Hacker News: socalgal2

New comment by socalgal2 in "EFF is leaving X"

socalgal2 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:36:23 +0000

What a joke. Eff complains that Musk threw out the previous censors. It's been well documented they were censoring in bad faith. Effectively the Eff wants the bad censors re-installed.

New comment by socalgal2 in "Git commands I run before reading any code"

socalgal2 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:01:21 +0000

a project isn’t dying because of no commits. Rather it’s stable

I often feel I need to setup bots to make superfluous commits just to make it look like my useful and stable repos are “active”

One example (not mine) a a qr-code generator library. Hasn’t been updated in 10 years. It’s perfect as is. It just provides the size and the bits. You convert those bits to any representation you want. It has no need to be updated

New comment by socalgal2 in "How to get better at guitar"

socalgal2 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 02:37:33 +0000

"Dude, sucking at something is the first step at being sorta good at someting" - Jake the Dog

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu8YiTeU9XU

New comment by socalgal2 in "Taste in the age of AI and LLMs"

socalgal2 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:31:31 +0000

Isn't this a temporary situation though.

Today: Ask AI to "do the thing", manual review because don't trust the AI

Tomorrow: Ask AI to "do the thing"

I'm just getting started on my AI journey. It didn't take long before I upgraded from the $17 a month claude plan to the $100 a month plan and I can see myself picking the $200 a month plan soon. This is for hobby projects.

At the moment I'm reviewing most of the code for what I'm working on, and I have tests and review those too. But, seeing how good it is (sometimes), I can imagine a future where the AI itself has both the tech chops and the taste and I can just say "Maybe me an app to edit photos" and it will spit out a user friendly clone of photoshop with good UX.

We already kind of see this with music - it's able to spit out "Bangers". How long until it can spit out hit rom-coms, crime shows, recipes, apps? I don't think the answer is "never". I think more likely the answer is in N years where N is probably a single digit.

New comment by socalgal2 in "Londoners are sick of viral videos telling lies about their city"

socalgal2 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:01:47 +0000

I don't know anything about Oklahoma City but I'm pretty confident that SF is a shit hole having lived there up to 2024 and seeing it first hand every day. Any stats that claim otherwise are lying.

New comment by socalgal2 in "81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone"

socalgal2 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:38:34 +0000

It's not designed for anyone to go though - Yesterday I setup an Nintendo Switch for my Uncle. There were so many steps it was ridiculous. Off the top of my head

1. enter your language

2. enter your region

3. enter your wifi and password

4. select your wifi (why 3 didn't do this I have no effing idea)

5. create a MII, you can't skip this step though you can pick a pre-created one

6. link your MII to an account - you can skip this but the device is useless without an account if you didn't buy games on physica media

7. Setting up an account shows a QR code so now you have to get our your phone

8. Enter your email and get send a verification email

9. switch to your email app and find the code

10. switch back to your browser and enter the code

11. Fill out your name/address/phone etc....

12. Now you want to download an app so you can use your switch so, pick e-store

13. Get QR code and scan

14. Get told you were sent another email verification

14. Go to email app and get code

15. Switch back to browser and enter code

16. Type in your CC Card info

17. Now pick a game to purchase

18. The purchase button is off screen after a bunch of legalize before it and no indication you need to scroll down

19. Choose purchase

20. Get told you need to verify again (in a tiny box you can check "remember me")

there were more steps. The whole process took about an hour, maybe longer

Even with all of that, there just a ton of stuff about a Switch that's taken for granted or poorly designed. As an example, he wanted to play Switch Sports Golf. The Switch home screen assumes you're using both controllers. At some point Switch Sports Golf switches to using just one controller. That's not clear at all. Another example, you pick Golf. It displays a screen showing you to hold the controller down and press the top button (X), but also on that screen is a generic, "press (A)" to continue this dialog. It's a very poorly designed screen giving to conflicting directions.

I get it, he's not the target market.

New comment by socalgal2 in "81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone"

socalgal2 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:10:33 +0000

A business doesn't have to serve all customers. You can't walk into 99.99% of USA stores and pay in rupees or yen or yuan. This is no different. They can choose what they accept and what they don't. Just like not every store takes credit cards or doesn't take certain credit cards (discover, amex) or doesn't take bitcoin.

New comment by socalgal2 in "Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI"

socalgal2 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:32:46 +0000

Unfortunately there is a ton of pressure not to review code. AI enthusiasts see themselves in a race against others and code review = going slower. I recently attended a company wide "let's all use AI" conference and several talks were about how they were not reviewing much code anymore because the PRs were coming in 10x to 50x more and they just couldn't keep up.

Scary AF

New comment by socalgal2 in "Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't"

socalgal2 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:26:09 +0000

good cherry picking there

New comment by socalgal2 in "I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok"

socalgal2 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:20:13 +0000

I’d be happy to use the app if they didn’t suck. The websites have more info and the browser is more capable by default. Like by default I can select any text I see, an address to copy into a calendar, a phone number to send to someone else, a name I want to paste into a search engine. an app is the opposite, by default nothing is selectable and I’m at the mercy of the nearly universally bad UX designer’s whims

New comment by socalgal2 in "The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes"

socalgal2 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:33:11 +0000

Most games back then where small. An C64 only had 64k and most game didn't use all of it. An Atari 800 had max 48k. It wasn't until the 1200 that it went up. Both systems are cartridge based games, many of which were 8k.

Honestly though, I don't read much into the sizes. Sure they were small games and had lots of game play for some defintion of game play. I enjoyed them immensely. But it's hard to go back to just a few colors, low-res graphics, often no way to save, etc... for me at least, the modern affordances mean something. Of course I don't need every game to look like Horizon Zero Dawn. A Short Hike was great. It's also 400meg (according to steam)

New comment by socalgal2 in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

socalgal2 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 06:18:02 +0000

I'm mostly fine with markdown, but I just wanted to comment, this example in the post

    # Hi
    
    I am a  simple  _programmer_ doing
     elegant  programming.
    
    
    
    And here is my portfolio

Might not do you think it does. markdown does not include html parser per-se. It allowes HTML but has rules like

    I am a super *grinch* yall

will generate

    I am a super grinch yall


It doesn't see the span element and turn off parsing.Similarly, the div in the first example produces div, p, close-p, close-div, because the rule isn't "find he closing tag". The rule is something like "if the line starts with html then stop parsing and just copy until the next blank line.
All that said, I know the rules and generally know how to follow them. Of course I still run into the issue that even though there's commonmark, every site and tool is running their own variation which are incompatible.



New comment by socalgal2 in "Big-Endian Testing with QEMU"
socalgal2 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:25:54 +0000

I'm with you this. I lived through the big endian / little endian hell in the 80/90s.  Little endian won. Anyone making a big endian architechture at this point would be shooting themselves in the foot because off all the incompatibilities. Don't make things more complicated.
In fact, I'd be surprised if you made a big endian arch and then ran a browser on it if some large number of websites would fail because they used typedarrays and aren't endian aware.
The solution is not to ask every programmer in the universe to write endian aware code. The solution is to standardize on little endian



New comment by socalgal2 in "Significant raise of reports"
socalgal2 — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 21:43:31 +0000

> Linux devs keep making that point, but I really don't understand why they expect the world to embrace that thinking.  You don't need to care about the vast majority of software defects in Linux, save for the once-in-a-decade filesystem corruption bug.
The point is that all of those bugs are now trivial to exploit and so will be exploited



New comment by socalgal2 in "LinkedIn is illegally searching your computer"
socalgal2 — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:42:37 +0000

How does this scan happen. AFAIK there is no API for a webpage to scan for extensions. The most a page could do is try to figure out indirectly if an extension exists if that extension leaks info into the page.



New comment by socalgal2 in "Obfuscation is not security – AI can deobfuscate any minified JavaScript code"
socalgal2 — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:19:15 +0000

If it’s too hard to read ask your ai to deobfuscate it :D



New comment by socalgal2 in "Obfuscation is not security – AI can deobfuscate any minified JavaScript code"
socalgal2 — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:17:39 +0000

And read through native code as well



New comment by socalgal2 in "I traced my traffic through a home Tailscale exit node"
socalgal2 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 22:06:27 +0000

This is my question too... It's concerning to me that everyone one seems to be using tailscale (and maybe cloudflare access) and that I don't see mention of open source alternatives. I'm sure for some network experts the alternatives are obvious? Setup a server somewhere publically available that runs ??? and have it be your auth/rendezvous server.
people complain about github being proprietary but I haven't seen much complaint about tailscale being proprietary.
I assume I'm just being overly paranoid? It's certainly convenient to just sign up  and have things just work.



New comment by socalgal2 in "Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp"
socalgal2 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:33:13 +0000

This entire thread it almost entirely proof that HN is now reddit. No facts, no consideration, just accusation and crowd think
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
none of that here
> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
not followed here
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
none of that there
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Lots of that here
The system is clearly automated. As others have pointed out, they've been able to download without incident. As other have also pointed out, Firefox also warns. The warning is reasonable, claiming that something isn't downloaded often is true, until it isn't. A few more downloads and the warning will likely go away.
Nothing to see here except a Google hater mis-interpreting something and the posting ragebait.



New comment by socalgal2 in "Kyushu Railway Company Train Varieties"
socalgal2 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:23:15 +0000

I wish this mis-information would die
JR was converted into 7 companies. Most of other 93 existing train companies were not paid for by government. Take Tokyo - The Keio lines, the Odakyu lines, the Tokyu lines, the Tobu lines, the Keikyu lines, the Seibu lines, etc... are all private and have been private since they started.
As for JR, most of the debt was paid back, at least by JR East and JR West.