<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: sgentle</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sgentle</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 03 May 2026 14:12:43 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=sgentle" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "I'm going to cure my girlfriend's brain tumor"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>At some point, every man comes face to face with the lie of his potency. We're told our willingness to turn ourselves into ruthless avatars of purpose makes us powerful. Unstoppable. We can do anything if the call is great enough. Is it suspicious that the call takes the voice of more powerful men? Pay it no mind. The world is yours for the taking.<p>Then, one day, the tide comes in. You learn what old men know. What women know. What every victim of circumstance knows. Sometimes the world just happens to you.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Feb 2026 05:01:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921459</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921459</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921459</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A curiously frivolous way to frame the decision to get involved with a notorious sex trafficker. Nothing to do with values, integrity or culpability, just some boys missing their mommies.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Feb 2026 08:22:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910393</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910393</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910393</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "Tesla ending Models S and X production"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Market cap and it's not even close. Turns out financialisation is the classic you-get-what-you-asked-for-not-what-you-wanted of capitalism. We told the optimiser to make number go up, and number has certainly gone up. China's number? Not as up.<p>I think it could have gone differently if we gave our economic system something to optimise other than itself, but then we wouldn't have centibillionaires, so... swings and roundabouts I guess?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 29 Jan 2026 04:55:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46805949</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46805949</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46805949</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You know how it's considered a kind of low-effort disrespect to answer someone's question by pasting back a response from an LLM? I think equivalently if you ask a question where the best response <i>is</i> what you'd get from an LLM, then you're the one showing a disrespectful lack of effort. It's kind of the 2026 version of LMGTFY.<p>If you still want a copy-paste response to your question, just let me know – I'm happy to help!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 28 Jan 2026 02:24:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46790247</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46790247</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46790247</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And "picturing" is just a florid way of saying "imagining", no?<p>The art of language lives in its redundancy; every unforced choice is a venue for self-expression.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 09 Jan 2026 02:16:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46549367</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46549367</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46549367</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> What I am saying is that women make bad choices [...] and later regret it<p>Yes, especially when those women are also children. One of the many reasons it's illegal to have sex with them and especially illegal to rent their bodies to your friends.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 21 Dec 2025 06:37:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342767</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342767</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342767</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "2026 Apple introducing more ads to increase opportunity in search results"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Only time I've ever been successfully phished was the App Store. I have an Android phone but I wanted to try the ChatGPT app on my iPad and naively clicked the first result, which was of course a scummy clone. I have since wised up and understand the App Store search results to be roughly torrent search levels of trustworthy.<p>I guess the bar for user trust has now dropped enough across the board to sell more off without losing customers? Pretty sorry state of affairs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2025 06:43:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46322897</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46322897</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46322897</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: Wolfrominoes]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is a little puzzle game I made based on Wolfram's rule 30[0]. I was doing some sketches based on old Genuary[1] prompts and for some reason this idea stuck with me, so I polished it up into a hopefully playable state.<p>I wanted to keep things minimal, but as a semi-easter egg you can play custom variants using url parameters like <a href="https://demos.samgentle.com/wolfrominoes/?rows=20&rule=110" rel="nofollow">https://demos.samgentle.com/wolfrominoes/?rows=20&rule=110</a><p>[0] <a href="https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Rule30.html" rel="nofollow">https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Rule30.html</a><p>[1] <a href="https://genuary2021.github.io/prompts" rel="nofollow">https://genuary2021.github.io/prompts</a></p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46020701">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46020701</a></p>
<p>Points: 10</p>
<p># Comments: 2</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 23 Nov 2025 04:16:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://demos.samgentle.com/wolfrominoes/</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46020701</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46020701</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "Core Devices keeps stealing our work"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Getting strong The Scorpion and the Frog vibes from this situation. Unfortunately, this is just the nature of a profit-maximising entity. Profit is the gap between how much it can take and how little it can give. It concedes nothing without a demand. Why would it?<p>The playbook isn't exactly a secret. What you might describe as a "classic walled garden enshittification trap", Peter Thiel and Sam Altman would describe as "monopoly (affectionate)": <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REKbaA6USy4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REKbaA6USy4</a> – "proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale", exactly by the book.<p>I think the bias towards optimism is commendable but I hope this is the wake-up call the community needs to treat "your love is valuable enough to build a business around" as the Faustian bargain it is and keep Core Devices on a short leash. They want to own you, not work with you. It's their nature.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2025 04:31:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45961423</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45961423</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45961423</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "Steam Machine"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>DXMT has been advancing very quickly: <a href="https://github.com/3Shain/dxmt" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/3Shain/dxmt</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Nov 2025 02:47:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45909893</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45909893</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45909893</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "Gmail AI gets more intrusive"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's been like this for decades. Remember Google+? Remember Google Talk/Chat/Hangouts/Meet/Allo/Duo etc? The company simply values internal political advantage over coherent product development or user experience.<p>At Google, you're not the customer, and you're not even the product; you're a metric in a promo packet. Your value in the "AI engagement" column vastly exceeds your value as a satisfied user. The system is working as intended.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 08 Nov 2025 23:12:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45860921</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45860921</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45860921</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "I Want You to Understand Chicago"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Do you not think there might be a relationship between the lack of due process and the choice of terms?<p>Like, maybe the defining difference between arrest and abduction is whether the action is the output of an accountable system of justice, rather than whether the people doing it are the right kind of people and the people having it done to them are the wrong kind of people.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 08 Nov 2025 22:49:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45860749</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45860749</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45860749</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's a very... pre-1748 kind of philosophy. Hume, Keynes, Russell, Popper and others have written at length about the limitations of prediction from past experience. You can read more about it here: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction</a><p>Even if we accept that extrapolation is the best you can do, you'd still need to justify why the domain of "past experience" is exactly wide enough to generalise across current and previous US presidencies, but not so wide as to include even one of the numerous populist strongman takeovers in non-US political history. Proof by American Exceptionalism, perhaps?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Oct 2025 23:06:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740488</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740488</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740488</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "Show HN: ASCII Automata"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Really fun. Thanks for sharing!<p>Some random ideas:<p>It'd be cool if you could start the growth engine from manual mode. Maybe for breadth-first growth you could add all the placed characters, and for depth-first just the last cell you clicked (+ some kind of visual feedback to show what that is)?<p>I'd also love to play with some way of enabling/disabling the characters to create a subset and see how that behaves.<p>One last thing is it'd be nice to toggle the grid lines off.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Oct 2025 01:43:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45664040</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45664040</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45664040</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "Lace: A New Kind of Cellular Automata Where Links Matter"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Same link :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Oct 2025 12:12:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45654856</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45654856</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45654856</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "The Rubygems.org takeover"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think you're not getting his key point, or you are but you're being coy about it. He <i>did</i> say skin colour, in the form of "native Brits". How do you know that? Because of the article he linked, defining the terms he was using. The article is called "Ethnic groups in London", not "Cultural groups in London". He quotes statistics about "native Brits" that match the article's demographics for "White British". There is zero ambiguity here.<p>If I say "I love a [sweet treat](wikipedia.org/wiki/ice_cream)! It's so refreshingly cold on a nice hot day", there's just no intellectually honest way to claim maybe I meant apple pie. Do you understand? He's not talking about Russian immigrants because they're white. He is talking about Pakistani immigrants because they're brown. He's literally telling you what he means and you're choosing to ignore it. Why?<p>Perhaps there are, in fact, reasons to not say skin colour even when that's what you mean.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Oct 2025 05:42:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45652827</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45652827</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45652827</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "The Rubygems.org takeover"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As I said, the Wikipedia article is what the words "native Brits" links to.<p>Here's the article: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London</a><p>Here's what the article says:<p>> In 2011, it was reported for the first time that White British people had become a minority within the city<p>How could you possibly come to the conclusion that it's not about race? Do you think he linked to the wrong article by accident?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Oct 2025 03:16:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45652069</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45652069</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45652069</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "The Rubygems.org takeover"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>To quote DHH: "when much of the media reports a story like this, it's often without citing the specific words in question"<p>I think you lose a lot when you abstract away someone's words as "positions that alienate". Pineapple on pizza is a position that alienates, as is forced sterilisation of criminals. So here's some specific words:<p>> London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits [ie white, as specified by the Wikipedia article the words "native Brits" link to]<p>> There's absolutely nothing racist or xenophobic in saying that Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes, Britain primarily a united kingdom for the Brits, and Japan primarily a set of islands for the Japanese.<p>He doesn't think brown people belong in the UK. His "positions" are racism. He's racist. That's the problem.<p>Where have all the enlightenment-values rationalist monks gone now that we so desperately need people to combine P and P -> Q?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Oct 2025 02:47:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45651923</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45651923</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45651923</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "Moonlander.BAS"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's a bit tricky because velocity and altitude are floored every step, and you can only burn on whole timesteps so you can't necessarily hit the target velocity and altitude in a single burn.<p>I'm not sure if it's optimal, but this is a 2-burn solution that does 1 burn to hit x=20 and another to hit v>=-14 right afterwards: <a href="https://gist.github.com/sgentle/d88dd6fe37e76f9167db24379dc73249/" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/sgentle/d88dd6fe37e76f9167db24379dc7...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Oct 2025 07:43:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45632618</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45632618</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45632618</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sgentle in "Lace: A New Kind of Cellular Automata Where Links Matter"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've updated the shader – I think the issue was just that I was initialising the states to random values instead of running a proper degree calculation. The behaviour looked pretty similar to me either way, but now it matches exactly and I added colours to make that clear: <a href="https://imgur.com/a/4gZKlSg" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/4gZKlSg</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 18 Oct 2025 12:55:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626969</link><dc:creator>sgentle</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626969</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626969</guid></item></channel></rss>