Hacker News: AdamN

New comment by AdamN in "The death of the brick and mortar toy store"

AdamN — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:16:07 +0000

We still go to our local toy store - which is quite nice and only about 5 blocks away (in Berlin).

New comment by AdamN in "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence"

AdamN — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:14:09 +0000

It's probably not so much the AI thing as the latent disgust at the social media landscape and the toxicity driven by Meta and others.

New comment by AdamN in "Was my $48K GPU server worth it?"

AdamN — Fri, 22 May 2026 10:34:54 +0000

Yeah there are good accounts of this in Down and Out in Paris and London and also one of Hemingway's books - forgot which one.

New comment by AdamN in "Python 3.15: features that didn't make the headlines"

AdamN — Fri, 22 May 2026 08:37:49 +0000

The case I would make is that some of the libraries in Python are very fast and written in other languages (C, C++, etc...). With other languages that's more rare. For instance a Java application will probably use libraries that are all Java (or another JVM language).

The gotchas that I see with Python are that some really garbage code can work - that's more difficult in a language like Rust. The other nice thing about Python (aside from the fact that it can be very readable) is that devs rarely use threads and threads cause all sorts of race conditions - often when the performance of threading was never needed in the first place and the usage of them just added pointless complexity.

New comment by AdamN in "Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD"

AdamN — Fri, 22 May 2026 08:01:35 +0000

two is the right minimum number for a high availability dataplane but three is the right minimum number for a HA control plane.

With that said, if high availability is not a concern then 1 can be just fine.

New comment by AdamN in "Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment"

AdamN — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:14:50 +0000

That's still a man in the middle coordinating the payments (mpesa, etc...) and essentially holding both sides of the transaction. When you send money to somebody with mobile money you're sending it to the mobile network operator who then let's the other person know so they can move the money to somebody else (or cashout or leave it there).

It's not really a federated system because you can't for instance send money from mpesa in kenya to a different provider in uganda.

New comment by AdamN in "Anthropic acquires Stainless"

AdamN — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:39:47 +0000

Maybe. A bad programmer is unlikely to get something even working so in that world nobody will depend on it because they can't even use it. A bad AI programmer (or non-programmer) can get the thing working so people will depend on it - the blast radius is now higher.

New comment by AdamN in "Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better"

AdamN — Mon, 18 May 2026 11:20:38 +0000

But why not be true to the original author's text? What's the need to modify it?

New comment by AdamN in "Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better"

AdamN — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:15:49 +0000

SE sounds truly, truly awful. Thanks for making me aware of its existence so I can avoid it.

New comment by AdamN in "Kraftwerk's radical 1976 track"

AdamN — Wed, 13 May 2026 14:33:56 +0000

You expressed an opinion with how you framed it.

New comment by AdamN in "Kraftwerk's radical 1976 track"

AdamN — Wed, 13 May 2026 14:31:48 +0000

There's a modern argument that nuclear is greener than oil, gas, and even hydro and everything else. That's pretty new though (and certainly not a no-brainer).

New comment by AdamN in "Reverting the incremental GC in Python 3.14 and 3.15"

AdamN — Wed, 13 May 2026 14:29:30 +0000

Yeah it seems like a miss. I guess the thinking was that it wasn't developer-facing and just an internal optimization. But of course any change to garbage collection will change the memory and cpu dynamics of the process in a material way.

New comment by AdamN in "Kraftwerk's radical 1976 track"

AdamN — Wed, 13 May 2026 09:25:18 +0000

It's kind of all of the above. State and non-state actors have leveraged pretty much every movement there is to their own ends: civil rights, anti-nuclear, pro-nuclear, anti-Iranian government sentiment, pro-Iranian government sentiment, even jazz tours in Europe which were assisted by US intelligence orgs in the 20th century.

It's not a 'bad' thing and doesn't say alot about the core movements - it just is what it is.

New comment by AdamN in "Kraftwerk's radical 1976 track"

AdamN — Wed, 13 May 2026 09:21:49 +0000

I'm not sure why subsidies are per se bad. But also almost all infrastructure is subsidized regardless: roads, trains (cargo as well), ports, nuclear, coal, etc...

New comment by AdamN in "EU to crack down on TikTok, Instagram's 'addictive design' targeting kids"

AdamN — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:01:44 +0000

One that's reinforced by those against whichever legislation or regulation is being proposed.

New comment by AdamN in "Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%"

AdamN — Wed, 06 May 2026 12:16:36 +0000

A manager who is also contributing code is almost an entirely different role than a manager who is not contributing code. Typically the former should not exist in a smaller org and in a larger org it makes sense to shift to the latter because there's enough non-code work to do that you might as well dedicate whole people to the task.

Different roles though.

New comment by AdamN in "The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code"

AdamN — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 19:11:51 +0000

I'm seeing that in Big Tech now - there's no room anymore and it's super short term thinking (couched in the language of long term thinking). It's a really dangerous game for an incumbent to fritter away the ability to innovate because there is only enough capacity to focus on the here and now.

New comment by AdamN in "Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs"

AdamN — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 07:55:12 +0000

Meta is fundamentally a media company and they're using AI towards that end. They don't seem to be productizing their tech beyond that in the medium term.

New comment by AdamN in "Email could have been X.400 times better"

AdamN — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:31:02 +0000

I don't unsubsubscribe unless I explicitly subscribed in the past. If I did not subscribe in the first place then it's spam (exception for small businesses who may not know better in which case I'll delete or unsubscribe).

New comment by AdamN in "Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen"

AdamN — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:39:42 +0000

What about low dose aspirin?