Hacker News: thelopa

New comment by thelopa in "Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks"

thelopa — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:13:22 +0000

I recently left a FAANG. Shortly before I left (for unrelated reasons) the director of my org got scolded by the VP he reported to because token usage in his org was low. After that the ICs in my org were told to use ai for everything or there could be consequences for their careers.

New comment by thelopa in "It's hard to justify Tahoe icons"

thelopa — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 16:21:04 +0000

I know someone who works on the macOS permission system. If you submit a bug report and share the feedback number, I will send it their way https://bugreport.apple.com/

New comment by thelopa in "Proton launches its own version of Google Docs"

thelopa — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 17:30:43 +0000

I’ve been running Linux for ~20 years. Proton is, without a doubt, a huge leap forward for the ecosystem. I stopped dual booting Windows for games ~5 years ago and haven’t looked back. It’s positively wild to me that native Linux builds for games are often harder to get working than just using proton and the game’s windows build.

New comment by thelopa in "Guix on the Framework 13 AMD"

thelopa — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 03:11:53 +0000

They needed to compile the kernel because they were using the full kernel. The main package repository (and thus the main binary caches) only include a de-blobbed version of the kernel. To get standard Linux including all the blobs, you need to use the “nonguix” package repository. The nonguix folks do have a binary cache server, but using it during install is slightly annoying. I currently have a guix vm compiling Linux for exactly this reason. Since you likely won’t be installing much else from nonguix during system setup, you only need to compile the kernel and other bloby things you choose to include (e.g. firmware, microcode).

New comment by thelopa in "Ad-hoc polymorphism erodes type-safety"

thelopa — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 23:48:04 +0000

I would argue that you should do something similar in Haskell, too. It would ensure that practically everything accessing the allow list fails to compile unless it had been adapted to the new model. Haskell’s strength is the compiler and its ability to pedantically enforce type errors. Use it! Let it help you!

New comment by thelopa in "Community Note correcting Musk’s anti-vax tweet mysteriously disappears"

thelopa — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 21:36:55 +0000

Disagreeing with a particular taxonomic way of describing different types of people simply because it makes it hard to advance your political beliefs does not mean the words involved in that taxonomy are slurs. “Slur” has a particular meaning, and it isn’t “makes it hard for me to achieve my political goals”.

New comment by thelopa in "Community Note correcting Musk’s anti-vax tweet mysteriously disappears"

thelopa — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 05:53:21 +0000

Cisgender is recent, but it’s also primarily used to serve as the counter to transgender. To understand “cisgender”, it’s useful to study the history of “transgender”. Transgender was introduced as a term because it encompassed a larger group of people and avoided the stigma surrounding “transsexual”. Transsexual has a history dating back about a hundred years. Since “trans-“ and “cis-“ are antonym prefixes, once you have transsexual, you have cissexual. For the purposes of Elon’s rule, it doesn’t matter whether it’s CISsexual or CISgender, he objects to “cis”.

New comment by thelopa in "Community Note correcting Musk’s anti-vax tweet mysteriously disappears"

thelopa — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 15:56:15 +0000

And yet, Elon has decided that a term used in academic medical research for nearly a century, “cisgender”, is a slur and banned from the platform. Funny how he wants to protect objectionable speech that aligns with his political view while restricting “objectionable” speech that doesn’t.

New comment by thelopa in "South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting"

thelopa — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 23:30:39 +0000

The Korean approach is still wrong, arguably. If you want to include the totality of the life of the baby, the next normal stopping point would be conception. That would make the child ~9 months old, not 1 year.

New comment by thelopa in "Brute.Fail: Watch brute force attacks fail in real time"

thelopa — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 22:07:57 +0000

I disable password authentication and use fail2ban. It's unlikely they will be able to brute force my key, but no server is perfect. sshd might be compromised one day. I’d rather have an extra layer of defense just in case.

New comment by thelopa in "Neverflow: C macros that guard against buffer overflows"

thelopa — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 15:44:13 +0000

Many of the str functions in the C standard library assume a nul terminator.

New comment by thelopa in "Windows 11 is getting a force quit option to close apps without the Task Manager"

thelopa — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 15:32:08 +0000

I’ve used Mac’s at my job for about 10 years + a few years of personal use before that. I’ve had ample time to get used to the Mac workflow.

macOS’s approach only works nicely if you expect to have one simultaneous task per app OR you don’t expect to switch between apps. Once you have multiple simultaneous tasks in multiple apps, it becomes really cumbersome to use command tab. My job tends to involve exactly the pattern of window switching that macOS isn’t made for.

New comment by thelopa in "The halting problem is decidable on a set of asymptotic probability one (2006)"

thelopa — Sun, 28 May 2023 18:13:53 +0000

Some models of the Turing machine have an infinite tape in only one direction. Some also don’t require every state to have an exhaustive set of transitions. Those models generally consider going off the end of the tape or failing to find a transition to be a halting state.

New comment by thelopa in "U.S. Depression Rates Reach New Highs"

thelopa — Thu, 18 May 2023 20:57:30 +0000

A leading candidate for the 2024 US presidential election has made a campaign promise to make healthcare that I rely on virtually illegal. Dozens of representatives in congress have cosponsored a bill that would make it illegal to even teach doctors about this form of care. I would not survive without this care. Things may be worse in the rest of the world, but if healthcare I rely on is taken away then there is no way I will stay in this country.

New comment by thelopa in "The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere"

thelopa — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 21:08:44 +0000

I’m assuming I’m the “assertion made below”. I made no such claim. Let me rephrase it.

There have been 8 mass shootings in America in the last 7 days. No one was running to twitter to speculate about their causes. No politicians were raising concerns about troubling trends. The shootings were going completely unremarked on in national politics… until a shooter happened to be trans.

If you want to speculate that commentators and politicians are giving the other incidents the same attention, we would literally never hear the end of it. On average, almost 2 mass shootings happen per day. But, for some reason, those incidents weren’t given national attention. Curious.

New comment by thelopa in "The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere"

thelopa — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 20:41:51 +0000

But, again, why are you focusing on a group that is statistically less likely to commit mass shootings compared to the average person? Even if you find some root cause for trans shooters, you’d be, at best, eliminating what amounts to about 0.1% of cases. Why not look at groups that are over represented?

New comment by thelopa in "The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere"

thelopa — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 20:30:09 +0000

You optimize for the common case, not the uncommon one. Shouldn’t we figure out why shootings in general are happening rather than fixating on a specific case because it involved an unpopular minority group?

New comment by thelopa in "The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere"

thelopa — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 20:21:35 +0000

This narrative about trans shooters is disconnected from reality. If you take every trans shooter in the last decade, you get less than 10… out of thousands. For context, last year America has nearly 700 mass shootings. Trans people are actually under represented in mass shootings. Estimates put trans people at up to 1% of the population. We would naively expect 7 shooters last year to be trans, but none were. Saying that the recent shooter is part of a trend of transgender shooters requires outright ignoring all evidence to the contrary.

New comment by thelopa in "The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere"

thelopa — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 20:14:18 +0000

Citation needed. Everything I’ve seen indicates that transition rates are roughly equal.

New comment by thelopa in "Let's build a Chrome extension that steals as much data as possible"

thelopa — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 02:21:14 +0000

Browser JS definitely never had the ability to unmount storage volumes before Chromebooks existed.