Hacker News: singingfish

New comment by singingfish in "Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence"

singingfish — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 02:12:12 +0000

Meta's bots are spectatularly awful, and if your organisation needs to use facebook advertising, they're also unblockable. There are ways around it that doesn't exactly block them but does clearly communicate they should GTFO, but it just shows you what an awful company Meta is.

New Modern Glossary of Computer Science

singingfish — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:52:17 +0000

Article URL: http://unfuck.i.ng/art/science/new_modern_glossary_of_computer_science/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49382326

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by singingfish in "Brief Observations on Life"

singingfish — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 09:33:23 +0000

It was brought to my attention that the phrase "terminal, degenerative, sexually transmitted condition" returned no results from my search engine. So I tried to fix it.

Brief Observations on Life

singingfish — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 09:33:23 +0000

Article URL: http://unfuck.i.ng/art/science/life/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49033136

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by singingfish in "Not everyone is using AI for everything"

singingfish — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:52:15 +0000

as a rule the interviewee should be assessing for goodness of fit, as well as the interviewer. If my simplified nuanced answer to why I limit my usage of LLMs was poorly received, I wouldn't want to take a job somewhere likely to make me miserable.

New comment by singingfish in "Microsoft 365 Copilot – Arbitrary Data Exfiltration via Mermaid Diagrams"

singingfish — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 07:22:50 +0000

aka LLMs can not learn from experience - this is a fundamental limitation. c.f - individuals with Korsakov's syndrome - who also confabulate in a similar manner.

New comment by singingfish in "VST3 audio plugin format is now MIT"

singingfish — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 00:24:40 +0000

Both Yamaha and Roland keep a long back catalogue of reasonably priced parts for at least their mid-range pianos and up as well. I should check Korg too I guess.

New comment by singingfish in "VST3 audio plugin format is now MIT"

singingfish — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 10:47:20 +0000

I've had some impressive customer service from Yamaha concerning decades old saxophones that they have zero prospect of generating revenue from in the future, for an unrelated (musical) data point.

New comment by singingfish in "Hedge funds have to be big"

singingfish — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 23:07:16 +0000

Of course they do - it's the same as bookmakers or other gambling syndicates, it only makes sense to operate at a certain scale otherwise the rounding errors and stochasticity will kill you.

New comment by singingfish in ".gitignore Is Inherently Sisyphean"

singingfish — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 23:42:29 +0000

If you want to just stop yourself from shooting yourself in the foot in your current checkout and maintain privacy around your own stupidity, you can add patterns to `.git/info/exclude`

New comment by singingfish in "Matt Trout has died"

singingfish — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 12:36:45 +0000

and long may he idle

New comment by singingfish in "Matt Trout has died"

singingfish — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 12:33:05 +0000

dumb, sick, stupid, other adjectives - generally not negative although could be in the right context - both in the Australian and North West England (where Matt was from) context. Just watch out for being called a fucking cunt. In almost all cases that one is pretty unambiguous. I do remember at one point having a conversation with Matt about how handling East Coast and West Coast North Americans was quite a different proposition from a cultural perspective, also related to this thread.

Matt would have liked this discussion. And given that his and my mutual friend has some actual legitimate serious expertise on obscenity in the English language even more so.

New comment by singingfish in "Matt Trout has died"

singingfish — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 10:37:55 +0000

and child prodigies are notorious "arseholes" QED.

New comment by singingfish in "Matt Trout has died"

singingfish — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 05:19:23 +0000

I totally get it, some people found his mess very difficult and it could easily lead into a death spiral. Others had a very different experience. He was certainly someone needed to be managed by those who knew him well from time to time, when possible.

New comment by singingfish in "Matt Trout has died"

singingfish — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 01:08:27 +0000

Matt taught me everything I know about how to make commercial programming creative, engaging, artistic/craftsman type activity, aligned with my desire to keep everything open source to the maximum extent practical.

Another former colleague who is way more talented than I am emailed me privately to express a similar sentiment.

You'll find Matt's indirect influence in things like SQLAlchemy, and chunks of the enduring parts of the javascript ecosystem as well. He was known in the perl community, but his unparalleled thinking skills have a much wider indirect influence

New comment by singingfish in "Matt Trout has died"

singingfish — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 00:03:32 +0000

Matt was a child prodigy, and child prodigies have it notoriously tough. He and I worked closely for a while. There is someone else important in my life that has somewhat close to mst's intellectual gifts, and similarly to mst they also have difficulty controlling their reaction to other people. However, unlike this other person in my life, mst did know how to express accountability and had been on a learning process to deal with his limitations. Matt and I never had beef, perhaps because we recognised that our respective strengths and weaknesses were complementary.

New comment by singingfish in "Why I don't ride the AI Hype Train"

singingfish — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 12:03:41 +0000

Yeah, there's useful, but not that useful. It help to think of them as "language extrusion confabulation machines" to understand the actual limitations.

New comment by singingfish in "Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables, researchers find"

singingfish — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 03:04:31 +0000

In other news, water is wet and the sun rises every morning.

New comment by singingfish in "The return of the buffalo is reviving portions of the ecosystem"

singingfish — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 03:00:43 +0000

What about extra feed - grain or silage or whatever? Or do they keep stocking density low?

New comment by singingfish in "All Kindles can now be jailbroken"

singingfish — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 02:57:58 +0000

Tyre is clearly the correct spelling. I quickly tire of anyone claiming otherwise. Gaol is an archaic spelling which I've found incredibly confusing ever since I was a small kid a long long time ago.