Hacker News: wryoak

New comment by wryoak in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

wryoak — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:24:47 +0000

> it’s somewhat demoralising working with a bunch of corporate office workers cosplaying as engineers

Why is the meaning of your own life derived from your perception of the lives of others? Or rather, why is it that when you judge others’ lives as inauthentic you find your own to be so too?

New comment by wryoak in "Coalton is an efficient, statically typed Lisp with ideas from Haskell and OCaml"

wryoak — Thu, 28 May 2026 23:33:09 +0000

Nothing will ever be enough, for all interpretations of the statement, reveling in all the irony, pathos, and prideful triumph that could possibly be extracted from such interpretations from here to eternity

Humans will keep inventing and remixing

New comment by wryoak in "Use boring languages with LLMs"

wryoak — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:34:41 +0000

Contradictory anecdote: there’s basically only one way to write Elm, as it is a very trend-resistant language with minimal updates over long timespans, but most agents in my experience will throw Haskell syntax and Prelude functions into their Elm output. Compiler or LSP will often set them right but they still try it initially

New comment by wryoak in "Mississippi is running out of liquor, and it's the state's fault"

wryoak — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:25:42 +0000

Despite the title, the article sure makes it seem like it’s the private company that runs the state’s warehouse’s fault; at least that’s who most of the interviewed retailers blame

New comment by wryoak in "Checking If a Movie Has a Post or Mid Credit Scene"

wryoak — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:53:40 +0000

Or you could spare the five minutes to watch the credits, seeing the names of all those people who made the movie you just enjoyed. Discuss the film during that time so you don’t spoil people in the library. Make some new friends.

New comment by wryoak in "Make macOS consistently bad (unironically)"

wryoak — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:26:26 +0000

It’s very rare that I maximize an application. I’m always stacking. However, I don’t think it’s an optimizing assumption: I am frequently fighting with the window manager as I rearrange my windows and it automatically maximizes them because I got too close to an edge of the screen

In general my browser is dead center or slightly to the right so I can access my other windows (terminal, throw away text editor, etc) easily where command tab is insufficient (when I have multiple terminal windows, eg)

New comment by wryoak in "Ultra-processed foods should be treated more like cigarettes than food – study"

wryoak — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 01:26:12 +0000

The Nova framework for classifying processed foods was created in 2009 by a Brazilian epidemiologist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification

Presumably, since the first citation in the paper is said epidemiologist (Monteiro), this is the framework they rely on.

Unless you’re intent on scientific gatekeeping, in which case having actually read the reported study (it’s linked in the article fyi) would have offered much more effective methods of rebuttal than semantic quibbles.

New comment by wryoak in "[dead]"

wryoak — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 22:17:23 +0000

Yes but some who have posted rather incendiary (and since-deleted) comments in response to you and others had created their accounts just today

New comment by wryoak in "[dead]"

wryoak — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 22:02:54 +0000

PSA: Check the account age before responding to any comments in this thread

New comment by wryoak in "Ask HN: Strangest or most unexpected behavior you've seen from GitHub Copilot?"

wryoak — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 14:04:56 +0000

Well, you didn’t share the exact text of the original prompt but you described yourself as having asked it to do something. These models are being trained for agentic behavior on data where an agent is asked _to do something_, and as their output is purely probabilistic, the rewarded response will then often include the text “I have done something” even though they have not done something. Perhaps there _is_ an issue with the integration that caused your experienced response, but purely based on my experience and the limited information you gave, my immediate guess is that the model positively associates your prompt with the generated response

New comment by wryoak in "Ask HN: Strangest or most unexpected behavior you've seen from GitHub Copilot?"

wryoak — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 03:57:54 +0000

That doesn’t seem weird. Wrong, sure, but not out of the ordinary

New comment by wryoak in "Every product still shipping buttons is legacy"

wryoak — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:23:51 +0000

Okay, let’s talk about that first command: sort all files in this directory by relevance. Relevance to what? Is this a permanent sort (what does it do to the file names?) or just a reordered ls output? What button in what OS is this superseding? Is this really an huge improvement over the smart search functionality in most OSes (besides requiring an open terminal and additional keystrokes for the abstractions)?

Some of these are slick despite not really being examples of the obsolescence of UX idioms. But that first one is a very strange example to lead with.

New comment by wryoak in "US immigration officer fatally shoots woman, 37, in Minneapolis, officials say"

wryoak — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 20:31:08 +0000

The video shows her driving away from the officers. They approach her window, she backs up a bit, turns her tires away from the officers and starts driving forward when the agent fires into the car

New comment by wryoak in "Ozempic Melted Away Weight–and the Idea of 'Body Positivity'"

wryoak — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 20:18:28 +0000

I don’t want anyone to be sick, and I think that’s the point of these drugs, but there seems to be a lot of finger pointing rather than celebration

New comment by wryoak in "Ozempic Melted Away Weight–and the Idea of 'Body Positivity'"

wryoak — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 16:16:52 +0000

The west = the western hemisphere, the new world, the Americas, from the Northwest Territories to Patagonia

But why trouble yourself to distinguish anyway? 30% of the Irish are obese, 28% of the UK, nearly a quarter of Belgians and Germans. If over a fifth of your population is sick, does it really bolster your national ego so much that some other place is sicker?

New comment by wryoak in "The HSBC app refuses to work if "Bitwarden" is installed on user's Android phone"

wryoak — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 17:15:34 +0000

Warn? Yes. Refuse access? No.

I would close my bank account over this. That’s not saying much though because they literally pay you to open new bank accounts these days…

New comment by wryoak in "My shower head is racist [doechii]"

wryoak — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 17:11:09 +0000

I don’t understand the appeal (is there any?) of overhead showers. Yeah sometimes I don’t want to wash my hair, but I’ve got a different primary beef. For me, it’s how do I rinse my pits or between my legs or anywhere facing down, folded or partially covered? I’m just supposed to rely on enough water running down the nearby parts of my body? Bend at difficult to balance angles on the slick shower floors? Cup my hand and splash? Garbage design through and through imo, and I regard anyone who has last used one as likely unclean in some rather key areas

New comment by wryoak in "Brew by Weight? Brew by AI"

wryoak — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 01:42:27 +0000

Naturally it was only a matter of time before AI would be applied to recreational drugs

New comment by wryoak in "Ask HN: Is it enough to use XOR encryption for my journal app?"

wryoak — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 12:40:50 +0000

What are your users journaling about? Do you think it’s possible they could be journaling about things that, in their region, could lead to prosecution? Ostracization? Take your user’s security seriously. You don’t know what they are putting in “just a journal app”

New comment by wryoak in "Coding agents write 90% of my code now"

wryoak — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 05:47:27 +0000

I just don’t understand this claim that it’s faster to tell an LLM to do something than to just do it. Yes for large tasks, but the author discusses “edits” and being heavily involved with “pedantic” requests. It’s not specific enough to evaluate but what I’m picturing from their description makes the argument dubious to me