Hacker News: samspot

New comment by samspot in "I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets"

samspot — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:47:06 +0000

The purpose of the fake birthday is not to protect random website credentials. It's to prevent someone with that data from walking into my bank and impersonating me. I started giving a fake birthday after being shocked by how little info some organizations needed to authenticate me.

New comment by samspot in "Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke"

samspot — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:56:10 +0000

Alternatively, you can easily add the bloat, discover if it has real value, and then strip it without the bad feeling of having sunk countless hours creating it. Vibe coding is excellent for making the first prototype to throw away.

New comment by samspot in "Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made"

samspot — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:25:26 +0000

You can also reduce team size by employing insane, life-destroying crunch time.

New comment by samspot in "Amazon without the knockoffs"

samspot — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:26:31 +0000

The no hassle returns from Amazon mitigate everything. I recently bought direct from someone and had to return because they didn't send the advertised item. I had to pay return shipping and a restocking fee, costing me $40 and a lot of my time. I tried to work it out with the seller not realizing that I only had 30 days to dispute with Paypal, so I was screwed there. My overwhelming takeaway was I should have bought from Amazon. (and, if you use paypal open a case with them asap instead of talking to the seller first).

I don't particularly like Amazon and would like to shop somewhere else, but it is sooooo convenient that it's hard to quit.

New comment by samspot in "Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others"

samspot — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:52:02 +0000

You are not wrong, but I just don't have time. My choices are pay someone or throw my hands up. I have been paying backblaze. But I recently had a drive die, and discovered the backups are missing .exe and .dll files, and so that part of the restore was worthless.

What time I do have, I've been using to try and figure out photo libraries. Nothing is working the way I need it to. The providers are a mess of security restrictions and buggy software.

New comment by samspot in "Apple Just Lost Me"

samspot — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:43:21 +0000

You can get by just fine in the US without a credit card too. At least if you have a debit card (which can pretend to be a credit card in most situations). We were actually unscored by the credit bureaus for several years when we didn't own a house.

New comment by samspot in "Ask HN: How to be alone?"

samspot — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:13:54 +0000

They said go every day, not do intense workouts every day. Plenty of things you can do at a gym that don't require recovery days. Being there so much should confer some social benefits too.

New comment by samspot in "I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard"

samspot — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 17:37:26 +0000

I envy your life of peaceful routine. For me every evening is a trip into the unknown. Sure some things repeat on the same days. But there is always something new. This week the one I'm aware of is daily Soccer tryouts. I have to check my spouse's paper calendar every day to keep up.

New comment by samspot in "Claude Code is being dumbed down?"

samspot — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:36:25 +0000

Posting like this is an anti-pattern. "Everyone wants what I want, and if you don't build it my way you are stupid." Props to teams that can find some value in feedback like this, but I think I would have stopped reading. If you have really valuable feedback for a product the last thing you want to do is deliver it wrapped in ignorance and entitlement.

New comment by samspot in "Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability"

samspot — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:15:39 +0000

I read the bug as notepad can launch unsafe links by delegating them to the OS to open.

New comment by samspot in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

samspot — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 17:41:00 +0000

I think we overestimate the amount of reading, writing, and thinking that occurred before LLMs.

New comment by samspot in "Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability"

samspot — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 17:35:18 +0000

It's hard for me to imagine anyone balking at this feature. My core note taking workflow frequently involves:

1. Note about blah 2. Paste link to blah 3. Open that link later when reviewing my notes.

Blah is sometimes a web link, sometimes a link to a doc on my system, and sometimes a link to an item in my todo tracker. The better analogy is this is like a pencil having an eraser built in.

I use Drafts instead of Notepad, but if I used Notepad I would want to be able to easily open links in my notes. When I do find myself in Notepad, it's because I double clicked on a readme file that often contains links to resources I need.

New comment by samspot in "America has a tungsten problem"

samspot — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:23:13 +0000

If we use our tungsten to make quality Big Mining Drills (https://wiki.factorio.com/Big_mining_drill), we can improve the efficiency of known resource patches.

New comment by samspot in ".NET MAUI is coming to Linux and the browser"

samspot — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 18:01:00 +0000

Accessibility is for all user experiences, not just websites. WCAG is still a good resource for native apps even where some specifics do not 100% apply.

If Qwasm is referring to Quake, it absolutely should have, for example, legible color contrast and be usable if you are colorblind.

New comment by samspot in "Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS"

samspot — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 16:06:31 +0000

It's good to know that "Linux is only free if your time is worthless" still holds true after all these years. From the way many talk, I honestly thought it might have changed.

New comment by samspot in "On loyalty to your employer (2018)"

samspot — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 16:50:14 +0000

Article points are mostly all valid, don't give your loyalty in return for abuse, etc. etc.

But I've been at my employer 11 years now and I have greatly prospered. They took care of me in many ways that aren't required by law, and gave great benefits. They didn't abuse me or take undue time from my family. They constantly invest in my career -- for their ultimate benefit, yes, but I benefit too. If and when I get transactioned out, I'll have no regrets.

It's ok to reward an employer with some loyalty for treating you well.

But also, this quote needs to be here :)

Would I ever leave this company? Look, I’m all about loyalty, In fact, I feel like part of what I’m being paid for here is my loyalty, But if there were somewhere else that valued loyalty more highly… I’m going wherever they value loyalty the most. — Dwight Schrute

New comment by samspot in "I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)"

samspot — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 16:40:13 +0000

If you never pick up a pen to sign a birthday card, thank you note, or wedding album, that's a symptom you are too isolated!

New comment by samspot in "I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)"

samspot — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 16:33:19 +0000

A common mistake in accessibility is to assume accessibility is mostly for users who are blind. I've rarely seen the opposite approach, calling something accessible that is very much not accessible to a person who is blind. A url is much more accessible for many people with disabilities than the postal mail.

Even if you mean access instead of accessibility, presumably a person who can find a way to acquire stamps can just as easily make it to a library with public computers.

New comment by samspot in "You wouldn't steal a font"

samspot — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 20:19:38 +0000

Copyright, and patents, are not based on moral principles. It's a temporary government license meant to encourage innovation and hustle. Whether it works or not, I don't know. But the only question of morality is if it's immoral to break an arbitrary law, or not.

New comment by samspot in "Reworking 30 lines of Linux code could cut power use by up to 30 percent"

samspot — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 17:04:01 +0000

When you achieve expertise you know when to break the rules. Until then it is wise to avoid premature optimization. In many cases understandable code is far more important.

I was working with a peer on a click handler for a web button. The code ran in 5-10ms. You have nearly 200ms budget before a user notices sluggishness. My peer "optimized" the 10ms click handler to the point of absolute illegibility. It was doubtful the new implementation was faster.