Hacker News: Skunkleton

New comment by Skunkleton in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

Skunkleton — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:17:12 +0000

Kagi is an aggregator for other, some paid, search APIs. They have, at least in the past, served some percentage of their results from Bing's API among others for example. Kagi seems to me to be dependent on these APIs being available, if they were to go away, so would Kagi.

I am a happy subscriber of Kagi though, they provide a really excellent service.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them"

Skunkleton — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 20:46:18 +0000

Or get this - you get a drm free copy and they let you redownload/stream it for and undefined (hopefully long) period of time. After that you can play your copy or use a copy from elsewhere.

New comment by Skunkleton in "I used sound waves to make espresso. It could cut coffee‑brewing energy use by ¾"

Skunkleton — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:13:54 +0000

If your goal is to understand the quality of the espresso shot, rather than experience a high quality espresso shot, letting it cool off provides a useful data point.

New comment by Skunkleton in "US battery manufacturing output continues to break records"

Skunkleton — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 04:54:14 +0000

Watts * seconds are joules. Joules is a unit of energy. Watts are power.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Siri AI"

Skunkleton — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:48:52 +0000

> Schiendelman sent you a message on hacker news clarifying what its showing. It's you asking about the plant she told you about, it finding that text message, summarizing, and also proving with the text that it's accurate.

wow! we are in the future!

New comment by Skunkleton in "United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert"

Skunkleton — Sun, 31 May 2026 18:23:51 +0000

In the simplest possible terms: this is total bullshit security theatre. At no point has there ever been a bomb or even a bomb threat carried out via usb device names. There is absolutely no reason to even look at the names of Bluetooth devices on a flight.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Using Kagi Search with Low Vision"

Skunkleton — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:47 +0000

You must be joking. Google ties all of your searches to you wether you log in or not.

New comment by Skunkleton in "An Introduction to Meshtastic"

Skunkleton — Wed, 13 May 2026 02:02:36 +0000

Yeah, this is basically what happened with prop 65 as well.

New comment by Skunkleton in "An Introduction to Meshtastic"

Skunkleton — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:25:49 +0000

My understanding is that the rules around those is similar to prop 65 rules. So unfocused as to dilute the original purpose.

New comment by Skunkleton in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

Skunkleton — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 05:35:56 +0000

Because spacex already bought xai.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message"

Skunkleton — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:54:07 +0000

The title is misleading and not in the article. This change is for business/enterprise accounts. Also, these are still credit based. The change is that credits now operate on tokens like the API rather than on messages as they used to.

New comment by Skunkleton in "What if AI doesn't need more RAM but better math?"

Skunkleton — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 16:02:17 +0000

The TurboQuant paper is from April 2025. I’m sure the major labs knew about it on, or even before, the day it published. Any impact it had would have been a year ago. Yet I keep seeing these posts and discuss completely ignoring this.

Can we please start talking about this in that context? We already know what TurboQuant will do to DRAM demand. We already know what it will do to context windows. There is no need to speculate. There is no need to panic sell stocks.

New comment by Skunkleton in "US Job Market Visualizer"

Skunkleton — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 02:24:25 +0000

It could also be that masters degrees concentrate in fields with lower compensation. Teachers are in high demand, but yet they still tend to have something beyond an undergrad.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Layoffs at Block"

Skunkleton — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 21:22:29 +0000

I didn't add a why. Here is why.

Most of the staff doesn't have the visibility into the business to understand what may or may not make money. You can have a great idea, even on that could be a successful product, but it could still be a bad fit for the business.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Layoffs at Block"

Skunkleton — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:49:38 +0000

This depends on your goals. If your goal is to drive efficiency into your processes, drive down tech debt, or fix pain points for customers of your existing products, sure. Most people at a your company with have thoughts, and lots of them will have good ideas.

If your goal is to pivot the company into new verticals, or to develop an entirely new product, then "asking staff for ideas" isn't a likely way to succeed.

New comment by Skunkleton in "747s and coding agents"

Skunkleton — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:35:12 +0000

I don't think it's odd. Sacrificing deep understanding, and delegating that responsibility to others is risky. In more concrete terms, if your livelihood depends on application development, you have concrete dependencies on platforms, frameworks, compilers, operating systems, and other abstractions that without which you might not be able to perform your job.

Fewer abstractions, deeper understanding, fewer dependencies on others. These concepts show up over and over and not just in software. It's about safety.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Layoffs at Block"

Skunkleton — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 03:56:32 +0000

My experience is that "asking staff for ideas" does not lead to successful products. Sometimes, sure, but in general it does not.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Origin of the rule that swap size should be 2x of the physical memory"

Skunkleton — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 02:47:46 +0000

It's not just fork. The operating system overcommits memory all over the place. For example, when you map memory, that can/will succeed without actually mapping physical pages. Even "available" memory is put to some use and freed in an asynchronous way behind the scene, a process that is not always successful.

Honestly, I think overcommit is a good thing. If you want to give a process an isolated address space, then you have to allow that process to lay out memory as it sees fit, without having to worry too much about what else happens to be on the system. If you immediately "charge" the process for this, you will end up nit-picking every process on the system, even though with overcommit you would have been fine.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition"

Skunkleton — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 06:36:18 +0000

If you make structural changes to your filesystem without a journal, and you fail mid way, there is a 100% chance your filesystem is not in a known state, and a very good chance it is in a non-self-consistent state that will lead to some interesting surprises down the line.

New comment by Skunkleton in "CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun"

Skunkleton — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 22:20:43 +0000

Yes, that is really all it is.