Hacker News: tetromino_

New comment by tetromino_ in "You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)"

tetromino_ — Sun, 31 May 2026 15:37:14 +0000

> It's only for war or to consolidate power in the hands of the ruling class

Consider Egyptian and Mesopotamian irrigation and flood management, Persian and Roman roads, Chinese canals...

New comment by tetromino_ in "The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time"

tetromino_ — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:46:25 +0000

I get that the tax man needs to be paid, but what possible justification could there be for

1. demanding for this data monthly, rather than quarterly or yearly; and

2. demanding it via an annoying bespoke process rather than as an entry in the business's regular tax filing or some other pre-existing regular paperwork that small businesses are already submitting?

New comment by tetromino_ in "The real cost of owning a home"

tetromino_ — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:04:42 +0000

Condos may, and quite often do, have enormously expensive maintenance issues that the condo owners are quite unaware of until the last moment and will have to shell out for via special assessment from the condo association. Example from personal experience: very soon after moving into my condo, cracks were discovered on the other side of the building. They were investigated and it turned out that the building was made from substandard concrete. All exterior facing concrete needed to be replaced or the building would fall down. To pay for the fix, there was a special assessment that I needed to pay into, and to add insult to injury, for 2 years I could not use my theoretically beautiful view from the balcony and windows - it was all jackhammering and concrete dust.

New comment by tetromino_ in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

tetromino_ — Sat, 23 May 2026 23:37:01 +0000

Sometimes. In many/most countries, it requires at minimum that both parents be citizens of the same country. In a few countries, dual citizenship is banned completely, so if the kid is a US citizen they cannot be the country's citizen.

New comment by tetromino_ in "The locals don't know"

tetromino_ — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:28:19 +0000

What you have to do, as a local, is regularly invite some out-of-town friends or relatives to stay in your apartment for a weekend to get yourself unstuck from your rut. You will need to show them around, take them to art museums and downtown views and restaurants, help them to not get lost on the train system etc., and in the process, you will get to do things you don't normally do as a townie.

New comment by tetromino_ in "Why modern parents feel more sleep deprived than our ancestors did"

tetromino_ — Sun, 10 May 2026 23:56:50 +0000

Mothers in the ancient past started at age 16-22 (note that fathers' ages at first child were extremely variable depending on the ancient culture in question) but then kept going giving birth every few years until age 40+. (Or until they died from childbirth complications, famine, disease, etc.)

Please take a look at the very thorough demographic analysis of the ancient peasant class at https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-an...

New comment by tetromino_ in "I want to live like Costco people"

tetromino_ — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:38:10 +0000

Part of growing up is realizing that the places where a person eats or shops, what music and entertainment they consume, what clothes they wear - are entirely uncorrelated with their personality and character and worth. And cringing hard at your own past teenage past self who confused such superficial identity markers with personality.

Unfortunately, it sounds like the article's author is only on their first step of this realization.

New comment by tetromino_ in "Waymo in Portland"

tetromino_ — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 13:43:37 +0000

Per [1], a typical Portland public bus causes about 730 times more road wear than a full size pickup truck (which is about the worst case for road wear from a personal vehicle). How many buses have more than 700 people riding in them?

(I am of course ignoring the scaling for fuel, maintenance, pollution, and traffic costs of personal vehicles; but my point is that most people severely underestimate just how awful the economic case for an underused full size bus is. Now, minibuses and microbuses are a different story; but US public transit systems don't use them.)

[1] https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...

New comment by tetromino_ in "An update on recent Claude Code quality reports"

tetromino_ — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 22:33:38 +0000

Where I work, options that don't do anything are seen as good engineering practice. You see, you can't break your user's scripts. Your CLI arguments are part of your stable API. If your tool used to have a cache_dir CLI option, and now no longer needs it, you still have to keep accepting cache_dir and treat it as a no-op until you are confident your users have migrated away from it.

New comment by tetromino_ in "What killed the Florida orange?"

tetromino_ — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 19:56:39 +0000

According to the article, the reason why the bacteria was so quickly fatal for Florida orange trees is that their roots were weakened by a sequence of major hurricanes and by many years of excessive pesticide use.

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

tetromino_ — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:56:05 +0000

Out of curiosity, I ran the 5 command on my project's public git tree. The only informative one was #4 ("Is This Project Accelerating or Dying") - it showed cliffs when significant pieces of logic were decoupled and moved to other repos.

New comment by tetromino_ in "Battle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game"

tetromino_ — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:17:44 +0000

Same happened for me when I clicked on the link, I had to delete the cookies for wesnoth.org and then load the site again. I think their Anubis setup might be broken a bit

New comment by tetromino_ in "Sam Altman's sister amends lawsuit accusing OpenAI CEO of sexual abuse"

tetromino_ — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 19:46:46 +0000

Using eyewitnesses to corroborate as much of her story as possible, plus any artifacts generated during the years of abuse (medical records, therapist notes, texts/letters to friends, diary entries, etc.).

New comment by tetromino_ in "FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data"

tetromino_ — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:59:27 +0000

Key quote:

> Even though it did not have any business relationship with OkCupid, the third-party data recipient asked the company to share large datasets of OkCupid user photos and related data with it because OkCupid’s founders were financial investors in the third party. OkCupid provided the third party with access to nearly three million OkCupid user photos as well as location and other information without placing any formal or contractual restrictions on how the information could be used, the FTC alleged.

I wonder what is this third party that the complaint does not list by name?

New comment by tetromino_ in "A nearly perfect USB cable tester"

tetromino_ — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 19:35:42 +0000

Attempting to access treedix.com (the advertised product) gives me

> Access Denied

> Sorry, you do not currently have the necessary permissions to access this site, or this site may not be available in your region.

Are they geoblocking the USA from even viewing their site for some reason?

New comment by tetromino_ in "Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed"

tetromino_ — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 22:25:09 +0000

> try to reproduce on a current build

Good luck doing that when the bug report (like virtually all bug reports in nature) doesn't provide sufficient reproduction steps.

New comment by tetromino_ in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

tetromino_ — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 13:57:29 +0000

> The reason we force people to use Jira is because it only works if everyone uses it.

In my experience, AI out of the box is at first a useless gimmick - until someone starts seriously playing with it and defines a skill file for integrating it with some internal tool. And another person starts playing with it and figures out that AI is pretty good at using another internal tool but only if the tool runs in --silent=1 mode by default, so as not to confuse AI with too much logging output. And a third person figures out that it's actively dangerous to let AI some some other internal tool - but hey, there's a safer alternative, and which happens to perform better too. And pretty soon you end up with an ecosystem of business-specific scripts and .md files and skills and MCPs that's actually helpful 85%+ of the time. But the only way to get there is to get devs and power users tinkering with it.

New comment by tetromino_ in "US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says"

tetromino_ — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:36:05 +0000

Paywalled

New comment by tetromino_ in "How Big Diaper absorbs billions of extra dollars from American parents"

tetromino_ — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 15:52:18 +0000

> But cloth diapers are obviously much better for the environment

It's obvious only if you save and reuse the same set of cloth diapers for 2 or more babies. (Which places some constrains on brand, durability etc.) If you have only one kid, I am not sure which side is environmentally more friendly; growing and processing all that cotton (not to mention the plastic for all the waterproof covers) uses a lot of water and energy...

New comment by tetromino_ in "Little Free Library"

tetromino_ — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:00:50 +0000

In my experience (I have 3 within walking distance of home), they tend to have good children's books, but the adult selection is almost useless, leaning towards religious propaganda and bad cookbooks.