Hacker News: zdc1

New comment by zdc1 in "Am I German or Autistic?"

zdc1 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:14:07 +0000

There's an interesting spectrum of reactions here. Maybe the real test is peoples' reactions to the test...

New comment by zdc1 in "Help Keep Thunderbird Alive"

zdc1 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:49:46 +0000

Yeah, there's basically nothing explaining why the need more funding, and what they will do with it. Hosting? Salaries? Admin? You'd hope for a bit more context than this.

> How will my gift be used?

> Thunderbird is the leading open source email and productivity app that is free for business and personal use. Your gift helps ensure it stays that way, and supports ongoing development.

New comment by zdc1 in "Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)"

zdc1 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 07:04:25 +0000

I'm kind of getting at the fact that people tend to optimistically overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes. This is true for lottery tickets, and stock options (every startup is definitely going to the moon).

From the company's perspective, options/equity are great for creating alignment. From an employee perspective, employees need to understand that they are making a bet and have limited control over the outcome of said bet.

New comment by zdc1 in "Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)"

zdc1 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 07:12:39 +0000

People who sell lottery tickets, on average, do better than those who buy them. The same applies to stock options. Which is why "bonus" options are fine, but "buying" them by taking ESOP over potential salary, can be a bad choice.

New comment by zdc1 in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

zdc1 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 09:21:21 +0000

The other thing that keeps coming up is the github-code-is-fine-but-the-release-artifact-is-a-trojan issue. It really makes me question if "packages" should even exist in JavaScript, or if we could just be importing standard plain source code from a git repo.

I understand why this doesn't work well with legacy projects, but it's something that the language could strive towards.

New comment by zdc1 in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

zdc1 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 08:51:30 +0000

Might be better to calculate them separately for each locale and then tie-break with your own approach (min/max/avg/median/etc.)

New comment by zdc1 in "People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account"

zdc1 — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 10:17:41 +0000

Just go on eBay and find whatever ThinkPad fits your budget

New comment by zdc1 in "Hold on to Your Hardware"

zdc1 — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 05:42:33 +0000

The AI bubble feels like it's already starting to burst. Sooner or later the market will see that AI has improved productivity by 20% (or whatever figure) and realise it's much less than the 1000% improvement they've been pricing in.

New comment by zdc1 in "So where are all the AI apps?"

zdc1 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:16:10 +0000

Even if you have the app, you get to start the fun adventure of marketing it and actually trying to grow the damn thing

New comment by zdc1 in "The three pillars of JavaScript bloat"

zdc1 — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 03:05:12 +0000

A lot of this basically reads to me like hidden tech debt: people aren't updating their compilation targets to ESx, people aren't updating their packages, package authors aren't updating their implementations, etc.

Ancient browser support is a thing, but ES5 has been supported everywhere for like 13 years now (as per https://caniuse.com/es5).

New comment by zdc1 in "A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)"

zdc1 — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 13:14:55 +0000

I assume this is one of those cases where if you're in the culture, you'll know which rules you're allowed to break (and when) vs if you're on the outside it's easiest to just follow all the rules all the time.

Reminds me of an episode on youtube of How The British Upper Class Live | Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over where the presenter eats her eggs "wrong", much to the dismay of her posh host who tells her (in his subtle British way) that she should "sort that out".

New comment by zdc1 in "The American Healthcare Conundrum"

zdc1 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:31:23 +0000

Australia and the US have similarly higher obesity rates. As you can see in the article, their system is simply just inefficient (arguably, by design)

New comment by zdc1 in "Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis"

zdc1 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 17:50:24 +0000

There's definitely been an enslopification of both. Endless sequels. "Franchises" with meaningless stories and common tropes. Maybe it's survivor bias when I think back on older works, but nothing just seems that exciting these days.

New comment by zdc1 in "The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ"

zdc1 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 14:26:40 +0000

I do miss What.CD and its catalogue of classical music where it was easy to find the different renditions of any given symphony. It was the best I've seen (not that I've searched very hard since then). Spotify leaves a lot to be desired in that respect.

That being said, Spotify is probably not the best product if you listen to classical. If classical were all I listened to, I would probably still have an offline collection in a Media Monkey library as my main source of listening.

New comment by zdc1 in "Rack-mount hydroponics"

zdc1 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 06:06:10 +0000

Gen Z will often write like that, feeling that using capitalisation feels too "formal" for non-professional communication.

It's feel just the next evolution in our written messaging dialect. Gen X had c u l8r?. Millennials didn't have to pay per character, and got full qwerty keyboards so opted for normal sentences. And now Gen Z have decided that auto-capitalisation is unnecessary.

New comment by zdc1 in "The MacBook Neo"

zdc1 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 05:41:13 +0000

Personally, I would not buy any laptop without 2-3 years of warranty support / Apple Care. Laptops are expensive and things can stop working for lots of reasons. It's why I've loved ThinkPads, though I now use Apple as my usage these days is less dev / more fun.

New comment by zdc1 in "Can a wealthy family change the course of a deadly brain disease?"

zdc1 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 05:27:18 +0000

You can't really blame the healthcare system for this. Alzheimer's and Dementia existed before modern medicine. The reality is that many fit, active, and otherwise healthy people will hit their 60s and 70s and will experience cognitive decline and Alzheimer's.

New comment by zdc1 in "Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993"

zdc1 — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 07:34:14 +0000

Well the games of my childhood, Total Annihilation and Seven Kingdoms, came out in '97. So for my own selfish reasons I would argue that the Pentium II is where progress should have stopped.

On the other hand, at least I'll get to play Castle of the Winds.

(I also loved Z: Steel Soldiers, but despite the '01 release date, I'm sure it too would have run on a Pentium II).

New comment by zdc1 in "We installed a single turnstile to feel secure"

zdc1 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:22:42 +0000

As someone who's lived there, it's definitely more about the consistency. Generally speaking, if you make a police report, it will be investigated. This includes for smaller issues like lost items too. From what I understand, their courts also give fairly consistent sentences.

Combine this with the fact that Singapore is small and full of security cameras, and it create a situation where breaking the law carries a decent risk of getting caught as police will have the willingness and resources to investigate.

On top of this, a massive proportion of the population are there on work visas. For these people, any sort of crime or bad behaviour would mean deportation and loss of their job.

As an aside, here's an interesting CNA documentary on their prisons: https://youtu.be/tJqRPycWUDg

New comment by zdc1 in "Blood test boosts Alzheimer's diagnosis accuracy to 94.5%, clinical study shows"

zdc1 — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 03:49:49 +0000

I would personally want to know as early as possible, so I could get my affairs in order and register my wishes around end of life care and euthanasia while I am still recognised as having full mental capacity.

It's also better for people around the Alzheimer's patient, as it will let them understand why someone's personality and behaviours may be changing, and possibly let them be bit more forgiving of such changes. It will also give family more time to plan and understand the health and community services and support are offered wherever they live.