Hacker News: trepaura

New comment by trepaura in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

trepaura — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:23:53 +0000

We're rich for reasons that do not remotely correlate with happiness for most Americans. Happiness on a larger scale did exist for about 2 decades during which we had strong labor laws and high taxes for corporations and the wealthy. I also have to specify the ultra wealthy mostly didn't exist in that time frame except for a small handful of people with generational wealth.

Once the corporate tax rates started to drop, deregulation started and employee and consumer protections began being stripped as well. As a result, all that money has been allowed to pulled away by a tiny fraction of ultra wealthy, non-working Americans.

After 4 decades of these circumstances, this has left the majority in a state where they can't afford Healthcare or virtually any kind of emergency without going into life long crippling debt with no hope of escape.

Incidentally, the top correlating factor with divorce is being unable to pay for 1 moderate emergency with savings. If you can, then it's possible to resave that money before the next one most of the time, but if you can't, the interest will eat you alive.

New comment by trepaura in "Copilot edited an ad into my PR"

trepaura — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 02:54:26 +0000

50/50 it's a hallucination, and that's half the problem. Enshitification is something that happens all the time in the training data scraped from various websites, so yes, it's going to randomly toss out ads for shit, even when editing your PR descriptions.

Just a reminder, after 8 years of me telling people that hallucinations mathematically can't be eliminated, they finally admitted it's true. Claims that non LLM approaches can remove them are bogus. This technology was never going to work.

New comment by trepaura in "Have a fucking website"

trepaura — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:15:53 +0000

He specifically says "if your are a business, an individual artist or creator". They aren't saying everyone, just people who have the potential to benefit from it. Not a blog site, basically they're advocating for personal portfolio sites and contact points. Having 5 social sites you might be contacted through is a pain that often means commission or work requests simply get missed.

New comment by trepaura in "Modern CSS Code Snippets: Stop writing CSS like it's 2015"

trepaura — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 14:11:52 +0000

These look like some interesting css options, though I'll comment that adding grid placement options is less new, and more just minor syntactic sugar. Plus, basic grid layout styling being added to css will rarely do what we actually want them to do.

Accounting for scrollbar appearance and auto-updtating the width of the frame/window is pretty useful, though. Not having the horizontal scroll bar suddenly appear when a vertical bar is needed due to dynamic elements is highly preferable.

New comment by trepaura in "Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros"

trepaura — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:28:59 +0000

This was a very foolish choice on Netflix's part. Most if the iconic IP from WB/HBO has gone down hill in a dramatic fashion over the last decade.

Game of Thrones was good for a few seasons, but half way through the fans started dropping almost as quickly as main characters. DC movies have had very few genuine successes, even if they've technically turned a profit.

Putting all that content up on Netflix would be unlikely to pull in that many more subscriptions, and would require dropping the existing streaming service(s) and agreements to allow for exclusivity.

This doesn't bring significant talent or IP to Netflix, it's just an attempt to grab market share. I doubt they'll try to move anything out of WB/HBO's existing streaming platforms or agreements. This just looks like an attempt to increase profits by simply buying a profitable company and letting them mostly continue to function with minimal changes.

In other word, this probably isn't the worst acquisition possible for consumers, but it certainly won't improve life for anyone to let it happen, and it does consolidate market share and control when it comes to media. This probably won't be hugely evil, but it won't be good either.

New comment by trepaura in "The AI coding trap"

trepaura — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 04:29:40 +0000

I'll gove you what you're asking for. Academic, genuine research has shown a clear result. AI is slower than an experienced engineer. It doesn't speed up the process because the loop you describe, it's terrible at it.

New comment by trepaura in "xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B"

trepaura — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 15:24:50 +0000

Hillarious. He wrote his own press release to pretend like he didn't just buy his privately held company using his publicly held company shares.

He's an idiot but I'll give him some credit, he just dumped a bunch if shares at their inflated value before they could drop even more. The guys he conned into buying Twitter with him won't have a reason to seek revenge now, and he can make whatever bullshit claims about the value if X he wants, since it's a private sale.

He did roughly the same thing with Telsa acquiring Solar Winds. Musk's Net worth is smoke and mirrors.