Hacker News: abracadaniel

New comment by abracadaniel in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

abracadaniel — Sat, 16 May 2026 21:00:06 +0000

It’s useful for a while. Hardware has a pretty short useful lifespan. I’ll be curious how the landscape will look in 10 years as it comes time to replace all of these servers. Maybe we’ll extend the lifespan, or usage will continue to grow, or we start shutting down datacenters.

New comment by abracadaniel in "Her life savings mysteriously disappeared after a systems glitch"

abracadaniel — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:52:35 +0000

Paper statements are now opt-in most places, so most people won’t have local copies of the records anymore. It’s extremely important, because there is no duty for a company to provide historic data. None of my banks provide detailed data back more than a couple of years.

New comment by abracadaniel in "Israel escalates attacks on medics in Lebanon with deadly 'quadruple tap'"

abracadaniel — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 02:20:23 +0000

That requires them to either travel to a country that recognizes war crimes and be arrested, or a country deciding to go in and get them. I can’t imagine anyone would have the political will and means to invade. It seems extremely unlikely there would ever be an arrest.

New comment by abracadaniel in "US national level OS-level age verification bill proposed"

abracadaniel — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:04:36 +0000

This is one of the issues with all of the steadily eroding privacy that get accepted because you’re allowed to opt out. It doesn’t take long before you’re the only one in your neighborhood who opts out, and that makes you very identifiable and suspicious.

New comment by abracadaniel in "Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control"

abracadaniel — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 02:16:58 +0000

Which is why it’s important to be able to run models locally. Which also might explain the strategy behind buying all of the memory that is or will exist for at least a year out. Maybe we’ll eventually see AI safety be used to prevent people from running local models.

New comment by abracadaniel in "Why craft-lovers are losing their craft"

abracadaniel — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 02:08:00 +0000

If you were to want to do it between 8am and 5pm, yeah I’d say it does. Lots of places demand much longer hours as well, and would pass over people who want to make use of their free time.

New comment by abracadaniel in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

abracadaniel — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 17:46:47 +0000

Until they start trying the carrot instead of the stick. Then it becomes a bidding war to determine the "reality"

New comment by abracadaniel in "WA income tax clears House after 24-hour debate"

abracadaniel — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:15:30 +0000

You don’t clear $50m a year by paying people what they’re worth. The wages are unfair, by definition, if there is someone able to skim away that much at the top.

New comment by abracadaniel in "WA income tax clears House after 24-hour debate"

abracadaniel — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 14:58:10 +0000

The person earning $50m a year is profiting on the labor of hundreds of thousands of people. Rent seeking on their labor and skills, relying 100,000x more on the infrastructure that made them rich. No one makes $50m a year in a vacuum, they do so by utilizing the economy they live in and rely on.

New comment by abracadaniel in "A plastic made from milk that vanishes in 13 weeks"

abracadaniel — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 19:56:58 +0000

Products that involve clay as an ingredient tend to have issues with lead contamination (along with other heavy metals) as it likes to absorb them, and the sources are highly variable.

New comment by abracadaniel in "Americans want heat pumps – but high electricity prices may get in the way"

abracadaniel — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 05:08:08 +0000

Installation costs dominate the price. I check every few years, and while the hardware is down to about $5k for me, cost for installation remained $45k-$50k. Which is where it’s been for years. Makes diy very attractive though.

New comment by abracadaniel in "I'm going to cure my girlfriend's brain tumor"

abracadaniel — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 02:07:12 +0000

That long duration stress from caring for a loved one with a potentially fatal illness is difficult to describe. I remember sharing that same driving thought of “if this goes south, will I honestly be able to say I did everything I could?”

New comment by abracadaniel in "Ode to the AA Battery"

abracadaniel — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:56:11 +0000

A standard that works something like nvme drives would be neat. Room for a longer flat battery, cool use a full size. Don’t have one? That’s fine a short one will still work.

New comment by abracadaniel in "AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected"

abracadaniel — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 03:10:01 +0000

A potential difference I see is that when internal tools break, you generally have people with a full mental model of the tool who can take manual intervention. Of course, that fails when you lay off the only people with that knowledge, which leads to the cycle of “let’s just rewrite it, the old code is awful”. With AI it seems like your starting point is that failure mode of a lack of knowledge and a mental model of the tool.

New comment by abracadaniel in "Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux"

abracadaniel — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 17:59:05 +0000

From my experience it seems to happen all the time. Settings reset, uninstalled apps reinstalled, firewall settings erased. I went looking for the Windows 10 patch that deleted the Documents folder if you had remapped it to another drive, and it was hard to find an article due to all the other times their updates have also deleted people's Documents folder. This was the first time I recall it happening: https://www.engadget.com/2018-10-09-windows-10-october-updat...

New comment by abracadaniel in "SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation"

abracadaniel — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 02:07:54 +0000

That’s not what I’m seeing. They requested comments from the public about the product, only mentioning that the fact that they weren’t allowed to purchase more from Sparkfun [0]. Sparkfun then jumped into the discussion with accusations of a Code of Conduct violation, and only then did they respond publicly. Sparkfun made it public first in that 3rd party forum.

[0] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...

New comment by abracadaniel in "SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation"

abracadaniel — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 23:19:36 +0000

They seem to have reported it in private and were then banned and publicly accused of Code of Conduct violations in retaliation. Going public with everything would seem to be the reasonable response.

New comment by abracadaniel in "BYD Sells 4.6M Vehicles in 2025, Meets Revised Sales Goal"

abracadaniel — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 17:59:09 +0000

This has been my experience when trying to buy any EV in the US. They technically exist, but finding one at a dealership is hard. Harder still is finding one that they actually have charged. Finding one without massive dealer fees is impossible. They use the forced scarcity as an excuse. Chevy dealership told me I was better off buying a Tesla. Hyundai told me “this isn’t really an EV kind of city”

New comment by abracadaniel in "Study Reveals How Tattoo Ink Affects the Immune System"

abracadaniel — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 19:24:23 +0000

I wonder how that could play out for people either autoimmune disorders. Do tattoos reduce the likelihood of acquiring an autoimmune disorder, or could getting a tattoo afterwards reduce the severity, or could it be negatively correlated and make it worse?

New comment by abracadaniel in "Disney Lost Roger Rabbit"

abracadaniel — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 20:49:44 +0000

Or possibly, actors who still have their faculties tend to keep acting, even into advanced age. Not sure if that's true, but even the perception of that being true could lead to these kinds of assumptions.