Hacker News: sjamaan

New comment by sjamaan in "Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code"

sjamaan — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 13:06:16 +0000

It also supports PostmarketOS. This post made it to HN yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338285

New comment by sjamaan in "Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?"

sjamaan — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 12:06:57 +0000

It's a shame grandparent's link gives a 404 now, I'd love to compare the two.

New comment by sjamaan in "AI agent runs amok in Fedora and elsewhere"

sjamaan — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:10:49 +0000

> Regardless of your political views a tool is a tool at the end of the day. Attempting to anthropomorphize a category of objects in order to shift blame all for the sake of furthering an agenda is plainly bad faith behavior.

Guns are literally made for killing people. That's their only reason for existence. They are a weapon. This makes them qualitatively different from cars, which only incidentally kill people (and the vast majority of time, not on purpose).

To me, trying to equate deaths caused by purpose-made killing tools with those caused by generic tools is arguing in bad faith.

New comment by sjamaan in "Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes"

sjamaan — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:53:39 +0000

You'd still be walking around as a free advertiser for their stuff, simply by owning Google-branded hardware. And of course the hypocrisy of having a Google phone to avoid Google spying is palpable.

New comment by sjamaan in "Netherlands blocks US takeover of vital digital supplier"

sjamaan — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:49:14 +0000

Best news of the year!

New comment by sjamaan in "Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore"

sjamaan — Tue, 26 May 2026 08:54:44 +0000

Java and C are older languages which have either solidified (C) or are very careful about breaking compat (Java). Most languages nowadays are indeed in the "move fast and break things" mode.

New comment by sjamaan in "Drunk post: Things I've learned as a senior engineer (2021)"

sjamaan — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 11:52:15 +0000

> Also you get to do cool SQL shit nobody understands and you become invaluable =)

Goddamn right!

New comment by sjamaan in "Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people"

sjamaan — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 08:11:24 +0000

The people involved in commissioning and funding nuclear power plants don't understand nuclear physics either.

The customer doesn't need to understand how the solution works, as long as they can understand that it would solve their problem (in the case of the power plant: producing "clean" energy) and any potential drawbacks or limitations (in the case of the power plant: the waste byproduct).

The point here is that as a "tech person", it's your job to help the customer understand the cost of what they're asking, and come up with a satisfactory solution based on your understanding of their needs.

New comment by sjamaan in "An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story"

sjamaan — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:26:14 +0000

So much is missing from this story. Did they report it to the relevant data authority? Did the fix they said they applied actually fix anything? Etc.

New comment by sjamaan in "Stop Sloppypasta"

sjamaan — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 10:41:27 +0000

I think before, it was easier to spot. Before, the effort spent would often show in the volume or consistency of the writing. Now, one can create a big, wordy and convincing-sounding document (without any grammatical errors!) in mere seconds. It also provides for some convenient plausible deniability: you can always claim the LLM only helped you here and there with the wording.

So now, even figuring out that it was a careless or lazy job takes a lot more time, which drastically skews the economics in favor of the careless person.

New comment by sjamaan in "Technical Excellence Is Not Enough"

sjamaan — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 14:15:38 +0000

I realize it's been "written" by an LLM, but the content could have been written by someone I know. It's eerie how this person thinks exactly the same way. It's never their fault, always the others', and they are always obviously right and no amount of arguing can change their mind.

On The Problem of LLM-Assisted Contributions to Open Source Projects

sjamaan — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 08:49:50 +0000

Article URL: http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/articles/open-source-and-llm-contributions.txt

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47163577

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by sjamaan in "“Car Wash” test with 53 models"

sjamaan — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 13:00:04 +0000

Exactly this. The question states it as a fact, so why would you go back and point out the inconsistency?

New comment by sjamaan in "Chrome extensions spying on users' browsing data"

sjamaan — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:54:54 +0000

Also, car companies have a lot at stake and are a clear target. The scammer is hard to even identify, and has no reputation to worry about. Of course in case of a sold extension, the original author of the extension may have a reputation they care about, but only if they're still making other extensions.

New comment by sjamaan in "Why S7 Scheme? (2020)"

sjamaan — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 14:25:07 +0000

S7 is very cool indeed. It also comes as a single C file, which makes it easy to embed.

As a CHICKEN maintainer, I'd love to hear what the author was missing in the FFI part of the manual.

New comment by sjamaan in "Show HN: We Built the 1. EU-Sovereignty Audit for Websites"

sjamaan — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 14:42:50 +0000

Good point regarding registrar. Thinking a bit further, there's also the top-level domain: if that's under US control (eg .com), it could still be yanked away from you.

New comment by sjamaan in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

sjamaan — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 11:58:22 +0000

My blog is at https://www.more-magic.net, mostly about programming (with a focus on Scheme) or adjacent stuff.

New comment by sjamaan in "Eat Real Food"

sjamaan — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 10:45:54 +0000

> - Force better labeling, like the Nutri-Score in France and EU

NutriScore is mostly useless, to the point of being misleading. The system was cooked up by the industry, which explains a lot.

It is a label that tells you how nutritious a given product is "compared to products in the same category". So you could have, say, candy or frozen pizza with a NutriScore A and that would be just fine according to this system because it happens to be more nutritious than other candy/pizza. In other words, a product having a NutriScore of A doesn't mean the product is actually healthy or good for you.

New comment by sjamaan in "The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently relying on open source"

sjamaan — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 07:59:36 +0000

Then you should support the Free Software Europe's "Public Money, Public Code" campaign: https://publiccode.eu/en/

Trustworthy software through non-profits?

sjamaan — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 05:11:40 +0000

Article URL: https://www.more-magic.net/posts/trustworthy-software-through-non-profits.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46157040

Points: 2

# Comments: 0