Hacker News: wakamoleguy

New comment by wakamoleguy in "Youth Suicides Declined After Creation of National Hotline"

wakamoleguy — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 18:03:17 +0000

And yet the data shows that they did decline. I'm sure they could be much better, and the response will vary from state to state.

New comment by wakamoleguy in "I wrote to Flock's privacy contact to opt out of their domestic spying program"

wakamoleguy — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:41:20 +0000

The data ownership is really interesting, as many threads here are going into. I wonder if it's possible to sidestep that entirely, though! Under the CCPA, "personal information" is defined as information that identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked — directly or indirectly — with a particular consumer or household. That says nothing about ownership.

To the extent that Flock is only storing the data on behalf of their customers, I'd understand they wouldn't be required to delete it. But to the extent that they are indexing it, deriving from it, aggregating it across customers, and sharing it via their platform, it seems they should be required to remove that data from those services.

But then again, I am not a lawyer!

New comment by wakamoleguy in "One item purchased, ten emails"

wakamoleguy — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:49:23 +0000

Is there a technical limitation why these never seem to be grouped into a thread? I generally appreciate the updates on my package, but I also value a tidy inbox.

New comment by wakamoleguy in "Shooting down ideas is not a skill"

wakamoleguy — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 02:31:37 +0000

These are all risks. Not all risks need to be mitigated, but some can be. Others can be accepted. Saying “Python is too slow for production scale, but our goal is a small proof of concept,” is a valid answer even if it doesn’t “solve” the complaint. And if you don’t even have that answer, then the burden is not your problem. The lack of due diligence is.

Hello, MDX. Hello, Islands. Goodbye, MDX

wakamoleguy — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:35:37 +0000

Article URL: https://wakamoleguy.com/p/hello-mdx-hello-islands-goodbye-mdx

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575644

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by wakamoleguy in "A Theory of the World as run by large adult children"

wakamoleguy — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 14:34:28 +0000

I mean, that LLM idea _sounds_ ridiculous, but similar ideas have worked really well in machine learning for games like Chess and AI.

One Task at a Time, Even with AI

wakamoleguy — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:06:42 +0000

Article URL: https://wakamoleguy.com/p/one-task-at-a-time-even-with-ai

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47003542

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

AI-DLC Solves the Wrong Bottleneck

wakamoleguy — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 21:07:09 +0000

Article URL: https://wakamoleguy.com/p/ai-dlc-solves-wrong-bottleneck

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46980975

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by wakamoleguy in "Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance"

wakamoleguy — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:43:53 +0000

It was some attempt at reductio ad absurdum. If you are concerned about letting Alexa into your home, you must be as irrational as Chris Hemsworth. Edit: I'm misusing reductio ad absurdum, but somebody will please tell me what the fallacy here is called.

New comment by wakamoleguy in "Switch to Jujutsu Already: A Tutorial"

wakamoleguy — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 21:21:10 +0000

It’s also possible that I start my next task without remembering to create a new diff first. That might explain the conflict when the original commit becomes immutable?

New comment by wakamoleguy in "Switch to Jujutsu Already: A Tutorial"

wakamoleguy — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 21:17:16 +0000

I build a few diffs off of my local main, create and push a bookmark, and then create a PR back to main from that bookmark.

New comment by wakamoleguy in "Switch to Jujutsu Already: A Tutorial"

wakamoleguy — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 13:16:48 +0000

Maybe it’s based on whether the GitHub merge is a squash, rebase, or plain merge? Or do folks usually manually perform the merge with jj?

New comment by wakamoleguy in "Switch to Jujutsu Already: A Tutorial"

wakamoleguy — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 13:11:35 +0000

I have been trying to use jj for a couple months now, but hitting some friction with my company’s GitHub PR workflow. Specifically, after the PR is merged, the next time I fetch I always end up with a ton of conflicts. It gets hard to clean them up, so I often end up abandoning all mutable commits to start fresh.

I feel like I’m doing something wrong, as I haven’t seen this mentioned in any tutorials, but I don’t know what! :-/

New comment by wakamoleguy in "Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)"

wakamoleguy — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 13:01:36 +0000

Not all taxes are in income or capital. Some are e.g. on consumption (gas, cigarettes, carbon, etc). There’s an argument that in place of corporate income taxes, we should let companies reinvest freely (or pay dividends), and then recoup the taxes elsewhere. The Planet Money podcast has a classic episode about this and other aspects of a presidential platform most economists could agree on.

New comment by wakamoleguy in "Show HN: Python with do..end in place of strict indentation"

wakamoleguy — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 22:47:30 +0000

If we’re talking about pasted code not having the proper indentation, that’s a major difference between languages with and without significant whitespace. A formatter can fix that in C, but not in Python. Additionally, manual fixing of the indentation is required first.

New comment by wakamoleguy in "Show HN: Python with do..end in place of strict indentation"

wakamoleguy — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 01:54:47 +0000

Of course you can leave it inconsistent! If whitespace is insignificant, you can move things around however you want and use (frequent) runs of a code formatter to clean things up for you. If whitespace is significant, it must be fixed manually line by line.

New comment by wakamoleguy in "Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction"

wakamoleguy — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 14:15:13 +0000

It has been even more than 500 excess employees. 300 were laid off in January 2021, and another 500 in April 2023. The percentages imply that headcount bounced around from 2800 down to 2500, up to 3100, down to 2500, up to 2600, and now down to 2100.

These same macroeconomic headwinds have existed for some time now, and the fundamentals of Dropbox’s core business commoditization haven’t changed for the better.

New comment by wakamoleguy in "The Flywheel Effect"

wakamoleguy — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 21:03:19 +0000

I agree. There is an additional quality here as well: Inertia doesn't care whether there is one big push or many little pushes. With the flywheel analogy, it's clear that it's not just one big push. That's what they are trying to convey in the business context. There is no one moment of transformation.

New comment by wakamoleguy in "Maximal min() and max()"

wakamoleguy — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 15:24:02 +0000

Why are these defined as macros at all? A function call would come with overhead, of course, but wouldn't compilers be able to inline that anyways?

New comment by wakamoleguy in "If we want a shift to walking, we need to prioritize dignity"

wakamoleguy — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 16:49:46 +0000

Walkability isn't just important in big cities; you can have it in smaller towns, too. I live in the suburbs of a large city, but my town has a small "main street" area with shops and restaurants that I love to walk to. I also have the anxiety around crowds (especially post-pandemic), and my town is the perfect balance of freedom to walk places and space to breathe.

When I think about walkable vacation spots, I don't only think of cities either. I think of small beach towns where even though it isn't populous, things are close enough together to explore on foot.

So I guess one question I'd pose is: if you could have that personal space without the car, would you still prefer the car and why? And given the negative externalities of the car, are there other ways those needs could be solved?