<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: trobertson</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=trobertson</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:47:41 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=trobertson" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Lore and story wise [Oblivion and Skyrim] have incredible depth.<p>As you said, you never played Daggerfall or Morrowind. Just about all of the lore in Oblivion and Skyrim comes from Daggerfall, Redguard, and Morrowind.<p>As for the stories... sorry, but you're on your own there. Oblivion's was okay, but Skyrim's story was a trainwreck from beginning to end. Of all the parts of Bethesda games, it is the character + story writing that has suffered the most over the years.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2025 13:21:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45875715</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45875715</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45875715</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Mullvad VPN 2024 Security Audit Results]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://mullvad.net/en/blog/the-report-for-the-2024-security-audit-of-the-app-is-now-available">https://mullvad.net/en/blog/the-report-for-the-2024-security-audit-of-the-app-is-now-available</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42395572">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42395572</a></p>
<p>Points: 3</p>
<p># Comments: 2</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Dec 2024 02:29:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://mullvad.net/en/blog/the-report-for-the-2024-security-audit-of-the-app-is-now-available</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42395572</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42395572</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "Pipe Syntax in SQL"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> unfortunately KQL doesn't seem to have INSERT, UPDATE etc.<p>(Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Microsoft, and I use Kusto basically every day)<p>This seems to me to be a deliberate design choice. Microsoft doesn't want engineers mutating the databases by hand. There are mechanisms to do that (mostly outside of Kusto, and usually to resolve privacy incidents), but the common case of querying is not supposed to allow for arbitrary changes to the database.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 Aug 2024 07:12:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41345140</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41345140</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41345140</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to popular food brands"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Looking at the Colonial era is looking at slavery ~300 years before it peaked just before the Civil War. Therefore, the numbers you give for the Colonial times don't have anything to do with the conversation.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 06 Feb 2024 18:42:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39278563</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39278563</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39278563</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "Why can't today's young adults leave the nest? Blame high housing costs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Demand grows to meet supply.<p>Well, that's where you're wrong (with respect to housing in the USA).<p>Municipal zoning laws mean that houses are not getting built. Apartment growth is not keeping up either. Nor is condo growth. In the places with jobs, there is no available housing.<p>This lack of housing is what is keeping houses at top dollar in spite of the mortgage rate tripling over the span of a year.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Jan 2024 02:41:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38976835</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38976835</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38976835</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "Why are things expensive?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's due to the Universal Postal Union, which is a UN agreement that governs the costs and subsidies associated with international shipping.<p>The link below explains it well, but the gist is that China was rated to be a "poor" nation, whereas the USA was rated to be a "rich" nation. This rating essentially means that the USA is subsidizing packages shipped from China to the USA.<p>Trump (in a rare moment of not being an idiot) threatened to withdraw from the agreement over the subsidies. He didn't, but the agreement did get amended, and packages from China will start becoming less subsidized (more expensive) by 2025.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union#2019_Extraordinary_Congress" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union#2019_Ex...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 19 Dec 2023 14:03:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38695598</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38695598</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38695598</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "Find the date of your birthday in the number pi"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> this site is a blast from the past<p>> I'm frequently asked where people can get such a ridiculously large amount of pi. Be warned that 50 million digits of pi takes up 50 megabytes. This can take up to 4 hours to download with a 28.8k modem!<p>I love the old internet. Users gave a shit about other users.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 Oct 2023 18:01:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37959413</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37959413</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37959413</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Fortunately it was a granite countertop and not quartz.<p>Granites are primarily composed of feldspar and quartz, which are both primarily composed of silica. Silica is the thing that causes silicosis, and when that granite was cut it was clouds of silica dust that covered your home.<p>You were no more safe in that granite dust than you would have been in quartz dust.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 24 Sep 2023 17:19:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37635074</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37635074</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37635074</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Hard drugs are not pot or alcohol<p>In point of fact, alcohol causes more deaths per year than all other drugs combined:<p>CDC [0]: Alcohol causes over 140,000 deaths per year according to data between 2015 and 2019<p>CDC [1]: All other drugs caused 100,000 deaths in the twelve month ending in April 2021<p>There's a lot of arguments to be made as to why (different legal status, different cultural norms around use, etc.) but the fact is that, currently, alcohol use is more lethal than all other drug use combined.<p>---<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/20211117.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 01 Aug 2023 23:20:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36964640</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36964640</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36964640</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "The World Bakes Under Extreme Heat"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>An adaptation of the "narcissist's prayer" for climate change deniers:<p>---<p>Climate Change isn't happening<p>And if it is, it isn't that bad.<p>And if it is, that's not a big deal.<p>And if it is, that's not our fault.<p>And if it is, we didn't mean it.<p>And if we did, you should have stopped it.<p>---<p>Your comment is on line 3.<p>> we need to allow ourselves to conceive of such things as human civilization continuing on without much fuss.<p>There is a large difference between "conceiving of possibilities" and burying our heads in the sand. Climate Change is not a new phenomenon, we've known about it for 50 years (and the oil companies have known for longer). We have decades of research telling us that climate change will drive extreme weather. We have decades of research predicting the effects it will have on human civilization.<p>None of this is new info. The "alternate possibilities" have been considered and disproved a long time ago. We know, without ambiguity, what's happening.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 19 Jul 2023 00:39:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36780851</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36780851</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36780851</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "Fusion reactor is held together with tape"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's what they're saying. It's spelled "lede": <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lede" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lede</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 15 Jul 2023 20:14:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36740538</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36740538</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36740538</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "Two-thirds of North America at risk of energy shortages during extreme demand [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Which is still a full order of magnitude worse than the German numbers. Blaming nature for our shit infrastructure is only going to harm ourselves.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 28 May 2023 05:00:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36101292</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36101292</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36101292</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "The Butlerian Jihad"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The original text has a lot more Islam than the movies do. The most recent film deliberately toned down the Islam.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Mar 2023 07:02:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35164853</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35164853</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35164853</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "Microsoft Kosmos-1: A Multimodal Large Language Model"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's no goalpost to move. Psychologists have been saying that IQ tests are of limited scope and utility for decades. Specifically, it is widely agreed that an IQ test is not a valid way "to assess intelligence in a broader sense".<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Validity_as_a_measure_of_intelligence" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Validity...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Mar 2023 00:13:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34990227</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34990227</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34990227</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's not abandoned. Access still has an engineering team working on it, and that team still goes to conferences to talk with their users. Source: I work in the same org as them, and ate lunch daily with a few of them before the pandemic hit.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 30 Dec 2022 07:02:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34182635</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34182635</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34182635</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "Tesla driver falls asleep – Autopilot ignores police and continues driving"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"Full Self Driving"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 29 Dec 2022 23:41:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179645</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179645</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179645</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>HoloISO is what you're looking for: <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/holoiso/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/holoiso/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 18 Dec 2022 00:07:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34033645</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34033645</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34033645</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's important to mention that Schmidhuber is usually correct, in that his lab has been decades ahead in both theory and proofs-of-concept. The reason his lab is so under-cited is that his lab made these advances before the hardware to practically do it was available. Now that the techniques can be run, it's the people running them that tend to get all the credit for being "first".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 29 Sep 2022 00:27:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33014912</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33014912</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33014912</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "Reading Soviet Sci-Fi at the End of the World"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I still think it could have the potential be a really interesting TV show.<p>It's already a movie. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 26 Sep 2022 18:49:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32986763</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32986763</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32986763</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trobertson in "Amazon built a new unit to fix its engineering culture"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've been working at Microsoft (in the Office org) for a bit over three years now and this managerial attitude is very common. I'd go so far as to say that managers making sure their reports have a good work life balance is standard.<p>It comes with the age of the company. Unlike start-up land, loads of people in Microsoft have families and kids, and value their family more than they value work. It's normal to leave work on time, and it's concerning if someone stays late.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 21 Sep 2022 16:28:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32927522</link><dc:creator>trobertson</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32927522</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32927522</guid></item></channel></rss>