Hacker News: tomcatfish

New comment by tomcatfish in "Discord Read Receipts Exploit: When, How Often, How Long"

tomcatfish — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 20:08:57 +0000

Neat find, and I liked the various patches (two-step image serve, post in another channel to fool the cache). This was a fun writeup.

New comment by tomcatfish in "Swappa.com for GrapheneOS compatible devices – Stay Away"

tomcatfish — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:56:51 +0000

They… will not say that, because they get a large fine if you report them. Every store I've been too has been deeply apologetic when this has happened (a small handful of times in my entire life).

New comment by tomcatfish in "A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)"

tomcatfish — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:23:48 +0000

This reply is smug but dreadfully silly.

The giveaway is the handling of information and curiosity. You argue for throwing both away, and it's not clear why. When the author takes away more decimals than they should, the article becomes useless. When the author leaves in more decimals than they should, I round "with my eyes" to my desired precision. As a bonus, I can take their numbers and spot-check them easily.

The author put up a fun piece on a board game review website and summarized that the dice are fine. You ask what the threshold is, I say use your brain and eyes to pick one. We only need to read this once, not grade 200, so we don't need to invent an arbitrary cutoff.

If you treat students or coworkers in this way, I hope it is clear to them that you respect rubrics more than the actual "Ask a question, gather data, answer it in public" scientific process and that they do not mistake stodgy rules for must-follow procedures. It would be a shame to scare people off from rolling dice on the internet because someone may say there are too few p-values or too many decimal places.

New comment by tomcatfish in "Show HN: Sonar – A tiny CLI to see and kill whatever's running on localhost"

tomcatfish — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:10:37 +0000

HN is a place where people can be expected to go beyond the title (though I like the limited script and am glad it was posted). Misleading titles are not uncommonly flagged and changed, even.

New comment by tomcatfish in "The 49MB web page"

tomcatfish — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 22:54:16 +0000

Cannot reproduce on my machine

New comment by tomcatfish in "Claude Code wiped our production database with a Terraform command"

tomcatfish — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:31:21 +0000

I agree that a second issue doesn't erase the first, but also I've got enough work experience to know that a system which can be brought down by 1 person no matter the tooling they use is a system not destined to last for long.

New comment by tomcatfish in "Claude Code wiped our production database with a Terraform command"

tomcatfish — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:36:30 +0000

Despite multiple comments blaming the AI agent, I think it's the backups that are the problem here, right? With backups, almost any destructive action can be rolled back, whether it's from a dumb robot, a mistaken junior, or a sleep-deprived senior. Without, you're sort of running the clock waiting for disaster.

New comment by tomcatfish in "Picking Up a Zillion Pieces of Litter"

tomcatfish — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 21:17:12 +0000

Ah, nice. Some of the gloves are very hard to read.

New comment by tomcatfish in "Picking Up a Zillion Pieces of Litter"

tomcatfish — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:26:58 +0000

That seems like it cannot be true? The words are 11, 5, 2, 12, 7, 7 letters long. It cannot be "stop throwing your gloves on the ground".

The correct answer is XER?APUOBIA LEADS TO INDIVIDUALLY WRAPPED CARROTS

I do not know why you did not spot check the number of letters!

New comment by tomcatfish in "“It turns out” (2010)"

tomcatfish — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 22:27:50 +0000

It turns out that both phrases are used like this, similarly to how they teach in logic classes that "but" is just "and" in fancy clothing, but actual usage is quite different. Actually, a lot of language is just signpost phrasing that "helps the medicine go down" by giving hints at how the following idea will connect to this one.

---

Both phrases are used like this— let me explain:

Logic classes teach that "but" is just "and" in fancy clothing, and actual usage is quite different. A lot of language is signpost phrasing that "helps the medicine go down" by giving hints at how the following idea will connect to this one.

New comment by tomcatfish in "An off-grid, flat-packable washing machine"

tomcatfish — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:25:01 +0000

The THIRD sentence in the article explains that they ship to the US. You are tone-policing your hallucinated version of the article!

> Enter Navjot Sawhney, who founded the UK-based social enterprise The Washing Machine Project (TWMP) to tackle this, and has now shipped almost 500 of his hand-crank Divya machines to 13 countries, including Mexico, Ghana, Iraq *and the US.*

New comment by tomcatfish in "Google releases its new Google Sans Flex font as open source"

tomcatfish — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 22:53:58 +0000

Yes, it matters, and big companies can do fantastic things by designing extremely expansive fonts which make it easy to include users speaking plenty of languages that we developers don't even know about.

New comment by tomcatfish in "S&box is now an open source game engine"

tomcatfish — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 04:31:22 +0000

When you say that it would "almost be like a punishment for Linux users", I think you're wrong, because it literally would be a value add. There is something interesting about the fact that offering you 10% more value would be taken as a downgrade

New comment by tomcatfish in "Kagi News"

tomcatfish — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 01:19:42 +0000

…They are also building email

New comment by tomcatfish in "Fair Pricing"

tomcatfish — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 00:24:34 +0000

Holy crap this is going to let me move some privacy-focused folks over to join me in Kagitopia. Good job guys, you are always working on something cool.

New comment by tomcatfish in "Show HN: Brutalist Hacker News – A HN reader inspired by brutalist web design"

tomcatfish — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 02:17:04 +0000

Huh, this looks very neat. I like the effect that happens briefly while you scroll.

New comment by tomcatfish in "New York’s attorney general says SiriusXM’s cancellation process is illegal"

tomcatfish — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 19:23:01 +0000

Privacy.com is what I've used the past half decade

New comment by tomcatfish in "The Inner Ring (1944)"

tomcatfish — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 23:30:54 +0000

Explain?

New comment by tomcatfish in "Nobody knows what's happening online anymore"

tomcatfish — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 23:30:01 +0000

That's not an oxymoron.

If before the top show was seen by 90% of all customers, and now each of 20 shows is watched by 5%, it will be comparatively very hard to find someone who has watched the most-viewed show of today despite it being the most watched.

You panned someone for understanding basic math.

New comment by tomcatfish in "We're not Platonists, we've just learned the bitter lesson"

tomcatfish — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 02:30:08 +0000

He's aware. When someone disagrees with you about AI, sending them Plato entries is generally unhelpful and pointless