Hacker News: vigilantpuma

New comment by vigilantpuma in "Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones"

vigilantpuma — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:07:30 +0000

They literally said, "Violence is necessary and justified in various situations, which means guns are necessary and justified in various situations"

New comment by vigilantpuma in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"

vigilantpuma — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 01:25:51 +0000

The further you have to narrow down the set of speakers for whom it's a basic color term, the less of a basic color term it is for English as a whole. We don't have to have this argument about e.g. orange.

New comment by vigilantpuma in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"

vigilantpuma — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:57:26 +0000

With all due respect, you're one individual and basic color terms for a language are not determined by a single individual. If you look at usage via proxies like Google ngrams[1] or Google trends[2], cyan barely registers, which suggests it hasn't really shifted to a basic color term.

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=black%2Cwhite%...

[2] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=Red%2Cgreen%2Cyellow%2Cb...

New comment by vigilantpuma in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"

vigilantpuma — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:04:02 +0000

Pink and red are also separate basic color terms in English!

New comment by vigilantpuma in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"

vigilantpuma — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:53:39 +0000

I didn't say that English speakers only see blue or green. I said that those are the two basic color terms that cyan is in between, and cyan isn't a basic color term and thus collapses to one or the other if categorized under basic color terms. Same goes for teal.

New comment by vigilantpuma in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"

vigilantpuma — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 06:52:19 +0000

This test is really using how English organizes color. In English, blue and green are basic color terms ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms)). You're right that we would have trouble with an orange screen if we were asked to call it red or yellow, but that's because orange is also a basic color term in English.

Other languages draw those boundaries in different places. For example, in Russian, light blue and dark blue are separate basic color terms (goluboy vs. siniy), so asking a Russian speaker to collapse those into a single category would feel just as wrong as collapsing orange into red or yellow does to us.

Cyan isn't a basic color term in English. So yes, the test is basically asking: if you had to assign this color to one of the basic English categories, what would it be?

The frustration you're describing is kind of the point. With something like orange, English gives us a clear category, so "rounding" feels wrong. With cyan, it doesn't, so people end up splitting it differently.

New comment by vigilantpuma in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"

vigilantpuma — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 06:28:07 +0000

Actually people will definitely insist on "no that's blue" or "no that's green." My husband and I have frequent disagreements about a specific shade of blue/green. I think it's blue. He thinks it's green.

New comment by vigilantpuma in "Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs"

vigilantpuma — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:04:34 +0000

I had an interview in 2024 and my interviewer was CLEARLY doing other stuff during the interview. So a very different experience.

New comment by vigilantpuma in "How Tesla is proving doubters right on why its robotaxi service cannot scale"

vigilantpuma — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 15:29:41 +0000

Musk is a clearly brilliant man who does not know how to keep his mouth shut or not act like a teenager. I know he doesn't need my respect... But he's certainly lost all of it by now.

And for people who are like "yeah but he gets results," are you really saying he wouldn't be getting more results if he didn't spend the last 10 years being an idiot online?

New comment by vigilantpuma in "How Tesla is proving doubters right on why its robotaxi service cannot scale"

vigilantpuma — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 15:23:02 +0000

Probably because major news outlets are reluctant to include pictures of penises, even stylized ones, in their articles.

New comment by vigilantpuma in "Google's Sergey Brin Asks Workers to Spend More Time in the Office"

vigilantpuma — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 19:29:37 +0000

Nobody is against hard work, but what's the point of working harder than you need to for a company that has shown that hard work is no defense against being laid off?

New comment by vigilantpuma in "Google's Sergey Brin: Engineers Should Work 60-Hour Weeks in Office to Build AI"

vigilantpuma — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:04:31 +0000

Why would anyone be motivated to work 60 hours a week on Sergei's say-so when Google has amply demonstrated that they will lay people off at random regardless of their work ethic or contributions? I would think the layoffs demoralize people a lot more than the work habits of their colleagues.

The time for this sort of exhortation was before 2023, Sergei.

New comment by vigilantpuma in "Microsoft is eating the world"

vigilantpuma — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 18:05:20 +0000

Signing a petition is not the same as quitting, but that is something (and I hadn't seen it).

New comment by vigilantpuma in "Microsoft is eating the world"

vigilantpuma — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 17:12:12 +0000

Have 500-750 key employees departed? Or even threatened to depart? OpenAI has (well, had) 770 employees, you think Microsoft will lure away 70-97% of them?

New comment by vigilantpuma in "Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”"

vigilantpuma — Thu, 04 May 2023 20:16:11 +0000

Google, according to the article, has no moat either.

Ask HN: Setting up Mac for dev work

vigilantpuma — Sat, 18 Feb 2023 19:16:11 +0000

Having just been laid off from a megacorp, I find myself back outside a technological walled garden for the first time in over seven years. In the past I've done Android development, server side development, data analysis, as well as frontend dev (but I hate it). I'm armed with a Macbook Pro but I have no idea what the latest sine qua non software is for development.

Any recommendations for a software engineer looking to start coding in the real world again?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850069

Points: 2

# Comments: 5

New comment by vigilantpuma in "Mothers who regret having children are speaking out"

vigilantpuma — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 17:54:26 +0000

I think having children is pretty selfish also. You bring a child into this world... for what? To see yourself continued in the next generation? To make some future friends for yourself? To have that experience? How are these not selfish things? Both choices are selfish in different ways. The fact that one requires some personal sacrifice doesn't make it selfless.

New comment by vigilantpuma in "Mothers who regret having children are speaking out"

vigilantpuma — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 17:48:44 +0000

Really? In this comment page alone we have shit like:

"Final point, and one that I am cautious to make for not wanting to offend anyone needlessly: I know plenty of singles and couples who are childless, and several that are childless by choice. Suffice it to say that my anecdotal view is that sadness, eccentricity, and empty hedonism seem to develop over time in these couples, especially in the women."

"Spot on with the final point. I have 3, now aged 22, 19 & 16. I like to joke that I have parentdar: it's like gaydar, I just know if someone is a parent or not without them telling me. There's a selfcentredness about the childless that gives itself away in a thousand minor tells. It's more pronounced in women than men."