Hacker News: Finnucane

New comment by Finnucane in "Meta builds AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to interact with staff"

Finnucane — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:47:02 +0000

Must...resist...obvious..jokes...resist...

New comment by Finnucane in "They're made out of meat (1991)"

Finnucane — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:32:27 +0000

I still remember seeing Terry do a reading of this at Lunacon, I think, shortly after it was published. It was a good reading, he really knew how to land a joke.

New comment by Finnucane in "France pulls last gold held in US for $15B gain"

Finnucane — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:39:24 +0000

Actually reading the comments first because the page isn't loading for me.

New comment by Finnucane in "IBM 3270 Information Display System: Color and Programmed Symbols (1979) [pdf]"

Finnucane — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 01:25:52 +0000

Heh, up until a few years ago our inventory system ran on an AS/400, and we had to use 5250 emulators to log in. Don't miss it.

New comment by Finnucane in "Pam Bondi ousted as Attorney General"

Finnucane — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:07:44 +0000

They might be, but that’s not really a reason to let bad people stay in jobs they shouldn’t have. Otherwise e might as well give up any pretense of accountability and just let them do whatever they want.

New comment by Finnucane in "The First Video Game Was Just a Box in the Corner of a Bar"

Finnucane — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:02:17 +0000

There was also SpaceWar! from MIT, which Nolan Bushnell turned into a standalone cabinet game. Though I think you could make a case for Pong being the first coin-op video game, a commercial game rather than something that primarily existed in academic labs.

New comment by Finnucane in "LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs"

Finnucane — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 01:40:25 +0000

consumer space and space space chips.

New comment by Finnucane in "Midnight train from GA: A view of America from the tracks as airports struggle"

Finnucane — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:36:51 +0000

Just gotta zoom _way_ in to make the text readable, though.

New comment by Finnucane in "Cuts in publishing and book reviewing imperil the future of narrative nonfiction"

Finnucane — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 14:58:09 +0000

I spent years as a freelance proofreader and copyeditor. One of the reasons I don't so much any more is I was getting too many political books, books where the authors were not so interested in facts or logic--or even internal consistency. Most of these books were 'conservative' but this was not exclusively a right-wing issue. Ideology requires glossing over the complexity of the real world. It's draining to read this stuff, with limited ability to make corrections.

Hell, now I work for a uni press, and I'm seeing this in our own list more and more--writers are giving up on deep analysis.

New comment by Finnucane in "Leaked Anthropic Model Presents 'Unprecedented Cybersecurity Risks'"

Finnucane — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:56:26 +0000

"The fight has been about the Pentagon wanting to use Anthropic’s models even more than the company wants, which doesn’t seem like the thing you’d fight for if you thought the models presented security risks."

Well, remember who's running the show there.

New comment by Finnucane in "The 'shadow realm' of the affordability crisis"

Finnucane — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:12:02 +0000

I know this is a developer, so they're never going to suggest anything except number go up, but if the cost to buy is going up faster than the cost to rent, that suggests a distortion in the market that is not entirely about housing supply. Which means, number may go down. We have seen this movie before.

New comment by Finnucane in "Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80"

Finnucane — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:38:28 +0000

"More than 30 meters long, it filled a 9 m by 15 m room and weighed about 30 kilograms."

It was a balloon?

New comment by Finnucane in "FBI is buying location data to track US citizens, director confirms"

Finnucane — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 20:53:06 +0000

>For profit organizations are legally required to maximize shareholder value.

No:

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

New comment by Finnucane in "Stop Sloppypasta"

Finnucane — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:35:40 +0000

I suppose responding with 'AI;DR' would seem rude?

New comment by Finnucane in "Hegseth declares no quarter will be given"

Finnucane — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 19:02:48 +0000

Just change his title to Secretary of War Crimes.

New comment by Finnucane in "ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did"

Finnucane — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 22:13:42 +0000

If I described my symptoms to an AI and it suggested a diagnosis, I would defintely get a second opinion.

New comment by Finnucane in "The stagnancy of publishing and the disappearance of the midlist"

Finnucane — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 04:18:40 +0000

CBS/Viacom was trying to unload Simon & Schuster. PenguinRandomHouse wanted to buy, but it ended up selling to a private equity company. A rare instance where that was actually the better option.

New comment by Finnucane in "Science Fiction Is Dying. Long Live Post Sci-Fi?"

Finnucane — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 02:28:45 +0000

I was part of the NY sf publishing scene in 1990s. In those days the genre felt like a constraining box. The commercial successes of the 1970s and 80s, and the corporatization of publishing in general, meant that there were limits, in literary and conceptual ways. It's funny that he mentions Jonathan Lethem--I saw Jonathan a lot in those days. How to break out of genre was a frequent topic of conversation. It really seemed the only way up was out.

New comment by Finnucane in "The stagnancy of publishing and the disappearance of the midlist"

Finnucane — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 02:12:04 +0000

I worked in NY publishing in the 1990s and also did some small press stuff, and even then the 'death of the midlist' was already an old topic. And yeah, consolidation had someting to do with it: publishers were owned by bigger businesses that saw them as black boxes to extract value from. Distribution was changing: the big 'superstores' and Amazon/online sales starting to be a thing. Mass-market was getting crushed. Obviously, not everything that got published was a bestseller, or even expected to be, but authors couldn't get the same space to grow a career. If it didn't work, they'd be cut.

Now I'm a production editor for a uni press. For a while, it seemed to be a bit of a haven from the madness, but it's coming for us now too.

New comment by Finnucane in "Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?"

Finnucane — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 22:39:55 +0000

When you are MC Hammer, everything is an MC nail.