Hacker News: SteveGerencser

New comment by SteveGerencser in "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]"

SteveGerencser — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 02:36:54 +0000

I agree. I have never taken a discount from a friend or family member for work that they do for a living. It never made sense to me how anyone would want to underpay someone in their family or close circle of friends. I do however, go out of my way to make sure that they are charging what they are really worth.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]"

SteveGerencser — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 05:36:32 +0000

I began migrating from network/hardware/IT work and into marketing after nearly 2 years of heavy lifting getting ready for Y2K. In the end, "nothing happened," so all that time and money was wasted, according to nearly every company I worked with. Even had one demand a full refund. I agreed as long as I could revert all the work that I had done. They agreed, and the next day after that their entire system collapsed.

I couldn't even get my own dad to pay for network support for his company since he would never pay my rate for anyone no matter what. After 2 other people failed to solve his problem I fixed it in 15 minutes and then he "really" didn't want to pay because it only took 15 minutes.

I was very good at what I did but got no appreciation for keeping things from breaking, only for fixing things after they broke. Marketing paid better, and I could point at real world numbers daily and justify my pay. I don't like it anywhere near as much, but at least it gets more respect than any other IT work I did.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

SteveGerencser — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:41:17 +0000

Why would a billion-dollar company pay their employees so little that they need assistance to live? Or need to urinate in a bottle to keep their delivery times up? Greed and a belief that the rules don't apply to them.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts"

SteveGerencser — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:34:04 +0000

This is a direct result of pretty much all of the LLMs using Reddit as a training tool. People are selling GEO services with reddit spam being a big part of that.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "Someone bought 30 WordPress plugins and planted a backdoor in all of them"

SteveGerencser — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:52:15 +0000

The cost for access can be surprisingly low. Not all that many years ago it was pretty cheap to pay an editor at wiki or DMOZ or any of a few dozen other 'trusted sources' on the internet to get something added, or removed. I stopped traveling in those circles a long time ago, but I know that they are still very active and the cost is still surprisingly low.

While not code level access, these sorts of things are far more common than anyone wants to admit to.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "US destroying its reputation as a scientific leader – European science diplomat"

SteveGerencser — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 20:07:07 +0000

It wasn't very welcoming in the 90s either.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "Frank Gehry has died"

SteveGerencser — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 22:26:24 +0000

I got to meet Frank in the mid 90s while studying architecture in New Mexico. He was incredibly generous with his time and ideas to us students that stayed extra late to catch him touring the studios with the dean around midnight. His midnight critique of my design that was due the next morning made me throw it out and start over to include some of his ideas.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "Data centers contribute to high prices as energy bills electrify local politics"

SteveGerencser — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 17:20:29 +0000

We cancelled our install after TN removed the state level breaks. It pushed the payback out past the expected lifespan of the panels (25 years). I would have been fine with a 10 year payback, but 25+ was just not worth doing.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "Meta announces new data centers"

SteveGerencser — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 19:29:39 +0000

You would be surprised how little water drop is required to cause wells to "go dry". When wells are punched into an aquifer, they stop when they hit water, they don't keep going to be deeper. A water level drop of just 2 inches caused all sorts of issues for locals when Intel built its new Fabs in New Mexico.

Intel said that it wouldn't be an issue, yet when it happened, they did nothing to help and forced a huge number of people to have to put in new wells. The same will happen in Ohio.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "OpenAI says it has evidence DeepSeek used its model to train competitor"

SteveGerencser — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 15:57:33 +0000

> don't aspire to be like Altman

Aspire to be like Aaron Schwartz.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "AI Checkers Forcing Kids to Write Like a Robot to Avoid Being Called a Robot"

SteveGerencser — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 20:22:37 +0000

I submitted several scientific/research papers my wife wrote or co-authored in the late 90s early 2000s and they were all flagged as AI written by multiple tools. It was good for a laugh.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "NASA acknowledges it cannot quantify risk of Starliner propulsion issues"

SteveGerencser — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 04:18:30 +0000

Boeing merged with Lockheed/Martin when L/M was in serious trouble and rumors say it was pushed by the DOD because of all the L/M defense contracts involved. This then lead to the worst parts of L/M (management over engineering) gaining a foothold at Boeing (Engineering over Management).

The rest is a long, slow, decline into Boeing being what L/M was when they needed to be rescued.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "A search engine by and for the federal government"

SteveGerencser — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 00:36:09 +0000

People like Matt Cutts left Google to do exactly this. Much happier than when he was the head of the Google Search Spam team.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps"

SteveGerencser — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 22:47:34 +0000

We are in the 45 million. When we moved here over a decade ago we were told by TDS that they were expanding their service and should be able to provide us with 50Mbs 'soon'. 10 years later we are still 5Mbs (3 in real-world situations). With no plan to expand here ever. Fortunately, the local electric company got a grant and is rolling out 1Gbs fiber to 100% of their customers. TDS couldn't do it because it wasn't 'profitable'. The electric company is fast-tracking the build-out and we should have service less than 18 months after they started.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "CEO of data privacy company Onerep.com founded dozens of people-search firms"

SteveGerencser — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 22:42:48 +0000

A not-so-secret dirty little secret is that many of the reputation management agencies also own many of the public records websites that publish mug shots, court records, and so on. When you hire them to remove that information from the internet it puts you into a cycle of being removed from one or two of their website and added to something else.

You end up in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Complete with monthly fees.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "Big media publishers are inundating the web with subpar product recommendations"

SteveGerencser — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 21:05:57 +0000

Years ago Google banned BMW (I think) for their then very spammy tactics. Then they were forced to restore BMW because people searching for BMW expected to find BMW in the results.

The Google spam team has always been underfunded, and understaffed, and when the choice was 'do the right thing about spam' vs 'do the thing that is profitable', they always choose profit.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "Industry veterans get candid on ageism in gaming"

SteveGerencser — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 16:43:50 +0000

At 58, and playing 'video' games since the late 70s, I'm happily pulling the average age of gamers higher every year. Better than that, at 58 we just started work on our first video game that we have talked about making for over 20 years.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)"

SteveGerencser — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 20:22:32 +0000

My wife (engineer) taught a class called 'Math for Teachers', which was designed to teach elementary school teachers basic math. Not how to teach it, just how to do basic math themselves. A significant number should have failed that class but the administration refused to allow her to fail teachers who were failing for 'reasons'.

She quit the job.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "Rolex fined $100M for preventing its watches being sold online"

SteveGerencser — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 01:01:30 +0000

And that's what we did. I was working for a Rolex AD for about 10 years, and they were an AD for decades. One day they got fed up with the 'rules' and dropped their AD status and started selling Rolex on the "secondary" market. These were never worn watches in original boxes and papers and in no way different than the watch we sold as an AD. Just second-hand. We suddenly had access to the inventory that our customers wanted when they wanted it, and told Rolex to get stuffed.

And yes, watching objectively well off people argue about luxury items as if it's important is always entertaining to me.

New comment by SteveGerencser in "How Lego builds a new Lego set"

SteveGerencser — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 15:02:42 +0000

My granddaughter and I build a ton of 'boring adult sets' together, and then she gets to take them home, tear them apart, and make anything she wants with the pieces. But she also loves Minecraft (she's 8) and we buy the Minecraft specific sets as well. It is quite possible to do all the things, it's not necessarily an either/or scenario like many people like to present as their argument against something.