Hacker News: secstate

New comment by secstate in "We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git"

secstate — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:23:29 +0000

I also concluded based on the video:

4. GitButler is a terrible name for this

5. No one will use the "but" command over "git"

6. The founder needs to learn to enunciate the name of his new product better

And also, your central premise is exactly right. The solution to agents and humans working faster will not be better manual oversight of what they're doing. It's like missing the most important principle of agentic development. Supervise, don't gatekeep.

New comment by secstate in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

secstate — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:01:57 +0000

At-will employment is hard. Honestly, if you aren't planning to lose your job tomorrow when your at-will, you're not being honest with yourself. I wish it were different, but outside a union contract or some other fairly well-combed over business contract, you should not assume you will get paid tomorrow.

New comment by secstate in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

secstate — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:59:40 +0000

Outside of 90s television, this might be the most universal reference I have in my life.

New comment by secstate in "Colon cancer now leading cause of cancer deaths under 50 in US"

secstate — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 21:30:41 +0000

I think we're only beginning to appreciate just how sensitive our guts are to the abuse modern high-calorie food can dish out.

Honestly, given the extent to which many people's diets consist primarily of bleached and re-enriched wheat separated from the germ or simply refined corn, I think there are many more people who are slowly poisoned by their diet than realize it.

Yet there's plenty of hyperbole in my statement too. I don't think you could murder someone by making them eat your diet, unless it consisted of bags of broken glass.

New comment by secstate in "Colon cancer now leading cause of cancer deaths under 50 in US"

secstate — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 19:01:04 +0000

This. I'm as exhausted as anyone about the latest macro/micro nutrient diet. But also, when I binge on a bag of potato chips, I assume (correctly) that I'll feel like shit later. Calorie dense food that's easily procured and eaten to excess was not part of our evolutionary path up to now. Every individual person is a cornucopia of variables though too, and one persons perfect diet would kill someone else. So advice is hard to give out, but there are clearly some broad guidelines to eating and health that help you mitigate bad dice rolls.

New comment by secstate in "Show HN: Simple org-mode web adapter"

secstate — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:18:34 +0000

This is awesome. I knew about orgnice and orgzly ... this is different, so light weight, so easy to find things. I used org aggressively to track tasks and as a Roam alternative and this fits my use cases wonderfully.

I'm adding some nice-to-have features and will open up a PR with some of them very shortly!

New comment by secstate in "TikTok settles just before social media addiction trial to begin"

secstate — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:33:00 +0000

Christ, this is like a textbook definition of sealioning. You've hijacked multiple threads here persistently asking for more and more evidence of their claims. If you don't agree with an argument, provide your own counter evidence. Stop harassing people and do your own work, or stop reading the threads with people you don't think have valid opinions or have no evidence.

At this point, I'd almost think you were a bot yourself, as your oblivious to the social standards of online forums and/or manipulating them intentionally.

New comment by secstate in "Plunging US Birth Rate Leaves Too Many Colleges with Too Few Kids"

secstate — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 17:54:44 +0000

They should have said total fertility rate. Birth rates have absolutely been in a steady decline for decades.

EDIT, also, looking at TFR, it's been bumping around but there was clearly a collapse in the 60s. I wouldn't use that to show that the population of the US is growing healthily enough to support capitalism.

New comment by secstate in "Plunging US Birth Rate Leaves Too Many Colleges with Too Few Kids"

secstate — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 05:43:25 +0000

What source? The US birth rate was absolutely not steady from 1990 to 2010 according to the OECD [0]. Fear mongering aside, surely the prospect of a population failing to birth enough new lives to replace the ones that die, as happened in France last year, seems like a bad thing for a capitalist system that depends on growth uber alles. AI and efficiency be damned, fewer people buy fewer things.

0: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-202...

New comment by secstate in "Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?"

secstate — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 21:41:50 +0000

Oh man ... it's been years since I read this, but it all came flooding back reading that post. Brilliant. And interestingly, "Choose again" is shockingly similar to Steve Job's "Don't be trapped by dogma," philosophy.

New comment by secstate in "Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?"

secstate — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 19:14:36 +0000

It's not a great solution, but you can vote with your wallet and simply not partake in that form of entertainment. I can't say it's fun to be not up on current games, or to find indie/non-drm games to play. But piracy is just an end-around a terribly policy of non-ownership that manages to both not remunerate the folks who do the work and make no impact on the actual problem which is that we don't like the non-ownership clause in modern games.

So yeah, TLDR, vote with your wallet and give up the entertainment this time.

New comment by secstate in "Yadea is coming to the Western market"

secstate — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 02:23:37 +0000

I suspect at least part of this has to do with the fact that, relative to four wheeled vehicles, you can buy "impressive" motorcycles for relatively little cash compared to say, buying a truly performant sports car. Combine this low cost with an unrelentingly social pressure to show off, mix in one part social media and two parts a belief that you are invincible and I believe you'll have your cocktail of poor outcomes on fast two-wheeled vehicles.

New comment by secstate in "Google confirms Android attacks; no fix for most Samsung users"

secstate — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 19:59:50 +0000

e-recycling is only marginally better than a landfill. At least a landfill in pseudo-regulated government economy has the chance to be safely abated in 100 years. Though a few things of value are sometimes extracted, mostly it all ends in places like Turkey or India and burned or buried.

Sorry for the cynical take, but patronizing folks like this is worse than cynicism because it suggests that you actually believe what you're saying is true.

New comment by secstate in "What we talk about when we talk about sideloading"

secstate — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 19:41:22 +0000

While I wont argue about it feeling like a conspiracy theory, I will argue that pretty much no one knows sideloading as a term with regards to what i-drive meant by it.

And the fact that `adb sideload` is where the concept originated does nothing to dispel the way the term is frequently used in a derogatory fashion these days. It's wielded as a bogey man to make people afraid of unsigned applications. Despite the fact that many perfectly signed applications are full of malware and dark patterns.

Also, FFS, this is hacker news. Why on Earth would be arguing in favor of Google locking down how I can install software on my device.

New comment by secstate in "What we talk about when we talk about sideloading"

secstate — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 19:35:34 +0000

> The phrase after the "but" in the second sentence isn't the "summary definition". It's the part of the definition that best supports your argument. Cutting the Wikipedia definition down to that part is deceptive.

Wat?

Everything after the "but" is what Google means when they use the term sideload and is the only important part of the definition for f-droid's purposes. The other definition is completely irrelevant and, I would argue, hardly ever used anymore.

New comment by secstate in "How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods"

secstate — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 20:33:47 +0000

Honestly, UPF feels like a food industry plant word to make legislation a hot mess full of holes.

Just regulate added sugar and saturated/trans fats and be done with it.

Discord: Update on a Security Incident Involving Third-Party Customer Service

secstate — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 15:10:32 +0000

Article URL: https://discord.com/press-releases/update-on-security-incident-involving-third-party-customer-service

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517064

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by secstate in "Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account"

secstate — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 02:38:02 +0000

I mean, unless you know the various arcane aspects of Windows, it's pretty hilariously un-friendly when you step off the path, too. After a decade of using Gnome exclusively, whenever a friend asks for help with Windows, all I can do is shrug and suggest reinstalling and/or living with the pain.

New comment by secstate in "Just Use HTML"

secstate — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 14:29:04 +0000

The last company I worked for it honestly took me about two months to actually grok what they were doing with their forms because I couldn't fathom why you'd do this input-listener business on the FE while the backend was all Django APIs. They had re-engineered a form wizard flow and scattered the state management into three places (some in the API calls, some in third party API calls in the middle of the flow, and a decent chunk in the React flow via cookies/sessions). It was madness trying to debug it.

New comment by secstate in "Nuclear: Desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources"

secstate — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 18:37:14 +0000

haha, I swear I read Marx and Engels, but it was 25 years ago. So I suppose the problem we find ourselves in now is the feedback loop of capital sources being so well endowed there's no risk of investment to create more capital.