Hacker News: FartyMcFarter

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste"

FartyMcFarter — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:14:14 +0000

That still doesn't make it a good comparison. The salt emitted by desalination plants is already in the sea now, it's not salt that went somewhere else.

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste"

FartyMcFarter — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 08:38:13 +0000

Why is it akin to that? Doesn't the salt come from the sea in the first place?

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste"

FartyMcFarter — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 03:20:17 +0000

Yeah. Worrying about salt in the sea is like worrying about oxygen in the air. Can too much oxygen in the air sometimes be a problem? Yeah, in some corner cases. Is it a major problem that we can't solve? Not at all.

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "Every Byte Matters"

FartyMcFarter — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:32:01 +0000

Android Java apps' memory consumption is definitely a relevant concern.

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "A 10 year old Xeon is all you need"

FartyMcFarter — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 11:15:22 +0000

I may have missed this in the article, but:

What was the net effect of the optimisations? How much faster did it get?

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "FBI Arrests CIA Official with $40M in Gold Bars in His Home"

FartyMcFarter — Thu, 28 May 2026 06:53:55 +0000

The mindset of law breaking probably carries across jurisdictions.

UK's rudest chalk figure gets a glow-up to stop it fading in the rain

FartyMcFarter — Thu, 28 May 2026 06:10:47 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpvppe84lnvo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48305234

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing"

FartyMcFarter — Mon, 25 May 2026 17:19:45 +0000

As long as there's an RPC connection established and a partially sent request, I think it would count.

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing"

FartyMcFarter — Mon, 25 May 2026 17:17:32 +0000

If any company announces that they use token consumption as an employee performance signal, for me that's close to a red flag to stay away from that company.

No company with good engineering leadership should act like this is remotely a good idea.

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "Experience: We found a baby on the subway – now he's our 26-year-old son"

FartyMcFarter — Sat, 23 May 2026 08:18:59 +0000

Everything about this story is so satisfying, that if I read it in a lesser source I would be doubting it.

The person finding the baby was the person who eventually adopted him. The judge asking the guy to adopt the baby was the same judge that performed the wedding of the couple doing the adoption. Just so many great details.

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "Demis Hassabis Thinks AI Job Cuts Are Dumb"

FartyMcFarter — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:48:49 +0000

https://archive.is/0wi6J

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

FartyMcFarter — Fri, 22 May 2026 01:32:16 +0000

Both of them contained a search algorithm that explored some moves from each considered position, usually not all moves. Both of them contained logic (learned or programmed) to evaluate moves and/or positions.

The differences between them are many, but brute force doesn't enter into it in either case.

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

FartyMcFarter — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:52:36 +0000

Yeah, and back then people moved the goal posts too, saying Deep Blue was just "brute-forcing" chess (which isn't even true since it's not a pure minimax search).

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "The AI Layoff Bill Is Coming Due, and CTOs Are Going to Pay It Twice"

FartyMcFarter — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:44:14 +0000

> One in three employers spent more on restaffing than they saved from the original layoffs. That is not efficiency. That is a wire transfer with extra steps.

Well written :)

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag"

FartyMcFarter — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:25:43 +0000

It seems this particular company makes a payment for completing those tasks, so it might not be that bad.

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features"

FartyMcFarter — Thu, 14 May 2026 10:29:06 +0000

As someone without strong feelings on Linux vs Windows (I've used and developed on both about equally): this kind of news, along the way Windows has been changing has me wondering if I should change my primary desktop environment at home to Linux.

In my eyes, Windows used to be the desktop environment that "just works and can run almost everything". Lately it's becoming enshittified, with weird bugs showing up more and more frequently (a memorable one is not being able to launch Notepad from the start menu!!). I think Microsoft is losing its best attributes when it comes to consumer software. Linux may not be perfect but it's looking more and more attractive in comparison, even with its imperfections.

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools"

FartyMcFarter — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:01:27 +0000

That's true, but I don't know if this one was ever a good measure in the first place.

People use AI differently and they can be equally productive with a variety of token usage quantities.

Also, different kinds of work are differently amenable to using AI.

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

FartyMcFarter — Tue, 12 May 2026 09:17:20 +0000

> The old open-source bargain had a positive feedback loop. You pick Python because it’s easy. You find a bug in a dependency. You fix it.

> Agents broke that loop in a specific way: the unit of contribution shifted from the patch to the port.

What does this even mean? Every time there's a bug we port the whole code to a different language instead of patching it? This sounds like absolute nonsense, and makes me wonder whether a human actually wrote this.

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up"

FartyMcFarter — Sun, 10 May 2026 09:23:37 +0000

Thicc floppy disk.

The "Oomerd" button is probably the debugger by the sound of it?

New comment by FartyMcFarter in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% workforce"

FartyMcFarter — Fri, 08 May 2026 08:07:49 +0000

It got to the point where people were sarcastically posting "An update on " when sending goodbye emails.