Hacker News: socksy

New comment by socksy in "Show HN: Hacker News archive (47M+ items, 11.6GB) as Parquet, updated every 5m"

socksy — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 20:10:39 +0000

I can't stand this and will actively discriminate against comments I notice in that voice. Even this one has "Not because [..], but because [..]"

New comment by socksy in "Layoffs at Block"

socksy — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:19:25 +0000

Why? This is asserted throughout this HN thread as an obvious truism, but it seems precipiced on some dramatic right wing free market concept of how the world works that I can't tell is coming from the libertarians of hacker news, or is some kind of USA concept.

Why should society let the concept of a company exist if it is actively detrimental to society at large, for the gain of a very few?

New comment by socksy in "Layoffs at Block"

socksy — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 11:59:07 +0000

Are you arguing for or against capitalism here?

New comment by socksy in "The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling"

socksy — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 04:42:37 +0000

Allowing something isn't the same as enforcing it to be allowed. If there's regulation, like with ending roaming charges between countries, then it's required to be followed simultaneously across the EU. If there's a directive, like the Working Time Directive, goals of legislation are set out and each member state is required to introduce legislation that implements it. There's also decisions (for one country for one issue), recommendations and opinions (obviously non binding).

There's also the Court of Justice which is the highest court, but only in EU matters. National courts can refer cases to it, or the commission/member states can bring cases against other member states, if they believe they are not following EU law. This would mean either they are not following a regulation, or that the state has not fully/correctly implemented a directive into their own national laws.

As I understand it, there's no specific regulation or directive aimed at gambling itself. There's things tangentially related (data protection, anti money laundering etc). But since there's no regulation or directive saying "gambling must be allowed", there's nothing stopping a member state banning it completely if they so wish.

The only point in which the EU might step in would be if the law was somehow discriminatory or inconsistent (e.g. we ban all foreign gambling sites, but not our own, we ban lottery tickets but not state run casinos, etc).

New comment by socksy in "Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires"

socksy — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 18:35:58 +0000

Yeah but if you fuck it up it's a much bigger deal

New comment by socksy in "EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity"

socksy — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 15:36:19 +0000

Good thing then that there's a range of options between being let go immediately for no reason and companies being forced to employ bad employees for life.

New comment by socksy in "Statement from Jerome Powell"

socksy — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 09:06:29 +0000

> If you're not American, then you may not understand the way the American voting system works.

This is incredibly unlikely, given how pervasive American politics is, and how much the results of the American elections affects the rest of the world. Additionally, having a two party system is unfortunately pretty common.

New comment by socksy in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

socksy — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 06:03:42 +0000

Pretty sure that's the joke...

New comment by socksy in "Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers"

socksy — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 01:04:41 +0000

I feel I just need to run a slightly too large LLM with too much context on a MBP, and it's enough to slow it down irreparably until it suddenly hard resets. Maybe the memory pressure it does that at is much higher though compared to Linux?

New comment by socksy in "Kroger acknowledges that its bet on robotics went too far"

socksy — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:07:33 +0000

Also, anecdotally they are more popular amongst less price sensitive people with disposable incomes, where paying for the convenience is worth it.

But also, definitely not the Ocado model.

New comment by socksy in "Self-hosting my photos with Immich"

socksy — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 10:49:26 +0000

The database is Postgres, and the schema is quite sensible. You can (and I have) write normal SQL queries in psql to modify the data.

It might not be as easy as rsync to transfer data out, but I would trust it way more than some of the folder based systems I've had with local apps that somehow get corrupted/modified between their database and the local filesystem. And I don't think ext4 is somehow magically more futureproof than Postgres. And if no-one else writes an export tool, and you feel unable to, your local friendly LLM will happily read the schema and write the SQL for you.

New comment by socksy in "Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models"

socksy — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 12:49:18 +0000

To be fair, given the context I would also read it as a derogatory description of an LLM.

New comment by socksy in "Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time"

socksy — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 20:48:10 +0000

Part of the issue is that the landlord gets any say whatsoever about a public utility.

New comment by socksy in "Claude Code refused to add rainbows and unicorns to my app"

socksy — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 03:53:49 +0000

This is less to do with claude and rainbows and unicorns, and more to do with whatever your chat context before this request looked like. IMO you should be regular cleaning out your context, and use something like https://github.com/steveyegge/beads to keep track of your status.

In my work's repo:

    > In the frontend app, change the label from "login" to "rainbows". Make the toggle switch super rainbowy and unicorny so that it's really fun and that my 5-year-old daughter will like it.
    
     I'll help you make the login toggle super rainbowy and unicorny for your daughter! Let me start by exploring the frontend app to find the login
  toggle.

New comment by socksy in "Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category"

socksy — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 16:06:34 +0000

I mean if you skip the traditional publishing gates, you could in theory endorse articles that specifically bring out sections from other articles that you agree or disagree with. Would be a different form of article

New comment by socksy in "Keep Android Open"

socksy — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 07:30:28 +0000

Why would that affect anything? The Chinese Android ecosystem is already split from the Google one.

New comment by socksy in "Zed is now available on Windows"

socksy — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 06:46:59 +0000

Well exactly, I'm pretty sure that's what the GP is getting at — it would be a surprise if Rust didn't have good JSON support. Which it does. So it's unlikely to be the bottleneck.

New comment by socksy in "Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity"

socksy — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 01:13:55 +0000

440Hz is an A (and most people don't have perfect pitch anyway). Otherwise, I completely agree.

New comment by socksy in "Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads"

socksy — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 13:57:14 +0000

But you don't need it for Android... Can happily install uBlock Origin on bog standard Firefox there.

New comment by socksy in "Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts"

socksy — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 00:45:04 +0000

What? The Google LLM assisted search experience is... not the best option by a long shot? It's laughably incorrect in many cases, and infuriatingly incorrect in the others. It forces itself into your queries above the fold without being asked, and then bullshits to you.

A recentish example, I was trying to remember which cities' buses were in Thessaloniki before they got a new batch recently. They used to rent from a company (Papadakis Bros) that would buy out of commission buses from other cities around the world and maintain the fleet. I could remember specifically that there were some BVG Busses from Berlin, and some Dutch buses, and was vaguely wondering if there were some also from Stockholm I couldn't remember.

So I searched on my iPad, which defaulted to Google (since clearly I hadn't got around to setting up a good search engine on it yet). And I get this result: https://i.imgur.com/pm512HU.jpeg

The LLM forced its way in there without me prompting (in e.g. Kagi, you opt in by ending the query with a question mark). It fundamentally misunderstands the question. It then treats me like an idiot for not understanding that Stockholm is a city in Sweden, and Thessaloniki a city in Greece. It uses its back linking functionality to help cite this great insight. And it takes up the entire page! There's not a single search result in view.

This is such a painful experience, it confirms my existing bias that since they introduced LLMs (and honestly for a couple years before that) that Google is no longer a good first place to go for information. It's more of a last resort.

Both ChatGPT and Claude have a free tier, and the ability to do searches. Here's what ChatGPT gave me: https://chatgpt.com/share/68b78eb7-d7b4-8006-81e0-ab2c548931...

A lot of casual users don't hit the free tier limits (and indeedI've not hit any limits on the free ChatGPT yet), and while they have their problems they're both far better than the Gemini powered summaries Google have been pumping out. My suggestion is that perhaps you haven't surveyed the market before suggesting that "by far the best LLM-assisted search experience today is available for free at the Google prompt".