"

rainsil — Mon, 04 Jul 2022 14:37:08 +0000

I wonder why they haven't implemented this after so many years. It can't be much more difficult than integrating highlight.js and MathJax, and it's lost them at least one big publication (Hackernoon)

New comment by rainsil in "Goodbye Medium, hello Ghost"

rainsil — Mon, 04 Jul 2022 14:15:10 +0000

You can always use a privacy coin. Even if they get banned from exchanges, you can transact within the coin, then use an atomic cross-chain swap to cash out to bitcoin.

Alternately, there's decentralized mixing algorithms like CoinJoin that are indistinguishable from normal transactions with multiple inputs and outputs. Bitcoin's Wasabi wallet and Ethereum's Tornado cash do this.

Privacy is really a solved problem for anyone who wants to solve it.

New comment by rainsil in "SELinux is unmanageable; just turn it off if it gets in your way"

rainsil — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 14:36:42 +0000

>But I definitely think there's room for more comprehensive and transparent documentation to bridge the gap between the source code and barebones docs.

This is usually provided by technical books, which are available for a much wider range of systems than you'd think.

New comment by rainsil in "Crypto exchange revenue jumps by 600% and surpasses traditional markets in 2021"

rainsil — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 21:44:55 +0000

There's an inherent trade-off between decentralisation and computing price+performance, so it's likely that centralised exchanges will continue to be cheaper and faster for higher-frequency activities such as day trading, transaction processing, etc. Their utility for speculation decreases with harsher KYC/AML/accredited investor regulation, so it doesn't make sense for them to support that.

New comment by rainsil in "Stephen Wilhite, creator of the GIF, has died"

rainsil — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 20:48:48 +0000

WebP images support animation, and they're fully supported in Chromium and Firefox[0], but Safari support seems flaky[1]

[0]: https://caniuse.com/webp [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68522707/animated-webp-f...

New comment by rainsil in "AEG combi microwave unusable after update: device thinks it is a steam oven"

rainsil — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 16:26:04 +0000

It's a combination microwave/convection oven.

New comment by rainsil in "Deliberately optimizing for harm"

rainsil — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 20:57:55 +0000

Well the first year of the Iraq War cost the US $54 billion, according to congress's budget[0]. This doesn't include the total cost of the supporting infrastructure need to be able to deploy troops in Iraq quickly, but we can estimate that using the increase in defence budget from 2002-3, or $94 billion ($132B in 2020)[1].

According to Wikipedia, Minuteman III ICBMs have a 2020 unit cost of $20 million[2], so for the cost of an Iraq invasion, the US could have fired about 6600 missiles. Considering the invasion toppled the Iraqi government, it's pretty unlikely that firing 6600 missiles with conventional payloads would have been anywhere near as effective.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman#Counterforce

New comment by rainsil in "Gail.com"

rainsil — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 01:23:09 +0000

I didn't think typosquatting actually worked. I wonder if there's a general way to figure out the most common misspellings of a given domain name...

New comment by rainsil in "OnlyFans to block sexually explicit videos starting in October"

rainsil — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 01:41:14 +0000

The nudity exception is probably more along the lines of the usual carve-outs for 'scientific, educational, or artistic' content.

New comment by rainsil in "What Matt Levine Writes about (Or, the Rise and Fall of WeWork and GameStop)"

rainsil — Sat, 07 Aug 2021 15:34:26 +0000

Somewhat disappointed "securities fraud" wasn't mentioned, although the SEC is ever-present.

New comment by rainsil in "Ask HN: What's your go-to web stack for a productivity – performance balance?"

rainsil — Sat, 07 Aug 2021 13:56:24 +0000

Elixir and Phoenix is a great option. As a functional language, the focus is on pipelines of functions that progressively transform data structures, which is how Phoenix processes requests (through "plugs" transforming a Plug.Conn struct), and how Ecto, the database library, performs validations. Pattern matching and assertive programming, the use of keyword lists for optional arguments, behaviours (i.e. interfaces), and an ergonomic macro system make the language (almost) as productive as something like Ruby, and typespecs, along with Dialyzer, allow you to claw back some type safety. The architecture that Phoenix promotes, particularly the use of contexts, encourages you to write maintainable, well organised and encapsulated code.

LiveView is really Phoenix's killer app. It allows you to write responsive SPA-like applications without writing any JavaScript. It sends user interaction to the server over websockets and ships an optimised diff structure back to the client to patch the DOM, without having to deal with client-side state management and JSON deserialisation. It's built on top of OTP GenServers, which make it easy to write performant, stateful "processes" that scale well and are monitored by "Supervisors" that deal with restarting (or otherwise dealing) with them in the event of crashes, which reduces the need for defensive programming.

The ecosystem is also quite good, and I've found well-designed libraries for dealing with most common problems, such as auth, persistent background jobs, serialisation, wrapping common APIs. Documentation for every library is available on hexdocs.pm, and is usually decently comprehensive. For Phoenix itself, pick up Programming Phoenix, which does a better job of giving a big-picture understanding than the docs, but only has a short chapter on LiveView.

By way of criticism, I'd say that Phoenix should work on improving its directory structure to be something similar to [0], and deployment story (it's relatively difficult to find a nice solution that deals with things like migrations).

[0]: https://elixirforum.com/t/best-practice-for-directory-struct...