Hacker News: Borborygymus

New comment by Borborygymus in "Flock CEO gets his house blurred out on Google Maps and Zillow"

Borborygymus — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 20:52:44 +0000

I guess they must be doing something wrong.

New comment by Borborygymus in "Don't Take the Black Pill [video]"

Borborygymus — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 13:13:53 +0000

As an old school Free Software kinda guy, I was a little shocked at the lack of enthusiastic support for "if you do not own the source code, you are not in control". From where does this apathy come?

New comment by Borborygymus in "How Did Node.js Come About?"

Borborygymus — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 19:35:05 +0000

There was a talk about Node.js at Open Source Bridge in Portland in 2011 or 2012 (nice con). I was volunteering doing mic handling at that talk.

I remember the speaker saying about how they had no idea about how to debug node programs. My personal reaction was that this was a fun little toy, but the idea of JS on the backend was utter madness. Little did I know what a monster it would become.

For the record I still think JS on the backend (or anywhere else) is madness.

New comment by Borborygymus in "I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs"

Borborygymus — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 19:26:15 +0000

> Or maybe you pipe into xargs and pray your filenames don’t have spaces

Or maybe use: `find ... -print0 | xargs -0 ...`

I guess you're still hoping your filenames don't contain an ASCII NUL, although that's a fairly reasonable assumption for all but the most paranoid use-cases.

New comment by Borborygymus in "IceCream – Never use print() to debug again"

Borborygymus — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 10:30:54 +0000

Remember COBOL's EXHIBIT?

New comment by Borborygymus in "Java 27: What's New?"

Borborygymus — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 13:04:13 +0000

Java is swell and all, but having seen how the vendor treats even their large customers, I could never in good conscience recommend them to anyone I do business with. Better to miss out on the latest features and work with more respectful vendors IMO.

New comment by Borborygymus in "Altman: GPT-5.6 is 54% more token efficient on agentic coding"

Borborygymus — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 18:13:22 +0000

more efficient than what? I loathe this marketing speak.

New comment by Borborygymus in "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"

Borborygymus — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 19:17:25 +0000

All Operating Systems suck. Linux sucks less for things I care about, and has done for a long time - much longer than 7 years for my purposes.

I too am required to use a Windows machine for work, which seems to get worse with every release. They even ruined notepad.exe. The bloat is unavoidable. The new laptop I got one year ago that seemed more than enough when new, is now struggling under the bloat. It takes me in excess of 10 minutes to log in, connect VPN, start teams, outlook and putty in a citrix session. Madness!

New comment by Borborygymus in "“Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server"

Borborygymus — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 17:40:33 +0000

> with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure

Linux.

> AI

The slop people are complaining about.

> and enterprise solutions.

Business users are totally fed up of poorly-function Co-Pilot buttons in every UI. The people who sign contracts are not the people forced to digest the cruft.

New comment by Borborygymus in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

Borborygymus — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:01:26 +0000

The child predators are not stalking the adult forums. They're in the "for kids" ones. This "protect the kids" nonsense needs to be called out for what it is - a sham.

New comment by Borborygymus in "Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload"

Borborygymus — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 18:12:03 +0000

Microsoft has long been a company where the left hand and the right hand are not well coordinated. It'll be interesting to see if they can reconcile the "everything must be AI" mantra from the executives with the crystal clear "we do NOT WANT THIS" message from their customers.

Place your bets.

New comment by Borborygymus in "CEOs to Keep Spending on AI, Despite Spotty Returns"

Borborygymus — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 22:42:01 +0000

I concur.

New comment by Borborygymus in "Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright"

Borborygymus — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 16:07:09 +0000

I always wondered if it would be feasible to make the headlights produce polarized light (e.g. vertical), and have windscreens filter out that polarization... I guess it would only work if the scattering of light off of whatever is being illuminated sufficiently depolarizes the light. Anyhow, I thought it was a neat idea when I was a teenager.

There might be some issues with retro fitting the world's existing road vehicle fleet, but that's a deployment detail. :p

New comment by Borborygymus in "Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK"

Borborygymus — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 20:39:30 +0000

I guess Scumbag College's University Challenge performance must have edged them out.

New comment by Borborygymus in "Old and Small Technology"

Borborygymus — Thu, 15 May 2025 21:09:29 +0000

Funny to see Emacs with a Y for small... one of the humorous expansions of "Emacs" I once read was, "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping", alluding to how bloated it was perceived to be.

New comment by Borborygymus in "AI PCs make users less productive"

Borborygymus — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 22:40:04 +0000

There's not really a standard definition of an AI PC, but if there's anything beyond marketing, it would take the form of a neural processing unit, which supposedly makes some AI-related task fast by providing hardware acceleration. Cited examples include voice recognition and "training models", although I'm pretty sceptical about the later being at any significant scale.

I suspect what it will actually boil down to in many cases is having recall enabled by default and an always-listening voice assistant.

New comment by Borborygymus in "Oracle, it's time to free JavaScript"

Borborygymus — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 19:44:04 +0000

It's long gone the time people should stop doing business with Oracle.

New comment by Borborygymus in "CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process'"

Borborygymus — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 05:51:00 +0000

Exactly.

Much of the discourse around this topic has described ideal testing and deployment practise. Maybe it's different in Silicon Valley or investment banks, but for the sorts of companies I work for (telco mostly) things are very far from that ideal.

My view of he industry is one of shocking technical ineptitude from all but a minority of very competent people who actually keep things running... Of management who prioritize short term cost reduction over quality at every opportunity, leading to appalling technical debt and demoralized, over-worked staff who rapidly stop giving a damn about quality, because speaking out about quality problems is penalized.

New comment by Borborygymus in "Expect – Linux tool for automating interactive programs"

Borborygymus — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 11:20:19 +0000

> the situations in which you need to use it are likely cursed.

So true, and yet so common.

New comment by Borborygymus in "Expect – Linux tool for automating interactive programs"

Borborygymus — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 08:59:42 +0000

I used to use it on HP-UX in the 90s.