Hacker News: ropable

New comment by ropable in "Rotten Dot Com"

ropable — Sun, 10 May 2026 23:48:09 +0000

Oh my word. This site, orsm, ebaumsworld, etc. I'm glad to say that none of these were formative for me, but that were always morbidly entertaining to a young man still firming up his prefrontal cortex. They were like reliable garbage fires that you couldn't help but go look at sometimes.

Yeesh, the things we put on the internet.

New comment by ropable in "California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy"

ropable — Wed, 06 May 2026 05:36:23 +0000

Everybody gangsta about not needing government handouts until it's their own livelihood at stake.

New comment by ropable in "Google removes "Doki Doki Literature Club" from Google Play"

ropable — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 23:35:38 +0000

Doki Doki Literature Club is a game that I played, and then replayed, purely on the basis of recommendations by trusted reviewers. The genre (visual novel) and theme (anime pin-up schoolgirl) are ones that I have no interest in. I was extremely glad that I did play it, though; it was a profoundly thought-provoking experience. It was extremely disturbing in the best possible way.

Definitely not for kids, though, and it's worth taking the content/trigger warnings seriously.

New comment by ropable in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

ropable — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 07:45:42 +0000

It's very hard for me to see this war (regardless of final outcome) as anything other than a massive strategic loss for the USA. The US has spent a stunning amount of materiel and political capital to achieve nothing of lasting benefit to themselves, and have killed thousands while further destabilising and impoverishing the region. A catastrophic outcome.

It's absolutely possible for both sides in a major conflict to lose, and they've managed to do so in this case.

New comment by ropable in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

ropable — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 23:44:10 +0000

As evidence supporting the "bright side" outcome of this conflict, two separate people I know here is Australia have fast-tracked a decision to replace their ICE vehicles with an EV. It only took a week's sticker shock at the fuel bowser to take them from "Eh, sometime next year" and "comparing a hybrid with ICE" to "Buying a BYD car ASAP". I'd be curious to know if there has been any significant effect of the market for electric scooters and bikes, also.

New comment by ropable in "How the Turner twins are mythbusting modern technical apparel"

ropable — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 04:45:07 +0000

I didn't quite clock what they meant in that paragraph. I'm pretty sure that a 1.8 degree drop in body temp is approaching hypothermia.

New comment by ropable in "The American Healthcare Conundrum"

ropable — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 23:56:05 +0000

You mean that there is a rule which prevents for-profit companies offering personal health insurance from pocketing more than 20% of revenue?

Those poor, benighted shareholders. What a socialist hellscape.

New comment by ropable in "Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting"

ropable — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 23:59:07 +0000

"New account". Meanwhile, the account is 4.5 years old with 2600 karma and has hundreds of thoughtful comments.

New comment by ropable in "Does that use a lot of energy?"

ropable — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 02:35:42 +0000

It gets across just how ridiculously energy-dense liquid petroleum fuels are.

New comment by ropable in "EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear"

ropable — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 01:31:48 +0000

Alternative story: they take these still-perfectly-functional finished products and find other markets for them. This isn't second-hand, damaged clothing, it's unsold new product.

New comment by ropable in "It's 2026, Just Use Postgres"

ropable — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 02:54:34 +0000

I have a colleague who (inexplicably) doesn't trust Postgres for "high performance" applications. He needed a database of shared state for a variable number of running containers to manage a queue, so he decided to implement his own bespoke file-based database, using shared disk. Lo and behold, during the first big (well-anticipated) high-demand event, that system absolutely crawled. It ran, but it was a total bottleneck during two days of high demand. I, who has made a New Years resolution to no longer spend political capital on things that I can't change, looked on with a keen degree of schadenfreude.

Just. Use. Postgres.

New comment by ropable in "France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc."

ropable — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 05:22:38 +0000

Trump has done/is doing generational harm to the perception of the US worldwide, to say nothing of US soft-power influence. It's going to take decades to rebuild that trust after he's gone, and we still have a couple of years of his term to run yet.

New comment by ropable in "Nvidia Stock Crash Prediction"

ropable — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:32:29 +0000

From my perspective, the US is foot-gunning itself into geopolitical irrelevance through the destruction of its soft power and undermining the NATO alliance. For all its many, many faults, the CCP's actions around establishing itself as the Asian regional superpower are patient, strategic and consistent over the long term. They're playing it far too smart to get into a shooting war with the US, and I'm in agreement that they'll probably end up consolidating Taiwan peacefully in a decade or so.

New comment by ropable in "GenAI, the snake eating its own tail"

ropable — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:24:26 +0000

Everyone here throwing shade at Stack Overflow is clearly too young to remember the horror of Experts Exchange and every other technical help site prior to SO. For nearly a decade, it was absolutely transformative as a technical help resource. It certainly had its faults, but it was so far ahead of the other options as to be game-changing.

I believe that the main reason for SO's decline starting around 2018 was that most of the core technical questions had been answered. There was an enormous existing corpus of accepted answers around fundamental topics, and technology just doesn't change fast enough to sustain the site. Then the LLMs digested the site's (beautifully machine-readable) corpus along with the rest of the internet and now the AIs can give users that info directly, resulting in a downward spiral of traffic to SO, fewer new questions, etc.

Vale, Stack Overflow. You helped me solve many tricky problems.

New comment by ropable in "Nvidia Stock Crash Prediction"

ropable — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 05:30:17 +0000

If China does invade Taiwan, I feel like most people are going to have bigger problems than the Nvidia stock price.

New comment by ropable in "Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?"

ropable — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 02:15:56 +0000

A social circle is like a garden, inasmuch as you have to put in work to tend and maintain it. You have to put yourself in a position of potential awkwardness or rejection, which isn't easy. Interacting with people (especially strangers) also takes practice - small talk is a skill like any other.

If you already have a friendship circle, start being the one to propose meetups (cafe, pub, picnic, hike, etc.) If you don't, it's harder - join a social sporting league, group fitness class, dance class, DnD group, anything where people have to talk with each other. When you arrive, turn your phone off for the interval. It might take a couple of goes to find something that sticks or the right environment.

I think that the real trick of "solving" the loneliness epidemic is that it isn't spread evenly. Everyone has their own individual level of opportunity for social interaction, so the solution is hyper-local and individualised. There's no one size fits all solution.

New comment by ropable in "Every country should set 16 as the minimum age for social media accounts"

ropable — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 07:30:45 +0000

I continue to be broadly in favour of this idea. I agree that there's some wiggle room around the specific age (15 vs 16), but for a population-level change you just need to pick an arbitrary value, implement, and re-assess later. I also acknowledge that 1) online age-gate mechanisms tend to suck, 2) the evidence of harm is weak, and 3) it really should be up to parents to manage at the individual level. But ultimately, I feel that a restriction like this would be a net positive for the mental health of the vast majority of young teens.

Make the change, assess the effects, adjust/repeal as needed (just like everything else). It seems like the kind of change that's well-suited to undoing later, in case of unintended consequences. It's not like we're going to be permanently stunting the growth of an entire cohort or something.

New comment by ropable in "Every country should set 16 as the minimum age for social media accounts"

ropable — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 07:06:45 +0000

> But OK let's assume social media is always bad for kids and also that someone invents a perfect age gate... kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe.

Straw man argument, much? Might as well argue "We can't make any changes, ever, just in case something else happens!

We'll address the next issue when/if it happens, same as always.

Silent Rebuilds: Keeping Container CVE Counts Near-Zero

ropable — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 02:18:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bretfisher.com/silent-rebuilds/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46583135

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by ropable in "Iran Protest Map"

ropable — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 03:21:24 +0000

I came here to comment on this specific issue. The level of unsustainable groundwater extraction and inefficient consumption by agriculture and industry in Iran is just wild.