<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: usefulcat</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=usefulcat</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 20:54:41 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=usefulcat" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "Taking a walk may lead to more creativity than sitting, study finds (2014)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For several years I walked to and from the office, about 1.5 miles each way. Typically in the morning I would listen to a podcast or audiobook, and on the way home I would often continue thinking about whatever I had been trying to figure out at work. I found it useful.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 14:48:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48280619</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48280619</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48280619</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I agree, and that's part of the point. "Free money glitch" does not sound like a valid description of any lottery I've ever heard of.<p>There's a reason (several, probably) why you don't actually see cases of police arresting each other and then suing to enrich themselves.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 14:01:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222731</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222731</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222731</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You're making a big mistake by completely failing to account for the inherent (not to mention quite large) uncertainties in this kind of situation.<p>A priori, it's not "40 days in jail == $800k payday", it's "some unknown number of days in jail and risk of a conviction in exchange for a <i>chance</i> at a payday of unknown value".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 20:42:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48213821</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48213821</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48213821</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sounds like a glaringly obvious conflict of interest?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 00:17:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201418</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201418</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201418</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You mean the same electorate that elected a nominally Republican candidate who campaigned on <i>raising</i> taxes, and then proceeded to do exactly that?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 22:29:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48186680</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48186680</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48186680</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> It costs him little to nothing to say,<p>That all depends on how much he values his credibility, I think..<p>But to be fair, for someone as good at self promotion as he is, I can believe that the value of the hype could be greater than the cost in credibility.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 21:53:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48186253</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48186253</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48186253</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "Texas county passes 1-year data center construction ban"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Is it really that difficult to believe that these residents—many of whom are living out in the country by choice—really just don’t want this kind of development near them? And that they have taken action of their own volition?<p>I laughed out loud at the suggestion that rural Texans are reading Politico, or any other “elite media” for that matter. I say this as someone who has lived in TX for decades.<p>ETA: to be fair, I'm not saying that what you describe never happens, but no way is this an example of it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 16 May 2026 21:04:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163795</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163795</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163795</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "AI is making me dumb"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Experience is so so valuable right now.<p>I think traditional coding experience will be a lot more valuable in 5-10 years, given the apparent inverse relationship between that and LLM usage, and the number of people who seem to already be heavily reliant on LLMs today.<p>The next killer app on the scale of today's LLMs could be an LLM (or call it whatever) that can un-spaghettify the reams of code that are currently being generated by LLMs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 14 May 2026 23:05:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48142419</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48142419</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48142419</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "USDA Projects Smallest US Wheat Harvest Since 1972 Due to Plains Drought"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Unless you have some theory that correlates the two<p>I guess you meant something more like "shows a causal relationship"?<p>Because they're already correlated, which I thought was the point..</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 14 May 2026 17:25:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48138389</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48138389</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48138389</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "Cost of enum-to-string: C++26 reflection vs. the old ways"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't recall the source, but I don't believe most (any?) c++ compilers implement compile-time code evaluation by compiling and running code.<p>For one thing they are required to disallow all undefined behavior for compile time execution, and some forms of UB only occur when the code is run.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2026 14:18:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48122249</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48122249</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48122249</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I mostly use C++ at work, but I love ruby for its expressiveness and use it all the time for small to medium sized scripts where performance doesn't really matter.<p>However I've definitely noticed that the larger a ruby program gets, the more likely I am to manually add type checks. Beyond a certain size I simply can't fit everything in my head at once. Even though these checks are still done at run time, debugging is <i>much</i> easier when I can find out ASAP when something is not what I expected it to be.<p>People often say "that's what tests are for!". But if I'm spending time writing tests that verify the types are correct, I see that as a waste of my time because that's exactly the kind of thing that a compiler could do for me in a statically typed language.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 17:42:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111611</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111611</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111611</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "How do I deal with memory leaks? (2022)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>auto_ptr is not used in the example that uses sort(), so "on the same page" is doing a bit of lifting here.<p>He's using auto_ptr to demonstrate RAII, which is fine. I would assume that the use of auto_ptr indicates that the example was written some time ago.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 08 May 2026 20:41:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48068535</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48068535</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48068535</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Look at the chart of their stock price over the past couple of months. There was a huge run that started literally just over a week ago. Even after this 20% drop, the price today is only slightly below where it was before that run.<p>Their stock price has been pretty volatile for a while now (6+ months), so even with a swing of this magnitude I don't think it's valid to see it as much more than a correction.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 08 May 2026 17:21:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48066124</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48066124</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48066124</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026<p>That's great that they're doing that, but it's absolutely not guaranteed, either in this particular case (prior to this announcement, i.e. when these people were hired) or in general.<p>But all of this ignores the more general point, which is that--for reasons which may or may not be their fault--some people are not in a good situation financially and for them being laid off is a big deal with very real risks. Just because that's not you doesn't mean it's not a real thing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 08 May 2026 17:10:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48065973</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48065973</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48065973</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "Nintendo announces price increases for Nintendo Switch 2"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The price is increasing by 20% in Japan and 11% in the US, so the price increase in Japan is nearly double the increase in the US.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 08 May 2026 16:12:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48065147</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48065147</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48065147</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "Grand Theft Oil Futures: Insider traders keep making a killing at our expense"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>He's notoriously unpredictable. I would agree that it's more obvious now, but I think it was still quite obvious in his first term, especially after inciting a riot at the Capitol.<p>Given the rashness that he displayed prior to his second term, I don't see why it's at all surprising that he would start a war. To think otherwise just seems like wishful thinking.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 14:44:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48050086</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48050086</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48050086</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I do agree that it’s obvious in the way that you describe. But I still think it’s a point worth making—that it could apply to anyone. Because I don’t think that thought is likely to occur to a lot of people, regardless of their particular belief of choice. And that is a problem.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 04 May 2026 05:05:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48004854</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48004854</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48004854</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "AI uses less water than the public thinks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hope they don't find out how much is lost naturally to evaporation each year..</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 01 May 2026 21:20:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47980502</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47980502</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47980502</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in ""Parse, don't validate" through the years with C++"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't see how this is in any way preferable to having an ordinary default constructor that does the same thing:<p><pre><code>    // There are a few ways to let API callers bring their own 
    // memory, as they would in a no-malloc environment and this
    // stack-friendly c'tor is a stand-in for that. 
    static Birthdate epoch() { return Birthdate(1900, 1, 1); }</code></pre></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 13:41:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47962317</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47962317</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47962317</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by usefulcat in "US special forces soldier arrested after allegedly winning $400k on Maduro raid"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Is he important enough to get a presidential pardon? That's how you know whether he's a "little guy".<p>To be fair, that bar is quite a bit lower these days, but still..</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Apr 2026 04:33:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47885551</link><dc:creator>usefulcat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47885551</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47885551</guid></item></channel></rss>