Hacker News: New Comments

New comment by datadrivenangel in "The Zen of Parallel Programming"

datadrivenangel — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:02:25 +0000

Fred Brooks and the mythical man month observed that communication between people expands faster than linear, and that adding more people to a project makes it later.

New comment by skullone in "Natural experiments prove phytoplankton carbon removal works"

skullone — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:02:13 +0000

Couldn't they front a pump with a macerator?

New comment by aboardRat4 in "We want Texans to know their rights"

aboardRat4 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:02:08 +0000

>These billboards came from Mayday Health, a nonprofit dedicated to sharing information about abortion pills, birth control, and gender-affirming care.

Castration activists fighting people willing to get into other people's wombs

In other words, idiots fighting idiots. I wish sincere luck to both sides of the conflict.

New comment by JimsonYang in "Americans are angry about data centers. Politicians are feeling the pressure"

JimsonYang — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:01:59 +0000

*upate I just realized this is Saline, next to Ann Arbor and had a lot of student activism to push back against the data centre project like last year

So imo I dont think the article truly represents the opinions and thoughts of most michiganders

New comment by G0lg0thvn in "We want Texans to know their rights"

G0lg0thvn — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:01:57 +0000

Who’s that?

New comment by ijk in "Americans are angry about data centers. Politicians are feeling the pressure"

ijk — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:01:49 +0000

The portable gas turbine is a somewhat separate issue, in that it's highly illegal but if you have more money than god you can just pay off the fines and the judges.

It's relatively easy to avoid being that egregious about it if you're a little bit patient on construction permits and power contracts.

NIMBY opposition to datacenter construction is orthogonal to that, except insofar as in both cases the construction will gravitate toward places that won't or can't object to the construction.

New comment by wonnage in "AI advice made people 3x less accurate but 2x confident, researchers found"

wonnage — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:01:35 +0000

They provide a sample of hallucinated answers from ChatGPT at the end of the study.

New comment by senshan in "AI advice made people 3x less accurate but 2x confident, researchers found"

senshan — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:01:08 +0000

This could serve as a beacon for those who still care:

Richard Feynman: "I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo

New comment by Joel_Mckay in "A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows"

Joel_Mckay — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:01:05 +0000

We agree it probably would have still failed, but mostly it was the legacy code-motion compatibility/performance issues that were practically inescapable without refactoring millions of lines of code.

gcc maintained the ia64 target a long time for unclear reasons, but it was also still inefficient on other platforms. The FOSS compiler worked, but that was its only performance metric that counted for many users. =3

Not sure why you think the Intel compilers were a myth, as they are still around working far better than gcc in many use-cases:

"An Overview of the Intel® IA-64 Compiler"

https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~amaral/courses/605/papers/In...

New comment by brcmthrowaway in "Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s"

brcmthrowaway — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:34 +0000

Oh man, Id love to find cheap surplus digital signs

New comment by BigTTYGothGF in "We want Texans to know their rights"

BigTTYGothGF — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:33 +0000

Every minute spent tracking down a lady getting an abortion is a minute not spent tracking down a murderer or a rapist or similar.

New comment by everdrive in "REO Trucks I4 4WD Pickup Truck Starts at $21,500"

everdrive — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:21 +0000

Interesting if it's not vaporware. As others have said, it's too soon to feel certain about this yet. It looks really exciting though.

New comment by ColdStream in "A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows"

ColdStream — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:19 +0000

Recently thanks to Modern Vintage Gamer on youtube, there has been a push to see if you could get Doom to run on the NeoGeo. Because of its very unique hardware (no framebuffer) it is a very unqiue and tough task.

And yet, some folks have come to the battle and have ended up extensively using LLM's to code it. It is wild to see that these things can target such an obscure platform and get some decent results in a very short amount of time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPxhuKTltsk

This is something that doesn't have any real economic value but many are more than happy to see happen.

New comment by elictronic in "What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard"

elictronic — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:06 +0000

You don't need an X-ray for a board this simple. Every component has well defined input and outputs. Give a mildly competent freshman EE student or high quality high school student you could have the board recreated in a few days.

Low product quantity and low quality/fake products resold on amazon from AliExpress are the biggest roadblocks at this point. The juice isn't worth the squeeze.

New comment by andy_ppp in "Natural experiments prove phytoplankton carbon removal works"

andy_ppp — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 23:59:58 +0000

How much of the carbon stays in the animal eating the bloom? I would think while it's tricky to calculate assuming them being eaten is bad might not be true. Of course we might end up making farting whales and adding loads of methane to the atmosphere knowing our luck...

Whenever we try playing god it seems we generally mess things up a few times so we'd need to monitor the actual outcomes in reduced CO2 in the atmosphere over several decades. It seems extremely high risk to assume there won't be unintended consequences...

New comment by vegavis in "Fayetteville officers fired for misusing license plate system"

vegavis — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 23:59:33 +0000

That is not to mention, Flock cameras are not really for tracking your license plate. Hell, id argue its hardly about recognizing your face. They siphon the meta data off your phone and use that to build a digital profile of you, which is arguably the most dangerous part. I'm sure absolutely nothing nefarious could come of that, like say, Graphite levels of pre-crime or cyber blackmail.

New comment by joshspankit in "Transcribe.cpp"

joshspankit — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 23:59:17 +0000

Through all this I kept wondering (and excuse the question if it is inappropriate): what’s the benefit of a transcription of the sounds since the ideal is a 1:1 IPA representation to audio recording and neither is itself a translation?

Isn’t the recording itself “more ideal” than any representation of it?

New comment by comrade1234 in "Show HN: How much profit does your employer make per employee?"

comrade1234 — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 23:59:11 +0000

I've worked for top... 10? Silicon Valley companies that you most definitely know. Two major ones. I would sometimes do napkin math, like once a year, to see if I was actually worth my salary. I usually was way ahead but when I wasnt sure I pivoted, just out of pride really. I always had this image of me working for startups where every dollar mattered even though I wasn't.

New comment by thejazzman in "Codex Resets"

thejazzman — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 23:59:06 +0000

It no longer works and only respects a server supplied value now

New comment by nhan123 in "Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s"

nhan123 — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 23:58:51 +0000

Awesome SRE approach to a physical legacy problem, looking forward to the GitHub repo