<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: thwarted</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thwarted</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 04:09:43 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=thwarted" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "The weekend is 100 years old"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Aren't these effectively the same thing? In order to get the benefits of living/working as a group/in a society, there needs to be common elements; aggregating by location/space and by time go hand in hand.  If the farmers' market is in the park on Sundays, you can hardly expect to show up at a different time or place and still participate. Regularity, in time or place, is the most common and scalable way to coordinate. The way to avoid that is to remove the need to coordinate, but then, by definition, you are alone.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Aug 2026 18:18:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49322341</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49322341</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49322341</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "'Pervert glasses': Backlash against Meta's smart glasses grows"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I can't think of a better example of intrusiveness than "as soon as I pull out my phone [the kids] are grabbing for it", which I'm reading as "the kids want to use it even tho it isn't theirs". We've trained the kids to intrude on someone else so they can get a dopamine hit.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:40:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49246134</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49246134</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49246134</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> <i>made the bread cheap enough</i><p>The circus is distracting from the price of bread, apparently.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Jul 2026 07:26:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48989163</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48989163</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48989163</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "Setting up your spare Mac for Claude Code to control, a step-by-step guide"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You don't have an on-call rotation but do have people dedicated to vendor relationships, and that guy works on the weekend?  I'm not sure how you completely avoid getting alerts on the weekend for third-party payment processor issues, which can happen anytime, if you actually want to transact business on the weekend.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 18 Jul 2026 18:55:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48961050</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48961050</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48961050</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "Evidence of inconsistencies in evaluation process and selection of winners"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> <i>Open-source projects often have this problem where you can have dozens of thousands of man-hours poured into a project without a single end-user opinion taken into account.</i><p>How is this "a problem"? The reason there are dozens of thousands of hours on an open source project is because the end-users are working on it. Some projects exist solely for someone to work on it (that is, the "working on it" is the "use case"). Open source does not expect or need to make money or get "users", so how people discover or source what they build and how to proceed isn't really a "problem".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Jul 2026 18:53:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48950940</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48950940</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48950940</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The industry couldn't decide what it wanted for a long time (and maybe still hasn't settled). Pages needed to be consistent visually no matter which platform and browser the page was displayed on (which is odd, few people used the same sites on multiple platforms at the time). Oh, but then it was visually jarring because it didn't match the rest of the platform and you couldn't leverage your knowledge and experience of the platform's UI (the way multi-select worked in drop downs, accessibility). But then you couldn't style the widgets on the page to make your site distinct (styling OSX "lickable candy" widgets didn't work so well since they were so visually unique). And then you had mobile where space is a premium and scrollbars were sometimes visually hidden and the entire application took up the whole screen, so differences from other sites and the platforms as a whole were not as prominent. So all widgets had to be stylable (IIRC, you could style buttons but not scrollbars for a while, which made things inconsistent within a given page itself). And complete control of the "experience" became desirable, the scrollbar was seen as part of the page, not part of the container that holds and displays the page.<p>Ultimately the browser was recognized as its own platform and had to support all the customizations and accessibility concerns. User stylesheets are a thing, but few used that for much more than hiding annoying elements, and today the most likely user customizable thing is being able to switch between light and dark modes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:46:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48936948</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48936948</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48936948</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "When A.I. is a member of the family"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> <i>tricking people into believing that a ML model can have experiences, feelings…</i><p>… or that sentences like "You're secrets are safe with me" is at all legitimate, meaningful, or legally binding.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Jul 2026 20:27:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48926610</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48926610</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48926610</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "The Three-Second Theft: Why AI Voice Fraud Outruns Every Defence"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The bank is trying to authenticate you, while you're trying to authenticate the bank. The bank calls and tries to authenticate themselves to the callee by saying "is your birthday such and such?", they're risking sharing PII with an unauthorized third-party. The solutions are a non-trivial amount of effort that no one really wants to put up with, unfortunately.<p>I used to have a residential mortgage with two other people and my name was stuffed into some ancillary field as a co-holder and they refused to give me any information or transact over the phone. I eventually figured out I needed to tell them to look in some extended info field, and the whole endeavor was annoying but ultimately I was appreciative of the strictness (that the entire mortgage data model—at the time (25 years ago), I don't know what it's like today—seems to assume that it will only ever be two people of opposite gender who are married will be on a mortgage was much more disappointing. The other two people were assumed to be married and the woman was seemingly by default listed as the non-primary).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:49:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48923664</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48923664</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48923664</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Containers are often used with user namespaces, which is literally another (set of) user account(s).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:05:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48894740</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48894740</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48894740</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Leap days, February 29th, are not at the level of time zones. Different time zones do not disagree as to when March 1st will occurs immediately after February 28th.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:21:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48847450</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48847450</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48847450</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> <i>"What's your favorite sarcopterygian?"</i><p>Am I reading your post correctly, this question is the prompt <i>given</i> to an LLM? What is anyone expecting by asking an LLM what its favorite <i>anything</i> is? This is a conversational prompt, so accuracy and rigor is barely applicable or expected, so downgrading to a lesser model should be acceptable. If you really want to attribute <i>preference</i> to an LLM, consider the downgrade to be a "this conversation is beneath my advanced n-billion parameter training".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 08 Jul 2026 23:26:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48838768</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48838768</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48838768</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> <i>extra capabilities you get from an ActiveRecord framework such as full-stack admin pages</i><p>The naive "here's a row-level view of the database records" that things like ActiveRecord/ActiveAdmin give you by default are entirely inappropriate for any line of business administrative interaction.  Line of business admin sites should be workflow based and focused on surfacing specific information needed for processes outside of the admin site itself.  Non-developer staff should not be expected to interpret the state of rows and relationships among the tables.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 05 Jul 2026 23:09:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48798855</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48798855</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48798855</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "Please stop the AI confidence theater"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"We have this thing that's awesome that we can convince people to buy" eventually becomes "We can convince people to buy". It's unfortunate that "convince people to buy" can be successfully used independently of the quality or appropriateness of the item being sold.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 03 Jul 2026 16:27:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48776849</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48776849</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48776849</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "The war on terror primed America for autocracy"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> <i>younger folks don't fully adjust for important factors: plane hijackings used to be much more common</i><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings</a><p>(I can not say how comprehensive that wikipedia list is).<p>There's more in the 70s and 80s than I was expecting (having lived through the 80s), but given how many flights there are, hijackings have been and are exceedingly rare; and most of these are not even US flights.  These are "driving is orders of magnitude more dangerous than flying" and "10x a very small number is still a very small number" numbers.<p><a href="https://businesstats.com/global-air-traffic-number-of-flights/" rel="nofollow">https://businesstats.com/global-air-traffic-number-of-flight...</a><p><a href="https://easbcn.com/en/how-many-planes-fly-per-day-around-the-world/" rel="nofollow">https://easbcn.com/en/how-many-planes-fly-per-day-around-the...</a><p><a href="https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/world-air-passenger-traffic-evolution-1980-2020" rel="nofollow">https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/world-air-pas...</a><p>These numbers only serve to re-enforce that the response of giving up liberty for (the feeling of) security due to terrorist action in the US was probably outsized. General population awareness in general was probably more of a deterrent after 9/11 than any of the first order 9/11 response actions, especially considering that the US gave countries in the middle east further reason to hate Americans and US foreign policy after 9/11.  Obviously, terrorist attacks get a lot of air time and column inches, which feeds the perception of the risk.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:39:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48655200</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48655200</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48655200</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "Identity verification on Claude"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's rich that the cohort that sees identity verification and real names policies as necessary and meaningful also doesn't seem to understand the first thing about identity and names.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 21 Jun 2026 20:42:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48622412</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48622412</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48622412</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "I found 10k GitHub repositories distributing Trojan malware"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's safer in the same sense as if you're paranoid about your date being a serial killer, you meet them in a public venue. It doesn't mean your date isn't a serial killer, but the risk profile is different because other people can be involved/witness/have context.<p>You didn't use the word "safe", you used the relative term "safer", and on average, it is harder to hide ill intent in open source software, there's a greater chance it will <i>eventually</i> be discovered. The blast radius is larger for open source (because the barrier to using it is lower), which increases the number of people impacted, but an increase in the number of people impacted also increases the chance of discovery and motivation to address it once discovered.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:56:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48588237</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48588237</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48588237</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "Shall we play a game? – LLMs use tactical nukes in 95% of simulations"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"I need you to turn your key and enable the missile silo's MCP server, sir".<p>~ the opening scene from a reboot of War Games, probably.<p>A few years ago there was consternation over the US's missile launch system using 8" floppy disks, that it was needless archaic and had never been updated. Can't say that if the launch is mediated by the latest hotness LLM.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 21:29:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48496693</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48496693</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48496693</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "Queues Don't Fix Overload (2014)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Reducing buffer size puts back pressure on the whole system, which can be valuable to manage load (but often throttles faster stages and that throttling makes people uncomfortable). A meaningful metric is how much of the buffer is used at any given time and the throughout. If the buffer is backed up, that says there's a bottle neck on the consumption side of the buffer and more bandwidth is needed there.  For whatever reason, adjusting buffer sizes is the more common action taken. A buffer provides throughput management <i>but</i> it also provides info/metrics about the operation of the system.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:39:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492706</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492706</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492706</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I remember a book I read as a pre-teen, 40 or so years ago, about a kid who wanted to be "perfect". A wear a tree of broccoli on a string around your neck to learn how to overcome embarrassment. A perfect person never makes mistakes, and the best way to not make mistakes is to not do anything. Similar "requirements" of perfection and their expression are presented. The kid eventually finds himself in an empty room, by himself, doing nothing, wearing broccoli. Perfection was achieved, but at the cost of an extremely boring life.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:13:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492350</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492350</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492350</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thwarted in "AI agent runs amok in Fedora and elsewhere"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Having a key isn't a distinguishing aspect, it's the position in the "web of trust" network that is important.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 03:49:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48485992</link><dc:creator>thwarted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48485992</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48485992</guid></item></channel></rss>