Hacker News: New Comments

New comment by khafra in "Men who stare at walls"

khafra — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:37:14 +0000

A wise man once noted that the word "amusement" has the same structure as "deforestation."

(@stevenkaas on twitter).

New comment by chiefalchemist in "Ford's 2,200-HP electric Mustang runs 6.87-SEC quarter mile, smashes EV record"

chiefalchemist — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:36:47 +0000

Impressive. Until you realize we need the EV equivalent of a Volkswagen, not a rehash of a USA 70’s muscle car.

If China-made EVs eat the world, this Food project will be a “what was Ford thinking?” pin on the timeline plotting China’s conquest.

New comment by pcblues in "Men who stare at walls"

pcblues — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:36:29 +0000

For a while, I programmed while walking on a mini-laptop. Nice walking paths where I lived. I was on a hobby project and wanted to spend any minute on it. It wasn't pretty. I kept trying to design a contraption I could wear on my shoulders that worked like a laptop desk.

I also attached a laptop to a treadmill at home, but the static electricity from the rubber mat kept zapping the laptop.

The best result was a laptop on an exercise bike. But the bike couldn't have a high resistance or I would lose concentration.

New comment by vintermann in "How I leared what a decoupling capacitor is for, the hard way"

vintermann — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:36:09 +0000

> you end up with people building ziggurats atop an ocean of incomprehension.

Everyone does. There's probably a layer below for everyone but the most theoretical physicists. I don't know where the leaks in electronics engineering's abstractions are, but I'm pretty sure they exist.

New comment by Amorymeltzer in "The World's Most Complex Machine"

Amorymeltzer — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:36:07 +0000

It's been mentioned before, but Chris Miller's Chip War from a few years back is an excellent, very-readable book on the topic. Goes into depth on the history and development of chips and their production. He did the rounds on the interviews back then, and it's definitely worth a read. The EUV stuff is great, but I particularly liked his history on how the USSR was always going to lose and how integral Apollo really was.

New comment by justinclift in "Cheapest GPUs in the World"

justinclift — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:35:26 +0000

AI;DR :(

New comment by maxnoe in "Can You Find the Comet?"

maxnoe — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:35:13 +0000

Our telescopes actually need the (or at least an) atmosphere to function.

There are some classes of observatories, which you cannot build in space but which are still affected by satellites to some degree.

New comment by Havoc in "Cheapest GPUs in the World"

Havoc — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:35:08 +0000

Not sure I’d consider a gov subsidized scheme as part of a price spread

New comment by amazingamazing in "$1,605: average annual ad value of a U.S. Google user"

amazingamazing — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:34:51 +0000

Presumably this only counts internet users.

New comment by nchie in "Easyduino: Open Source PCB Devboards for KiCad"

nchie — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:34:36 +0000

I haven't made a ESP32 design, but I recently learnt KiCad and PCB design enough to do a RP235x board with a non-reference design (1.8v VDDIO). I only used the official hardware guide + LLMs for questions, and had it work on the first try - it wasn't too hard!

New comment by potter098 in "Show HN: PrePrompt – rewrites vague prompts before they reach the LLM"

potter098 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:34:24 +0000

This feels useful if it improves first-acceptance rate rather than just making prompts longer. I'd be curious whether you track how often people keep the rewrite as-is vs editing it back down, especially once the learned stack hints start to accumulate.

New comment by soegaard in "WASM is not quite a stack machine"

soegaard — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:33:42 +0000

FWIW if you are looking for examples of WebAssembly written in the textual format, take a look at:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soegaard/webracket/refs/he...

As a small example, here is a definition of `$car` which extracts the first value from a pair.

    (func $car (type $Prim1) 
               (param $v (ref eq)) 
               (result (ref eq))
      (if (result (ref eq)) 
          (ref.test (ref $Pair) (local.get $v))
          (then (struct.get $Pair $a (ref.cast (ref $Pair) (local.get $v))))
          (else (call $raise-pair-expected (local.get $v))
                (unreachable))))

New comment by thomassmith65 in "Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930"

thomassmith65 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:33:39 +0000

The American cut of the movie has an intro narrated by Joseph Cotton, who played Holly Martins. The wording might differ (since the movie is clearly Holly's first time in Vienna)

New comment by ArcHound in "Meetings are forcing functions"

ArcHound — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:33:15 +0000

Hello. For what it's worth, I'm in a similar role (Security Architecture) in a different sector. It's the same here.

The trick is to block your calendar with 30min slots to approx. 80% of capacity. If your calendar is private, these won't be challenged. This leaves you some space to do the work, some other space to get random meetings in and if you're lucky, everyone is happy.

I think this is the price to pay for a high-profile role.

New comment by pcblues in "Men who stare at walls"

pcblues — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:33:04 +0000

I thought that was Einstein, Lincoln, or Keller :)

New comment by lordkrandel in "Ask HN: Why Are Companies Tokenmaxxing?"

lordkrandel — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:32:46 +0000

All marketing is based on people's irrationality. What would you buy AI for if it wasn't for hype and FOMO

New comment by adrian_b in "Meetings are forcing functions"

adrian_b — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:32:31 +0000

I strongly agree that the agenda must be published upfront.

Moreover, when something more substantial must be discussed, e.g. the accomplishment of some project milestone, or a work plan or a proposal for new features or for a new project, a document should be prepared and sent in advance to the participants with the description of the obtained results or of a plan or of a proposal, enabling them to prepare suggestions for improvements or for alternatives, or criticism.

Nonetheless, I may agree with what the previous poster said about Americans and conciseness in meetings (i.e. the lack of thereof).

New comment by laserbeam in "GTFOBins"

laserbeam — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:32:25 +0000

I just grabbed one of the examples there which was readable and didn't require the reader to know all the extra flags passed. One that would illustrate the purpose of the website. One that Linux newbies who read the question and further answers here could follow along with. Not one that tried to be optimal.

New comment by mytailorisrich in "The World's Most Complex Machine"

mytailorisrich — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:32:25 +0000

It is unavoidable that, at some point, China will have its own matching or better machine because they obviously how incredibly strategically important it is.

New comment by moffkalast in "The World's Most Complex Machine"

moffkalast — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:32:22 +0000

This is gonna sound super dumb, but I'm not sure how they aren't being profitable if there are shortages, just price things beyond break even level? The average person can't even tell the difference between a Core 5 and a Core 5 Ultra, you can practically sell them at the same price and I'm not even sure they'd notice when actually using them. The performance jump is relatively minor and the bottlenecks are elsewhere.