Hacker News: Fargren

New comment by Fargren in "Phone-free bars and restaurants on the rise across the U.S."

Fargren — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:01:10 +0000

It's easier (or at least different) to say to your friends "let's go to a phone free bar" than it its to say "let's go to a bar, phone-free".

In the first case, a third party came up with the idea, and you are subjecting yourselves to their idea. In the second case, it's your idea, and your friends are subjecting themselves to your idea. Really if you are proposing, there's always a bit of "your idea" there, but the "blame" can be shared with someone else who's not in the group.

New comment by Fargren in "My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix"

Fargren — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 20:28:08 +0000

Government regulation has mandated USB-C in all devices, which helps me every day. Just to name something in the realm of what the article is about.

New comment by Fargren in "End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance"

Fargren — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:29:42 +0000

A system where this can happen is healthy. The alternative is a system where once legislation fails to pass you are forbidden to modify it and try again. _That_ would be a broken system, where compromise is impossible, and attempting to make any change is a very risky move because you might fail, forever. There would be a chilling effect, legislation would take longer to change, and laws would become frozen in the past.

What we are seeing here is checks and balances, working as intended.

New comment by Fargren in "Every layer of review makes you 10x slower"

Fargren — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:37:54 +0000

The point of PRs is not to avoid mistakes (though sometimes this can happen). Automated tests are the tool to weed out those kinds of mistakes. The point of PRs is to spread knowledge. I try to read every PR, even if it's already approved, so I'm aware of what changes there are in code I'm going to own. They are the RSS feed of the codebase.

New comment by Fargren in "Treasure hunter freed from jail after refusing to turn over shipwreck gold"

Fargren — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 15:31:35 +0000

I think you are discounting the mental, physical and social toll of being locked up for 10 years. Without autonomy, without privacy, without access to your loved ones (some of whom might die, and the rest will likely have irreparably damaged relationship after), treated as a bad person, surrounded by criminals. It's not "you get 400M for aging 10 years", or for dying ten years younger; I might take those deals. It's spending those 10 years in a prison, and dealing with the consequences of that after.

New comment by Fargren in "Treasure hunter freed from jail after refusing to turn over shipwreck gold"

Fargren — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 11:04:25 +0000

At no point in my life would I choose to spend 10 years in jail for $400m. Only if my current living situation was very poor and this was my only way out of it. I can sort of imagine why one would... but it seems like an awful decision to me.

It seems more plausible to me he actually doesn't have the gold.

New comment by Fargren in "[dead]"

Fargren — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 11:53:16 +0000

The title doesn't match the article, and it's also not true. The term may have become more widespread after the 2013 book mentioned in the article, but it certainly existed prior to it.

New comment by Fargren in "British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time"

Fargren — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 11:43:33 +0000

Do we know that we don't see adverse health effects on those populations? I couldn't find any studies on the subject. I think it would be very hard to measure, since you can't really compare without comparing populations of different countries, and at that point any effects can be attributed to a myriad of differences between countries.

New comment by Fargren in "Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras"

Fargren — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:17:09 +0000

"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape, than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long & generally approv’d"

The amount of damage these cameras have caused is totally disproportional to whatever meager benefit they may have wrought. These are antisocial machines.

New comment by Fargren in "Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists"

Fargren — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 19:39:00 +0000

The first word of UBI is universal. The entire concept relies on that characteristic.

New comment by Fargren in "Where did all the starships go?"

Fargren — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 09:45:07 +0000

I think if you materially support the nazis, you are a nazi, regardless of what might be your internal justification. This is a distinction without a difference.

New comment by Fargren in "Consent-O-Matic"

Fargren — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 13:40:08 +0000

This is not my experience at all with Facebook. Since six months ago or so, Facebook is saying my three option are to pay them a subscription, accept tracking, or not use their products. I went with option three, but my reading of the GDPR as that it's illegal for them to ask me to make this choice.

I'm in Spain, this is probably not the same worldwide.

New comment by Fargren in "There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape"

Fargren — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:28:19 +0000

That would fall under Reuse rather than Recycle. Reduce, Reuse and Recycle are in the order of best to worst. Recycling is the last ditch effort to not completely waste something. It's always going to feel like a half measure, because it is.

New comment by Fargren in "There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape"

Fargren — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 13:52:28 +0000

If salvaging 100% of the materials that make up something is the only way to "properly" recycle, we are not recycling anything properly. Some components are not recyclable.

I won't speculate about whether the plastic on the board is recyclable, or ecological to recycle. I don't know. This is what I'm asking.

New comment by Fargren in "There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape"

Fargren — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 11:59:02 +0000

What would be properly recycling electronics, if not extracting the metals? should the worthless based board to be melted and used for bottles?

New comment by Fargren in "Rainbow Six Siege hacked as players get billions of credits and random bans"

Fargren — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 11:32:24 +0000

If 1% of indie games are solid, and all AAA game are solid, and there are 100 times more indie games than AAA games, then there would still be the same amount of solid indies as there are solid AAA games. As it is, I think for every good AAA game, there are somewhere between 50 and 500 great indie games.

Finding them is slightly harder, but absolutely worth it.

In any case, complaining about how many games there are out there that are not your thing is a waste of time. Much better to define what you like and look for recommendations from people who like similar games. Who care how many FPSs are released if you don't like FPSs? If you like RPGs, find RPG gamers and ask them what's good. Substitute for any genre; there is no genre out there that's not getting more releases than you could possibly play.

New comment by Fargren in "Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?"

Fargren — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 21:12:44 +0000

That explains why it happens, but doesn't really help with the problem. The expectation I have as a pretty naive user, is that what is in the .md file should be permanently in the context. It's good to understand why this is not the case, but it's unintuitive and can lead to frustration. It's bad UX, if you ask me.

I'm sure there are workarounds such as resetting the context, but the point is that god UX would mean such tricks are not needed.

New comment by Fargren in "Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth"

Fargren — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 13:21:41 +0000

It seems to me that building a recording device that can survive in space, that it's very light, and that can not break apart after receiving the impact from an explosive charge strong enough to decelerate it from the speeds that would take it to Alpha Centauri is... maybe impossible.

We're talking about 0.2 light years. To reach it in 20 years, that's 1/10th of the speed of light. The forces to decelerate that are pretty high.

I did a quick napkin calculation (assuming the device weighs 1kg), that's close to 3000 kiloNewton, if it has 10 seconds to decelerate. The thrust of an F100 jet engine is around 130 kN.

IANan aerounatics engineer, so I could be totally wrong.

New comment by Fargren in "Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth"

Fargren — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 11:44:13 +0000

Any mass that it fires would have a starting velocity equal to that of the probe, and would need to be accelerated an equal velocity in the opposite direction. It would be a smaller mass, so it would require less fuel than decelerating the whole probe; but it's still a hard problem.

Be careful with the word "just". It often makes something hard sound simple.

New comment by Fargren in "Court filings allege Meta downplayed risks to children and misled the public"

Fargren — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 20:31:08 +0000

It does not. Social media platforms have had massive societal impact. From language, to social movements, to election results, social media has had effects, positive or negative, that impact the lives of even those who do not use them.