Hacker News: ahi

New comment by ahi in "Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers"

ahi — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:48:09 +0000

Considering the capital costs in fitting out these datacenters, the land being 10x more expensive doesn't move the needle much on total cost.

New comment by ahi in "ICC ditches Microsoft 365 for openDesk"

ahi — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 20:22:48 +0000

They can try, but presumably as a tiny shareholder you would tell them to go f themselves. Subsidiaries don't have that luxury.

New comment by ahi in "Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout"

ahi — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 13:38:35 +0000

I know this thread is dead, but I should have elaborated. The quality of the individual worker is as good or better with an illegal immigrant, but it's a legal nightmare. If you pay decent wages and have decent working conditions, you don't have to get into that shadiness. There's a reason awful jobs, e.g. roofing, are filled with hard working illegal immigrants and meth heads.

New comment by ahi in "Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout"

ahi — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:25:02 +0000

I assume the parent was being hyperbolic. Illegal immigrants is the barrel scraping bottom of the work force.

New comment by ahi in "Dutch government takes control of Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia"

ahi — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 20:09:56 +0000

Defacto dictatorship now, but even when there were elections he wasn't exactly popular. In the 2015 parliamentary elections (2 members per district) he actually placed second behind another member of his own party. He became popular during the 2018 crisis then kept proving to be inept.

New comment by ahi in "Two things LLM coding agents are still bad at"

ahi — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 15:20:37 +0000

I really really hate code review now. My colleagues will have their LLMs generate thousands of lines of boiler plate with every pattern and abstraction under the sun. A lazy programmer use to do the bare minimum and write not enough code. That made review easy. Error handling here, duplicate code there, descriptive naming here, and so on. Now a lazy programmer generates a crap load of code cribbed from "best practice" tutorials, much of it unnecessary and irrelevant for the actual task at hand.

New comment by ahi in "Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears"

ahi — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 14:22:24 +0000

Patrick Boyle on youtube has a good explanation of what's going on in the industry: https://youtu.be/3ef5IPpncsg?feature=shared

tl;dw: some of it is anti-trust avoidance and some of it is knee-capping competitors.

New comment by ahi in "The value of institutional memory"

ahi — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:09:10 +0000

I am currently on a team of consultants. Ironically, most of us have more institutional knowledge than the client due to internal churn. Seems like every few years they try to cut our utilization in favor of some off-shore company that's "cheaper", the project blows up, then we have to jump in and save some middle manager's job.

New comment by ahi in "Jim Lovell, Apollo 13 commander, has died"

ahi — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:02:45 +0000

The movie was released 25 years after the incident. It has been 30 years since the movie was released.

New comment by ahi in "A grand tour through the essays of Lewis H. Lapham"

ahi — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:50:21 +0000

Somehow I missed his passing last year. Harper's was very important to me as a teenager stuck in the cultural wasteland of suburbia. Smart, critical, and often funny, it showed me writing didn't have to suck.

I was trying to come up with a descriptor when I found an obit: "Lewis was the last of a breed that never had many members to begin with: the patrician liberal."

https://www.newstatesman.com/appreciation/2024/07/lewis-laph...

New comment by ahi in "Tour de France confronts a new threat: Are cyclists using tiny motors?"

ahi — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:51:31 +0000

Theoretically, the motor would be most useful on the climbs of the mountain stages. On the flats a couple of hundred grams don't matter, especially when most of the leaders are hanging back in the group anyway.

That said, bikes can already be made under UCI weight minimums of 6.8kg. Yet from what I've seen, most tour bikes are in the 7-7.5kg range.

New comment by ahi in "Tour de France confronts a new threat: Are cyclists using tiny motors?"

ahi — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:37:32 +0000

I replied directly to OP, but applies here as well. Cycling is far more specialized than other sports so the pay off for doping is greater.

New comment by ahi in "Tour de France confronts a new threat: Are cyclists using tiny motors?"

ahi — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:35:40 +0000

Road cycling is a sport of extreme hyper specialization. Skill is much less of a factor than dedication, training, nutrition and genetics. Increasing VO2max by 5% isn't going to make you Messi, but it can put you on a tour podium.

New comment by ahi in "Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)"

ahi — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 17:55:39 +0000

"Juan Carlos Juarez, the town's mayor, said at the time: "They landed on our coast to confront a supposed enemy with typical commando tactics. But we managed to hold them on the beach.""

I would not have been able to get this out without giggling.

New comment by ahi in "Ask HN: What's with the repeated job posts on "Who's hiring"?"

ahi — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 20:49:56 +0000

I see a lot of unicorn job postings here and elsewhere. Bunch of companies here in the midwest are looking for 5 years experience in AI pipeline engineering. Those people exist, sorta*, but they aren't taking $60/hr contract gigs from bureaucratic hellscape Acme Corp types. Likewise, I see a lot of startups led by technical hustler types (more power to them) who would never pass their own hiring expectations. Your CTO is a webdev with 6 months prompt engineering. Why would an actual expert agree to work for them?

*unclear if experience from 5 years ago is relevant to current practice.

New comment by ahi in "Did "Big Oil" Sell Us on a Recycling Scam?"

ahi — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 19:44:11 +0000

Calling it "precious" is just a bit too on the nose. That looks more like an art project than an actual solution. One of their shredders working 24/365 can get through <500 tons. In 2018, US generated 35.6 million tons of plastic. Industrial problems require industrial (or legislative) solutions.

New comment by ahi in "A simple search engine from scratch"

ahi — Tue, 20 May 2025 14:11:24 +0000

LN and Westlaw's real service is their ubiquity. Every law student has access to it and every firm expects proficiency. While they generally suck, the last time I used it (looong time ago), their boolean search was quite nice. That kind of text search has mostly been replaced by non-deterministic black boxes which aren't great for legal research.

New comment by ahi in "From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you.""

ahi — Fri, 09 May 2025 01:03:49 +0000

I'm in my 40s so bit of a grey beard now, but I worked with the real grey beards at University of Michigan. Something like 75k active staff and students, and more than 600k living alumni, yet their email addresses were like bob@umich.edu. Setting up the first campus email server came with privileges.

New comment by ahi in "The Inchtuthil Nail Hoard"

ahi — Tue, 06 May 2025 20:17:16 +0000

I had the same thought, but in a different direction. They ended up just recycling most of these 800,000 nails. Seems like today this would be worth a couple million as souvenirs.

New comment by ahi in "The narrowest escalator in New York City"

ahi — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 19:14:43 +0000

Woah. The first comment gave me a wave of nostalgia I couldn't place. This must have been it. Couldn't have been older than 4 or 5 last time I was in G Fox.