Hacker News: zdc1

New comment by zdc1 in "Arithmetic Without Numbers – How LLMs Do Math"

zdc1 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:36:54 +0000

You'd think with tool use being as available as it is, the first tool we'd want to give them is a calculator...

New comment by zdc1 in "I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis"

zdc1 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:06:11 +0000

I will point our that most relationships end in separation. Maybe the reason for the breakup was in their story. Maybe they just stopped liking each other. We can't know without OP telling us.

New comment by zdc1 in "Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'"

zdc1 — Sat, 30 May 2026 10:40:26 +0000

With schemes like SpaceX, and the general number of large-cap-but-negative-earnings companies trading on the market, I feel like the conventional wisdom of DCA and chill / just passively buy the index will turn into an underperforming strategy vs a slightly more active or opinionated approach.

New comment by zdc1 in "AWS Fired the One Employee Who Gave a Damn"

zdc1 — Tue, 26 May 2026 13:50:51 +0000

I've seen some other posts on this site and yeah it's probably AI, and low-quality writing regardless.

Excellent candidate for throwing into AI and asking for a summary; if you bother reading it at all.

New comment by zdc1 in "We've made the world too complicated"

zdc1 — Sun, 17 May 2026 12:09:30 +0000

Yes. We can complain that technology is "too complicated" but so is the human brain, consciousness, and every other biological system which we have failed to fully understand.

Knowing that we are surrounded by systems we can never know is both a gift and a curse, but offering a chicken to the sky god for more rain is not a world I'd like to go back to.

New comment by zdc1 in "eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible"

zdc1 — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:47:33 +0000

Patrick Boyle on Finance has a Youtube video on the topic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBlu45HFruk). He basically explained that they simply can't afford the proposed transaction, so it was never going to actually happen.

New comment by zdc1 in "I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left"

zdc1 — Sun, 10 May 2026 15:10:08 +0000

Elasticache is definitely one of the services to consider self-hosting.

AWS doesn't add much in terms of APIs or polish. On the other hand, Redis/Valkey is one of the most simple services to self-host.

New comment by zdc1 in "Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school"

zdc1 — Fri, 08 May 2026 08:22:56 +0000

Singapore isn't particularly violent, it's just efficient. It's the threat of deportation (huge swathes of the population are on work visas) or punishment that keeps people in line. Even their prisons aren't very violent, it's just that if you commit a crime, the police will find you (it's a small place with lots of cameras) and the courts will apply the standard sentencing.

New comment by zdc1 in "Talking to strangers at the gym"

zdc1 — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:44:45 +0000

That's kind of the point. Ask yourself: which people would you genuinely be excited to make a little happier? (through a compliment or otherwise) Whose opinion are you keen to carefully listen to and consider? Who do you like enough such that you will want to put in the effort to remember their name?

I think the idea is that if the stranger on the bus has a haircut you genuinely find to be wonderful: tell them about it. You don't need to force yourself to be nice, just take action on the things you're genuinely excited to do.

And if you don't ever want to be nice to people, then you have some digging and reflection to do (including about if/when you are nice to yourself).

New comment by zdc1 in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

zdc1 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 09:53:31 +0000

Stop personifying LLMs. "It Confessed in Writing." No, it wrote some sentences that are congruent with the prior events in the context window. They're not real engineers. Shouting at them is like shouting at a mountain after a landslide. That's not how it works.

New comment by zdc1 in "Laws of Software Engineering"

zdc1 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:33:47 +0000

Counterpoint: "everything in moderation, including moderation"

New comment by zdc1 in "Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops"

zdc1 — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:45:24 +0000

SMST (Defiance Daily Target 2x Short MSTR ETF) could be a rough equivalent.

As the other poster mentioned though, many miners won't be using oil-based energy sources, so it does make one wonder about cause and effect. Maybe a dip in BTC would've done it regardless of oil?

New comment by zdc1 in "Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers"

zdc1 — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:17:29 +0000

Just like kids on a playground; only more brutal. Thank you, ancient chimp brain.

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