<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: snackbroken</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=snackbroken</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 11 Oct 2026 11:25:24 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=snackbroken" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce""]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's what I'm used to as well, but in my experience a lot of programmers take fold and reduce to be synonyms. A monoidal reduce is much less "scary" than a general fold. I suspect most programmers have never[1] heard the word monoid, let alone know what it means, and having to remember the meaning of a weird new word is enough to make most people dislike something compared to the simpler more familiar operations.<p>[1]Or if they have, their only encounter with it is the "a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" meme.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2026 20:31:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49732571</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49732571</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49732571</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce""]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Right. It's just one more thing you have to think about with Reduce that's not something you have to consider with Map/Filter.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2026 20:19:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49732410</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49732410</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49732410</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce""]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The accumulator is global state. If you're folding from list<int> to int you're right that it's (usually) effectively a pairwise operation on ints. If the fold is something like list<foo> -> tree<bar> then you have to reason about each intermediate (tree<bar>, foo) -> tree<bar>, i.e. how global state should evolve over time with each update.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2026 18:52:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49731319</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49731319</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49731319</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce""]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Map and Filter are nice because they let you reason locally about a single element in isolation. Reduce(Fold) forces you to reason globally about intermediate results. Reduce also forces you to conjure up a "zero" value of the relevant type, which isn't usually difficult but it does constitute some extra mental overhead.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 15 Sep 2026 05:42:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708207</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708207</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708207</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "How Trail of Bits helps verify the integrity of Signal chats"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>People seem to get on with Discord invite links just fine. You don't have to do the "confirm that all these emoji are the same on both your devices" dance to stop spam.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:36:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49678714</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49678714</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49678714</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "How Trail of Bits helps verify the integrity of Signal chats"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>One possible solution is to only be able to contact someone if you have received an invitation code from them out of band. E.g. "scan this QR code to add me on signal". Such an invitation code should default to single-use but users should be allowed to generate standing invitations so that businesses and the like can print and post one in their store or whatever. Start getting spam from one of your standing invitations? Just revoke it and make a new one. Presumably the Signal folks can come up with more alternative solutions than the half baked one I came up with after thinking about it for a minute, they're clever cookies.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 12 Sep 2026 23:22:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49678269</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49678269</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49678269</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Finns and Norwegians only are able to bike part of the year.<p>They very much bike all year round, even in the north where it regularly gets to -20C(-4F) in winter. Biking in snowy sub-freezing weather is really not a big deal as long as you maintain the bike paths as well as the streets.<p>Source: have lived there, everyone I knew had a bike they regularly used. The only time I can recall where people I knew who usually commuted by bike didn't do so was during an unusually heavy snowstorm. They instead had to walk about half a kilometer to/from where the city had managed to plow the streets and take a taxi. That was decades ago.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:25:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636543</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636543</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636543</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "We have a year to fix security everywhere"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Heretic[1] is not that far off, though I suppose it's more along the lines of undoing the "for your own safety" lobotomy than explicitly specializing in unsafe things.<p>[1]<a href="https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 14:01:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49610481</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49610481</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49610481</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "You probably own this 7-Eleven (and that's why it looks so sad)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Workplace safety improved massively when labor unions became a thing and workers got a say in safety standards.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 31 Aug 2026 18:38:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49513222</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49513222</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49513222</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You don't need explicit consent for functional cookies, e.g. a session cookie or to store what preferences the user has selected on your settings page. It is implicitly given by the user telling you to treat them a certain way. For that you just need a notice somewhere on the page that reads along the lines of "this website uses cookies". It can be an unobtrusive note in your footer.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 29 Aug 2026 10:12:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49488541</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49488541</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49488541</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>They "trust me"<p>>Dumb fucks.<p>Is an attitude he never grew out of.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:34:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49449954</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49449954</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49449954</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Market forces are not effective at creating good outcomes when there is an oligopoly.<p>If there are two producers each with ~50% market share, it's not profitable for one of them to improve their product such that they capture an additional 5% of the market but reduces the profit margin of their product by 10%. If there are 50 producers each with ~2% market share, one of them would happily capture 5% of the market (more than doubling the size of their business!) by sacrificing 10% of their profit margin.<p>In the Google-Apple duopoly it's <i>much</i> more profitable to engage in tacit collusion than it is to defect.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:27:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49217415</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49217415</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49217415</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>First, copying information isn't wrong to begin with. It is literally the one thing that makes our species special.<p>Second, even if you are a copyright maximalist the output of an LLM is either<p>a) not subject to copyright because it is not the creative work of a human or<p>b) a derivative work of the original training material to which the LLM's operator has no rights.<p>Since the LLM's operator forcefully asserts that it is not infringing, any wrong that arises from taking their word for it and distilling one model into another rests squarely with the operator of the former.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2026 20:30:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48984475</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48984475</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48984475</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "NYC may require landlords and realtors to disclose the use of AI in listings"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's not <i>just</i> good PR for politicians to pass "<specific instance> case of already illegal <generic> is explicitly illegal"-laws. Prosecuting a violation of <generic> tends to be a lot harder because in addition to providing evidence for <specific instance> it requires convincing a judge that <generic> even applies to <specific instance> in the first place. You get to short-circuit that ordeal by passing a law that clarifies the intent that yes, <specific instance> is in fact an instance of <generic> without having to go all the way through setting precedent in higher courts.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Jul 2026 10:15:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48966626</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48966626</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48966626</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>LLM text is like an optical illusion for the language part of your brain, only instead of the payoff being "Oh, cool! The dots aren't actually moving!" it's "Oh, 'cool'. You weren't actually trying to tell me anything worth my time."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:01:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48818025</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48818025</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48818025</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "Resetting Xbox"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>50 years ago, publicly listed companies understood that chasing short-term growth targets undermined long-term sustainability. The current failure mode is not an inherent property of being a publicly listed company, it's a consequence of incompetent leadership and bad regulatory policy.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Jul 2026 01:29:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48812648</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48812648</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48812648</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "EU Commission Response to 'Stop Destroying Videogames'"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It is somewhat infuriating (though not unexpected) that the EC is parroting the AAA industry talking points when said talking points were/are blatantly obvious lies about what remedies the Stop Destroying Videogames ECI is actually seeking.<p>Unfortunately, the charitable interpretation of the EC's behavior is that they lack reading comprehension. Less charitably, maybe if the EC had fewer shady backroom meetings with industry lobbyists and more meetings with the constituents they are meant to serve, they would act differently.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:14:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48562947</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48562947</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48562947</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "Every Frame Perfect"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's jarring to see instant changes that don't make sense. Animations are primarily a way to paper over UI that sucks to begin with.<p>Many transitions in Android are perfectly fine at 0x animation speed. The majority of transitions that suck without animation suck because the pre-/post-transition layout sucks and the transition between the two states doesn't make sense as a result.<p>It's the same with several of the transitions in TFA. For example, the address bar placeholder text[1] should just be left-aligned all the time. The save dialog[2] should <i>leave all the basic controls in their original location</i>[3] when switching from the basic mode to the advanced mode. That means the "Where:" label should also remain in the advanced mode, and the controls[4] that pop up to replace it should either be moved to the right or below. The search bar should also be moved down.<p>These are some really basic details and it is my understanding Apple used to not screw them up nearly as badly.<p>[1]<a href="https://tonsky.me/blog/every-frame-perfect/safari@2x.mp4?t=1781346810" rel="nofollow">https://tonsky.me/blog/every-frame-perfect/safari@2x.mp4?t=1...</a><p>[2]<a href="https://tonsky.me/blog/every-frame-perfect/save@1x.mp4?t=1781346810" rel="nofollow">https://tonsky.me/blog/every-frame-perfect/save@1x.mp4?t=178...</a><p>[3]<a href="https://imgur.com/ZpHLCsv" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/ZpHLCsv</a> Artist's rendition. Please excuse the minor jank and criminal amount of empty space; I couldn't be arsed to fiddle with the screenshots to get pixel-perfect positioning and shrink the advanced dialog horizontally. Bikeshedding over where exactly the new controls belong is welcomed but irrelevant to the point I'm making.<p>[4]Is it just me, or are their icons uselessly, impenetrably, unhelpful?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 20:47:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48521282</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48521282</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48521282</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "IXI's autofocusing lenses are almost ready to replace multifocal glasses"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, It's something you'd only want to do in particular situations where you know you'd otherwise keep swapping between two pairs of glasses annoyingly often.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:37:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48362997</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48362997</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48362997</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snackbroken in "IXI's autofocusing lenses are almost ready to replace multifocal glasses"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>An alternative to multifocals is glasses with one lens for near and the other for far or to use a contact lens in only one eye in addition to your normal glasses. This also obviously comes with downsides that take some getting used to but some people prefer it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 30 May 2026 16:07:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48337724</link><dc:creator>snackbroken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48337724</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48337724</guid></item></channel></rss>